Yes this was quite obvious, but the carrier/transport abuse is a good example. Its extremely effective(it makes the human player unable to attack nelf player's army, unless he went AM+elemental) , its not right(ie you have practically invulnerable army), but in the end people learnt to cope with this "imba" , and like you said:I'm pretty sure even the most hard core player will agree that some extremely effective things just aren't right and should not be done.
IE the thing wasnt intended, and after the initial IMBA cries people got to know it as a interesting game strat.so that even if the game is poorly balanced, it can find an own balance that isn't too dull.
I think that any modifications to the game are bannable (ie wall/speedhacks) BUTFor instance, playing with a hacked exe that makes all my units invicible, or see-through-walls hacks in FPS. Now that more and more game use helping external application (like better GUI thingies for MMO), the line is getting a bit blurry though. For instance I was once suprised to see that bright skin mods are considered ok by some pro tournamenter.
I dislike LUA, but when a game lets everyone use LUA, i try to exploit it to the fullest.BTW, what's would be your view on a hack exe that removed fog of war for Spring sleska? And what do you think about LUA widgets?
For example when i played world of warcraft i had a phletora of LUA addons that autocasted certain spells that can only be used after parries/dodges, making the micro in combats a lot easier, giving me time to look at the combat situation . Or addons that showed me where to get certain quest items to level up faster compared to people who had to seek for the quest items through hazy quest descriptions.
Blizz said that LUA is ok, so im going to use it. Had they said it is not ok, i wouldnt have.
Which drugs? Theoretically you could be as strict as you can and ban energy drinks and caffeine since they might give the other player a edge over the other player.Also, drugs in sports, ok or not?
Yes.In an ideal world, dev would only release perfectly playtested games with no exploits left. But reality isn't ideal. I do not believe having a rigid dev vision of how the game should be played, and have it enforced by "fixing" any "sploits" is the right way.
Agree. TA really lives up to its name as a "really cool wargame"I quite like the way TA was balanced upon: Give loads of units, a rich environnement with countless means of interaction and differentiation, so that even if the game is poorly balanced, it can find an own balance that isn't too dull. Well, TA still too often starts with the same flash rush then samson swarm, but at least in can ends in many ways. Despite highly skilled players trying their best for 11 years, there isn't one single way of playing TA.
BUT TO GET BACK TO TOPIC.
1) EXPLOITS
gamedev(s) shouldnt automatically seek to fix the exploits he/they, But rather look wheter the exploit makes the gameplay deeper (linebombing) , or whether the exploit makes the game really imbalanced ( last aa vsn jeffies)
2) SUPERWEAPONS
The bertha is one of the most beautiful concepts of superweapons that i know. It doesnt automatically give you a win, but unless the enemy doesnt respond to it he's slowly going to get shelled down.
It also creates a psychological effect, "that dude can already afford a bertha, im done for" or "omg he has t2 AND A BERTHA already. This is rather unique since not many computergames have this kind of psychological weapons.
It also shows that superweapons dont always need to be nukes.
3) COMMANDERS
On this i disagree, if the commander feature had been such a bad thing, there would've been more mods on OTA to remove this. But instead during the course of 11 years not that many people have whined about it (compared to the amount of people whining about flashAs for comm napping, I'd just remove the commander. Starting the game with such a powerful mobile unit is prone to open alot of abuse, and indeed it does, and then creat lots of drama about whether or not comm rushing is fair or not, and where does the blurry line end. For comm napping, making commander untransportable is so simple (a single FBI tag!) it could be fixed that way, but there's still the problem of being given the unit with the most powerful weapon (DGUN) and the most powerful death explosion right at the start. There's a reason other RTS start with harmless construction unit and not the most powerful unit.
)4) PREBUILT BASES
I dont like this concept since the initial game-phase would just become a more dull experience. To have prebuilt defences would make raiding not as favoured strategy (for example to have 2 cannons, 2 pylons and a gateway in starcraft for protoss around the minerals/nexus)
Whereas in games like wc3 the build-up phase is very important (making "walls" out of farms, building the base so tight the enemy cannot come to kill your goldpeons, yet having room to expand your base)
All of this would become nullified by the prebuilt bases at the expense of prolonging the already decided game.
Like you said, A game might be already decided before it begins, so why create a illusion for the newbie that he has chances?
I'd rather have him squished fast so that he can do another game faster, propably against a player of an equal skill, which brings me to the next part:
5) NEWBIES VS PROS:
To avoid such pro vs newbie games from happening, there are a few choices open.
One would be to scale up single player missions so that the first few missions are easy, the middle would be "hard" and the last missions would be almost multiplayerlike. How to do this i dont know, since im not a gamdev, but @least it sounds like a nice concept to me. Currently, Most rts games have a VERY clear difference between single and multiplayers.
The other is a more simple solution, A matchmaking system with win/lose/rank stats like battle.net
