Even the Bermuda Triangle wasn’t that effective.

And we need THIS week’s Darkfall post….

I didn’t do it myself, because I didn’t have the 750 sulpher required to buy in, nor the gold to acquire the sulpher, but if I had had either, I would have been in the middle of the rigor pyramid as well. As it was, from what I’ve heard, the devs announced that it was an exploit one day, and within only a day or so, the problem was fixed. As I mentioned, it was a one line fix out of 7 pages of changes listed in the most recent update noted.

If the near riot that was reported earlier is anywhere near true (don’t know, didn’t see it), yeah, that was poor form. Game impact, I think is negligible. Yes, some of my KGB mates have rigor attributes that are higer than mine. Do I see a big difference in performance between their characters and mine? Not really. It was a problem, it was caught, it was quickly fixed. I think the dev’s did a good job once they were aware of the issue.

Another thing that the latest update did was speed up the rate of skill gain, so I suspect my rigor values will catch up to those who spent thousands of gold on sulpher, so in a way, I came out with the better part of the bargain. It will take a little longer, but I will catch up, and I didn’t have to waste a pile of gold in the process.

So clearly, things were not meant to happen that way, but they did. And I realized I made a small mistake in my previous post: the game checked at the time of taking the unrest-supplies mission, which was even simpler to coordinate as long as people didn’t complete them, which they finally did together, hence the “ecobomb” exploit.

Also, one of the three ports mentioned in my previous post was in fact a newbie port, the only one which the French defended. But the key point of the devlog entry is that, incomprehensibly, it gave extensive details of what the exploit was and how it was done, even though it had been practically verboten for players to post any information about it on the game forums, on the grounds that it would urge people to use it. With the devlog, anyone who didn’t know about it by then now knew exactly what they needed to do. Since that came out on a Tuesday with the patch next Monday, they had another week to do it! And since the word “exploit” wasn’t used, the less scrupulous players could raise points of semantics until then.

Why am I mentioning this example? Because I saw it first-hand. Because it occurred early in the history of the game, and had long-lasting repercussions. Because I think it’s a clear example of failure in the face of exploiting at all levels, and I believe it deserves to be studied. Developer failure to make the game mechanics exploit-proof. Developer failure in the initial treatment of the problem, still marked by ambivalence (i.e., publishing a devlog entry detailing the problem before it was solved, while refusing to explicitly call it an exploit). Developer failure to act accordingly at a later stage, by refusing to act upon the exploiting done between the devlog entry and the patch (such as those three ports flipped at once), demonstrated by the refusal to reset the map on the one server clearly affected by this.

And I could mention failure at a later stage, when it led (directly or indirectly) to a desire to otherwise encourage the creation of red circles, so the developers came up with the idea to turn off the decay of unrest points. That way, you could start a red circle, leave it there, and continue grinding later on to bring it to a port battle — if you could risk the enemy countergrinding in the circle to bring unrest down; unrest just wouldn’t decay on its own.

But there were two problems with that. First, the only way for the defender to reduce unrest was to attack NPC ships (or players) of the attacking nation. So that would mean: If the British put a red circle around New Orleans, the only way for the French to bring the unrest down (and get rid of the red circle) would be to attack British NPC ships or British players. But what NPC ships did you get in greater numbers near a French port? What a surprise, French ships. British ships were a rarity, which meant the defender couldn’t effectively countergrind. So in many cases, with the defenders lacking the means to reduce unrest, the circles wouldn’t vanish until the conclusion of a port battle.

But then again, and this was problem #2, like those Blackbeard British who made no effort to win the map once they got to sit on every French (and Spanish) port of importance, what would be the incentive for an attacker in search of griefing (and nothing else) to hurry in bringing the unrest up to 10,000 (and a port battle), when you could just leave the circle there as a quasi-permanent PvP zone? So that’s what happened. Zones were put up, with no intent to ever bring the town to a port battle. Pirates (almost a ganker class in the way their RvR was designed to be meaningless) did the rest. What prevented the entire map from turning red was, if I remember, that only a certain number of ports from each nation could be put in the red simultaneously.

Unrest decay, the turning off of which some people had warned against, was soon put back into the game.

Ganking was another problem in the game, and the developers, as I mentioned above, once said in a devlog that they would make ganking go away. As an open-sea instance was limited to 6 players on each side, it was usually a 6-on-1 or something of that sort, and methods were used to make the attacker believe that there was only one ship. So a player would enter a fight thinking it would be a challenging 1v1 battle, only to realize after entering the instance that the opponent’s five buddies had been waiting in the closest port, ready to join the battle at any moment. This was a typical PotBS gank, and some players prided themselves on it. So the developers came up with the idea of allowing the defenders to have up to 9 ships enter the battle in progress as opposed to the maximum 6 for the attackers. It became known as the “Supergank”. Same tactics as before, but with more gankers. The attacking group of, say, 3 ships, would attack a defending group of 4, and then 5 buddies of the defenders would jump in from the closest port. I was not playing at that time, but I heard that a climate of sheer terror swept through the Burning Sea, with everyone afraid of attacking everyone else out of fear that it would turn into a 6v9.

