So here I am, sick as a dog, coughing up the spawn of Nurgle and wishing doom upon whatever foul miscreant carried this plague to fruition before carelessly spreading the filth in their general vicinity, like the meatspace version of an AoE. My frame of mind is snide, my love for the human race is at an all-time low — sounds to me like the ideal time for a rant. The topic today, dear readers, is that of loopholes in game design, and how far is too far?

I always tended to favour the tank builds. This probably says a lot about my mentality.

Let me take you back to a lesser-known Xbox 360 game, Chromehounds, a spiritual successor to the Armored Core series of mech simulators. Chromehounds was at least fairly original in that it allowed the players a great deal of freedom when constructing their own mechs — while it was still a Lego-like experience of fitting pieces together, there were various add-on blocks that served no purpose other than as hubs to connect pieces together in unusual directions. The gear available was moderately varied, with everything from the slow, steady quad-legs base (intended for artillery and other weapons of massive scope), all the way through bipedal, caterpillar tracks, and even the fast-yet-frail wheeled approach.

A great idea in theory, but sadly, poor planning and some issues which could simply not have been forseen came into play, and the game degenerated into what I can only describe as a festival of bullshit. Three core builds emerged, each crowning themselves the king of Chromehounds — the Gator, which used connector blocks in such a way to obscure the cockpit with guns, something that was never intended; the Quad Cannon (more commonly known as QC), perhaps the least cheap of the trio but still annoying in its own right, and the game-breaking Double Double (DD build), which abused the quality of reverse-joint bipedal legs — sniper legs, meant to support the high-recoil sniper cannons — to field not one, but two battleship-sized double cannons, providing enough firepower in four barrels to annihilate almost any other HOUND in a single attack. What was intended to be mounted alone on a slow, unwieldy four-legged beast was now being used deux fois on lighter, faster, more mobile machines, and the quality of the online experience swiftly dropped with it.

I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but unfortunately such behaviour is troublingly prevalent in the sphere of online gaming. Penny Arcade recently ran a strip expressing the distaste that I think many of us feel about the recent abuses on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where players take a specific set of “perks” (character customization options, to allow for different gameplay styles) to become literal ninjas, rushing about the battlefield armed with nothing but a combat knife — or the double shotgun build, which while somewhat more plausible, is still squarely in the same ball-park. In a game based around — as the name would imply — modern warfare, there’s something almost mildly insulting about seeing assassin-wannabes rushing hither and dither with nothing more than sharpened metal sticks, doubly so when their iniquitous endeavours succeed.

I could throw out a dozen more examples, but I think my point stands: At what point does manipulating game mechanics — to the extent that, while not “cheating” per se, players are using tools clearly in an unfair way that they were not intended — stop becoming “tactical”, and start bordering on the grim badlands of the harrowed exploit? Where, indeed, do we draw the line, if one is to be drawn at all?

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