NetGore

Devs seems to forget that games are ment to be fun. In everquest you could for example kill stronger mob by shooting at him from distance. It took a while but you could kill much stronger npc and get nice exp and revard. You could equip item with stats ment for level 40 to a lvl 1 player and make him uber. Or you could kill 4 mobs as a druid at once while warrior never could do that. So devs decided its imbalanced and in never games you cant do this. The difference is that everquest even imbalanced was fun and never games are boring. Because if i can equip weapon for higher level to lower player, then so what if i one shoot a mob? Anyone will loose anything if i do this? No. But i loose fun when im not able to do it, and devs will introduce stupid mechanics like level req or bindable items which kills fun for me.

It is always the small little bugs or mistakes that tend to be the thing that the best players use. When there are problems or bugs in the game itself they are not often seen to be problems to the gamer, but more of an advantage if you know the trick, if you don't you = noob. Like in CS:Source de_dust2 in dark you can crouch jump onto a small ledge where the boxes weren't placed completely together, this might have been done on purpose but it is still something that not everyone knows about, also throwing flash grenades over the wall to long from T spawn in de_dust2, this provides the T's with an unfair advantage gaining ground via long. Also if you throw somethng and jump at the right time it will go further, all these things could of argubly be put there on purpose but a few of these "bugs" with others are really what sets the more skilled players apart from the less skilled players.

When i used to play CS: S in a serious clan one time we had to study the spray pattern of each weapon. I remember the AK 47 was kind of like a T shape spray. Which meant i knew that from a certan distance i could spray (if i was desparate) and i could get a hit almost everytime and if i aimed correctly then i'd get a headshot everytime. A lot of people play cs:s and it's a very popular game although i don't think it's entirely down to the "bugs" in it, i'm just saying there are some which do make the game more fun.

^ That's amazing, I have been playing CS:S on pubs atleast once a week for like 3 years and never even knew this.

Although I still liked 1.5 much better for similar reasons to my first post. I could run straight up to a CT and start crouch jumping like a lunatic, the CT would just spaz out spraying everywhere and i would just knife downwards until he was dead. For some reason in CS:S jumping makes you run slower which is kinda dumb (not to mention you run slower in general), so basically as soon as you jump you get owned. Also I'm still in the habit of compensating for recoil .

I also loved the fact that AK47's and Deagles were more accurate than sniper rifles when used the right way. The deagle imbalance was what kept me playing CS 1.5 (deagle only basically became a cult leading to the creation of lots of deagle only maps). I could run fast and deal tonnes of damage with high accuracy, 1.5 just felt more... ninja.

Yeah exactly. This is basically what i was trying to say but couldn't figure out a way of saying it.

I agree mostly. I feel that basically devs will become so focused on solving problems that they forget what the actual purpose is, that being making the game fun.

Well lets see:

WarRock: had tons of bugs in the latter versions, and people started glitching their hitboxes.

Like this they had lower Accuracy (crouch jumping in a way), but their hitboxes were not where their body was.
If you knew this, they were as good as dead. If not, they were invincible.
Also when leaning over walls in Warrock there was a glitch that let them shoot through a minipart of the wall.

Stuff like that is the consequence of uncapable game devs.

In Americas Army, in most maps, it was more about strategy, than shooting skill.
Of course, over time i became better in melee,
but I was always good hiding from snipers, having enough patience to not get shot by snipers,
to aim over mid distance and kill people, distract em with grenades, etc.

To me, Americas Army was more of a Skill game, than Warrock was.

If a game needs skill (aiming, positioning etc etc) its cool.
If a game needs you to know the glitches, its just a FAIL.

Open your eyes people.

And in an MMORPG its not necessary to keep players BALANCED when fighting monsters.
If one class levels 4 times faster than all others, yes. but if he levels a tad faster, who cares.
Healers always level slower, but they often get parties to level in, etc.

