Legal cheating with third-party software

In World of Warcraft as in most other MMORPG the use of third-party software which helps you win battles in PvE and/or PvP is a bannable offence. With one notable exception: voice-chat software like Teamspeak or Ventrilo. Although this sort of third-party software gives your team a huge advantage in PvP, and helps a lot in PvE raiding, it is legal. Mostly because it is hard to detect, as it doesn't directly mess with the game's data, like a bot software would do. This being so, I think that game companies should integrate voice-chat into their games, to level the playing field.

My first guild in World of Warcraft raided without using voice chat. Some people were absolutely opposed to voice chat, and nobody had the knowledge and the hardware to run a Teamspeak or Ventrilo server in the background. When I switched guilds and started raiding with the new guild, I found they were using Teamspeak. I installed TS on my laptop (thus it doesn't affect the performance of the PC I'm playing on), and noticed immediately how much smoother raids go when you have voice chat. Especially aggro management becomes easier with somebody on TS announing "go DPS" and "stop DPS" at the appropriate moments. Voice-chat also beats any boss mod hands down in announcing who is the bomb at Baron Geddon, or similar important announcements.

Move to PvP, and the advantage of using voice-chat becomes so big, it isn't even funny any more. On the smaller battlegrounds in World of Warcraft the "premade" teams, using voice-chat, rule absolutely. They just need one guy to guard every flag they own in AB, calling in their mobile team via TS as soon as the opponents try to attack. If you can communicate quickly where the enemy is, it becomes easy to always outnumber him.

If a third-party software makes such a big difference to a game's battles, there are only two things a game company can do: Ban it, or integrate it. Banning it is easy when the third-party software using game commands, which is how Blizzard is able to ban Decursive and similar software. But voice-chat runs completely in parallel, without touching the game. And as I said, my Teamspeak runs on my laptop, so even if Blizzard's Warden spyware would be able to detect Teamspeak, I would still come up clean. So I think Blizzard's best option would be to integrate voice-chat into World of Warcraft, for example as part of the WoW 3.0 expansion, a year after the Burning Crusade.

A number of MMORPG companies are already going that way. Turbine does it, for DDO and LOTRO. EVE online is going to integrate Vivox voice-chat software into their game. NCSoft's Auto Assault has it. And integrated voice-chat has also been announced for Tabula Rasa, and a number of other upcoming games.

Now nobody will be forced to use voice-chat when he doesn't want to. But removing the technical hurdles to using it and integrating voice-chat directly into the game is a good thing. World of Warcraft already puts everybody on a battleground into one raid group. Putting them into one voice-chat channel automatically as well would be easy. It would then just be up to the players whether they actually wanted to coordinate their attacks that way.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link