Star Wars Players Banned for Dancing
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 12:33PM Happy New Year everyone! I hope you celebrated, but not by dancing in the Star Wars MMO, as that got a lot of people banned. Doing the "group dance" command by typing /getdown apparently messes up enemies targeting you. You get to be basically invulnerable.
It's kind of mindblowing that a developer would ban people for an exploit like this. I thought we've been around the block over and over and over and over on such things. Fix the problem, and don't BAN people for taking advantage of advantageous properties in the game. I mean really. BioWare has instituted this squishy rule: "dancing is currently not permitted outside of special Dance Zones." Sounds kind of like living in a dictatorship, which I guess it is, but that's just really eerie. What are the special Dance Zones? I think it means "dont' do this in combat," but I honestly don't know. How about a hard coded rule that doesn't make me guess if I'm doing ban-worthy dancing?
If fixing the problem is some hard thing, then remove dancing entirely for a brief time, or disable the /getdown command. I'm disappointed that banning players was the response here.
UPDATE: BioWare says that the e-mails telling people they were banned were fake e-mails. If so, the fake e-mails skirt dangerously close to what seems standard practice in MMOs, but maybe BioWare is off the hook, if they just fix the dancing thing.
Reader Comments (6)
Hello! Just a quick FYI - according to Massively Bioware is says that the quote came from a fake email. Here's the link:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/04/breakdancing-breaks-swtor-enemies-spirits/
Funny video, though. ;-)
What I heard, through the grapevine, admittedly... was that noone was banned because of the dancing itself. Some people were banned for something like creating a new character, using the dancing to safely reach the highest level areas in the game, and then opening treasure chests and flooding the auction houses with items.
From what I hear, some people have been banned for buying things at the auction house for cheap, and selling them for more than they got them for. Oh no! Anything but profit!
But really, I hear this game is really bad.
> taking advantage of advantageous properties in the game.
Am I missing something? From the description you gave, it sounds like something that is obviously outside of the "Boundaries of Playing to Win".
I assume you meant "obviously inside." Unless it's for practicing for some non-existing upcoming tournament where the bug isn't allowed. But it's not that at all. It's just an effective thing you can do to get better look (from world chests), so of course players should do it. And developers should fix it.
This is a messup by Bioware, but it's a small one. The bug is small, and if a player got bad, that's unfair and shouldn't have happened.
There's a big messup with this game now, though. Before the recent patch, end game PvP had a problem: Instead of killing each other on the open PvP world Ilum, they would simply trade objectives, as it was counter productive to start fighting each other. Instead, people would just take turns taking the objectives to complete their daily and weekly quests.
So, to fix this, Bioware decided to change the objectives so people would actually have to kill each other. This is what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMIYiStnJJE
...Yeah, so it turns out the Republic is outnumbered by the Empire about 5:1 on every server. Of course, Bioware is not to blame. There was no possible way for them to know this!