More like 18. 1 is close, but I still don’t buy it. Even then, it’s a stretch. Again, now that developers know about it, have they patched it? If it were unintended, is this special ability to teleport folks to NPCs now taken away? If it’s mildly patched and the ability is still there (from what I gather from you guys), then again, there’s no problem here.
Nope. Crack would be a cheaper habit and easier to kick, I presume. World of Warcraft might be the best video game ever, but I’ll never find out.
Crack is cheaper?
I’m only paying 15$ a month…
Sure. And then he wrote a “scientific” paper and had a biased article written about him. Had he kept it to City, people would’ve just said “Boy, glad that douche is gone” and thought no more of it. But he went over and above the call of troll duty, painting City players as disturbed psychos in a mainstream (albeit local) newspaper. It’s completely unfair and uncool, and this is hardly a loophole the devs can close.
Nobody cares that this guy griefed, except for the people he griefed. People care that he griefed and then acted both like he was just being scientific and like he’s a martyr.
But he’s got a point. I get the feeling that he’s not the best source over what he did or didn’t say or how he did or didn’t do things, but he has a point. He’s acting within the limits of the game and within its rules. The only rule he’s broken, if he’s even broken a rule, is Rule 18, as previously noted. If it were unnatural or unintended, or worked better than the developers thought it would, then wouldn’t it be eliminated/toned down?
Is your point that the effect was unintended and finally figured out by the developers and now they’re nerfing it somewhat and he’s stepping out of the game? If that is your point, then the only problem you can have with this guy is that his technique worked better than the developers intended. I’m unimpressed.
Except it didn’t. It wasn’t a legitimate technique, which was reflected in the fact that he didn’t get any kind of reward from it.
Analogy time, since you’re not familiar with City in specific: Deathmatch game. Halo, Quake, whatever. Score is kept by number of kills, right? The most “legitimate” way to win is to earn points by killing other people. In games where suicide results in a -1 kill, causing other people to kill themselves is a less common, perhaps less tolerable, but still legitimate way to win. But what if there were an obscure way to trigger someone’s death such that you didn’t gain a point and they didn’t lose one, it just sent them back to a spawn point, maybe removed all the weapons and powerups they’d accumulated since their last death. At that point, you’re no longer playing to win, because killing the person in that way does not afford you any advantage. All you’ve done is set back their time and effort with no gain for yourself. At that point, you’re no longer playing the game, you’re playing the player. You’re no longer being competitive, you’re just being an asshole.
Going back to City, the original idea behind Teleport Foe was that you could teleport your enemy into an ambush of other players, or teleport them into the middle of your own NPCs (one class, Mastermind, can have up to 6 controllable NPCs). That’s fair and fine, because at that point you’re still engaging player to player. That gets you rewards and that affords you an advantage in playing. However, teleporting an enemy into range of auto-kill NPCs gets you nothing. You cannot win by doing that, except perhaps by pissing off all the other players to the point where they just leave. And what fun is that?
The professor’s analysis is rather hypocritical. Neither he nor the other players were breaking any of the hard-coded rules of the games. But both sides were breaking social conventions. He, by exploiting a loophole in the game design (and saying “it hadn’t been fixed yet” does make it any less an exploit) and by taunting other players about it. And some of the other players were also over the line in the way they reacted to him. But it’s disingenuous to complain about those players breaking social conventions while he was doing so as well. Bottom line: if you act like a jerk, it’s not unexpected that some people will act like jerk back at you.
I note you’re not disputing the ‘easier to kick’ part 
Except in Deathmatch, you still get the win. If this guy isn’t getting any reward, whether it be from loot or experience. That seems to be a basis for comparison here. What if he were getting the Gold-Dusted Boots of Skipping each time he did it or 5000 experience?
Besides, it’s not like he’s doing it in a Player-versus-Environment setting. He’s doing it in the Player-versus-Player setting, yes?
I think my biggest issue is that it is part of the game. It was put there by designers, so I have a hard time just dismissing it. Presumably, the developers could change the game to get rid of Teleport Foe, but they haven’t.
Well, to be fair, the whole point of Teleport Foe really was to be grossly unfair to its target. City of Heroes was created, first and foremost, as a PVE game; its entire reason for being is to pit superpowered players up against colorful badguys and their legions of mooks. It contains a whole lot of powers that are incredibly unfair. To give just one example of many, virtually any character you could create has the ability to render a target completely unable to act, for as long as you care to keep them that way, and some can even extend that to very many targets simultaneously.
For most of the game, TP Foe was a niche, largely unused ability. So you pulled a mook out of thin air and you and your superfriends immediately crushed him. So what? It’s just one mook. There’s lots more where he came from.
Then, for some unfathomable reason, they shoehorned PVP into the game. The obvious win-button abilities all got their behavior changed where PVP was involved. Some barely even functioned at all on players. But Teleport Foe somehow got overlooked. It was still amazing at setting up ambushes, but still wasn’t -too- terrible, since you still had to beat the player normally and they had the opportunity to survive or escape as usual.
