Anyone ever cheat on an online game?

[Atamasama]

@Patch

Interestingly, there’s a form of cheating now called “stream sniping.” Folks will broadcast their game play live on a stream (TwitchTV or similar), and if you’re watching their channel while they play, you know where they are and what they’re doing. I’ve been playing World of Tanks as of late, and an opposing artillery player was live streaming their play. A player on my team was watching and called out where they were, and where they were aiming. Not something I would make the effort to do, but with someone calling out info in the game chat I didn’t ignore it either.

I call that “pride goeth before a fall”. If you don’t want to lose, don’t literally broadcast what you’re doing.

That’s not cheating, that’s an opponent being stupid.

[Chronos]

How about calling up your opponent’s roommate and suggesting that they make some nachos-- Is that cheating?

[Dr.Strangelove]

I cheated in the original Everquest. It had a crappy lighting system which only computed the lights for each vertex, and the terrain had such large triangles that if you were standing in the middle of one, you frequently couldn’t see a thing even if you were holding a light source (like a greater lightstone), since the closest vertices were the equivalent of hundreds of feet away.

So I recompiled my video driver such that the vertex lighting factor never fell below a certain threshold. Instead of going to 0, it went to maybe 20%, with everything in between rescaled. Although there was no wallhack cheat detection at the time, it wouldn’t have made a difference since there were no third-party programs, shim layers, etc. Just a completely ordinary video driver.

Although I’d mostly call this fixing a rendering bug, it did have the side effect that I didn’t need to carry a lightstone around at all, which was pretty convenient.

[watchwolf49]

Multi-accounting is usually against the rules … thus technically cheating … and in some on-line games it does confer an advantage … if everyone is running two accounts, then it’s much easier keeping organized …

The worst cheating I’ve seen is on chess servers … people using chess computers to play …

[Quimby]

@Patch

Interestingly, there’s a form of cheating now called “stream sniping.” Folks will broadcast their game play live on a stream (TwitchTV or similar), and if you’re watching their channel while they play, you know where they are and what they’re doing. I’ve been playing World of Tanks as of late, and an opposing artillery player was live streaming their play. A player on my team was watching and called out where they were, and where they were aiming. Not something I would make the effort to do, but with someone calling out info in the game chat I didn’t ignore it either.

I’ve heard of this happening with Magic the Gathering streamers. People will sometimes use the stream to see what is in their opponent’s hand. Not sure if there is way around this if you want to stream a game that has hidden information other than the honor system.

@Atamasama

I call that “pride goeth before a fall”. If you don’t want to lose, don’t literally broadcast what you’re doing.

That’s not cheating, that’s an opponent being stupid.

There are people who stream playing games literally for a living. Taking advantage of a streamer may be easy to do for their opponent but it is still cheating. They can choose, to you know, not peek.

[Atamasama]

@Quimby

There are people who stream playing games literally for a living. Taking advantage of a streamer may be easy to do for their opponent but it is still cheating. They can choose, to you know, not peek.

I consider it no different than if someone is giving out their position in chat. Do I ignore it? Heck no. And it’s ludicrous to consider it cheating. That would be like saying a football team is cheating if their opponent is calling their plays in clear English and broadcasting what they’re about to do.

If you’re giving out information that your opponent is readily able to access then you’re choosing to give yourself a disadvantage. Nobody’s forcing you to live stream what you’re doing. If it’s how you make a living then accept it or get a real job.

[Chronos]

Why not just put the stream on a few minutes’ delay? Is there really that much value in it being “live”?

And yeah, it’s not cheating to make use of information that your opponent is voluntarily giving away.