In PVP MMORPG players can and will get very picky. Include skill in your game
(no point and click adventure!) to reduce the imüact of class imbalance.

Diablo 2 was cool. Imbalanced as hell, but my Teleporting Skills were wicked,
and I could duel using nearly any spellcaster.
(I was a tad inexperienced with melees in pvp)

These are the SC1 glitches that i can remember off the top of my head:
Larvae/Overlord/trapped SCV group air stack glitch, hold-position mine clearing, patrol glitch, reverse patrol glitch, stop lurker glitch, lurker burrow stacking, worker glitching, lay spidermine glitching, mine unit through building glitching, drone drill, gas run, gas trick, observer glitch, reaver suicide bomber glitch. These are all exploited very often in proleague games (i think drone drill and observer glitch are banned in progames now).

Sorry another SC1 VOD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEvu1iiYm5o&#t=11m20s

Oddly enough this is what makes the game so great to watch, and why the game is still huge, and why SC1 progamers get paid so much.

Of course there was one where you cancel your spawning hatchery just before it dies, and the game crashes (though its patched now). Those ones you should get rid of.

A glitch is, by definition, not something intended. So either they accept it, making it no longer a glitch but part of the gameplay, or they leave it as a glitch, in which case the game is just buggy. So yes, a game with glitches is not a good thing, even if it is fun to abuse them.

Its not like they accept it, more like they were just unaware of it. SC1 is no longer getting patched so any new glitches found are not going to be patched.

Also sometimes glitches are a good thing and raises the skill ceiling (and variation/dynamics) of the game, which is what I am trying to point out. Given the example of GunZ in which the glitches was what made it popular. And yes the devs did not accept it and patched it, and suffered very badly as a result. They even sent a letter of apology to all the fans.

The view about glitches being a bad thing is the common mindset of devs who can only look at things through solving problems rather than through the eyes of a gamer.

or the view of a gamers who like to play a non buggy game. i get that you're really in to starcraft, but you use what works for it as a metric for all other games. keep in mind one big point is its a game that is still huge... in asia. sure it's still played competitively in the western world but no where near the degree. ask most people here about it and the common response will be "wow that game's still around?" starcraft is really the exception to most of what you've brought up. there is nothing wrong with fixing these glitches, because they're obviously creating game play that is, to use one of blizzards favorite patch day terms, "unintended". instead of saying the devs are ignoring what's fun, maybe it's the devs securing that the game is played as they meant it to be, which is the way they find fun.

so gunz failed because of fixing glitches. most likely because it drew all the exploiters that got shoo'd away from other games. it's completely anecdotal anyway. i could also point out a game called celetania, an mmo rts, which had a few bugs allowing huge resource production and crazy strong fleets. the boards were full of people saying exploiting them was part of the game and took skill/planning to gain the advantages. the vast majority of the user base left when the bugs werent fixed at the end of beta. the game went from a huge player base to a total flop and shut down a few months later. i was one of those people that decided my $10/month was much better spent on something without game breaking bugs.

you can also look at diablo 2 which is still running along side sc. go on battle net you'll find a few hundred people playing. go on after a ladder reset and you'll find a few hundred thousand. why the difference? after a wipe all the bugs that the vocal minority say make the game fun havent run rampant yet. once they do, players start dropping like flys.
also look at battleground in WoW. due to twinking, a completely unintended metagame, most of the player base was totally alienated from battlegrounds while leveling. they had to spend a ton of resources even out matches just to bring the casuals back. most old players still wont hit a BG till level cap because they've been left with such a sour taste.

the pros may see these things as skillful advantage, but i'm sorry that's not what draws in the crowd. the average gamer has no clue who the pros are or what they're playing, nor do they care. the hardcore gamers follow them. the casual player, the vast majority of the market, dont.

the pro and hardcore gamers may be the ones keeping the game alive a decade after release, but being the minority they're not the ones paying the bills. blizzard understands this and also knows they may be causing grumbles from that fan base, but they're still going to play. so when developing a AAA title is now a multimillion dollar affair do you think it is wiser to leave things as is in favor of the hardcore, or make it as causal friendly as possible to sell a few million more boxes? it's even more important to go after the casual when talking about mmos.

you enjoy that type of play, which is fine. not everyone shares your opinion though. sure some times the unintended effects can be fun to toy with. but like zan said, if the game moves to the point where using these bugs becomes the status quo then to me it's a fail.

