Cactus may get away with abusing his players just for fun, but he's well recognised enough to be invited to talk at the GDC. I for one can't afford even to momentarily bore or annoy my audience, because they'll drop me like a hot coal and move on to something else. It's not like there's any shortage of free alternatives for them to try (none of my games are on that list - ledsen). You don't get any favours when nobody's heard of you (not that any of my games actually are any good).

I don't want to be all negative though, so how about something constructive? Let's have a look at "how not to make your game abusive", so as to preserve the universal balance of... the universe? To do so we'll be exploring three problems which can contribute to making your game particularly annoying: repetition, randomness and incoherence.

There’s been some discussion about death penalties lately, and I figured it was a good opportunity to discuss some issues with death penalties in MMOs, and penalties in games in general from a game design point of view. So, let’s take a look at this topic and see how many flamewars we can fan!

It’s an MMO designer classic: stick some giant horrific monster into an area to keep players on their toes. If the players refuse to run away from said monster, they get killed. But they always have plenty of warning. “The earth shakes when the giant walks,” says the designer — “they can’t help but notice that! So it’s not unfair. It’s just something to keep them on their toes.” Or how about the old “random firetraps in the middle of a raid dungeon” trick? Spices things up without being unfair, right?