Another aspect: I enjoy asymmetrical games, where one side has one set of advantages and disadvantages, and the other has a completely different set, and where to win you have to figure out how to use what you have to negate your opponent, rather than just doing the same thing better. So I’ll often set up a scenario in games like Warcraft with terrain that the AI isn’t good at handling, or the like, but then make up for it by setting multiple opponents allied against me. Sometimes some of the things I give myself as advantages would be considered “cheating”, but I make up for it by giving the opponent advantages, too.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I’d remove the resource limitation from the equation in Starcraft, but I’d never just play against one opponent. That’s too easy.
I’m a gamer from way back, so I’m accustomed to tinkering with the “official” rules. If my old gaming group didn’t like a particular aspect of a board game or a pen-and-paper RPG, we’d CHANGE it. The point wasn’t to hew to some designer’s arbitrary rule set. The point was to have fun, and if changing the rules made the game more fun, then changing the rules was the right thing to do.
There’s nothing wrong with “cheating” in a single-player game. (Or in a multiplayer game, for that matter, so long as all the players agree to the cheat.) The official rules of a game are not holy writ. They’re merely a scaffolding for the construction of an entertaining experience. And if they fail to serve that purpose for a particular player, or group of players, there’s nothing wrong with changing them so they do.
It’s not the same thing, I am also a gamer from way back and i think the kind of rule change we made to RPGs is more of a kind with mods than with cheats, you are changing the game not cheating.
Again i ask, why do you play Civilization if you dont want to play a civilization simulation?, and what real civilization managed not to lose one single battle?
What’s the difference between changing a game and cheating?
Heh. It’s not like Civilization is a simulation. It’s a fun few hours of fantasy. And if my fantasy is to be the ultimate dictator who never loses a battle, why shouldn’t I play that way?
You can change the game to make it harder, or simply different, if you change it for the express purpose of makint it easier then you are cheating
because its WRONG :mad:
:D.
I think there lies the difference, players like the OP and me (and I?) see the game as a simulation, while others see it as a sandbox to enact their fantasy, thus the misunderstanding.
In view of that, i’ll think of removing my fatwa against cheaters, you can breath freely again (checks watch) Except Anaamika, I think is already to late for her…
First, I am not fan of speed challenges - KoTR, Neverwinter Nights and Fallout 3. I rather they just give out the option when your Speech reaches a certain level, or not make it black and white. I do load before a Speech challenge because I think those are stupid challenges (especially those with no retries).
The only other time I have cheated is to save time. I can’t remember what game it is, but I occasionally do cheat to speed up getting from point A to point B. For some reason, I remembered using cheat codes in HoMM 4, but I think it is just to remove the fog of war (if you explore some large damned map, it would take you hundred of turns)
Thirdly, take Fallout 3 - the random encounters are so extremely unbalanced for a new player. I usually save before I head to anywhere important and reload if it turns out to be some crazy monsters which I could not defeat at my own level.
The purpose of the game is to provide entertainment. If you cheat to do it, and you enjoy it, I guess there’s no big deal.
Modding Fallout 3 is exactly like changing the rules in a pen and paper RPG. Out of the box, weapons deteriorate at a ridiculous rate - fire off one clip with your pristine sniper rifle and it’ll be sitting at 80% condition or some ridiculous thing. So there are a whole host of mods to change that mechanic - either by increasing the number of items that can be used to repair your sniper rifle, or by making it degrade from use more slowly, or some combination of the two.
How is that different than using house rules for D&D because you think that class X is silly overpowered so you give them an extra handicap (or whatever)?
Granted, some Fallout mods make things extremely easy. Some godlike weapon might be added to Moira’s inventory available for peanuts or something. But the people who use such mods are often simultaneously adding extra extremely nasty beasties wandering the Wasteland. Or they might have completely changed the combat mechanics to make their character far more susceptible to damage. Or whatever. The glory of the game is that nearly anything about it that you don’t like can be changed, to the point where heavily modded it might not be anything like the original except superficially. If it also happens to be easier because some kid likes the decapitation animation on supermutants, who the hell cares?
