Thought Exercise V Solution

The exercise: Describe an alternative method of limiting cheating in an online RPG.  Bonus: make it appease the fickle, foam-at-the-mouth fanbase of Blizzard games.

During the controversy over the Diablo announcements last month, I mistook mods for add-ons.  Mods alter the rules and mechanics of gameplay while add-ons alter the UI and cosmetic elements of the game.  With that in mind, I have a whole hosts of thoughts.  The first of which is:

Make a map editor.  Here's a short game: name all the Blizzard games since the original Warcraft without a map editor (Hint: there are two and they both start with "Diablo").   While that certainly didn't hurt the sales of those games, I am surprised Blizzard missed out on that opportunity.  Watch any Blizzcon and you'll see stereotypically large and pony-tailed guys mumbling into microphones about all the things wrong about Diablo.  A map editor would give them room to prove it (and maybe they will!  Some of those guys have played more Diablo than the entire Blizzard team combined).

Mods were a significant part of keeping Diablo II going for so long.  I had roommate that swore by several of them, claiming they were more balanced and enjoyable than the original game.  I tried them and disagreed, but the large library of mods to choose from at least meant Diablo has some diverse replayability.

With Battle.net in place and now a requirement for playing the game, safe distribution of maps is already there.  Players could make two types of maps: arenas and campaigns.  Arenas could be Vanilla or Custom, with vanilla using all the mechanics from the normal game.  Custom would allow map designers to add new abilities and test them in glorious player-versus-player combat.  Campaigns would all be custom, since they involve adding new items, zones, and monsters.

The original Diablo team eventually left and created Runic Studios, famous for Torchlight.  They provided, separate from the game, an excellent little map editor.  The small Torchlight community created a impressive number of mods for the game, including new classes and levels.  There is precedent for map editor for this kind of game, and with Blizzard's diehard community, it would be vastly successful.

I don't mind the concept of real-world-currency auction houses, but since I am thinking of alternatives, why not Redesign Item Ownership.  Where WoW had Bind-on-Equip and Bind-on-Pickup items, Diablo III could implement a system of Bind-on-Server items.  Once an item drops, it can only be picked up and traded by people who were on the server when it dropped.  This means no cross-game item selling.  This would not apply to every item, just items of certain rarity.  This cuts out the flagrant item selling.