MCOC and Player Reponsibilties
Dear MCOC team,
Could you please clarify to us what constitute a bug, the exploitation of a bug and where the responsibility lies?
Having played quite a few online games, it’s clear to me that any user who tries to use 3rd party software or make alteration to the game to gain unfair advantages should not be tolerated and should be banned from the game.
However, if there is a design flaw to a particular event/game feature, I would assume it’s the responsibility of the game designers to determine whether it is intended or not, and if and what action should be taken against it. We the players’ sole responsibility is to report anything we believe to be unusually to Kabam either through the forum or the support team directly.
Until now, whenever there is an unintended bug that had an adverse effect to us players, the process seems to follow my assumptions above, and I have been very happy with the way the support team has handled them. I.e Reponses on the forum and from the support teams mostly been swift, and when the anomaly has been confirmed as an unintended, patches were generally put in within a few days. On cases when the bug had a serious negative impact to all the players, we also received compensation rewards.
However, when there is an unintended bug that had a beneficial effect to us players, the process become inconsistent and ambiguous. If I or any player goes into an event map, and see two revives in a single path, I think most of us will be inclined to take that path and the rewards on offer; and if these revives appear again on re-entering the map, I think some of us will be tempted to do that path again until they disappear.
As long an action is within the game design mechanism, it should not be us the players to decide whether it’s intended or not. Those with the upmost morality, may decide to report such an anomaly to Kabam through the forum or the support team, and from there, it should then be dealt in the same way as the adverse bugs. On cases when the bug had a serious positive impact to some players, it should be Kabam’s responsibility to take back some of the extra rewards people received to ensure the fairness of the game (but also consider compensate people for the time and resources they spent in getting these rewards). Once such an action is openly communicated to the players, I doubt many will have much to complain.
Now what I really don’t like is this concept of ‘exploitation’ introduced by you on those players who benefited from your game design flaws. It encouraged us players to turn on each other in the name of fairness of the game, and I have seen tag such ‘cheaters, ‘cancers’, ‘plagues’ been thrown around in the forum, along with other nasty comments that constitute personal attacks on individual players.
We really like the MCOC game, and with the amount of new content that it introduces every month, we understand that there are always going to be design flaws, and the game will need constantly to be twigged, Some of the fixes and unwind could be difficult to achieve and we will try out best to be patient on them; but ultimately this is what we pay any game company for, to ensure the proper function and integrity of a game.
Labelling players who benefited from a game design flaw as ‘cheater’, ‘exploiters, banning and use them as scape goat rather than finding a proper fix to an error in the game is both wrong and unprecedented. With the amount of money people have spent on the game, this could also bring unwanted liabilities to Kabam, something none of us would like to see
And finally, the forum is a place for us players to express our opinions about the game, and seek to bring positive changes to the game. I am not here to offend anyone, so please don’t just delete my post and threaten to close my account (like you did to some of my friends)
regards
