LotRO Dev Shares Thoughts On Exploits

LotRO developer Orion has posted his thoughts on exploits and emergent gameplay in his latest blog entry.

A growing issue in LotRO, along with many other MMOs out there, exploits are the bane of many a developer. Orion begins his blog by describing exploits and emergent gameplay, and why they happen. He then goes on the give a few examples, namely in the Grand Stair encounter.

“Jumping from an increased height no longer killed players: This was painful to see. Expected behavior was for players to jump and plummet far enough to their death, but something in code changed at this time and the damage dealt by falling was reduced…no more death while jumping.” He goes onto give another example “Standing at the back of the throne room means that the devoted never aggros the group and thus never enters the fight: Again emergent, but clearly not the intent of the space. You discovered a clear bug that is now an exploit…” He continues, explaining Turbine’s position on this “So what makes these exploits? Some will say that these seems like legit strategies to beat a difficult encounter. While true they do make it easier to beat a difficult encounter,  they also abuse flaws in game code to achieve their objectives.”

See the full blog at the LotRO site.