Discussion Have you ever cheated in a game? [judgement free zone]

angelwire

Member
I'm working on an online multiplayer game and I've been looking into security measures to try and stop cheaters. It has made me incredibly curious about why humans cheat in online games.

It's interesting to me because humans can play physical games with arbitrary rules and no security features. For example, in Tic-Tac-Toe the pen and paper don't stop you from making two moves in a row. And Chess and Checkers pieces can be moved anywhere regardless of whether or not it's a legal move.

Obviously cheating is enjoyable for online games or else it would never happen. So I want to start some kind of database to figure out common themes on why cheating is more fun than not cheating. If you know of any interesting articles, videos, or books on the subject please share them as well.

Anyway, I'll start. It's not an online game but cheating is cheating:

How I cheat: When playing card games I'll occasionally try and hide an extra card somewhere or deal from the bottom
How it's fun: I just like to see if I can get away with it. Sometimes I'll keep on stashing cards just to see how many I can steal before getting caught. To me, it's almost like a game within a game, play a card game while also playing the cheating game. I almost think card games would be more fun if everyone played the cheating game... but then it would be a part of the rules that you are allowed to "cheat" and it wouldn't be cheating any more. And if it's not cheating, then it's not as exciting. I don't ever feel guilty about it because it hardly ever effects the outcome. And if it did, I'd have a terrible poker face and everyone would be able to tell.

Anyway, hopefully I'll get some interesting responses. I'm not here to judge you for cheating because you obviously have/had a reason. I just want to know what the reasons are. Please keep this is a judgement free zone so people will feel comfortable to share their stories. Unless you're someone who cheats at "Go fish" with your 6 year old nephew... you're a total monster that needs to be in jail, I think we can all agree on that. (just kidding in case it wasn't obvious)
 

Mercerenies

Member
Back when my college friends and I used to get together and play Munchkin on the weekends, we had to set up rules for what kinds of cheating were "allowed", because everybody was doing it. Specifically, you could hide cards, conceal information, and basically do whatever, but only after the game started. So no hiding a card in your pockets between games. And if you get caught, you go down a level. We even have a special "Level Negative One" house rule where if you get caught cheating and can't pay the penalty, then you get kicked out. I used to have to count all the cards at the end of the night because people would hide them and genuinely forget.
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
I know of 2 reasons.

1. More applicable in online games, people cheat simply because they aren't good enough in their opinion and want an unfair advantage to overcome that.

2. Sometimes, a game is really more fun for some people if they change a few things. Maybe they really enjoy the fighting in a game and don't care for the level navigation, etc... so they cheat to make that easier or faster to get to the "good stuff."
 

angelwire

Member
I know of 2 reasons.

1. More applicable in online games, people cheat simply because they aren't good enough in their opinion and want an unfair advantage to overcome that
Would you say this is the temptation for you to cheat? Personally, the temptation to cheat is the excitement of going around the rules without getting caught. I feel like winning with cheats would make victory less fun and defeat more frustrating.

2. Sometimes, a game is really more fun for some people if they change a few things. Maybe they really enjoy the fighting in a game and don't care for the level navigation, etc... so they cheat to make that easier or faster to get to the "good stuff."
In this case it seems like the best "security" is to adjust the game design to make cheating unnecessary. Or allow the same game style customization that the cheating allows for.

One of my goals for me is to try and find ways to give people that enjoy cheating a way to have as much fun within the rules as they would outside the rules.
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
Would you say this is the temptation for you to cheat? Personally, the temptation to cheat is the excitement of going around the rules without getting caught. I feel like winning with cheats would make victory less fun and defeat more frustrating.
I know it doesn't tempt me personally, I'll just get better at a game. But for some people it is pretty important to win so they are indeed tempted. Part of the temptation with winning is with the benefits you get, XP, Gold, whatever applies to the game under discussion.

In this case it seems like the best "security" is to adjust the game design to make cheating unnecessary. Or allow the same game style customization that the cheating allows for.