I'm not talking about sales, I'm talking about competitiveness and gameplay. Because sales you mostly get within the first few months but after that how do you keep it sustainable and how do you keep the game popular and fun? This doesn't just apply to SC1. This applies to many games.

I can talk about SS Melee vs Brawl, Street Fighter 2 vs their totally forgotten sequels (bar SF4 which I will explain in a minute), or Counter-Strike 1.5 vs CS:S, DotA vs League of Legends, etc, etc, if you want me to. They all suffered the same result for the same reasons. Lower skill ceilings, bugs/exploits weren't re-implemented in the game as gameplay. Sure CS:S, Brawl, and SF all were popular sequels, this is mostly because of the popularity of the prequel, however they aren't sustainable, the sequel after that will be less popular. SS Melee was always growing in popularity, Brawl was a big-bang that soon dropped off the radar. CounterStrike 1.5 was always growing in popularity, CS:S was a big bang that soon dropped off the radar, 1.6 has 1000x more servers and players than CS:S does. Not only that CS:S isn't even considered competitive enough to be featured in WCG (world championship gaming), instead 1.6 takes its place. Same for SF, SFII growing growing growing, oh Alpha *dead XP. Then SF4 comes out and the popularity goes through the roof. SF Alpha wasn't that popular, neither was the casual gamer oriented pocket fighter that everyone anticipated and then quickly forgot. Oh HoN another one, compare this to the absolutely casual gamer oriented LoL, which is more popular? HoN. At least Quake devs know what they are doing, it's still sustainable, competitive, and will be for a long time.

I can talk for ages about CS:S, Brawl and LoL but lets not go there.

And sorry but fixing the bugs would kill all of Blizzards SC1 sales right now, yes I said that correctly, right now. SC1 sales were in top 10 last year, and has been top 20 for a long long time. This is partially because every 13 year old in korea is getting their hands on the game after watching the proleague. Blizzard wants SC2 to grow as an esport, Blizzard better cater to the damn players that will make it an esport, otherwise we will get another player based organisation running all the competitions again.

Yes its less popular in comparison to korea, anything would be, compared 4.5 million sales from one country alone out of 9 million in total. That doesn't mean that SC1 is less popular than most other games out there. Its one of the most competitive games in the US right now, SC1 competitions [each] are handing out up to $15,000 each year in the US. The only games that I know of that out class this are Quake and CS 1.6 which are also very old-school buggy games. No modern casual-friendly bug-fixed games even come close.

About celetania, beta is free, release is not? I've seen this happen in many of the beta games I tried out, notice the phrase, tried out, I never intended to buy it, a lot of people are like that. Free Beta to paid release can often end up in a flop, its called risk management. Then again I don't know much about it, and I prefer to work on what I know.

I had a different experience to you then with Diablo 2. Even 13 year olds (because I was that old at the time) knew many of the neat tricks you could do in diablo 2, although these were exploits not bugs. I haven't played in ages, but popping corpses with mines first comes to mind. The reason so many people start playing during ladder reset is not because they get owned because of bugs. Its like this in pretty much every seasonal game, Utopia, ICCUP, even fantasy premier league. Diablo 2 I found was mostly a cooperative game beating diablo/baal as many times as possible, until you maxed out. I would be happy for my partner to get me experience points with exploits, although this generally didn't happen. And the only people that got to that point were hardcore gamers, so the point about casual gamers I don't think really applies here.

