The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming
Worst thing for a multiplayer game: Success
by Brad Wardell
If you make a multiplayer game that actually has some sort
of ladder on it (high score list or ranking system) you better
hope that either a) you are prepared to spend a lot of time
fighting cheaters and vandals or b) pray your game doesn't
become popular.
There is something about we humans and competition. If there
was a world wide contest for eating tree bark where the top
100 tree bark eaters were ranked and placed with their picture
on a website, you can bet that there would be no shortage
of people ready to demonstrate their tree bark eating prowess.
And such competitiveness brings out the worst in some people.
Some people will do anything for a high score. As Blizzard
discovered the hard way with Diablo and countless other popular
games have discovered, people will work hard to cheat.
Anyone reading this who's played Counterstrike recently knows
the feeling I'm talking about. There are cheats for just about
everything now. Some are more subtle than others and it all
comes down to the desire to beat a bunch of people you don't
even know.
The second problem you run into are the real psychos out
there who don't try to cheat but rather try to destroy. Our
own servers have suffered many times because of users finding
ways to take down our servers. Nothing quite like having to
spend part of your weekend creating an emergency fix for a
server because some bored teenager has found a way to knock
down the server and ruin everyone's fun. I used to feel bad
for the nerdy guy in high school who got picked on. But these
days, I'm starting to wish I'd given the class computer jerk
a wedgie.
This is one of the reasons why I think Internet privacy goes
too far. I think there should be a way to know who, to some
degree, is behind a given IP so that we can at least more
easily complain to the ISP about these kinds of people.
Our next game, Galactic Civilizations, won't have any multiplayer
in it. Maybe in a sequel but not the first one. I want to
concentrate on making a really good, in depth, strategy game
and not have to assign one of our precious few developers
to go and make sure that some kid can't hack into the server
and screw with people in the middle of a game.
What do you guys think? Talk to us here on QuarterToThree's
message board or visit our news
server:
Do you agree with Brad or do you want to give him a wedgie?
Post your thoughts on our message
board.
Brad Wardell is the Project Manager of two ongoing
Stardock games:
The Corporate Machine, a business strategy game
due out December 11 and Galactic Civilizations, a turn based
strategy game due out late 2001. Stardock’s website is http://www.stardock.com.
Brad Wardell’s website is http://people.mw.mediaone.net/bwardell.
He is also the Product Manager of WindowBlinds (www.windowblinds.net)
and DesktopX (www.desktopx.net).
|