One of my goals for me is to try and find ways to give people that enjoy cheating a way to have as much fun within the rules as they would outside the rules.
There is nothing wrong with changing your game to allow for some easter eggs, and some gaes do that, along with other changes. An old XBOX/PC game called Jade Empire had some adjustment which was really just a glorified difficulty setting. The wording of the explanation was about whether you wanted to balance the story and combat, or if you were more interested in the story(which made combat faster and easier) or more interested in combat(which just made it harder), none of the options did anything to the story itself though. But the idea makes sense.

The pitfall I see with this is that not all games are going to be easily changed like this. And if you force it into a game, the game won't be the same anymore in some cases.

I think if you can easily fit it in and it makes sense, go for it. But if not, maybe just have the option regardless and warn the player that the game won't be as fun or whatever...or just don't make too much effort to block cheating efforts.
 

Roa

Member
I've only ever cheated in FTL by making the fleet slower... because 💩💩💩💩 that game. I couldn't enjoy a single minute of it knowing how one trip of bad luck could ruin a run.
I probably made 30 or so runs and made zero progress to unlocks to make it easier, and game with no progression for failure with luck being tied to failure so often. it was a literal waste of my time, that or tell valve to remove it from my library.

But by the time I did mod it, I was already too annoyed with the game and didn't get any satisfaction after winning a run like that, so I never played it again. It could be a cool game, but its way too heavy handed in RNG, using only a few viable stratagies, and punishing anything that looks like a learning curve.

I don't understand how people praise that game so much. People don't seem to mind throwing 200-300 hours into a game before a good run is something should enjoy or have time for. I've never seen a lukewarm player. People either hate it, or spend thousands of hours on it. And even worse, the chance to even get rewards is tied to random events and perfect setups, so making progress isn't even tied to winning. It's awful.
 
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I cheated in Pokemon as a kid, because screw having to convince my parents to travel halfway across the US just for a Mew. If I played competitive Pokemon, I'd cheat again in a heartbeat because getting Max IV Pokemon legit is just a poorly designed timesink that takes dozens of hours for each Pokemon.

I can't remember ever cheating in any other games. If I did, it was likely because a save file got corrupted. That, or I just wanted to mess around after I beat a game.
 
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O.Stogden

Member
I've used cheat codes in games back on the N64/PS1 era. But I don't think I've ever cheated outside of a singleplayer game.

Knowing how irritating games like Fall Guys and GTA V are when there's a hacker involved, I hate it with a passion. Especially Fall Guys, 1 hacker means 59 other people just wasted their time as they literally have 0% chance of winning now, no matter how good they are.

If you want to hack a singleplayer game, or alter it so you can get through it faster and avoid the grind, then that's cool, I've used trainers before to speed up the gameplay a little. But leave the multiplayer games alone please!
 
I've cheated SO many times ever since I figured out the Konami code as a child. Most of the time this was due to boredom.

Many times in the early 2000s I cheated on Starcraft and Counterstrike in multiplayer matches. I was still in a phase back then; late-teens/early twenties, wanting to annoy people on purpose for my own amusement. I just LOVED causing people to rage and would do anything to achieve it.

I do not cheat so much anymore, let alone actually play current video games.
 

TsukaYuriko

☄️
Forum Staff
Moderator
I don't understand how people praise that game so much. People don't seem to mind throwing 200-300 hours into a game before a good run is something should enjoy or have time for. I've never seen a lukewarm player. People either hate it, or spend thousands of hours on it. And even worse, the chance to even get rewards is tied to random events and perfect setups, so making progress isn't even tied to winning. It's awful.
Here's one such lukewarm player for you, then. Procedural games have this certain risk to them... the risk that, precisely due to being procedurally generated, they may generate something that's close to impossible, or impossible, for the player to overcome. Usually, there are mechanics in place that are geared towards preventing a player becoming too strong or too weak due to randomness, but even those tend to be based on random factors. As such, it's possible for the best player, or even an AI that plays as close to perfect as possible, to have the worst possible luck streak and fail a run.