PvPing at level 30-something is flat out boring I might add, casual gamers might be lucky to get there. The reason people can own each other so much is because of the game mechanics, not bugs. When you have perfect items you are literally invincible even with people 10 levels higher than you. In regards to things not intended in the game, you think the whole economy of trading with SOJ's is a bad thing? I think it adds dynamics to the economy of the game. What about Cow King? you think that should be removed too? That's what makes the cow level exciting.

Sorry but your arguments are equally as unjustified as mine are, if not more. You are just giving wild assumptions (like I did with celetania),

Or maybe the OP played GunZ and knows what he's talking about? Have you actually played GunZ? Did you experience what happened? This is a really bad assumption to go by, worse than the one I made about Free Beta -> Paid Release.

One thing, I've been having reasonable success with this. You might be interested in keeping up with it to see how it turns out.

I am the first poster, sluggaslamoo
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=125146

Depending on what blizzard does might help to prove my theory or your theory, stakes are on Blizzard has made changes before from posts on TL.net, this one has gotten almost as big if not bigger than those articles that pushed for change and its only been 2 days. The difference though is that while the articles were only written, I'm showing videos on what we mean. Because the last few times blizzard has made changes based on our articles but somewhat confused changes that wasn't exactly what we wanted. However I am somewhat at a disadvantage here because now the release date is getting very close, patches are getting smaller.

dont get me wrong, i dont claim to be right. i'm entirely as biased as you just in the far opposite direction

celetania was paid beta. when they went to "finished product" and it became clear they werent going to fix those problems. reading the forums you would think it was a non issue, but that was only about 10% of the player base actually posting. all the players who loyally payed the subscription left in droves and the game collapsed.

as far as diablo, read just about any forum or news post with comments related to the recent patch. you'll find tons of posts along the lines of "i cant believe they never fixed X" or "i would totally start playing again if they had fixed Y". quite a few explain the ladder reset booms i mention and specifically state it's because at a certain point all the BS is so wide spread it takes the fun out of the game. i'm talking mostly about duping here though other exploits are mentioned too. it's not that people dont know how to do the, but that they dont WANT to be involved in a game that rewards what some consider cheating.

it's like botting. some games embrace it and consider it required to be competitive, others others shun it and consider it a tool used by those with no skill.

i am also talking about gameplay more so then sales. competitiveness goes right out the window. the overwhelming majority of western players dont care about that aspect. as i said before, what the pros are doing doesnt mean crap to them. a fair and balanced game is what brings them in.
you have to also consider we're looking at the same product through the eyes of two vastly different markets. what will be a wild success there will be passed over here.
if you want to push the pro circuit aspect you're selectivity choosing your facts.
the major league gaming circuit, handing out prizes of $100k consists of halo 3, super smash brother brawl (yes BRAWL) and tekken 6 along with WoW and others. in fact looking at the lineup for both mlg and wcg, they both seem to be focused heavily on the "modern casual-friendly bug-fixed games". the cs 1.6 vs cs:s statement may be true, i cant find anything to back it up, but i think it has more to do the shortcomings of cs:s since valve came down pretty hard on all the bugs in cs1.5 and addressed alot of them for 1.6.
sf2 the sequals did poorly cause they just sucked, no other reason. sf2 was at its peak with super street fighter 2 hyper champion turbo omgwtfbbqsauce edition. by the time alpha came out everyone was just burned out and tired of the same rehashes. i can also address the bugs in sf2 by saying when we were all crowded around the arcade cabinet waiting for our turn, being known for "cheesing" was a good way to never be asked to play.
brawl i thought was the best in the series, the fact it doesnt seem to be as much of a mainstay may have alot to do with the fact it's on a system pretty much shunned by the hardcore gamer.

gunz, yes i played. didnt care for it at all. my assumption was not at all unreasonable. if a game is known for exploits that are not allowed in comparable games, then collapses when those exploits are removed, why would it be wrong to assume the exploits are what drew them there in the first place?

