This is a post based on a reply I made on Reddit. When I read the initial post, I realized how my game is using the power of open source to solve some inherent issues with PVP based Multi-player Online Role Playing Games.
The first issue mentioned was performance. While open source itself does not help directly with this, the Wograld policy of keeping system requirements low helps a lot with this issue. Who cares if the graphics are beautiful if you can barely play due to the frame rate. Forget about pvp then, because performance will be so abysmal for many people that you will hardly be able to pvm.
The next two issues are things that are directly resolved through the useage of open source for both the client and server of the game. Bugs were explictly mentioned. A lot of games (I'm looking at you Runescape.) have ongoing bugs that are never fixxed even though the developers probably know about them. With open source, the playerbase can directly fix bugs and actually commit a fix in order that the bug just goes away. Eric Raymond is famous for his quote "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Well, now by having all the code, both client and server open source, it will be shallow enough that finnally the bugs can get fixxed.
The second issue deals with game balance. Ideally, the developers will understand game balance and how communities work. They should understand the underlying dynamics, and while they should listen to the players, they shouldn't necessarily give them what they ask for, instead they should make a game that creates a healthy and thriving community, and not one where all the players quit over time because game balance is too broken. Sometimes, the developers fall into blind spots and never actually understand how communities work. If that happens, the original game code still exists and the community itself can fork, and players can play a balanced non-broken game instead of a broken one.
The last issue mentioned deals with cheating. Some people think closed source software somehow prevents or lowers cheating, but looking at all the closed source proprietary games with cheating problems proves that closing up the source code does not prevent cheating. Instead, some games though they could prevent cheating and still have certain calculations running on the client side. Cheating can be prevented by running things on the server side.