It's at this point where players either realize that this isn't the kind of gameplay they can get enjoyment out of, or that they'll be fine playing the game despite this. I'm the latter kind, but am still aware of the issues the core design has. But that's the point when I stop thinking of the game as something I have to win, and start thinking of it as something I might win. Or maybe I'll only make it up to a certain point, and then lose. But I survived up to that point, with the few resources I had, which probably was comparably hard, or even harder, than winning a run where I was completely overpowered.

It's like this with many games - Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, FTL, The Binding of Isaac, just about any game that has Wanderer or Mystery Dungeon in its name... in a similar vein, games such as Mario Party, Monopoly or Ludo are essentially random in nature. Losing is a part of these games. If you play games solely to feel rewarded and like you accomplished something, then they're not the type of game you'd enjoy. If you enjoy playing games for the experience of playing them, including accepting any route the flow of the game could take at any given time, you'll likely get some form of enjoyment out of such games.


@angelwire
With that said, I believe precisely this phenomenon - playing games to achieve something - is a major reason why people cheat. Hitting a roadblock in a game for any reason, such as time gates, difficulty spikes or losing one too many runs to randomness, seems to be one of the main motivating factors that leads people to cheat according to my personal experience. For me, it was a similar one, namely game content being locked behind alternate reality games and region locks.


This was in Pokémon Emerald. Already having captured everything I could have in the game itself and having transferred everything I could from the older games, I ended up having captured all but a handful. The few missing ones were either exclusive to bonus disks of games that were distributed only in Japan, or were distributed during events that required you to physically move to one of a few select locations across the world to receive some special item in the game that was required to be granted access to some normally sealed-off region where you could capture exactly one Pokémon.

It was back when online trading wasn't even possible and I wasn't capable of moving out to any of the event locations on my own. I played those games day and night for as long as I could to get the most out of them. Unfortunately, it felt like I was the only person playing Pokémon (or any game whatsoever??) in a 30 kilometer radius. I made it my back-then life goal to, well, catch 'em all, because what else was I supposed to do before I discovered that I can just make my own games, right? :p
Blatant exaggeration reserved, but suffice it to say that the only feasible way I had to obtain Pokémon that weren't available in the game I was currently playing was to buy two copies of each console, a link cable as well as all available games to then trade everything to one game.

Well, that's actually what I did. Notably, one of the games added a single Pokémon to my collection (I went through Pokémon Channel just to get Jirachi)... and after all that, I'm still looking at an incomplete Pokédex because some dude in Japan decided that certain Pokémon are only available for people who either live somewhere nearby the handful of event spots, or annoy their parents for long enough until they cave in and take them on a five hour drive to stand in line for two minutes to get some virtual item in a matter of seconds, then drive back for five hours. This is probably one of the first things I looked up once I gained access to a computer and the internet... now imagine the look of horror on my face when I found out that all of the dedication I put into collecting everything was doomed to end in an incomplete collection. Absolutely unimaginable.

This arbitrary locking of game content behind what's essentially an alternate reality game is... not what made me cheat. It wasn't the main reason, at least. That was when I found out that out of the 386 Pokémon that existed back then, a single one of them (Celebi) was available only to owners of the game Pokémon Colosseum... in Japan. Even if I had personally attended all of the local events, there still wouldn't have been a way for me to get one of them all unless I either happen to know a Japanese person who moved to somewhere nearby where I live and had obtained one of them prior to moving (or someone who had one traded to them by someone else) or shell out a couple hundred for a Japanese console, game, bonus disc, and then play through the entire game... in Japanese, which was not going to happen due to step 1 blowing my bank account balance that was already negative at the start of the month (I think you can guess why!). Oh, and then I'd also have to navigate the moon rune menu to choose "trade" instead of "release Celebi and save the game". Yeah, no.

That is what made me cheat. I added those event items to my inventory, captured two of the missing Pokémon (Mew can crawl back into its microtransaction lock in Pokémon Home and Deoxys can get oneshot by Mega Rayquaza's Dragon Ascent and retcon-punched through space into another dimension via a literal link cable 16 years in the future for all I care), saved both myself and whatever unfortunate soul would've had to endure a combined 10 hour drive with me otherwise (... twice) a bunch of trouble in the process, spawned a Celebi on the first route of the game, captured it in a Master Ball I added to my inventory, released the motherflipper and felt... not much better than before, really.


