There’s an interesting article on Wired about how players, given a chance to create their own missions for other players, quickly started churning out ones where you could grab as much stuff as possible as quickly as possible.
Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom
It reminded me of one of the first things that the people running Ultima Online said years ago at a panel discussion I attended in Austin, “Players are bastards.” I don’t agree with the sentiment and I don’t think the UO developer who said it really believed it either, he was just coming off of a rough time for exploits and problems caused by players in the game. But it’s always wise to stop and think for a second, “What if I wanted to exploit this, how would I do it? Could I do it?” This is important stuff if your PBBG is one where players create content for other players or you’ve ever considered building one where they do.
