I was on a bus and I overheard, because well, if you don’t want me to listen to your one sided cell phone conversation then post questions about it on a public board then maybe you shoud shut up.
But anyway this teen was talking about the Internet and apparently he got BANNED from his site, because he visited a cheat site.
What is a cheat site? He looked kind of geeky so I figured it was some kind online game people play. And maybe a cheat site is something that gives a code or something.
Any one have any other ideas? I know a one sided phone conversation isn’t much to go on but I thought I’d speculate anyway.
In a gaming forum I help moderate which is explicitly dedicated to fair play, people sometimes visit a cheat site and we don’t know or care. But sometimes they download a cheat from such a site and use it in our games. When they do that, we find out about it through various means (;)) and we address the issue, which may include banning from the forums and from the games we can control (we do not control the game companies or the Internet).
It’s worth noting that in almost every case, the guilty party characterizes the ban as “I only visited the cheat site out of curiosity, I didn’t use any cheats in-game.” This is even after being confronted with evidence. I think some people can be in denial and some people are able to flat-out lie in an attempt to consciously manipulate their reputations.
IANA Gamer at all. I understand from reading the above that a “cheat site” distributes cheat techniques for PC games, online or otherwise.
What I don’t understand is how a “cheat” could *exist *in such a game. If keying “12345” in a particular situation gives you super powers for 3 minutes, that’'s not cheating. That’s using a feature of the game. A feature deliberately placed there by the people who designed & the game & wrote the program to implement it. It’s no more cheating than, say, the 2-point conversion in US football or batting the pitcher 8th in US baseball.
So, would some kind soul care to enlighten me on what a "cheat’ is and how the category differs from a little known game-specific tactic or technique.
Definitions vary based on whom you ask…I’m with you that using a feature of the game as programmed doesn’t constitute cheating under any circumstances, but there are those who feel differently. Blizzard, for example – one of the biggest players in online gaming – is quite willing to punish players of World of Warcraft for its own programming failures. If, for example, an enemy can be moved to a place where you can attack it but it can’t attack you, taking advantage of this is deemed “exploiting”, and you can and will be punished for it. (Note to WoW players: I don’t want to start a 'sploit debate, at least not in this thread; I don’t do it and don’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t term it “cheating”, and hence I’m using it as an example.)
That said, most cheating in online games doesn’t use features of the game as-programmed, but uses third-party software or client-side stored data editing to confer an unfair advantage to the player.
An “aimbot”, for example, is a type of cheat program for first-person shooter games that can identify and target enemy players from ridiculous distances (and sometimes through walls/terrain), ensuring 100% accuracy. Players using manual firing (ie, not cheating) stand no chance against a player using an aimbot, because entering their line of sight means certain death.
To use another WoW example, a popular cheat in player vs. player battlegrounds used to be to edit/delete the model for a door, stored client-side, that prevented the player from entering the battlefield before the start of the fight. By shrinking/removing the door model, a player could get to a particular objective before the battle started, with other players being unable to do anything about it.
There are any number of examples, of course, but these should give you the general idea.
One example that might help–let’s say we’re playing a game, and you have some sort of stealth/invisibility power that will allow you to get position and a surprise attack on me. Now, depending on how the game is programmed, it’s possible that the server is sending data to my client telling me that you are there, but is also telling me that you’re stealthed, so my client will not show me your position in the game.
However, I could run a cheat program that actually is able to read the datastream going to the game and decode it so that it tells me that there is a stealthed enemy there, negating pretty much all of your advantage.
One interpretation: in many games, codes are added in development to instantly enable various features for the purpose of testing. For example, dying repeatedly might interrupt a tester checking on his aim and weapon functions, so an “invincibility” cheat code is added, enabling him to test the weapon endlessly without annoyingly kicking the bucket from return fire.
Such codes are often not intended for use in the published game, but are determined by hackers examining game files, often in violation of the terms of service, and published on cheat sites.
That’s not the only definition, but that’s one way a code written by the game’s developers could still be considered cheating.
Some forum admins can set up a code such that they can trace not only where you came onto the board from, but where you went from the board. That’s probably what happened.