If anything, that experience turned me bitter towards any form of game design that even allows people to get into a spot where the game's advertised main goal (gotta catch 'em all) is literally impossible to achieve outside of regional circumstances, as it's what made an experience I had otherwise enjoyed for a decade end in frustration.

It also changed my perspective about games in general. I don't have to win to enjoy games. I don't have to complete absolutely everything to "win" the game or something. I don't even have to "win" the game at all. I can do all of that if I want to, of course, provided that the game lets me and I'm good and/or lucky enough to make it through everything. I still enjoy playing games even if I end up losing, or lose halfway through a run. It's what I did up until that point that makes it fun. I draw my enjoyment not out of winning, but out of the gameplay itself, which I'd assume is a major factor that quickly turned me away from cheating again.

Another thing that helps with it is that I mostly play games together with others nowadays, either co-op, against each other, sometimes in teams, or I just stream gameplay and others can watch me play. Cheating in the games we play together would probably not be very well received in the first place (and we would quickly lose reputation and/or get banned for it), and probably not very entertaining for anyone to watch outside of very specific target audiences that I don't want to attract anyway (although the occasional noclip can be somewhat entertaining and/or educational in regards to how the games are made).

In general... if I can't win a game, hey, let's just turn it into a challenge to see how long I can survive, or how much of it I can complete. If I can win it easily, let's make up additional rules to make it harder for me. If I still win, great! Let's add more rules, though. If I don't... well, I still had fun, and they had fun watching me play. I don't play games to win, but to have fun just by playing them. When there's no goal I feel I need or want to achieve, I have no reason to cheat, because I have nothing to gain from it.


So... this is why I did, and no longer do, cheat in games. The key was a change in mentality that not only made me stop cheating as quickly as I picked it up, but also enjoy playing games more in general.

Now excuse me while I get back to my Pokémon Shield Nuzlocke. After that's done, my Deoxys from Alpha Sapphire and Mew from Ranch are ready for transfer... and hey, I even picked up a Celebi at an event during the Diamond period. The world's balance has been restored. ;)

(W-What the hell are "Arceus", "Hoopa", "Volcanion", "Zeraora" and "Zarude" and what do you mean there's no way for me to get them?!)
 

Rob

Member
Why people cheat in a game depends on what the game is and what the person wants out of the game.

In MMORPG's, I would guess that cheats can involve:

[Possible reasons that I think people might do it are bullet pointed]
  • Duplicating Items
    • Saves a lot of time
    • Easy way to make money
    • Easy way to get hold of an item that might otherwise be rare
    • Easy way to make sure you don't lose an item that breaks upon death or stolen when dead etc
  • Make Levelling Easier (get xp fast)
    • People don't want to "put the work in" to levelling up
    • People think the game is too grindy
    • People want to be "The Man" and be the highest level possible and/or higher level than most people (for various reasons eg PvP, having people look up to them and whatever else goes on in MMORPGS)
  • Boost stats (useful for both PvP and PvE)
    • People want to dominate in PvP
    • People want to cominate/have an easy time in PvE
I tend to like grindy games and I prefer to play games "the legit" way, especially if it's a multiplayer game. To me, gaining something in a game like levels/rare items/achievements etc is especially fun when it has been challenging. It's a false sense of progress but it's a big part of why I can become addicted to MMORPGs (and because it's addictive I don't play them any more!). I can imagine that for some people this isn't fun. Maybe that's why they cheat.

It could also be something competitive within them, that means they NEED to win, regardless of the means.

I don't really have a proper insight into the people who are happy with cheating in online games. I would guess that when confronted by something that they know will take them hours upon hours, they take a more "practical" approach and use a cheat to get the thing they want instantaneously (Bro, are you really going to spend 20 hours of your life grinding or just use this cheat to get there?). I often wonder why people troll or just act like assholes to other players in online games (I've seen people spend HOURS EVERY DAY JUST trolling/griefing), rather than actually playing the game. Maybe cheating/trolling is related?

