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Article Synopsis
Baranor tackles the issue of cheating. When is cheating wrong, and when is it acceptable? Baranor knows. | |
“I never cheat…”
During my six year career as a Diablo II player, I never used a cheat, hack, or anything similar, and I tried to avoid all the cheaters on Battle.net as much as possible. That is, when I was not out butchering people of course. But why? Well, once upon a time there was a game called Diablo, and that game, still my favorite as far as atmosphere goes in a game (“AAAH Fresh MEAT!”), also favored high on my online playing list at that time. Actually, it was the only game I played online… my dad had a telephone modem, and I had a copy of Diablo. So I played most of the time when mommy and daddy weren’t home (dad would not have liked it, as he always complained how high the telephone bills were until we got a specified bill and it turned out he made 60% of the calls on it), and slowly but surely, my character rose from level 1 to 20, 30, and then 40, and eventually, I had a level 45 Warrior named Dal-Kurzak with three red dots. At that time I had already run into some hacking scum, and I had god-mode (though I never used it), a character back-up program, an inventory scanner so I could scan for hacked items, a tool with which I could copy other people’s gear and several other gizmos and tools. Mind you, I never used most of the stuff, but I had it none the less. Already someone had hacked over my char after a four-hour playing session, and finding your guy with a Str and Dex of 0 isn’t exactly fun. I also had a townkill, healing someone else for –1800 hit points. I was armed to the teeth.
So one night I ran into some random guy, and he killed me whilst out of town, about 100 times, and resurrected me, and that in just about 15 seconds. Kill-ressurect-kill-ressurect… eventually, there was a huge pile of gear and gold around my mangled body. I had a backup, was pissed off, and ready to go and hunt him down… and I turned off the pc and forgot about it. I never ventured online again within the world of Diablo I. When DII came out I went for it.
Sad? Nope. This is not a rant about cheating either, in case you might have thought that. This is actually about the fun that cheating can bring. But not in online games. Cheating in online games, as per above example, is stupid. However, cheating in single player games can be hugely amusing. I say “Doom” and IDDQD, and then IDwhatever it was to get the Berserk power up and smash monsters to a red pulp with your trusty knuckle buster. Need I say more? Yes? Great! I played a lot of XCOM: Terror from the Deep, a great strategy game, but on the higher levels life could get somewhat difficult. You see, you had to have both a live Lobsterman Commander and a certain artifact on your base, and then you had to research (i.e. interrogate with shocks) the Lobsterman Commander… however, if you researched the Commander without said artifact, the game went into a small loop and you could never get that information. That information however was crucial to your success and ultimate victory. Once I figured that out, I had to a) restart or b) resort to cheating in order to finish the game. Restarting a game which takes about 100 hours to fully play through isn’t exactly fun, especially when the problem is a bug, so I decided to pluck open a save game of a friend of mine who did have the research done. I sifted through its files, figured out what did what and eventually I lifted the tech-tree accomplishments from his game and dropped it into mine. Problem fixed, and I finished it.
That was XCOM: TFTD… which is part deux of the series… but in part one you could do far more fun stuff. You could for example take over an alien’s mind (as XCOM is all about killing aliens that invade earth), but you could not enter his inventory. However, if you entered the inventory of one of your own soldiers and started running through the inventories of the rest (by key-press) you could scroll to the inventory of the alien, equip him with a hand-grenade, make him pull the pin and then drop it onto his feet. Bug-abuse anyone ^_^?
Anyone ever tried System Shock and System Shock II? A friend of mine can play through SS2 in two-three hours. Don’t know if he used a hacked char for that, but I know he sometimes uses hacked up chars for other games. Does it cheapen his experience? I really don’t know… but it is true that certain RPG’s are build in such a way that build A yields quests A, and build B yields quests B. With a hacked up char you can open any door, do anything you like and pretty much get every quest you like. His hacked up chars give him the freedom to do whatever he wants in a game. And why not? It is his game, and he doesn’t affect anyone with it. Sometimes it is way more fun to cheat through a game. Have a particular hard level of Starcraft which you cannot breach because your RTS-skills aren’t up to par? There is no cow level! Can’t finish a map in Doom? IDNOCLIP. Want to test something in a mod you made for Unreal? Console commands…. Yeah, console commands. That’s what most cheats are. Why did the developers of Doom put those codes in? Because they wanted to test stuff, and quickly too. Same goes for Starcraft. I bet you that “There is no cow level” originally was something like Alt+F+7, so that they could quickly skip levels to test functionality. But ha and ha, those codes are damn useful!
Cheating can be very entertaining. Also, it can teach you to be more inventive and to try and search for workarounds. Had I not used a hex editor back in ye olden days to cheat myself some extra stats in this or that game, I would not have been able to or even have known of said possibility to use a hex editor to manipulate data inside files. It helped me to solve a problem at work. As for cheating in an online game (like running a bot), well, that’s a different story, and if you want to cheat there, where there is an even playfield for all participants, I have the following advice: Bust your modem with a hammer and eat it!
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