There's already a long post in off-topic about "trolls", which got me thinking a bit more about aberrant behavior online. For some reason, game devs seem to make similar mistakes over and over, either through oversight or intentional avoidance of the potential to abuse game mechanics. It's like they expect people to play their game the way they want it to be played, but don't put in sufficient or reasonable mechanisms to enforce that desire...
Sure, in a perfect world, everybody would play nice, and follow both the letter AND spirit of the rules. But that's just never going to happen. There are some games (EVE online jumps to mind) that embrace the "wild west" approach to game governance, which is frankly very refreshing sometimes. But a game like MWO, which REQUIRES at least squad-level coordination for enjoyable play, AND has essentially no barrier to entry (free to play), I'm pretty sure that type of laissez-faire approach just won't work.
So anyway, instead of doing the hindsight is 20/20 thing, I thought it might be interesting to discuss what types of "exploits" or other metagame shenanigans to expect, and what, if anything, could be done to control, respond, or prevent them. Perhaps the most obvious/damaging one to game credibility (aside from blatant hax/exploits anyway):
Game fixing. If there's any mechanism to control or anticipate the matchmaking process, expect folks to exploit it mercilessly. Could be as simple as in-game cross faction collusion using throw-away accounts to quickly lose matches or more elaborate fifth-column/traitor/manchurian-candidate scheming. Or simply organized, deliberate win trading. With the skill tree setup, you might also see people dual-boxing a mech on both sides of a fight, then running off to a corner to shoot themselves to up their skills. Basically, anything to corrupt the may-the-best-team-win intent.
Some other pretty standard misbehavior includes leeching (play n afk), general griefing/TKing (for the lolz, as opposed to for a gain.), spamming chat (with stupid ascii pics, vulgarity, etc.), general antisocial malevolence ("use alt-F4 to bring up your control panel..."), etc.
Would really be nice to know that all the OBVIOUS stuff like this has been considered and proper responses put in place BEFORE the game comes out, as opposed to the typical knee-jerk post game cleanup. There's lots of different approaches in use in various games... learn from history or repeat it.
Thoughts?
Edited by Remf, 09 July 2012 - 12:50 PM.