Game Breaker/Video Games/Role-Playing Game/Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game: Difference between revisions

* When first introduced ''[[Eve Online]]'''s Doomsday Devices (a massively damaging AoE attack<ref>dealing enough damage to instantly destroy any ship smaller than a Battleship, and even Battleships will fall if not specifically tanked against them</ref>) could be fired remotely, and imposed no penalties on the ship which fired them. This often resulted in battles being decided simply by which faction activated theirs first. One [[Obvious Rule Patch]] later the ability to fire remotely was removed, and they now disabled the ships jump-drive for 10 minutes when fired, turning them into more balanced last-resort weapons.

** Doomsdays are becoming a Game Breaker again for a different reason: one doomsday is survivable, a second is not. The Double Doomsday is now a common technique for obliterating sub-capital fleets. In a recent show of force, Goonswarm and allies set off 16 Doomsdays, enough to obliterate capital fleets as well.

** Speed was arguably even worse than Doomsdays. If a ship is fast enough it can outrun all incoming damage (short of AoE effects). Nanofiber modules and Polycarbon rigs which boosted speed and maneuverability were for a time de riguer in small-gang combat. Eventually CCP realized that when people's advice when fitting any cruiser was 'nano it' this might have broken the game somewhat. It remains possible to make your ship invulnerable by orbiting fast and close but only for frigates and the tactic can be countered very simply by not flying solo as your friends can easily pull range and nail the bastard.

*** Speed was in fact even worse back in the day when Battleships would be nano'd to invulnerability.

** Going clear back to Pre-CU! Of the three Damageable stats, only Mind could not be buffed by doctors. The relevant entertainer buffs were a small fraction of what the doc buffs were doing for the other six stats, and even with food and drinks thrown in you could only get sorta kinda close, and for a shorter duration. To top it off, mind was the only stat that couldn't be healed by the otherwise overpowered (like the doc buffs!) standard stimpacks. Now throw in the fact that each combat class could deliberately focus their attacks on a specific one of the three pools. The classes able to target mind generally ended up overpowered in PvP. Similarly for weapons with mind-affecting Damage over Time bonuses, particularly fire. For round two, throw in that the most common type of armor in the game could be, and was, readily made to have protection against all types of damage EXCEPT stun, which most profs couldn't use. Eventually Composite armor with protection against both kinetic and stun did emerge, but the stun protection was always the weakest and it tended to lose some on the other protections to boot... Now, wrap it up by having only ONE combination of profs that can use a stun weapon (Geonosian Sonic Pistol) with a mind-pool attack (Eye Shot). Care to guess how common Bounty Hunter/Pistoleers were? (The fact that people were pushing the crafting system as far as it would go to get ANY stun protection is a hint)

** An older example: Pistoleers had two specials called Knockdown Shot and Dizzy Shot. Many a player who did not know there was a pistoleer in their midst often found themselves attempting Knockdown Recovery, to no avail. The only message they would get on screen was "You cannot Knockdown Recovery while Dizzy."

* Early on in ''[[City of Heroes]]'', there was no limit to the amount of spawns a player could herd, or a limit on how many could be affected by an area of effect attack. It was possible for a single player with enough defense and/or regeneration to herd every enemy on an entire map to one location, and either use an AoE attack themselves (or have a teammate do it) to wipe them all out in one shot, getting massive experience points with practically no risk to anyone else on the team. And if the mission required something other than merely taking out enemies to finish it, they could quit and restart the mission and farm it all over again. This was later changed by stopping mobs from mindlessly following the herder (if they got too far away, they'd stop chasing), limiting how many critters could be angry at a given player (No more than the largest amount of critters in one spawn--others would break off and attack other targets, or just disengage), and putting a limit on how many critters could be affected by a single attack.

** This was made worse by a few other game breakers, especially the Tanker Invincibility power. It gave a bit of defense for every enemy nearby... except it ticked faster than the defense faded, and had too high of a defense value in the first place, so the resulting Tanker became nearly impossible to hit with just a bunch of weak enemies nearby. While not completely impossible to kill, it was pretty close. Thankfully fixed.