Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Blizzard Lawsuit

I was planning on writing about renaming dynamic tonight, but I came across something a bit more interesting that I would like to comment on. Apparently Blizzard is suing MDY Industries over a program called WoW Glider, which lets players automate play of World of Warcraft. While I am strongly against people who want to cheat to get ahead in games I really think in many cases, like this one for example, that it is more Blizzard's fault. A good MMORPG shouldn't be able to be automated, if only for the fact that anything that can be automated isn't worth doing. Software and hardware is developed to solve boring repetitive tasks. If WoW is boring and repetitive (which in my opinion it is) then why not automate it, its not worth actually playing.

If a game designer cannot make a game entertaining without repetitive tasks then they have failed as a designer. I don't like doing repetitive homework... so why do I want to kill the same creature over and over for hours to level, or hit the same handful of keys to 'grind' for something. At least if you make your game challenging and require thought then automation will be difficult. If its a challenge then at least automating it will be fun. And when coding an automated game player is fun, you know its time to write better games. I hope this has been insightful.

CORRECTION: I forgot to place a link to where I heard about this, it was at www.zenofdesign.com.

-Toraux

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