Ashley Cartwright
Villager
You just proved Frank's point. Diablo 2 (and indeed, most action roleplaying games), and the arcade game you mentioned, are bad games because they permit degenerate strategies.I still remember very clearly an insignificant event of my childhood, at that age I was crazy for videogames in bars and later in home computers (it was the middle of the 80's). There was an older guy who was playing a classic spaseship game, so called "shoot'em up", with a tiny spaceship firing thousands of evil enemy spaceship in a simple vertical-scrolling environment. Every 10000 points or such the player could win an extra "life". The guy had found a spot on one level when there was a bonus extra "life" to be easily taken just by catching an item on the screen; if you purposefully died a few seconds after taking that bonus life your spaseship would have had to start a little before that area, and you could have taken the same bonus life again at next passage. Nothing lost, nothing gained, but the process of going from the re-start of the spaceship to take the bonus life and then die again took about 30 seconds and gave out some points in the meantime for killing few enemy spaceships, something like 500 points every time (just making this up, but it took something like 20 times this process for effectively gaining an extra life). The guy went playing for about 2 hours the same 30seconds scene, on and on, to gather up an extra life every 10-15 minutes, occasionally dying twice and wasting the last 10 minutes of play. I didn't stay longer to see when he stopped doing this and go on with the rest of the game, but after 2 hours of being there he was still at the same point, and didn't even seem to be having fun at all. I think it was a sick way to play.
More recently, I have seen friends of mine spending nights after nights playing Diablo II in almost the same way, doing the same level over and over, killing literally thousands of insignificantly challenging opponents to gather few miserable powerups to their characters every evening or so, and to collect hundreds of items which were always just the same, and just the same were discarded all the time.
Your example of how to abuse the rule (which of course I see you would never do yourself) just reminded me such things. It is so sick that it doesn't even need to be corrected.
In a good game, there are no degenerate strategies, and the most optimal ways to play are also the most fun and interesting ways to play.
I don't give a sh.1t if designing tabletop rules is hard. That's not my problem. I'm not being paid to play. You ARE being paid to design rules. If you want me to buy your game, WRITE GOOD FVCKING RULES.