I have a lot of hours in Mount & Blade: Warband. I really enjoyed the combat as it was difficult to master (and easy to lose your edge if you hadn't played for a while). I also knew the game mechanics inside out just from playing so much so I knew how to move away from swings to mitigate damage, how to use armour to make some blows glance etc, and I generally wrecked most people, especially in a 1 vs group or group vs group combat. Other people were better duelists, but I preferred a big melee and that's where most of my experience came from.

I have seen a few Youtubers review Warband and say the SP is great but the MP is "full of cheaters" and I would think that, for the most part, those YT'ers are wrong about the prevalence of cheating. I've played on EU and NA servers, all kinds of mods and I just haven't seen it.

The 4-directional combat can be difficult to pick up if you're not used to it and you're facing players that might have been playing for a decade already. If you wanted to "level the playing field" and you weren't averse to cheating, maybe you'd look into picking up an "auto-blocker" cheat or "auto-aim" cheat. You still wouldn't beat an expert player though, due to the nature of the game. There are stats in the game but outside of mods and SP you don't gain stats or level up and if someone did boost their stats they would be easy to spot (and they can still lose to a good player).
 
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Cpaz

Member
I only can recall two off the top of my head.

Cave Story, cuz that last level can bite me. Also that was years ago when I sucked (even more) at games. I wanna say, like, pre-2010??? It helps that the community has a bunch of tools for save editing.

More recently, though, was my genocide playthrough of Undertale. Interestingly enough, it kind of added to the experience.
I was already a monster. Why not make worse? I honestly probably felt worse for how I breezed through everything at the end.
 
I play PUBG mobile and I purposely take damage in water and the blue zone and then heal up because that gives me extra points. :D
Exploits aren't cheating. They're well within the boundaries of what the game mechanics expect you to do. One of the most famous examples would be wavedashing in Smash Bros. Melee—100% not a glitch. The developers purposely added in the ability for an airdash to keep your momentum if you hit the ground during it. If you're familiar with state machines (which you probably are if you're on this forum), there's a unique state for characters used only when wavedashing. The devs just didn't expect people to use it as much as they do in competitive matches.
EDIT: It probably depends on the game and the situation. "Cheating" implies violating rules.
 
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Mk.2

Member
I think for the majority of games I played in the early to mid 90s, I only saw the second half of the game because sharing lists of passwords was so common back then. The difficulty combined with having a finite number of lives before having to start the game from scratch was the reason.

During the PS1 era, lots of games had cheats for the usual things like invincibility/all weapons/unlimited ammo, along with many others, and I think the appeal was breaking the game and playing it in a manner that wasn't originally intended with its design. In some cases, you could find things to appreciate about the game that you wouldn't have noticed playing it normally.
 
D

Deleted member 13992

Guest
noclip
iddqd
dncornholio
dnstuff
konami code
smb3 magic flute

probably some others in the late 80s and 90s
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
I cheated in Pokemon as a kid, because screw having to convince my parents to travel halfway across the US just for a Mew. If I played competitive Pokemon, I'd cheat again in a heartbeat because getting Max IV Pokemon legit is just a poorly designed timesink that takes dozens of hours for each Pokemon.

I can't remember ever cheating in any other games. If I did, it was likely because a save file got corrupted. That, or I just wanted to mess around after I beat a game.
Here's one such lukewarm player for you, then. Procedural games have this certain risk to them... the risk that, precisely due to being procedurally generated, they may generate something that's close to impossible, or impossible, for the player to overcome. Usually, there are mechanics in place that are geared towards preventing a player becoming too strong or too weak due to randomness, but even those tend to be based on random factors. As such, it's possible for the best player, or even an AI that plays as close to perfect as possible, to have the worst possible luck streak and fail a run.

It's at this point where players either realize that this isn't the kind of gameplay they can get enjoyment out of, or that they'll be fine playing the game despite this. I'm the latter kind, but am still aware of the issues the core design has. But that's the point when I stop thinking of the game as something I have to win, and start thinking of it as something I might win. Or maybe I'll only make it up to a certain point, and then lose. But I survived up to that point, with the few resources I had, which probably was comparably hard, or even harder, than winning a run where I was completely overpowered.

