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TOWN KILLING: WHAT DO WE DO? GIVE EVERYONE THE OPTION, OR HAVE NO OPTION?
You are a new player and are looking for help so you decide to join a game called "Help For Newbies" which was created by a level 48 sorcerer. You get in and the guy seems pretty friendly and gives you some cash to go buy some stuff. While you are buying stuff, something odd occurs. Fireballs start raining down on you and you are toasted in several seconds. That level 48 sorcerer just sits there and laughs. You have been Townkilled.
Townkill is another cheat created by some ingenious (or moronic, depending on who you talk to) hacker who figured out how to let people cast spells in town. What is the problem in that? Well, although the town would make a unique battle ground for duels, Blizzard never intended this to happen. The end outcome is that some people use it for their own evil purposes, others use it for defense against other Townkillers, and the majority of people will have to take the damage and run since they can't fight back.
Diablo has been subject to many cheats, yet Townkill is the most lethal and most annoying. You may never encounter a Townkiller or you may not be able to find a game without one in it (which is becoming more and more common by the day), and there is no way of telling if that friendly character has the cheat active. If you have encountered one though, you will know what it is like. You don't know what to do, whether to run into a dungeon, quit the game, or try to hide out behind a house. And by the time you make up your mind, you will most likely have been killed or crashed. More on that below.
Above I said the cheat was created with someone of high intelligence, or high idiocy depending on who you talk to. I say that because Townkill is a very unstable cheat. The chances of a Townkiller for scoring a kill are probably ten to one against him. The cheat crashes very often and when it does, it crashes everyone else's computer who is in the game. So, the concept is unique, yet not anywhere near well executed. Then again, I couldn't do any better. (April 2 Update: The Townkill cheat is much more stable now. It is possible to kill people without the game crashing. Woe is me.)
Lately on Battle.net, certain guilds have been traversing the chat channels have been distributing web pages that contain the Townkill cheat...and it is supposed to be used for defense only. Now, here is where I don't think things were thought out straight. Not everyone who doesn't have the cheat is a good guy. There are people who receive it and then use it to their advantage as others had against them. But then again, yes, their are people who do use it for defense only. By distributing it to everyone though, you are hitting both groups and therefore increasing the amount of evil Townkillers in the process! In my opinion, even if you can't defend yourself against a Townkill, I would much rather have fewer Townkillers then for almost everyone to have the cheat and to be taken advantage of. I say almost everyone because remember, we all are (hopefully) not on Battle.net all day long to receive such notice of a Townkill web page and newcomers are clueless to the cheats and hacks available for Diablo until they become more experienced.
So, what to do now? From what I can see, the only solution is possibly in the new patch coming from Blizzard when it's done. If the patch can disable other currently running executables, that would eliminate ALL cheating. Yet, since I don't know what kind of programming that would take, I don't know if that's a possibility. Then there are the hackers who will take apart that patch in under a week. Giving Townkill to everyone is definitely a bad choice. Please, if you are a guild looking to do good, giving out sites with Townkill on it, you are a partial root cause of the problem. The town should be a safe haven, not a target range. If you want to kill people, be more devious and lure them down into the dungeon. Townkill is a cowards way of killing.
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Here is an example of ME getting Townkilled. To my defence, I posed for the picture by screwing with the Tkillers minds. Morons. I stole a collection of ears they dropped afterwards. Ha! Also note the obscene amount of hitpoints that Warlord guy has.
Fight fair, it's more fun. See The Guide to Making Pkilling Fun.