Playing in easy mode is a cheat now? It’s part of the official game mechanics!
I would never have beaten Civ I in the highest mode if I hadn’t started in the lowest…
I have a confession to make. I totally cheat coded my way through all three Warcraft strategy games.
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I hate strategy games. I suck at strategy games. I am the world’s worst strategy player. (The exception was the Impressions City Builder games (Caesar III, Pharaoh, Zeus)…I was mediocre/okay at those.
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I started playing World of Warcraft before I ever even cracked the seal on a Warcraft game. The Warcraft strategy games ARE the backstory and lore of World of Warcraft and I was very interested in experiencing that backstory and lore. However, see 1).
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I was not playing to win. I didn’t care if I won or not, so much as caring that I get to go on and see the next scenario because I’d BEEN THERE in WoW.
The interesting thing is that, in some scenarios, cheating (and I went whole hog: infinite resources, God mode, etc) “breaks” the scenario. In the scenario of the Battle of Mount Hyjal, I killed Archimonde at his base camp at the bottom of the mountain…and then waited for 10 minutes while the game counted down the time it would have taken him to march his army up to the base of Nordrassil. It was a REALLY boring ten minutes…
Who said that playing in Easy mode is cheating?
#3 in the OP’s list:
The OP did. Evidently if we’re going to do our perverted little cheats we should certainly be too ashamed to tell people on a public message board.
I see, well that does not look like cheating to me.
Since my post apparently led to Blinking Duck’s brain hemmorage in that other thread, here’s a repost of my response (which I posted before realizing he opened this one):
I’m a completionist. I like getting the optional conversations that won’t occur/areas that can’t be accessed without succeeding at speech challenges.
You never have to succeed at a speech challenge to finish the game. And usually when the successful speech challenge gives me a shortcut, I’ll do it the hardway just to see it all. I’ve visited every room in every map I’ve been to, whether I needed to or not, just because I want to see the whole game. I’ll repeat conversations over and over just to see what the different information branches give me, even if I don’t really get any new info and the various branches merge to the same point anyway.
So if I metagame to do it, so be it. I still beat the game, because my metagaming doesn’t change the overall outcome of any quests I undertake.
That sorta makes sense, is still WRONG though, and you’ll pay for it in the afterlife, for sure.
Same here. Some games, I “cheat” through only to get to see the story unfold. I don’t remember using actual cheat codes, invincibility trainers etc… ever, but using cheap strats such as quicksaving/loading every 5 seconds, or using only the most broken, unbalanced, bug exploiting mechanism the game has to offer ? Sure. Because I don’t enjoy the game itself that much - so I don’t give a damn about messing it up.
That’s only for games I utterly suck at, so RTS mainly. Oh, and that damn Dark Elf mission in Heroes 5. If you’ve played that game, you know the one I’m talking about. I don’t mind a challenge, but 1 city against 5 ? Enemy heroes with artifacts up the keister ? And additional, random Inferno armies popping every other week for shits and giggles ? You’ve got to be shitting me.
Imagine you’re talking with a friend, who insinuates that he too bakes excellent pies from scratch all the time. But upon further pressing, you find out that he just buys his pie crusts premade from the store, pours in a can of pie filling, and heats it up in the oven.
In addition, your friend tells you that he’s never going to attempt to make a pie crust himself, thinking it too much work. Not now, not ever.
How would you feel about this? I’d bet you feel:
A) a little angry that he’s insinuating he makes pies from scratch (who know how many other people he’s told that to?)
B) a little disappointed that he’s never going to have the experience of making a pie crust by himself.
But if he never talked up his awesome scratch pies, and instead just made them, ate them on his own, and says he likes pie but takes shortcuts if he’s making them, no big deal. You can get a lot of the Pie Experience by eating other people’s homemade pies, even if you don’t make them yourself.
C) Don’t care because what he does in his own time with his own money does effect me in the slightest, and I shouldn’t be taking pie-boasting seriously in the first place.
