Icecrown, the home of the soon-to-be-dispatched Arthas, bane of Warcraft players everywhere: A frozen wasteland populated by all manner of twisted horrors, towering structures of blackened steel, and — perhaps somewhat eclectically — vikings. It’s not a nice place, and it’s not supposed to be a nice place. It’s not somewhere that you’d take your family for a summer vacation, setting up the beach chairs on the frozen tundra and basking under the plague-blighted sky. It’s the closest place to hell you’ll find in World of Warcraft — Molten Core excluded, I suppose — and it’s already well and truly frozen over.

This is nothing new, a zone which has been around since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, though recently expanded in the form of three new 5-man dungeons and the long-waited Icecrown Citadel raids. Revisiting this frigid wasteland on my rather unpleasant quest towards Loremaster, I’m struck by a revelation: I honestly believe that Icecrown is the single worst thing to have ever happened to WoW, due to terrible design decisions, and I’m going to tell you exactly why.

First of all, it’s big. Really big. Imagine the biggest thing you can possibly visualise in your mind. Got something in mind? Okay, it’s not quite that big, but it’s close. Getting around this sprawling mass of an area can be tedious at best, even with a fast flying mount, and much of the space honestly seems wasted; it’s as if Blizzard simply tried too hard to provide a grand, epic experience of towering monuments, jagged hills, and sprawling tundra, and simply cranked the experience up to 11. I applaud the effort, but there’s such a thing as “too much of a good thing” — and this is most certainly not a good thing that’s being stretched out from one horizon to the other.

Secondly, and this is my main gripe, phasing. This technology, new with the release of Wrath, allows the world to change dynamically around each player depending on what events had passed in their personal timeline. One player may visit an area and see a village full of happy, innocent fools, ignorant of their impending fate — another player, who has finished the quest chain, may see a burning, ruined wasteland, with skeletons and husks of buildings abound. A great idea in theory, and it can really help bring the player further into the game, enhancing the ‘realism’ of it all; the problem is that it tends to segregate too much. Your friends have all done these quests, and you’ve done these other quests, and you’re all looking at different versions of the world, unable to properly interact with each other. Add to this the frankly abysmal decision to add in 5-man group quests — which are near-impossible to perform alone, and even a challenge for a duo working together — which are also dynamically phased, so you can’t even help out a friend if you’ve finished the quest or aren’t up to that point yet. It’s like playing a single-player RPG, except you can’t complete certain segments without the help of others. Catch 22, indeed.

Finally, the new dungeons — while I haven’t experienced the Icecrown Citadel raids yet, I must express a great deal of displeasure with the direction Blizzard have taken, which is to say, hand out high-level gear for minimal amounts of effort, and then build dungeons around the assumption that everyone is already heavily-geared so artificial difficulty must be imposed. One of the worst offenders is fear — a game mechanic that sends your character fleeing in abject horror, leaving them unable to perform actions, and yet can be countered in many different ways. Not so, say Blizzard, apparently diametrically opposed to such concepts that they themselves invented. Not so, indeed, as any and all fear effects in the Icecrown dungeons — of which there are many, I must add — have been replaced with a similar mechanic which has exactly the same effect, except is now impossible to block or dispel. Add in living bombs and a number of other “forced damage” mechanics and other unpleasant effects — Mirrored Soul and Overlord’s Brand being the sadistic older brothers of King Ymiron’s Bane, while Permafrost is an obnoxious evolution of Keristrasza’s Intense Cold.

Add all these together, and what do you get? You get a zone that hates you; a collection of 140-odd quests and a large selection of dailies, the final “endgame” raid instances before the release of Cataclysm, and a trio of 5-man dungeons, all of which seem to go frankly above and beyond in terms of sadism and artificial difficulty. This isn’t just a place in the game’s world that is difficult, it’s a place where the designers have gone out of their way to force excess difficulty and “challenges” in, using methods that often cannot be avoided or mitigated. This is a place where even the basic mechanics of the game — the rules of the world, as it were — have been twisted and modified, purely for the sake of adding extra forced lumps of adversity. Hell, it seems, truly has frozen over.

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?