It's like this with many games - Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, FTL, The Binding of Isaac, just about any game that has Wanderer or Mystery Dungeon in its name... in a similar vein, games such as Mario Party, Monopoly or Ludo are essentially random in nature. Losing is a part of these games. If you play games solely to feel rewarded and like you accomplished something, then they're not the type of game you'd enjoy. If you enjoy playing games for the experience of playing them, including accepting any route the flow of the game could take at any given time, you'll likely get some form of enjoyment out of such games.


@angelwire
With that said, I believe precisely this phenomenon - playing games to achieve something - is a major reason why people cheat. Hitting a roadblock in a game for any reason, such as time gates, difficulty spikes or losing one too many runs to randomness, seems to be one of the main motivating factors that leads people to cheat according to my personal experience. For me, it was a similar one, namely game content being locked behind alternate reality games and region locks.


This was in Pokémon Emerald. Already having captured everything I could have in the game itself and having transferred everything I could from the older games, I ended up having captured all but a handful. The few missing ones were either exclusive to bonus disks of games that were distributed only in Japan, or were distributed during events that required you to physically move to one of a few select locations across the world to receive some special item in the game that was required to be granted access to some normally sealed-off region where you could capture exactly one Pokémon.

It was back when online trading wasn't even possible and I wasn't capable of moving out to any of the event locations on my own. I played those games day and night for as long as I could to get the most out of them. Unfortunately, it felt like I was the only person playing Pokémon (or any game whatsoever??) in a 30 kilometer radius. I made it my back-then life goal to, well, catch 'em all, because what else was I supposed to do before I discovered that I can just make my own games, right? :p
Blatant exaggeration reserved, but suffice it to say that the only feasible way I had to obtain Pokémon that weren't available in the game I was currently playing was to buy two copies of each console, a link cable as well as all available games to then trade everything to one game.

Well, that's actually what I did. Notably, one of the games added a single Pokémon to my collection (I went through Pokémon Channel just to get Jirachi)... and after all that, I'm still looking at an incomplete Pokédex because some dude in Japan decided that certain Pokémon are only available for people who either live somewhere nearby the handful of event spots, or annoy their parents for long enough until they cave in and take them on a five hour drive to stand in line for two minutes to get some virtual item in a matter of seconds, then drive back for five hours. This is probably one of the first things I looked up once I gained access to a computer and the internet... now imagine the look of horror on my face when I found out that all of the dedication I put into collecting everything was doomed to end in an incomplete collection. Absolutely unimaginable.

This arbitrary locking of game content behind what's essentially an alternate reality game is... not what made me cheat. It wasn't the main reason, at least. That was when I found out that out of the 386 Pokémon that existed back then, a single one of them (Celebi) was available only to owners of the game Pokémon Colosseum... in Japan. Even if I had personally attended all of the local events, there still wouldn't have been a way for me to get one of them all unless I either happen to know a Japanese person who moved to somewhere nearby where I live and had obtained one of them prior to moving (or someone who had one traded to them by someone else) or shell out a couple hundred for a Japanese console, game, bonus disc, and then play through the entire game... in Japanese, which was not going to happen due to step 1 blowing my bank account balance that was already negative at the start of the month (I think you can guess why!). Oh, and then I'd also have to navigate the moon rune menu to choose "trade" instead of "release Celebi and save the game". Yeah, no.

That is what made me cheat. I added those event items to my inventory, captured two of the missing Pokémon (Mew can crawl back into its microtransaction lock in Pokémon Home and Deoxys can get oneshot by Mega Rayquaza's Dragon Ascent and retcon-punched through space into another dimension via a literal link cable 16 years in the future for all I care), saved both myself and whatever unfortunate soul would've had to endure a combined 10 hour drive with me otherwise (... twice) a bunch of trouble in the process, spawned a Celebi on the first route of the game, captured it in a Master Ball I added to my inventory, released the motherflipper and felt... not much better than before, really.


