So in the news last week, Conan’s main owner - Tencent took action against one of the worlds largest cheater syndicate. Citing that because of their actions brands that Tencent own are taking losses.
A collaborative effort between Chinese police and gaming giant Tencent has led to the closure of what police say is the biggest ever video-game-cheat operation.
Tonight I was talking to my clan (we’ve now moved away from Conan and playing other games) about that and what I found interesting was that when we thought about why we abandoned Conan it wasn’t actually due to feature(s) of the game.
In fact in heart of hearts, we found that while we may not agree with the way the games direction was heading, it was still playable and forgiveable. We could make it work.
However what really drove us to the point of uninstall was simply: cheating.
It’s clear Conan’s actual owners feel the same way, given how much time and investmen they put into shutting down the cheating syndicate.
Roughly $76m (£55m) in revenue was made by the organisation which charged a subscription fee to clients.
I don’t know, if one was in Funcom given the level of data that is on display here, you’d imagine you could build a strong case to save the franchise further by acquiring more investment in anti-cheat funding to protect the brand and future brands from these issues.
Anyway, worth noting that reason for uninstall wasn’t because healing food was nerfed or stamina or even staff / dev broken promises. Simply put - cheating. It just wore you down and eventually you just openly said “well… sad…game had potential and when we played legitimate …it was amazing fun”
Yes. I deleted all my PvP characters one at a time because cheaters took over their servers. I’d delete one and try another server till the cheaters came to that one too. Eventually I decided to just PvE-C and save some time. PvP was never what was promised anyway since bases have to be destroyable in 45 minutes to an hour on average for the game to allow raids the chance to succeed. That’s not for me. I am more of a builder type. IMHO, if I spend months building a base it should be damned hard to raid. Not destroyed in 45 minutes.
I keep my oldest character on the Exiled Lands PvP server, but will never do PvP on the Isle of Siptah or start another PvP Exiled Lands character. Cheaters will always come eventually no matter what 10 Cents does.
The risk that there is a death behind a crime would deter people from doing it in the first place. So if people who think about cheating dont like dying they won’t do it. Thus they play fairly as everyone else and no one dies. The most valuable resource for humanity is time for it is limited in this universe. Death removes all remaining time left in a blink of an eye. Hackers / cheaters waste everyone elses time, happiness and possibly money. Thus they take and steal with no remorse of the most valuable resource to humanity.
A world without cheaters would make gaming fun and competitive again.
But I’m afraid it will never happen since money is always at play… and most people only care about money.
