I saw a piece of news on the BBC a few days ago about Blizzard suing a company in Germany over a piece of software that they released which allows players to cheat.
I fully understand why Blizzard does this as it adversely affects the playing experience of other users. I’ve never played an MP game but I can see why other people cheating would be really frustrating to those that don’t.
Even though I pay little to no attention to Valve’s MP IPs I do hear about VAC bans and other items related to cheating on its servers. Cheating is one (of the many) reasons I don’t like Association Football (footie to many English people, soccer to North American and futball to millions of others). Watching players purposefully try to convince the referee that they have been fouled or injured really busts my bullsquids.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
We have all, yes even you at the back, have used cheats when playing half-Life maps and mods. Sometimes because the designer has made a badly balanced/designed area or because it’s broken. Can you imagine playing any Half-Life game without the console available? No, me neither.
But that is what it is like for many SP games. If you could simply spend a few bucks/euros/pounds to make you life easier or even to have a little fun, would you do it?
Me? Probably not but mostly because I hate spending money and feel that if the game is badly balanced, I shouldn’t have to pay to fixed it.
Of course, in the competitive and often immature world of Multiplayer, the “rules” of conduct are completely different.
Thoughts?
Would you pay for a cheat tool for a SP game?
- Yes, why not? (0%, 0 Votes)
- Depends on the price. (11%, 6 Votes)
- No way, Barney! (89%, 48 Votes)
Total Voters: 54
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Paying for Cheats?
No. But i use cheating often in SP because i would like to play them completely and without god mode i m not able to play the game till the end.
No , i would not , but I think Blizzard are way too extreme with this cheating stuff , I 100% agree with banning players that use cheats , but banning them for life even if they bought a second copy I kinda feel like it’s illegal in way , he payed 40$ for a second chance (I think it has smth to do with your ip) , taking down sites with cheats, I totally agree with, but suing a company for developing a cheat , that’s nuts in my opinion. I’m pretty sure there is a more easy way of solving this problem , like scanning your game to check if your is different than the stock (the one that everyone plays) and if it isn’t these should be a “repair” function that will bring it back the stock one.
but why is it too harsh to get banned for life?
You know how to prevent it? Simply dont cheat.
F*&k cheaters in online games. Scum of the earth right after ISIS lol.
On the Overwatch policy, I’m actually more in agreement with the company. Admittedly I’m a fan of the game so I’ve a vested interest to see cheaters entirely out of my games.
I’m under the impression it’s quite common for cheaters to be happy to rebuy games and continue to cheat, despite the cost of repurchase. Heck, I’ve seen subscriptions of cheating software advertised at £30/month. A zero-tolerance policy might be very harsh, but it’s the only simple measure I can think of to actually eliminate cheaters from their game.
I’m unsure if a simple scan would catch any decent hack, I don’t use them, but I’m under the impression cheats modify inputs going into the game (making the inputs appear legitimate to a robot).
I imagine they’ve a serious interest in maintaining a positive environment for the “legit” players of their game, and going in hard on cheaters and those that supply them might be the only way to maintaining that positive environment and ergo a playerbase.
Games are just a chill, recreational activity for the consumer, but to the developer it’s the thing putting food on the table.
Aren’t there a load of examples of multiplayer games dying due to rampant cheating?
yes, I think they are playing the “long game”. Look at CS:GO. One of the most hostile communities ever. The recent gambling scandals and all that shit doesn’t help. Valve “we don’t care, do what you want” attitude is what allowed this to happen. In the long run Overwatch might benefit extremely from this attitude. At the end I personally love how Blizzard handles Overwatch so far, even though it is far from perfect.
Way back in the day, there was the Game Genie. It was an accessory you’d attach a cartridge onto before slipping it into the console and it would intercept the game before it ran and let you enter codes. Fundamentally, I think it was a kind of hex editor, with the codes telling it where to look and how to change the variable. Then you’d run the game and you’d have infinite lives, infinite health, etc. Older console games were remarkably resilient. They didn’t crash because you looked at them the wrong way because they couldn’t afford the overhead to do a lot of safety checks in code. So, the game would usually continue to run with whatever glitched data it had.
