MMOs: The fun of cheating

Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way,
Oh what fun it is
To get creative with your play.



Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Killing stuff is neat,
But it's even better when
You've worked out how to cheat.


Ever since the start of the MMO players have loved to push the game mechanics.

The Holy Trinity, so fundamental to the genre, may well have started as an exploit that got co-opted as a feature. In some primitive game a player figured out how to manage mob aggro and exploited this knowledge by stacking armour and defences on the character capable of holding aggro thereby inventing a much more efficient system than the Everyone Is Dps mechanic.

Many other standard MMO combat techniques are clearly methods of exploiting the AI which show the weaknesses of the program as a combat simulator. Kiting, circle-strafing, terrain exploiting and all manner of pulling. None of these combat techniques resemble what happens in real fights and it's unlikely that any of them were deliberately designed into games originally.

Sometimes the "exploit" is on the part of the developers: a field full of intelligent orc mobs who just stand there picking their noses while you pull and kill them one by one is designed as a bad simulation which is a fun game.

Why players love exploits

- it makes you feel clever.
- it creates a secret language of gameplay mechanics that "pro" gamers understand and "noob" gamers don't, thereby demonstrating mastery.
- it allows you to do amazing things not intended by the developers or expected by others.
- it allows you to progress faster and further than you would otherwise be able to.
- it makes the game look different and fresh.

How players show their exploits off, some examples


Example 1: Demon Lord Kazzak in Stormwind

Here is a video of Demon Lord Kazzak who has been dragged by a skilled Hunter to the city of Stormwind. The rampage this raid boss mob goes on is unstoppable by players since the boss heals when he kills someone. In an area full of low level players this makes him unkillable. When this boss was exploited in this way he had to be manually reset by a GM.

The Hunter had to do a tricky kiting job. Kiting such as this was generally managed by reverse jump shots. Your character moves forwards, then you jump, spin 180, shoot behind you while in mid-air, spin 180, then land pointing forwards. This tricks the game into thinking you had always been going forwards so you don't slow down while getting a shot off backwards. It takes a bit of practice to get right.

What is interesting is that although they moved this boss to prevent people continuing to do this they did not change the gameplay mechanic. It's on the long list of exploits which have become features.

Example 2: It's fun when the game goes wrong in interesting ways

This video shows an exploit where the player has managed to get the horses from the Arathi Basin stables to activate and attack the other side.

It's not amazingly powerful, the team exploiting lost this battle. It does however look interesting.

The good old days

This attitude is particularly prevalent in players who reminisce fondly about the early days of Ultima Online, Everquest and Star Wars; Galaxies. All of these games were designed (both on purpose and inadvertently) to encourage emergent gameplay.

When players say fondly that things were great back then what they are often remembering is they found interesting ways to beat the system that aren't readily available to most players in modern games.

The story of Fansy the Famous Bard, a player who killed other players by training mobs onto them is well-known and is an example of a player who received considerable recognition simply by exploiting over and over all day long.

Scott Hartsman agrees: his excellent blog post on emergent gameplay is called Emergent Play in MMOs - It's about the balance. Moorgard (developer Steve Danuser) comments:

"Locked encounters: saving the world from degenerates, (negative) one subscription at a time."

What he's saying is that it costs games companies subscribers to fix such problems because players love them.

Blizzard has been keenly conscious of this in policing World of Warcraft. Generally they don't ban players for exploiting - they just fix the exploit. Sometimes. Where they do ban people it's sometimes dependent on how succesful the player has been with an exploit.

When Wrath of the Lich King came out player Athene used his guild to help him level fast. He made level 79 in 13 hours. Then despite having confirmed with one GM that his levelling technique was legal another GM decided it wasn't, temporarily banned the players involved and reset the character to 70.

What they were doing was tagging mobs inside an instance, then the helpers would drop group and kill it while the power-levelled character went on to tag more mobs, then inviting everyone back before the auto-hearth mechanic for not being in the instance group kicked in.

After Athene and his friends were banned a player called Nymh made the world first level 80 also, and this time legally, with outside help.

Raid guild Exodus were temporarily suspended after a world first defeat of Yogg-Saron. Their take on the matter is very revealing. While they admitted that they exploited they said they'd do the same thing again and pointed fingers at many other world firsts which had been achieved using exploits and allowed to stand.

The whole issue of cheating has become such a grey area nowadays because some level of game mechanics abuse is an integral part of almost every player's arsenal and in many cases is designed back into the game as a "feature" by developers who like the way the emergent play changes the fundamental gameplay. The Ancient Gaming Noob found that only 12% of players surveyed thought that exploiting game mechanics was cheating and only 13% considered illicit real money transactions cheating.

Like it or not (and most players love it) exploiting is here to stay.

For designers the goal is a game where some exploiting is possible so that players are entertained but not so much that the game appears broken. When Darkfall released I didn't buy it because of reports of rampant afk macroing. A system that skilled you up for swinging your sword and supported macros was tailor-made for botting. Even a strict policy failed to prevent widespread abuse and I really didn't fancy a game which is played by leaving your computer on all day and overnight and levelling while you work and sleep. I hated it in SWG and didn't fancy dealing with it again in a game where it appeared to be mandatory. (They've since softened the skill curve to allow new players more chance to be competitive with veterans without exploiting).

So it's a fine line for developers - too little scope for player creativity and you follow in the footsteps of Warhammer Online. That game with its comparitively simple systems didn't allow the average player to seek advantage except through flavour of the month builds. What's worse they co-opted fotm as a design mechanic, deliberately overpowering Bright Wizards and Warrior Priests to balance the factions as Destruction was too strong. So not only was the only way to cheese the game (apart from certain keep exploits) playing a fotm build but the developers had decided which fotm build you would cheese with. This total lack of player control over their ability to cheese made the game less fun than its rivals.