what it comes down to as far as the skill ceiling is that you see working the fringes of the game as a sign of skill, i see working within the intended mechanics as a sign of skill. two different view points brought about by two different markets and play styles and we're both incredibly biased and outspoken for our particular side. which is why these things always end in a stalemate with us. if we were to agree on anything the fabric of existence would unravel.

btw, could care less how starcraft 2 turns out. i'm in that "people still play that?" camp. tbs over rts any day for me.

okay I seriously cannot understand this huge talk

IF YOUR GAME FAILS BECAUSE YOU FIX BUGS,
YOU ARE A WORTHLESS GAME DESIGNER!!!!

go get a real job if you cannot design a fun game.

I haven't played GunZ in over a year, but hearing this is terrible, The only thing that made GunZ fun was the kstyle, slashshot, swordflying ect. if they took that out they should just shoot themselves, It was a great example of how unexpected bugs and glitches can make a game funner, it wasn't even IMBA because everyone could do it you just had to learn.

I'm sick of games that require no skill to be good at.
we have enough casual games in the world.

EDIT: Haha I read the article, they put it back in! yay! Ima go play some GunZ XD

Like most games, most of the cheeses in SF aren't too bad. Cheeses are designed to punish certain styles of play, however once you know how to beat them, the player's reliance on cheese becomes a significant disadvantage. However it does make the game exciting. The cheese you might be on about might be the fact that some characters have certain zones which they control. A simple one is ryu's hadouken which controls an imaginary horizontal zone. So you spam that constantly so the player has to jump, then when they jump to close you abuse the other zone which the rising dragon fist takes up and there's your combo. It's good for punishing people who abuse combos or who just ground attack you all the time. However there are simple ways to beat this.

Anyways I don't know much about SF right now, I've only just got my custom arcade stick and intend to get into SF properly, last time I played was on the SNES when I was like 5 or something, so I didn't take it very seriously obviously.

The best analogy of cheese I can think of right now, is running up to the net in tennis. Some people reckon its cheap, however its designed to punish those who just sit at the back and defend to conserve their energy. If that was all we did, we would end up with games that last for ages and everyone would be completely bored (which is basically what is happening right now). If you don't execute your serve and volley perfectly, you are almost bound to lose. I've seen cheese in nearly every competitive game, and in my experience cheese is always a double-edged sword.

Just want to point out that you are arguing about something else. This thread isn't about good game design or bad game design.

For example lets say somebody finds a few bugs in Aleron which raises the skill ceiling of the game, twitch based reflexes now becomes a part of the game. A flood of new koreans looking for the next high-level MMO come in, they introduce the k-style, they find adapt the exploits in the game that make the game really fast paced and exciting for them, the game starts evolving very rapidly making it almost an e-sport, the games popularity starts to grow exponentially as these new players show off their prowess to their friends at local pc bangs.

The game starts to get shown on Korean TV channels, with interviews with up and coming pro-players who talk about the potential money market, other pros give tutorials on how to get good at the game and all the neat tricks you can do. The game's popularity starts to explode, and the game continues to evolve at a pace where some casuals just can't keep up with the rest of the bunch. The popularity in Korea starts to spread to America, now there are Korean and American pros casting live streams of pro games, and now almost anyone under 20 who plays the game is at a very high skill level, because they have the time to research and watch the live streams, and forums are every where.

While the game is still fun to play originally as intended (because you are a really good game designer), playing against other casuals is not a problem, however the casuals feel overwhelmed by the skill disparity, because they don't realise is that the players that completely own them play 10 hours a day more than the casuals.

Most players praise the game for having a very balanced the game through skill, rather than having a game of luck through items and counters. Your friends start to tell you that the game is too hard and they get owned really easily, they say bugs are totally imbalanced and their items suck now and make no difference.

Would you be willing to fix the bug and destroy the games popularity?

That's what the thread is about.

Okay in such an extreme case you dont really have the option of completely removing the "unwanted feature".

However, there should be an alternative, a way the game was intended to be.

