I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of an MMO in the vein of Disgaea, a PS2 strategy RPG. There are two key points interest me as Disgaea pertains to MMOs: exploits and advancement scaling. For now, I’m just going to touch on the issue of exploits.
Exploits
MMOs are very structured and try to keep players playing fair. How many times have you heard, “We can’t do X, because players will do abuse Y.” I’ve certainly said it a few times. At that point, you either need to solve Y or scrap X. If you’re on a strict schedule or find Y live, then the fix may involve duct tape. Solve Y that way too many times and you get a mess.
Disgaea is all about mastering the game mechanics in crazy and abusive ways. Things that are typically “exploits” are more like hidden nuggets in Disgaea that you’re encouraged to discover and abuse. Even once you figured out a way to take advantage of the mechanics, there was still a challenge in pulling it off.
It’s interesting because it was like a built-in layer of exploits in the game mechanics. For example, it was perfectly reasonable to find a situation where you were invulnerable and you could kill a massive monster that you created by throwing a bunch of monsters on top of each other so they merge. Or you could find combos on the tiles that clear out the whole map and give you insane bonuses. And you might even decide to permanently kill some of your party members to buff other characters. Or deliberately damage yourself as much as possible so that you could spend money at the hospital to unlock bonuses.
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What’s interesting is how the game was designed to encourage players to break the systems, and the algorithmic advancement supports long-term challenges.
I wouldn’t want to try any of this in a PvP game, because it’d create too much frustration if players are abusing these mechanics against each other. Indirect competition would be fine, such as leaderboards.
Obviously, doing this would be Really Hard in the context of an MMO and there are so many arguments about where it’d be flawed that I’m not even going to try to list them. It’s an interesting thought experiment. It has to be completely different than the typical MMORPG. Has anyone seen an online game take this approach?