Category talk:Cheats

Define "cheating"

I see there've been some reverts and disagreement about what counts as "cheating", which makes sense, because (correct me if I'm wrong) we haven't talked about this, have we? Do we have any more extensive game fanboys here, who can share their experiences?

To me, it seems that as unlikely it is that chests, gold and magic scrolls will regenerate, just because the computer goes into a state where these resources aren't accessible, this is the reality of the technology of the '80s. I think if Origin made an effort to make the exploit less efficient, that waters down the cheat value.

Take walking on chests in swamps in U4. Very unlikely that a chest can save a party 8-strong from poison gas. Maybe it wasn't feasible to make chests poisonous when they are in swamps, but they could have tried workarounds to make it more realistic (disappearing the chests after a while, for instance). I also thought that British's treasury in the same game was too big, too easy to access and too easy to regenerate. All a player has to do is let his Honesty bottom-out and then he can live off his ill-gotten gains and raise Honesty again.

However, I think these other examples, where it costs a lot of reagents, lockpicks, key presses, and the gamer's precious real-time to get a handful of gold isn't cheating. If you spend a pound to cheat a penny, then it's still "cheating" on Earth, but maybe we should develop a technical definition where it isn't.

So, if no one was to suggest differently, I would change the text on the page to read: "Cheating is exploiting a weakness in the game that allows the player to bypass challenges too easily." We may also want to re-examine cheating as "integral" to gaming. The Ultra-Mind (talk) 14:42, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Okaaaay... I thought we had some pretty decisive opinions on cheating, but since the issue has stalled, I thought I'd change the text and see what happens. Please do come up w/failed examples, if you can find 'em.

However, many of those cheating articles seem to be full of failed examples. It seems that they will need a fair bit of work, if we keep this definition. That "shortcut" term would make a lot of the material incompatible, I think. For instance, the expensive status trick. With all those spells you have to cast, I don't think I'd call this a shortcut.

As an aside, I didn't find the header image had much to do w/cheating and the language in those cheating articles will need to be brought up to Codex standards. The Ultra-Mind (talk) 14:24, 26 September 2013 (UTC)