Friday 13 January 2017

Punishing Players for Glitches

So maybe about a week ago I came across some news about Overwatch.  Usually I ignore stuff about Overwatch because I don't play it but this particular story caught my eye.  Apparently, if you use a certain character on a certain stage then you can glitch out of bounds, make your way to the enemy half of the map and just go to town.  Sort of cool but in a multiplayer game like Overwatch I can see why people would be upset with others using it.

However of course the fact that a glitch exists in a game isn't enough to pique my interest on its own, every game has its glitches.  What really made me raise an eyebrow was the fact that, according to a number of websites, Blizzard have issued a statement saying that it's going to punish players who used the glitch, probably meaning a ban.

Are you fucking kidding me?  I know it's annoying and I can see why the community would start alerting Blizzard to the problem so that they can fix it but banning players that used it, or punishing them in any way for that matter, is complete fucking dog shit.  The glitch is Blizzard's fucking fault, they are the ones who missed the detail and players used their oversight in order to get ahead.  Fix it, sure, but don't punish the players because of your fuck up, that makes you just look like a shitty baby throwing your toys out of the pram because people won't play the game YOUR way.  The glitch doesn't even look hard to pull off, the kind of thing that any Tom, Dick or Harry could pull off so how the fuck did you miss something that?

This isn't the first time I've heard something like this though.  I remember a while back reading a thing about World of Warcraft, way after I had stopped playing about a guild getting banned from the game for clearing a raid in a slightly unorthodox manner.  The boss for the raid had a gimmick of vanishing platforms that would kill you if you were stood on them when they came out from under your feet, except some smart players found out that throwing Rogue bombs at the floor stopped them from going away.  Blizzard caught on and fixed the floor but also banned the guild that discovered the glitch.  Once again, complete bullshit.  They managed to get some good loot by finding a flaw within the game, they aren't cheating, hacking or using mods, they are just exploiting a programmer fuck up.  Fixing it so that every guild can't just easy mode farm the dungeon is fine but banning people because your play testers are bad at play testing is just not fair. 

One more example of this was the famous GTA Online thing where people found out how to duplicate cars or something in order to sell them for tons of in game cash.  This, once again, resulted in a bunch of people being banned despite the fact that the error was the fault of Rockstar and not the players.  If players having so much money was a problem then they could have just rolled shit back rather than just kicking people off the game for using a bit of ingenuity. 

Glitches are going to happen, I'm not saying that a game having glitches is some kind of indication that programmers suck at their jobs, there's a lot going on and some shit is going to slip through the cracks.  That said, don't be a fucking angry baby when smart players start taking advantage of YOUR mistakes to get ahead.  In all three of these cases, the glitches are easy mode bullshit that anyone can perform even if they are drunk, high and have broken fingers.  We aren't exactly talking Queen Gohma Wrong Warp here.

Ban hackers, modders and all that jazz sure because in the case of multiplayer games those guys are just being dicks.  But glitching?  That shit is on you, fix it and move on and maybe you should even be thanking the people that discovered it because if they didn't then your shitty game would just stay broken, wouldn't it?

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