For those with more of a life than I, which achievement is not terribly arduous:
Rampant cheating turned me off of Diablo II and pretty much every PC FPS I ever tried online. Outside of PvP, though, I haven’t really noticed much cheating in WoW…and really, who cares about PvP in WoW? Still, Blizzard has gotten pretty effective at rooting out cheaters in a short period of time, even if they’re a bit overzealous – certain legitimate addons or third-party programs can get your account flagged for action, which will get you suspended until Account Admin can review your case. Frankly, though, I’d rather deal with that than the cheaters.
There are people who’re insanely good at these games. These people can hit others across the map like its nothing. They know everything about the movement and engine and can manipulate them to do unreal things. None of this is cheating. They’re just involved in the right communities and pushing the limits on everything.
For example, in the OP, he mentions one-shotting a tank. Lots of people know how to do this. On the abrams, there is a panel that doesn’t have an armor value assigned to it. If you hit it, you’ll do 100% damage to the tank. If you splash it, you’ll do about 75%. The same thing happened on the blackhawk helicopter with the left tire. If you hit the tire, the helicopter exploded and it was hilarious. That got patched out since hitting the wheel was a joke. It’s much harder to hit the spot on the tank, but people can do it. I do it.
A guy from the old BF2 team Checksix used to take a helicopter, fly it alone over a base, put it into the perfect spin to circle the two or three times, then switch to the gunner seat and mow everyone down. I can’t do that. I know he wasn’t cheating though.
There was this 1.6 player called Sunman. Everyone was sure that he was a wallhacker because he’d constantly do these ridiculous wallshots on people. He said he’d never cheat and no cheat detection program ever showed anything. At a CPL event, he shot a guy through two walls based on sound and knowledge about how people move on the map. People were looking at his screen. He wasn’t cheating.
I’m not saying that cheaters aren’t out there. I’m saying you can probably count the number of cheaters you’ve encountered in the last year on one hand.
But how is this not cheating? You’re exploiting a hole in the design to cause the game to act in a way that wasn’t intended. I’m 90% sure that if you did the same thing in WoW (found an inadvertent vulnerability and exploited it) you would be flagged.
In fact, something similar happened recently in WoW where a player got a “god mode” weapon and started clearing the end-game content with his guild. This got flagged and he got banned. Was he cheating? A related indecent was a some class (mage?) player spell-stealing a NPC’s spell (some sort of bone shield IIRC - made the player basically invincible) and using it to solo end-game content. Is this a cheat?
I’d say “yes” - if you use an exploit (known or unknown) to cause the game to behave in a way it that wasn’t intended, especially if you’re behavior decreases the enjoyment of other players, you’re cheating.
PS - If the Abrams was designed to have this vulnerability then that changes everything. It’s clearly not cheating to use superior knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of certain armor to be a better player.
This is horsepoop. The fog in the game prevents you from seeing anything past a certain point. That point is pretty far away, and it’s tough to make a shot at the limit you can see. Claiming that it’s possible to make shots based solely on ‘knowledge of movement and engine’ beyond visibility will require some huge evidence. First, you don’t even know that someone is there. Even if you have UAV or a spotter, you can’t see them on the display, they’re just a red dot on the minimap. Unless of course, you’re hacking.
Where? I have looked all over the place for legit one hit kill locations on a tank, and this is first I’ve heard of a no-armor panel. I saw video on youtube about how you can two shot kill a tank if you shoot it in the front of the treads, so I went to investigate this. I spent some time on a single player game shooting tanks there with various things, and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. So if you’ve got some place on a tank that causes it to be killed with one shot, let’s hear it.
No, this isn’t cheating. It’s just taking advantage of the ridiculously overpowered crap that anything that flies in that game has. The fact that it’s even possible shows severe lack of play testing, and a willingness to ignore huge unbalances in the game.
And this one time, this guy I saw shot a guy through two walls and he totally was hacking! Oh, and if you’re shooting people through two walls in BF2, you’re hacking.
And you’d be wrong. BF2 probably has more hackers than suspected, because the smart ones don’t do it to ridiculous levels or all the time, and they don’t get caught. I have personally seen more than 5 hackers in much less than a year.
