Of Certain Activities, Vague Descriptions, and Appropriate Responses

Foreword: Vague descriptions are a necessity in this post, so apologies if people take a disliking to them.

People will always take advantage of windows of opportunity. It's a fact of life.

In an MMO, a window of opportunity is often something which the Developers never wanted to happen, and such is the case with an ongoing activity which BioWare have come out and promised to tackle this coming Tuesday.

I'm not going to directly state what people are actually doing in-game (although doubtless people 'in the know' will mindlessly flock to quickly experience it this week one last time with BioWare's announcement in mind), but it was something that can be defined easily as 'game-breaking' due to it bypassing established systems in MMOs across the board.

Unfortunately for BioWare, this endeavour can easily be accomplished by anyone at level 60 under the correct circumstances, meaning that isolation is going to be nigh-impossible; any repercussions - and there should be some for this, in my opinion - would need to be blanket. I don't know how they can check on who did what how many times, so I don't know if a blanket 'minor' punishment is possible for the majority whilst a 'major' punishment can be reserved for those who were more frivolous.

Certainly any blanket punishment is going to draw unworthy criticism from those involved, but punishment was not meted out for similar endeavours over the last two years, and it's high-time BioWare confronted them as this particular one is easily the worst of the lot.

Considering that this particular endeavour has been in-game since 3.0 began - I don't know if it persisted through Closed Beta or not - people will have been doing this week-after-week in multiple cases; the question here is "What counts as 'major/minor' or 'abusing' in this light?", and my answer would be nothing more than drawing a blank. I'm sure BioWare have a system under their belt, though, and I look forward to seeing it implemented.

Another rant post, but I am really quite disgusted that this slipped into Live in the first place and that so many have debased themselves by undertaking the activity. I for one don't see the fun of it, but maybe I'm becoming too old-fashioned for stuff like this...