G
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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.development (More info?)
I'm depressed over scumming. It turns out that there's a bug in the
performance skill in GearHead. By repeatedly performing over and over
in town, it's possible to get infinite cash and experience. This isn't
the first time such an exploit has come to my attention. Previous
examples have included attacking the stairs for XP and allowing oneself
to be attacked repeatedly by weak monsters for XP.
I'm of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I feel that as a
developer I should do my best to block all obvious exploits, in order
to prevent any particular skill or tactic from being overpowered. On
the other hand, I think that trying to block all forms of scumming is a
fool's errand. There's no way I'm ever going to eliminate every
possible exploit.
Right now no effort is made to prevent save-scumming. In fact, there's
a configuration option to turn off automatic saving for people who want
to play GH more like a standard CRPG. There isn't any effort to prevent
other types of cheating, either. All the support files are plain text,
and the debugging console command is well known. I trust my players to
play the game in a way that's fun for them.
What's different about scumming for XP, though, is that it feels like
an activity that's sanctioned by the game. To cheat through other
methods you must step out of character and do some typing. To scum, all
you have to do is be patient.
I can change things so that scumming becomes less convenient, but I
can't think of how to change things so it becomes downright impossible.
I could announce to my message board that scumming is de facto
cheating, but there's enough grey area present to make such an
announcement meaningless. Alternatively, I could just fix up the
obvious problems with the performance skill and just assume that if my
players want to spend all their time scumming they can go play FF8
instead.
This is more of a rant than anything else, but I'm interested to hear
what other developers feel about the subject.
- Joseph Hewitt
I'm depressed over scumming. It turns out that there's a bug in the
performance skill in GearHead. By repeatedly performing over and over
in town, it's possible to get infinite cash and experience. This isn't
the first time such an exploit has come to my attention. Previous
examples have included attacking the stairs for XP and allowing oneself
to be attacked repeatedly by weak monsters for XP.
I'm of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I feel that as a
developer I should do my best to block all obvious exploits, in order
to prevent any particular skill or tactic from being overpowered. On
the other hand, I think that trying to block all forms of scumming is a
fool's errand. There's no way I'm ever going to eliminate every
possible exploit.
Right now no effort is made to prevent save-scumming. In fact, there's
a configuration option to turn off automatic saving for people who want
to play GH more like a standard CRPG. There isn't any effort to prevent
other types of cheating, either. All the support files are plain text,
and the debugging console command is well known. I trust my players to
play the game in a way that's fun for them.
What's different about scumming for XP, though, is that it feels like
an activity that's sanctioned by the game. To cheat through other
methods you must step out of character and do some typing. To scum, all
you have to do is be patient.
I can change things so that scumming becomes less convenient, but I
can't think of how to change things so it becomes downright impossible.
I could announce to my message board that scumming is de facto
cheating, but there's enough grey area present to make such an
announcement meaningless. Alternatively, I could just fix up the
obvious problems with the performance skill and just assume that if my
players want to spend all their time scumming they can go play FF8
instead.
This is more of a rant than anything else, but I'm interested to hear
what other developers feel about the subject.
- Joseph Hewitt