Lets say there was some bug in casting times or so,
so that people with fast keyboard reaktions could cancel casts at 50% casttime and still have the spell come.
This would be a bug that would make it fast paced and really extreme towards "non-pros".

Now I would definetely introduce an arena where this would be deactivated.

Either that or I would look at these bugs and,
if it wouldnt kill the popularity,
I would remove it from PVE and only make it available in the pro arena.
The arena for casuals wouldnt have this bug.

So in both cases, I would remove it from the casual scene.

An alternative would be to introduce different servers.

Nonetheless, I would want to give my players the option to play the clean game as my team intended it.

I dont understand why you want to fix those bugs and make game like it was intneded to be, if its less fun. What is the reason? To prove that devs think that they know better whats fun or that they are like gods or they are afraid to tell that they are wrong or what.

What i would do if i only had resources for this would be subforum with some extra functionality. There would be place for players to post bugs and suggestions for game, and possibility for them to vote what they want and what to fix in the first place. Players who played longer would have more points so they votes would be stronger. Something like this. Because any dev would like to know what to write to make successfully game. One that everyone likes.

well if youre initial design was worse, than you failed in game design at that point

and yeah, I would offer a way to play the game as intended.

bake, the cheese factor would be a closer analog to a full court press in basketball. it's within the rules and is legal but most often considered bad sportsmanship. when i was young sf an mk were the biggest thing around and playing them on consoles was a joke, so those players were looked at with contempt. it was never used as a tactic against certain styles but more just for a cheap win. you're pretty close with what you say with ryu but take out the uppercut and replace it with the 3 haduken speeds. repeatedly firing off all 3 on spam so there was a constant stream of blue across the screen is cheesing. honda and blanka were typically looked at as cheese characters too since they were often used to wall lock you then span slap or shock. sure it can be countered if you're on your game but it doesnt change the fact its a cheap tactic.

because that's what it was INTENDED to be. in my eyes it dont mean a damn thing what a minority of people thinks is more fun. the devs DO know better since it's THEIR game. a developer has a specific vision of a game being made, when something fell through the cracks that goes opposite of that vision why is it so hard to understand their desire to fix it? the intended game play is how the developer meant it to be and what they consider fun, if things that change the game play to a degree the developer no longer find their own game fun what was the point in making it at all? the get so much crap for supposedly doing things out of greed, but when they do something out of pure intentions to save their baby they still get crap for it.

exactly!

Full court press is a cheap tactic? Sounds like something I would hear from a person who can never see the downside of any tactic and just screams imba whenever some tactic beats them. Full court press is basically what you get when you have coach-less basketball teams without a defensive strategy, everyone knows that the biggest downfall of defending such a large area is open-spaces, agility, and most of all stamina. If used in high level its not bad sportsmanship at all, its called trying really hard. Bad sportsmanship is calling tactics cheap and not admitting defeat.

Gutterpunk you are making the assumption that the people who like the bugs are in the minority, which is not always the case. A lot of games bring in the bugs as actual gameplay when they come out as sequels, just look at strafe-jumping and quake.

I don't know but it feels like you think that commercial games run through the same process as indy games. Developing indy games and commercial games is a totally different process. When you develop an indy game, you hold most of the cards close to you, and you make choices that you like and you agree with and most people won't complain, I agree with that, its their game.

Commercial games run through a completely different process. Programmers can often not actually like the game they are developing (its been said many times in interviews), the game-designers were hired from somewhere else for their expertise rather than passion for the game. The sponsors only care about money, so when a sponsor that only cares about money hires a game-designer that doesn't care much about the game, what do you think the game designer is gonna do?

