It appears that Richard Bartle is still enraging the masses with his thoughts on The Art of Persuasion quest in World of Warcraft. Even a few weeks on from my original post on the matter, I still think he’s right, and other bloggers agree.

To recap. There is an alliance quest in WoW which requires you to zap a character with a cattle prod, in order to gain information regarding another quest. Bartle objected to this, why was an alliance character resorting to torture? Why wasn’t there another means out of the situation.

He’s right, of course, this is really down to poor game design. Why? Read on…

• It breaks canon
  Why are seemingly ‘good’ characters performing ‘evil’ acts? We’d expect this behaviour from a Death Knight, and indeed there is a quest where a Death Knight resorts to torture, but from a Paladin is a different matter entirely.
• There’s no other option
  Most good games give you another way out. Eve Online, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Ultima VII; all give you the option to say “no thanks” to morally questionable acts. Whilst your character development may suffer, you can still progress in the game.
• It breaks immersion
  Bartle has had some particuarly harsh comments about WoW being ‘only a game’, and that ‘people who torture in WoW wouldn;t totrure in real life’. Well, judging by this and this, I am afraid you’re wrong; some people seem to struggle to grasp the difference between real life and games.

Incidentally, this quest reminds me of the Milgram Experiment.

I’ve had a cold for the past few days, so my time has mostly been spent sneezing, sleeping, and browsing the web. In the latter of these things, two Eve Online related items have caught my eye.

The first is that Eve Online has finally released its own wiki. It’s not much at the moment, but there’s a few good articles starting up (including some that I have contributed to). The wiki can be found at http://wiki.eveonline.com/.

The second relates to a scandal which has rocked the Eve universe.  A exploit which went unnoticed for over four years, and has an impact in the region of USD$17,000. There’s an excellent summary over at Winterblink’s blog, “Official news about the starbase exploit“.