If anything, that experience turned me bitter towards any form of game design that even allows people to get into a spot where the game's advertised main goal (gotta catch 'em all) is literally impossible to achieve outside of regional circumstances, as it's what made an experience I had otherwise enjoyed for a decade end in frustration.

It also changed my perspective about games in general. I don't have to win to enjoy games. I don't have to complete absolutely everything to "win" the game or something. I don't even have to "win" the game at all. I can do all of that if I want to, of course, provided that the game lets me and I'm good and/or lucky enough to make it through everything. I still enjoy playing games even if I end up losing, or lose halfway through a run. It's what I did up until that point that makes it fun. I draw my enjoyment not out of winning, but out of the gameplay itself, which I'd assume is a major factor that quickly turned me away from cheating again.

Another thing that helps with it is that I mostly play games together with others nowadays, either co-op, against each other, sometimes in teams, or I just stream gameplay and others can watch me play. Cheating in the games we play together would probably not be very well received in the first place (and we would quickly lose reputation and/or get banned for it), and probably not very entertaining for anyone to watch outside of very specific target audiences that I don't want to attract anyway (although the occasional noclip can be somewhat entertaining and/or educational in regards to how the games are made).

In general... if I can't win a game, hey, let's just turn it into a challenge to see how long I can survive, or how much of it I can complete. If I can win it easily, let's make up additional rules to make it harder for me. If I still win, great! Let's add more rules, though. If I don't... well, I still had fun, and they had fun watching me play. I don't play games to win, but to have fun just by playing them. When there's no goal I feel I need or want to achieve, I have no reason to cheat, because I have nothing to gain from it.


So... this is why I did, and no longer do, cheat in games. The key was a change in mentality that not only made me stop cheating as quickly as I picked it up, but also enjoy playing games more in general.

Now excuse me while I get back to my Pokémon Shield Nuzlocke. After that's done, my Deoxys from Alpha Sapphire and Mew from Ranch are ready for transfer... and hey, I even picked up a Celebi at an event during the Diamond period. The world's balance has been restored. ;)

(W-What the hell are "Arceus", "Hoopa", "Volcanion", "Zeraora" and "Zarude" and what do you mean there's no way for me to get them?!)
This is why I like playing the original Red and blue versions, Havent been successful and getting a yellow or green copy other then bootlegs, anyways, Its really fun messing around with the glitches in those games ( long range trainer glitch (mew glitch), and missingno and getting glitch pokemon

main point, im not so much a cheater as a hacker. Havnet done anything with online games as I dont like mmo's and im not skilled with editing such
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Exploits aren't cheating. They're well within the boundaries of what the game mechanics expect you to do. One of the most famous examples would be wavedashing in Smash Bros. Melee—100% not a glitch. The developers purposely added in the ability for an airdash to keep your momentum if you hit the ground during it. If you're familiar with state machines (which you probably are if you're on this forum), there's a unique state for characters used only when wavedashing. The devs just didn't expect people to use it as much as they do in competitive matches.
EDIT: It probably depends on the game and the situation. "Cheating" implies violating rules.
I absolutely despise wavedashing for a number of reasons:
  • It changes high-level gameplay into something almost indistinguishable from casual play
  • It favors dexterity and endurance (which can be hard-capped at birth if you're unlucky) over planning and timing skills (which can be trained), thereby forever locking out a large number of people from high-tier play no matter how hard they try
  • The repetitive motion wears out both controllers and the user's body (look up carpal tunnel syndrome).
I'm not going to defend the random stumbling in Brawl, but a mechanic necessary for pro play making people's thumb muscles disintegrate under the extreme duress is on "bullfighting" levels of ethics.


