Trick or Cheat?

[Fuzzball]

Originally posted by quinns
Hmmm. All quiet now. Good! I imagine this is settled then. We have all agreed to be honest, upstanding players. That's great!

It was everyone's perception of honesty that was mainly being argued here. I truly don't think such a discussion will ever be done with Quinns. The accusations of weaker insecure players have always been thrown about when they are defeated. Very sadly, in online gaming recently I have used different names. Somewhat I haven't really done before for any reason, as I believe such a tactic is a deception in itself. I've found many opinions formed from these discussions I've overhead online of late. I don't like hearing myself and others here discussed in such a fashion. I've heard the level of accusations grow wilder, and the accusations of cheating and how, become even more incredulous. I've never held anything back from anyone who wanted to know something before. I've also tried to take the time out to point things out to people I thought may not know. I was looking to set up some really cool sites for my fellow ctp'ers. All this rubbish lately has discouraged me from playing the game with anyone but known friends. It doesn't make me want to share my works with any of these ingrateful and accusing gamers.

[quinns]

Originally posted by Fuzzball

It was everyone's perception of honesty that was mainly being argued here. I truly don't think such a discussion will ever be done with Quinns.

I know Fuzzball. I don't think it is really done with either I said that with "tongue in cheek"... though, I hope it really is somewhat true.

[blackice]

CHEATING IN GAMES
Today's games come with intentional cheat codes and third parties create other cheats. This is fine; but a subtler form of cheating is exploiting a game's loopholes. This is also ok since finding and using a game's loopholes is a challenge and often the only way to survive.

But loopholes remove the rest of the game's challenge and its associated personal growth and fun. Sadly, loopless games are hard to make and rare. So, instead of not playing most games, people often just outlaw the loopholes. Seeking mastery, some people also outlaw simple, easy, or degenerate tactics to bring difficult and complex tactics to bear.

So, cheating is actually a continuum and is relative to the observer's ability and intention with the game. This causes disputes in games: the accuser says the accusee cheated. Usually though, they simply differ on what they tacitly outlawed. The accuser thinks the accusee intentionally cheated. Symetrically, the accusee thinks the accuser is only angry that the tactic worked so well. Tensions will spiral if they share their thoughts.

Of course, sometimes a person intentionally cheats for emotional reasons, such as frustration or anger. Subtler is when, hedonistically, vu cheats just to feel the pleasure of winning.

Trying to win causes pleasure to be associated with winning (cathexis), while actually winning fires off that pleasure but lessens the association (inthexis or extinction). When a person wins by cheating, the pleasure association is quickly depleated (athexis) since vu doesn't have to try and the cathexis process is lacking.

Generally, once a game's challenge is gone, a person often uses cheat codes to wring out the last bit of pleasure from the game. This ruins the game for vu since, afterwards, playing the game without cheating is boring. This is actually good since it removes any risidual addictions and provides closure to the game. However, vu shouldn't start out using the cheats.

A designer can assure a game's longevity by making its challenge adapt closely to the player's ability. Vu can assure its adoption by carefully balancing cathexis and inthexis at the beginning of the game. Vu can raise its popularity by making cheat codes explicit and minimizing loopholes.

John LeFlohic
March 4, 1999

[blackice]

Comment...

[Solver]

Blackice,
You've posted this on so many boards and sent in emails .

[blackice]

Thanks for the input solver

[berXpert]

I don't get it this time (maybe due my bad english), but the idea is that cheating is normal

And that is normal to the programmers to build "loops" for the excitment of search them? (like the keystrokes in Duke Nukem or the ancient Doom?)

Or what's your point BlackIce, do you want to know what do we think about the cheating theme? I think a lot of words have been writed here, and in general all disapoint the use of cheating in this particular game.

Obviusly, the point about search "loops", is interesting. What about a reward for the first cheats found in Civ III?

[blackice]

It is hard I bet ok I translated it to spanish and sent it to your email. I hope not much is lost in the translation. Let me know.

[Fuzzball]

It's ramblings and pyschological speculations of some unknown uni-student on the topic of cheating in video games. A nice short read I 'spose. Next time someone cheats to win a game I'm in, I'll be hurling insults like...."Your cathexis process is lacking!!", "You have no honour, may your athexis feel the sting of my glare!!!!".
As opposed to the normal insults like...." I will asphyxious your asseous, gimp boy!!".

[blackice]

Hehehe lol or how about pass the name along so we can just ignore them?

[quinns]

LOL Fuzzball!

The solution to people that have been PROVEN to be cheaters is simple..... BLACKBALL. It has worked in every game or sport where I have encountered KNOWN cheaters. It should be no different in CTP Internet or PBEM. And once again, it isn't CHEATING if everyone agrees to the use of certain "features" at the beginning of the game.

[J Bytheway]

Getting back to the original topic of this thread...

Someone said that they wondered why the 50% switch penalty was removed. It WASN'T. That's the whole POINT of this trick. If you switch production through the 'build' button instead of through the 'queue' button, you will lose 25% of invested production. It should really be at least 75%, but that's not the point. This very fact is how we KNOW that this was an unintentional thing by the programmers. Surely everyone can agree that the two methods of production switching were intended to produce the same results.

In addition, this trick can be exploited much more than has been sugessted here.
I think that the focus on early-game effects has ignored the important late-game effects, especially with respect to leviathans, since they are very good but slow, and so it is very useful to be able to build them quickly and cheaply in a front-line city with just 1 population. Building them in the production powerhouses in the centre of your empire is no help (or at least help only with defense), since they take an eternity to move to the warzone. Check out my thread at:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23553

for details.

I hope this will not begin a new argument - I don't know how many people are still reading this thread - but I had to point these things out since noone else seems to have noticed.

John