I’m going to have to disagree with this. The CoD4 servers I play on average about a hacker a week just while I’m playing for an hour or so. Most of them make no bones about running hacks when they’re called on it and just keep on until a mod gets around to banning them.
This is kind of a grey area as far as calling it a cheat. It’s available to anyone playing the game without having to modify their own game code. A player can avoid having it used against them by simply not getting in the Abrams.
I don’t play WoW, but I suspect that somewhere in the EULA is language forbidding the use of exploits, so being banned for using one is completely reasonable.
One of the CoD4 servers I play on has a very strict set of rules. Bolt action sniper rifles and knives only. No other weapons or explosives. And no jumping/hopping for evasion. Using a pistol or a grenade wouldn’t be cheating, but it would be a violation of the agreement implied when you joined the server and would get you kicked or ultimately banned.
On one map on that server there is a hidey hole that once I get in it, coming after me is suicide. There are weapons that can get me, but they’re against the server rules. Using that knowledge to my advantage is not a cheat. Annoying as hell, but not cheating.
Eh, even then you get some crap from time to time. Ganking of quest-givers and flight-masters being the most popular way to grief lowbies. Also you can get the “jump around the mobs you’re targeting so hopefully you’ll accidentally attack me” gankers and the “run into your AOE attack so you get flagged” gankers. They are, however, few and far between.
Non of these are “cheats” in any real legitimate sense of the word. Just annoying and shockingly pathetic.
I don’t know anything about COD4. I do know that the cheat-download sites are active with thousands of users. I played Diablo 2, where thousands of players insisted that cheating was the only way to keep up, and wa perfectly legitimate, and angrily defended it. Items in Diablo 2 dropped by rarity; some were so rare I’ve only seen one or two legitimate drops in…years, actually; like since D2 came out…and I still play once a week on a team of old friends. Other items are much rarer than that – literally astronomical odds against having such items – one would be statistically unlikely to ever see one (a perfect 3/20/20 small charm, for example) in one’s career, including on other players one meets. Yet almost every public player encountered on Bnet had an entire inventory full of them, on each of their dozens of characters. And they’d often bald-facedly maintain that these were legit drops. It was like asking me to believe these folks were winning hundreds-of-millions-to-one lotteries on a constant basis.
The younger people I’ve payed online games with – the twentysomethings and especially the 10-15-year-old set – cheat openly, even when playing solo games with no opponent. Often to the exclusion of anything else. I watched one kid load up a game of Command and Conquer, compress the time so the computer enemy began building a city, then use codes to reveal the enemy city, give himself unlimited nukes, and paste the hapless computer enemy with them. That’s cute…but he did it over and over and over like he was OCD, then turned off the game when he was tired rather than play anything that involved even the remotest chance of a fair fight. ALL he ever did was use cheat codes to go directly to the “you win” screen.
That may be painting with a broad brush but I wonder if there is a generational thing going on. My 12-year-old stepson has little truck for my disdain of spoilers and cheat codes: his attitude is, “I bought (or you bought for me) this game, I’m going to play it to its maximum potential.” So when he plays a new game the first thing he does is go online for cheat codes.
I think it’s a genuine difference in the way we see games. I see them as a mental challenge and a form of relaxation; he sees them as something to squeeze maximum enjoyment out of.
This doesn’t make sense to me. The enjoyment is in the challenge, not mindlessly pressing the ‘You win’ button. Cheat codes are for having a giggle once you know what the game is supposed to be like, not for the entirety of the game. When I want to squeeze maximum enjoyment out of a game, I play the hell out of it, every combination I can. Then I bust out the cheat codes and see what infinite ammo is like. The kid that Sailboat described, the one playing C&C, that just scares me.
Remember the old Twilight Zone episode where the gambler dies and he’s in a casino, and always winning, and realizes he’s in hell? Has that changed?
On a PvE server, though, you could conceivably report someone for harassing you, and if someone’s killing FMs and NPCs, you just pull together a group of 80s and go stomp 'em.
