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ELI5: Why is cheating in online games seemingly so prevelant?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Well, in some cultures, if you're not cheating to get ahead you're considered a sucker.
I myself don’t cheat, but aside from hacking the actual code, I don’t think it’s cheating to do anything the game’s mechanics call for.
Most notably, I hate when people complain about spawn camping and snipers dominating.
My philosophy is: figure out a strategy to oppose that strategy. And avoid letting your spawn get overrun.
There are assholes I really hate though. Two experiences that really ground my gears were:
I don’t mind being beaten, but being tortured is a whole new thing IMO.
All of those issues sound like things the game developers should figure out solutions to. If there's a boring behaviour that results in boring gameplay and people can't do much against that unless they have overwhelming skill... Yeah sounds like a problem that they need to solve somehow.
Because games should be fun.
Well, that minecraft thing happened once in maybe a thousand hours of gameplay.
Same with the sea of thieves thing.
I think it’s acceptable to technologically tolerate small amounts of abuse, so long as the abuse isn’t literally killing people (dying in a video game doesn’t count).
If one asshole uses game mechanics to make the game not fun, during one session out of hundreds of sessions, it’s not that big a deal to me, and I don’t think it warrants changing the game mechanics.
Just my own opinion on it. Fine with people differing.
That being said, fixes for these two problems could be as simple as:
But I enjoy seeing people’s creativity in devising these evil stratagems, and also I seriously don’t think games should always be fun. I think games should enable players to practice making it fun. I think it should be possible for games to be not fun, so that players can practice the type of political organizing that helps groups of people kept reality fun.
But I’m weird in that I see video games as deeper than mere diversion; I see them as a way to practice for the Meta Game, which is the set of all games, including all the social arrangements we have in reality. I think permitting antisocial behavior in low-stakes scenarios gives people an opportunity to practice strategies for dealing with antisocial peers.
One time in minecraft this kid got himself a high level enchanted bow and about a million arrows, then proceeded to build a mountain out of lava and water buckets that constantly grew, and killed us all from the top of it with his bow.
The entire server was trying to take him down and he was just owning everyone. It became like 10 vs 1 as we tried to scale his lava mountain and take him out.
Moments like that are, to me, cool gaming moments. I was pissed but not really deeply. It was also amusing and impressive.
I’ve done koan training, so I love extremely “impossible” tasks that take countless tries to get past.
I do remember that before the koan training it was extremely frustrating and miserable to try try try 10,000 times and still fail at a thing, so I know I’m in the minority here.