Games

Let people have fun with the game FFS.

Mmmm. It's fine for single-player games to provide absolute freedom, but can really ruin multiplayer games, particularly competitive multiplayer games.

I only played Diablo briefly. Way back when it was released, late 1990s, they put out a demo. I tried it. Played a bit single-player. Felt kind of grindy and repetitive, lot of clicking on things to kill them. But some party-based games require people working in coordination to be interesting. Figured "well, maybe I can go play with some people", see if it's more fun with a team working together.

Logged into a demo server, and as I recall, one couldn't use single-player characters on servers (which makes sense, if the multiplayer characters need to run in a secure environment). I was not really enthusiastic about the idea of having to grind up a new character to where my other one had been. I doubted it'd work, but decided I'd try memory-editing my gold. Unexpectedly, it did -- the server just trusted the client as to quantity of items when they were moved around in the inventory. Huh.

So I filled up every possible slot in my character with the maximum amount of gold possible and went off hunting for a shopkeeper. Some other player on the demo server kept calling for other players to come meet him at some location for various reasons. That sounded sketchy, so I avoided that. It turns out that there were some clever hacks out that would apparently let characters both be invisible to other characters and do enormous damage. Eventually, that character managed to find me, gave me a whack that killed me in one hit, and the screen exploded into an essentially entirely gold-floored mass. That player, probably a little incredulous, walked around a little, then started trying to pick up gold.

It wasn't as if I'd lost anything that couldn't be promptly remade, but I decided that given the state of the game, given the frequency with which the game's rules were being broken -- both by me and others -- this probably wasn't the game for me. Last time I've played the series.

I agree with not limiting a single-player environment, but you can't let one character do whatever they want in a multiplayer environment without affecting the experience of other players in the game.