Commercial games just like any other software go through repeated cycles of change management. Nothing ever ends up the way as intended in the beginning, but by managing change they end up getting the "intended" result. Games are undergoing design changes all the time, so if this means allowing bugs to stay because of gameplay then so be it, it is now officially intended to be in the game. This is why a lot of project managers say, "I have never ever gone out of scope". Its not like some guy goes "right, here's the design, now go make the game", its never like that anymore. Games now are developed through an iterative cycle, where scope is changed all the time, and things suddenly become "intended" and "unintended" or the more appropriate phrase, changed. Therefore the term "clean game as intended" doesn't make any sense in this context either.

Battle.Net 2.0 is a complete fail. It has no chat channels, no LAN (because of the retarded DRM), no custom games, there is a 20mg limit on custom content you can publish and 5 maps only per account, and soooo many broken promises. Sure no LAN would be ok if the latency wasn't twice as bad as Battle.Net 1. The ladder is made in a way that obscures your ranking against other people so that it makes everyone feel like they are the best (you can't even rank yourselves against your friends if you are in the same league). The worst part is that the only real way to add people is via facebook, but for most people there is a principle at stake here. I'm sure devs don't care about this crap, but they still have to develop it. Whether or not they intended for us to use a completely F!@#ed up money grabbing [Facebook].Net is not the point, we shouldn't have to be forced to use what was intended if it makes the experience worse.

Commercial companies are always greedy, and are getting greedier, they will do whatever it is in their power to make more money. Indy games belong to the developer, but commercial games belong to us, they are making the game for us and we pay for it, we are the stakeholders, its not their game, its ours.

I agree with bake. And will add that you never know what will be result from your plans about your game. Look at vanguard. They was thinking that they had revolutionary combat system, they hyped alot of players and when they implemented it and tested it turned out to be simply too slow and uninteresting. So they went with simple skill system like in other games. So dont assume that you know how your rules will be working as intended always. And a bug can make your game unplayable or make it famous. You never know. And its of course up to you what you will do with it.

fact is:

you have to hold your player base if its your main income.

If bugs make up your main income, you have alot to learn before your next game.

if bugfixes create a good environment as you wanted it,
and your environment works, its a good design.

I'm not really sure what you're on about here, zanval.

If you designed a game, and a bug in the game brings in a huge playerbase that otherwise wouldn't joined... That doesn't mean the original was a bad design. It's bad coding, but then you might aswell deviate from your original design and make it a feature if it works better?

If the bug drives off the targeted playerbase, but brings in a larger one... It's still not bad design. If the bug never existed, the target playerbase would still be there. Because it did, you ended up with a different playerbase to the intended one.

I completely disagree with you zanval. I think its near impossible to disagree with bakes last post. Flawless code doesnt mean a good game at all.

its the extra quirks that are the spice of life, whether intended or not, you still created them, and it would be an even bigger mistake on behalf of the programmer to remove such errors if they were indeed what brought in the numbers. For me making a game is about people enjoying it (and as many people at that), as much as it's 'my baby' and I have a very clear idea of what I want, only sticking to this and creating MY personal vision isn't always what is best for the project. You gotta curve to the flow and find the correct balance between what your idealistic dream is, and the vision of that dream in reality.

Flawless code is possible flawless results, is in my opinion completely impossible. By that i mean, the code could be perfect no apparent bugs, however there are still gameplay bugs or glitches. These are in nearly every game, (particularly the games i don't tend to put down) the games where i go through it, complete it, do some online with it, get bored. Are nearly completely bugless. However the games that bring me back time and time again are games that have SOME bugs in. That i can either spend some time with some mates messing around with. Or exploit it to "OWN" some noobs. (i use those terms lightly) All i am saying is flawless code is a possibility flawless gameplay is not by any stretch of the imgaination. And if it was then you'd be IRL. I'm sure many would agree with me on this post.

I am honestly struggling to understand how people are not agreeing with this concept? Just two halves of the same whole I guess.

Although the idea of 'flawless results' is such a dynamic idea that its open to a lot of discussion, but from what you've said I believe this to be my interpretation of it too. The people in this topic that disagree ( I assume) would see flawless results to be 100% bug/glitch free gameplay AND code, and are unable to seperate the two. I think that this stems from the idea of being unable to seperate original dream and final product (what it *should* become) through things such as audience reviews and other critics.