I haven't cheated in any competitive games (hey, I don't play competitive games because I hate stress) but I've had a lot of fun with exploits that breaks games. Gen 1 Pokémon had a bug that let you escape from battles if you paused and used Fly / Dig / Teleport / Escape Rope on the same frame as an NPC challenged you to a battle, which put the game in a weird state where you're simultaneously in the battle and overworld state, and can overwrite battle data with your actions. (Hooray for 8-bit-era RAM limits!). Most notably, you could essentially manipulate the game into spawning any wild pokémon at Lv.7 this way, including Mew, Dragonite (which isn't banned from the Petite Cup in Pokémon Stadium since it only cares about the level range) and Gengar (not obtainable without friends normally). I set out on a quest to catalogue every NPC's resulting random encounter, but I had to end after I permanently softlocked my playthrough when the memory manipulation spilled over into progress flags...

Another similar fun glitch is the original version of Link's Awakening, where you could warp across the screen if you bring up the map at the same frame a screen transition starts (it loads the next level but never updates your position). You could sequence break like hell in that game, including doing the last dungeon first, and I set out on a challenge run to beat the game without the sword. (Which failed, since the first boss is immune to all sources of damage except the sword for some reason). The way the game's saving system works, it's possible to completely brick a savefile if you end up passing through certain doors that drop you off in deep water before you get the item that lets you swim, and then doing a save-and-quit: you'll reload at that very same door and enter an infinite cycle of drowning until you die. GUESS HOW I FOUND OUT.

Overall, my cheating has mostly boiled down to seeing a game from another angle, and these challenge runs probably more than doubled the playtime I got out of these games.
 
I absolutely despise wavedashing for a number of reasons:
  • It changes high-level gameplay into something almost indistinguishable from casual play
  • It favors dexterity and endurance (which can be hard-capped at birth if you're unlucky) over planning and timing skills (which can be trained), thereby forever locking out a large number of people from high-tier play no matter how hard they try
  • The repetitive motion wears out both controllers and the user's body (look up carpal tunnel syndrome).
I'm not going to defend the random stumbling in Brawl, but a mechanic necessary for pro play making people's thumb muscles disintegrate under the extreme duress is on "bullfighting" levels of ethics.
Wavedashing isn't used enough to cause carpal tunnel. It isn't used repeatedly like you claim, and it isn't stressful on the thumbs at all. You don't even have to move your thumb to wavedash. Wavedashing's primary use is to bait and conceal other actions, e.g. running towards your opponent, wavedashing backwards, then Fsmashing. Which, coincidentally, means it heavily favors planning/timing over endurance.

What is tiring and stressful on the body (index finger) is L-cancelling--an intentional technique (not even an exploit) which Nintendo mentioned as an advanced technique on their website for Smash 64 and they even nerfed it in Melee. All that said, I don't really have a horse in the game. I don't even like Melee. I play Rivals of Aether, where wavedashing is an intended mechanic explained to you in the tutorial. It also doesn't have L-cancelling, which is great for me since I have physical disabilities affecting my fingers.

Fun fact, several major competitions for Smash Bros. Brawl used a literal cheating device in order to disable tripping.

Star Wars: Jedi Outcast had the best cheats. Enabling cheats was: helpusobi 1
Then there's the big daddy cheat: g_saberrealisticcombat 1
Lightsabers become instant-kill and damage on-contact. I accidentally chopped Lando into pieces once by turning around with my lightsaber on. You could also change your lightsaber color to whatever you wanted or even get your lightsaber earlier than intended. I seem to remember the blade was invisible if you did that, though.
 
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AveCoo

Guest
Competition and high scores always leads to cheating. I remember the old tournaments on Mario Tennis for the N64 - people spammed the leaderboards with the winning code for that, effectively making it impossible for anyone to beat. I remember seeing it then when I was young, and I still see it today.

However, one developer I've seen handle this stuff expertly is Zachtronics. I've always admired how they implement public scores in the form of a histogram. I remember this being in SpaceChem and Shenzen. Your name isn't attached to the chart and your highest score doesn't stay at the top - making cheating effectively useless. Attaching names and scores to public leaderboards seems to only encourage people to cheat. The only time you could see high scores in these games was in private multiplayer games where it's much harder to cheat as you know the people you're playing against.

Maybe it's worth considering what information you display to the public versus what information you display to friends. I reckon a huge part is trying to disincentivize cheating altogether, rather than stopping cheaters. Just some food for thought :)
 
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