What was fun about it, especially to my prepubescent mind, was being able to screw around with other aspects of the game. Like the jump physics, the way weapons worked, Tetris even had a weird two-player hack where one player controlled rotation and the other movement. You could play as Street Fighter II characters who weren’t fully programmed, or find secret developer areas in games that were never removed. It had this appeal of doing something in a game you weren’t supposed to do, and that was naughty.
Nintendo hated this. They didn’t like the idea of people buzzing through their games and returning them to the store or potentially bypassing their lockout system. They also thought it violated copyright. They sued the makers of Game Genie to make them stop selling it. This led to a rather important legal decision in Galoob v. Nintendo, which you can read about on Wikipedia, but the idea was that cheating in a game was akin to skipping pages in a book, there was no violation. Nintendo lost that decision and had to pay up. Interestingly, this also led to the Micro Star v. Formgen lawsuit which concerned the legality of selling user-created levels for games.
As far as I know, Galoob no longer exists, but the actual company behind the Game Genie was Codemasters, who still exists to this day as developer and publisher who is something of a legend in European gaming circles for their longevity and quality of games.
What was the point of this tangent? In the past, yes, I paid for a cheating tool. It was fun. But it was also a product of its time and it predated the rise of multiplayer gaming. What you want to do with your copy of the game in a single player world should be your own business – but the moment it impacts the experience of others, then yes, I don’t support it at all.
hey that was really interesting. I didnt know about that stuff.
Could the missing no. glitch in the original Pokemon games be related to that somehow?
I think Missing No. was a legitimate glitch with the original Pokemon game. The game was trying to access data that unexpectedly doesn’t exist, so it defaulted to something broken and ran with it anyway because games often didn’t do sanity checks back then. So yeah, the same rationale. But I don’t think you actually need to cheat to get it. 🙂
While I liked using them as a kid, I completely despise them now. I can’t really get any enjoyment out of it unless I’m looking for some easter egg out of the map/harder to reach.
If I can’t beat a game even on the lowest difficulty, that would mean the game is poorly balanced and I don’t need to stress myself over finishing it. In fact, if I get a nice challenge I’m actually more encouraged to finish it properly.
So…in short…no.
if anyone on the planet buys cheats (for SP games), then I dont want to live on this planet anymore.
Phillip is trying to kill me with these question. First mobile gaming, now paid cheats. What the hell.
(and yes thats not 100% serious)
Depends on the type of cheat, I think. Sort of along the lines of what Maki and Quaskie mentioned – if the cheats weren’t necessarily to ‘beat’ the game but to alter how it is played, it might be interesting enough to buy. In that respect they might be considered mods rather than cheats.
I like to think of it as milking the game for any last content I can get out of it in single player as cheating can be kinda fun once you played trough the full game without cheating., I mean even in old game you had special codes you could input that made the game easier/cheated. But I would never pay for any cheating software and neither would I use it in any multiplayer game.
Seriously, who would buy cheats? When Steam announced the whole paid mods thing, everyone lost their s**t. Now cheats? Cut me a break. I’m gonna kill myself if that happens (not really).
Actually, techincally there are already paid cheats. It’s called microtransactions, DLC and pre-order boni.
No.
If i had to pay everytime i used stuff like God, IDKFA, the mirror mode of AvP1, or the all weapons dance moves of classic Tomb Raiders.
I would have been more broke than the dirty naked bum who’s currently not breathing under the bridge.
Back in the olden days the only way you paid for a cheat is if you bought the Game Genie cartage for the old consoles.
These days… no way… but the sad reality is that in this age of “Pay to Play” millions of people are effectively paying for an ‘advantage’ in single player games…. but it’s labeled/marketed completely different so it’s appealing and required.
Sickening.
I don’t play video games to get to the end, I play to enjoy the moment, and if thay moment happens to be weeks trying to get past a brutally difficult level, so be it, not even that makes me want to cheat.
Honestly, I don’t have anything against cheaters, as long as they stick to singleplayer, if you cheat in multiplayer games you don’t deserve any videogames at all.