Maybe his goals in playing that game (possibly even that particular day) were different from what yours would have been. In college, something that I liked to do to de-stress on occasion was set up a single-player UT game with the facing towers map, load it up with stupid bots, and then park my butt up in a tower with a sniper rifle and headshot the bots as they spawned. Challenging? Not really. Fun? Hell yes.
ETA: hotflungwok, because someone likes doing something in a different way from you, that makes it disturbingly wrong? It’s a game. I can see being worried if they apply the same ethic to their everyday lives, but you can’t make assumptions like that.
It’s disturbing because I don’t see how it’s enjoyable. How is just clicking the ‘I win’ button over and over enjoyable? I’ll admit to loading up the facing towers map on UT and blowing some heads off, but that was by far the exception, not the rule, and I didn’t do it over and over and over. It’s like the gambler winning every time he pulls the lever. What’s the point?
the if you dont like pvp dont play on the servers things always gets me…there are a shitton of people out there who like pvp, they just dont like losing to rampant hacks and cheats.
As my ol’ dad would say, de gustibus non disputandum est. More simply put: diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks. As long as what someone does for fun harms no one else, who are we to judge them? There are people out there who think playing video games for fun, period, makes us crazy psycho killers, but I’m guessing all of us in this thread would disagree with that.
Note that in this context, this only applies to using cheat codes in single-player games or modes. Using them to gain an unfair advantage against another person falls under the heading of “harms someone else.”
Personally, I was making the argument in the context of WoW, where it is very hard to hack or cheat at PvP, and getting caught doing so means you get banned. Ganking lowbies isn’t cheating, per se, it’s just generally a sign that the person in question is a bad who can’t win a fair fight (and will presumably get their face stomped in as soon as the cavalry shows up).
Battleground Europe, which I play quite a bit, has very little if any online cheats that I have seen. There are ways to cheat but they involve using second accounts to spy so it is not cheat free. However, it hasn’t been an issue for me.
This is a good point, and something that doesn’t even require cheating to become a “to each his own” sort of thing. Walk-throughs and helper add-ons can also range from “increasing enjoyment” by making something that was tedious or near-impossible both quick and possible to “decreasing enjoyment” by taking the challenge away completely.
I’ve found in WoW (to use an example) that some add-ons reduce the “questing” part of the game to “point my player in that direction and auto-run - when I get there kill the marked players or pick up the shiny things”. It certainly makes things faster, and is a God-send when you’re stuck and don’t know where to go or what to do, but I personally have to disable them from time to time to increase my enjoyment of the game (generally when I’m in an area where I haven’t done any of the quests before).
Other add-ons are essential for reducing the annoyances in the game though - replacements for UIs and action bars for example, or ways to scan the auction house automatically - they add to the experience without detracting at all.
Cheats in single player games are fine. I use them all the time to get myself out of scrapes, defeat superior foes when I cannot normally, keep ammo stockpiled without the annoyance of having to scavenge, etc. Crysis and Fallout 3 come to mind.
But hacking/cheating on multiplayer online games is just wrong and defeats the whole purpose of trying to pit your honest gaming skills against other people.
It’s enjoyable because everyone* likes to win, and by removing the “Challenge” part of it you get to go straight to the “Have fun and win!” element of it (if you so choose).
As others have said, I’ve been known to use cheats in single-player games to get past levels/areas I just. can’t. get past (various “racing” missions in GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Adreas, for example), or to skip past “boring” parts of the game to get to the “interesting” sections later- or, and this is probably my most common use of cheats- to try different things on a play-through after after completing the game “properly” the first time.
Cheating online isn’t OK, but fiddling with (“cheating”) a PC game (that you’ve paid good money for) so you get maximum enjoyment out of it in single-player mode is absolutely fine with me, both for the reasons FoieGrasIsEvil outlined.
Still, Blizzard has gotten pretty effective at rooting out cheaters in a short period of time, even if they’re a bit overzealous – certain legitimate addons or third-party programs can get your account flagged for action, which will get you suspended until Account Admin can review your case. Frankly, though, I’d rather deal with that than the cheaters.