Then they enabled this PVP in a real actual city zone, using the same rules as the other city zones. Primarily, where this topic is involved, that there are safe regions protected by invincible robots that instantaneously one-shot anything hostile that crosses their path. Nothing special, these things are literally everywhere in the game, they protect areas like hospitals and load screen points. They’re so far removed from the real actual PVP objectives in the zone, all they really do is prevent spawn camping anyway, right?
Yeah. Thus emerged this fellow’s bright idea through a series of oversights. No warning of it coming. No escape or retaliation possible. If your computer is a bit sluggish, you could very well be gone before you even saw it happen.
The “it’s in the game, it’s legitimate” point of view is willfully ignoring what would happen if everyone took that viewpoint. The “PVP” devolves into a game of who can attain the most range on their teleport, or ways to pull players towards these safe zones to teleport them. Nothing else is relevant - there is no other option when presented with this.
Not much of a game, that, now is it? Yes, ultimately, it’s the developers fault for making a bad game, but willfully exploiting that is disrespectful of your fellow players. Multiplayer games are a social activity, and like all others, treating other people poorly gets returned right back at you.
Not an amazing research discovery, that.
This thread makes me very, very glad that I play EVE.
Right, but the flaw isn’t that he used it, it’s that the developers put it in/left it in there.
If you want to goof around and use cheat codes (or loopholes) in a single player game, no one else cares. It’s only your own experience you are modifying.
When you play a MMORG, you share playing the game, with others, on a hosted game server. Therefore, I am expected to act (within reason) in a manner that allow the other players to enjoy the content. PvP walks a little close to a grey area at times (especially when the players are not anywhere near evenly matched), admittedly, but that’s why PvP is usually consensual.
In WoW, extreme cases of corpse camping can be an actionable (bannable) offence, as is using cuss words in general chat. The game code allows the actions to occur, and the developers (Blizzard) do not intend to patch these things out, but Blizzard has made it known that extreme forms of anti-social behavior are not welcome. Their sandbox, they get to make the rules.
Sigh. As has been pointed out several times in this thread, it’s impossible to anticipate all of the ways that griefers will exploit loopholes and game design to irritate the other players. Sure, it was perfectly legal to do what he did; however, it’s clearly not what the developers intended, since PvP deaths aren’t punished the same way that PvE deaths are.
And the point isn’t that what he did was legal or not- what’s important is that he did it strictly to ruin everyone else’s fun… and then acted innocent when others got mad at him for doing so.
Sure, it’s a design flaw to make an uncounterable tactic, in any sort of game, anywhere. The reason it’s a flaw is because the moment someone discovers such a thing, the only way for fellow players to answer it is to also utilize it yourself. The meat of the game gets discarded, the only thing actually being played is the sub-game of the uncounterable tactic.
To some people, the sub-game might be interesting enough in itself as to add to gameplay. FPS physics exploits are frequently defended by this argument, by the by.
But in this case? The presence of this one thing takes what would otherwise be a reasonably interesting game and turns it into a shallow button-pushing contest. It turns chess into tic-tac-toe.
Not a great many people would be content to play tic-tac-toe when they really wanted to play chess. However, you have no choice when someone shows up wielding the uncounterable tactic.
Reasonable people, upon realizing what they’re dealing with, would agree not to use said tactic, so they can continue playing the full game.
This guy was not a reasonable person.
So the other players are presented with the option of either playing his silly button-pushing sub-game, or not playing at all.
Which option would you have them take?
You’re missing the point pretty hard here. Yes, if the game rewarded him for the tactic, it would be considered legitimate and a whole slew of people would be using it. But that’s irrelevant. The reality is it doesn’t give a reward. Most people can recognize that means it’s not an advantageous tactic. The reward or lack thereof is the defining line here.
Please, stop with the “the developers left it in” canard. They cannot predict everything, and they have more priorities than a niche abuse in a niche system, which is what PVP really is in City of Heroes. The software is not the entirety of the game, it’s only one component. Just because the software allows something does not mean it’s desired by either the players or the developers. It doesn’t work like that.
That’s fine. Nobody’s omniscient. However, it’s known that this tactic is overpowered or unbalanced, so why wouldn’t/couldn’t they nerf it? Yeah, he was a bit dickheaded in plopping folks down in front of insta-death robots via a teleporter, but he didn’t create it and he did it in the areas that are (as I understand) clearly marked to be Player-versus-Player environs, so again, I fail to see the big problem. Sure, him acting like a victim is petty, but that’s not the real problem here.
I’d have the players air their grievances to the developer. If they take action, that’s their prerogative.
They did. But as I said before, changes aren’t made instantly unless it’s literally crashing the game. Changes made in haste are always a bad idea on MMOs.
So all is well in City of Heroes-land. The developers of that game didn’t invent the very first MMORPG. They’re not straying into completely uncharted territory. Would the fact that this exploit existed be because the PVP environment was tacked on?