Nobody asked for a 6v9 system because it was all too predictable, and everybody objected when it was first suggested. They brought it in anyway, until the next build, when they realized that their players had been right after all and pulled it out.

That’s the problem many fear with Darkfall: Bad design decisions with players ready to take advantage of them. But the difference between PotBS and Darkfall is that at no instant, not even during “No Crying in the Red Circle”‘s heyday, did FLS hide behind a mask of arrogance and hostility as Aventurine seems to be doing.

That’s why, despite all the awkward design decisions (and even the developers’ withdrawing from their own forums), I still care for Pirates of the Burning Sea, whereas many people here, myself included, are just indulging in schadenfreude about Darkfall.

Based on what I am reading here, it’s not some minor renegade guild that is doing it, it’s the major guys, and based on experience those guys are so competitive that if one side starts doing it, all the others will. Those who won’t will simply be left behind.

It’s an instance of the one rotten apple spoiling the entire barrel. The only people to remain competitive will be those who have used such tricks; the others will have fallen by the wayside. And then what?

And the pattern of pretending it’s not an exploit, even after being informed by a GM that it is one, and then boldly assert that “we’ll keep on doing it right until the patch comes in, so there”… I’ve seen that before: Pirates of the Burning Sea, Blackbeard server, February 2008. The British nation on the server was notorious for all the underhanded tricks it used, while being demographically dominant, and seemed to have dedicated its entire efforts to pissing off the French, the smallest or second smallest nation.

At the time, you could push an entirely peaceful town (zero unrest points) to a port battle (10,000 unrest points) just by dropping unrest supplies at the rebel agent in the town. (And the port battle itself took place x hours later, always beginning on the hour.) Normally, the cutoff was at 5,000 points, when the red circle appeared; after that, the rebel agent stopped accepting supplies, and you had to grind the remaining 5,000 points on the open sea, where players of the defending faction could show up and attack you. The problem was that it took a few seconds for the game to check when to turn off the rebel agent’s demand. So what the British did was gather all their numbers at the port they wanted to attack, and turn in their supplies simultaneously before the game checked whether to turn off the rebel agent. So the port went from zero to 10,000 instantaneously without having to grind on the open sea for the 5,000-to-10,000 part.

I remember that the Blackbeard British didn’t invent the trend, as the Spanish on another server had done it before, but the Brits turned it into an art form. Then there was a case, after the developers had acknowledged that it was contrary to intended game mechanics (without, however, calling it an exploit) with a patch on the way to solve it, where the British attacked three French ports at once using that “ecobomb” technique, which meant three simultaneous port battles. How many battles could the French fight, given their population? One. Which the British knew all too well. France won the one port battle it showed up for, and lost the other two by default.

Finally, the developers acknowledge it’s an exploit, and say they’re working on it. As for the ports France lost as a result? Oh, but the port battles were won honestly, so we won’t do a rollback, nor will we do a full map reset. It’s all right here: http://www.burningsea.com/forums/showthread.php?p=161224 . Never mind that the ports were lost because there were three battles at once, which was a direct result of the exploit, the port battle results were entirely legitimate in themselves, and therefore we couldn’t dispute them. (I always compare this to calling an election legitimate because the ballot boxes weren’t tampered with, never mind one candidate’s thugs guarding the entrance to the polling station with baseball bats.)

Then the natural thing happened. Why should anyone want to win a map that automatically resets, with only marginal rewards, when your sole purpose is to grief? So the French (those who didn’t leave after the developers’ disappointing response, that is) just told the British, take your damn map win, we’ll go after the Spanish instead. And the British, needless to say, dragged their feet for as long as they could, and at one point there were even rumours of extortion. They didn’t want to play the game as intended; they just wanted to grief the French.

So you see, you don’t need a server full of exploiting pricks to wreck a game. You just need a server where the exploiting pricks are organized and provided with the opportunity to do so. That is what happened with PotBS on the Blackbeard server; it took months for France to recover, long after the original faction had more or less quit the game or transferred to the Rackham server after the April mergers (followed, the next day, by the British exploiters) even though Blackbeard was one of the four servers to survive. And this probably will happen in Darkfall if this particular alliance comes to dominate the game, not to mention that there seems to be the same developer ambivalence towards the course of action to be taken.

Who’s ruling the game anyways? If a show of asshatery like that its allowed to win, well the GMs in there are weak.

Ive said that Tasos and Co. are a bunch of guys that talk a lot but they are being manhandled to their players.

I was wrong. I couldnt expect that a bunch of first timers behave better that that. Lets see an example in another PvP game: EVE Online. The GMs in there TODAY are cold, proffesionals, fair and merciless. They are that TODAY (im resalting that for disallowing whines of the past).

But heaven knows that those qualities were forged with experience and pain (i mean they live with a outpost of Something Awful) and they learned the consequences of the lack of said qualities the hard way **cough*t20*cough**. Its my impression for their handling of the recent major crisis.

It its fair to expect Adventurine to act like them today? No. But i wonder, will DarkFall live enough to they can learn those skills? I dont know.

BTW, a free tip: The fix for macroers is in the C compiler, not in the BanHammer.

I’ve seen this kind of stuff in every MMO I’ve ever been in. Boys will be boys.