One mans dream is always a good start, but this must become more global to become a real success. No one man can really pretend to know all the answers and outcomes, so it seems unlogical to remove outside influence in the way of design

Well I'll stick to what I already posted.

If you go with the flaws, be sure to still offer the "original game".

In this case were talking about online games-only or?
in an MMORPG, different servers make this possible.

It is possible if you have enough players interested in both versions of game, so its worth to have another server And even then, if you have complicated game and have few things you would like to remove and players dont, then you simply wont be able to create so many servers with all possible combinations of versions. And it happends to have few at once. Like i said somewhere else: vendor digging, players liked this in everquest but in every new mmorpg you cant do that, you can only buy back items you sold and even then its limited to few of them (why this is a problem its beyond me). Next thing is that casters like necromancer can solo things that normally require whole group. And you may belive it or not some people like it, others dont care because its not simple - but doable by skilled player. Another thing is items bound on equip and level requirements for them, players dont like it but since devs cant find better way to solve some problems they implemented it. And these are just few items from one game and i can mention another 10 or more only to this game. So you will end up with dozens of versions
And with those problems on board people still are (over 10 years now) playing everquest (even if some of problems was unnecesery fixed) and having more fun than with never games that fixed all of that "problems". New games are boring and everquest is loosing playerbase simply because its too old now ... But you wont find another game today with this feeling (i mean pre - luclin).

And there are 2 more games that are trying to copy everquest success (eq2 and vanguard) but they didnt. And yes, they dont have "problems" oryginal eq had

Kind of unrelated. This is by PurePwnage though not Yahtzee. I think the points could have been explained better though.

Not really viable IMO.

An online game requires a large community, the smaller that community is the less viable it is.

Maintenance is very expensive, no company is going to double the amount of money going into maintenance.

Ok so heres another one.

I recently got a PS3 and super street fighter 4. Got to C rank in about 3 days with Juri, then I had to study for exams.

I started watching VODs and there was something I found really interesting in most of the games. Basically the combo whores were getting dominated all the time, even if they scored twice as many hits, did really nice combos, and punished mistakes as hard as you could possibly do, that player would always end up losing.

Then I found about this new feature called damage scaling. What the hell? Seriously, this makes me so angry, it nearly made me switch to SF2 until I realised that no one cares about it and it has no online capability.

Basically the bigger your combo is the less damage you do. Not only that, the lower your health, the less damage is dealt to you. So basically if you manage to pull off anything more than a 15 hit combo you end up doing no damage beyond those first 15 hits, even 10 hit combos are a waste of time. So basically you end up with disgusting overly safe games, with a few pot shots here and there until someone dies, often finished off with a crouched light kick, or a hadouken.

This is the dumbest way to bring the divide between good and bad closer together.

Reasons:

• Basically zoning becomes used too much (spamming the same move over and over, leading to a predictable counter, and then you counter that counter), because even if you punish someone for being cheap you can't do enough damage to justify doing a hard counter.
• You will never see an awesome combo chain followed by an ultra-combo finish, because it does less damage than just using specials every now and then, besides ultras do 0 damage after about 15 hits.
• Cross ups become extremely powerful and can only be used by extremely good players over bad players (so basically noobs get owned, but they can't string a combo together in order to beat the good player when they make a mistake), so games still remain overly predictable.
• Safe play does way more damage than risky aggressive play

This is really stupid also because of the fact that street fighter trial mode promotes linking, in fact you can't pass the test unless you link all the moves together, even though if you don't link them, you will do tonnes more damage. So ill the newbies starting out online, will come-out with memorised seemingly bread-and-butter combos and get dominated by overly cheap and boring tactics every time.

Worst idea ever. This is another strike on my list of bad ways to make the game "better" by catering to casuals. Still waiting on a good one.