Kopikatsu said:
The 'The line between cheating and playing really, really well' thread made me think of something. When someone cheats, most people are not upset over the fact that the other person is cheating (For example, few people get upset over scripts in Team Fortress 2 despite the fact that they are artificially enhancing skill), but that they drain the fun away from other people. Being locked in your spawn because someone is flying around with an infinite ammo rocket launcher minigun is very...anti-fun.
But what of people who are simply immensely skilled compared to their enemies? I watched a video a long while ago about someone going 108-0 in Black Ops 2.(He died once, but it was a suicide via Lodestar by accident) Now, if BO2 had this functionality, would the other players have been justified in kicking him from the game? He wasn't cheating, but he was actively ruining the fun of at least six people, maybe as many as eleven. Arguing that it's fair because the people on the other team could have killed him is like saying that telling someone they can starve in the street or join the military is a choice. Technically yes, but practically no.
It's a bit harsh to say that someone can't play in certain servers because they're too good, but is there a point where it's necessary?
Well actually yes, Starving in the street or joining the military is a practical choice. At the end if the day people should generally at least try and do something to support themselves assuming they are capable. Unless the guy is disabled then yes, joining the military is a viable choice and nothing unfair about it, you give the goverment providing for you something in return for your support. If you wind up going to war and dying, at least you lived longer than you probably would if you just died right there.
That bad analogy which we could argue aside, I think the issue is that there is a point at which no amount of skill allows for something to happen, no matter how it might appear. Like it or not game code only allows for certain things or makes them practical. Just because someone is cheating does not mean it's always obvious, and someone producing defense videos after being banned or getting a ton of complaints proving their innocence generally means as little as a general photoshop as they have an obvious motive to produce elaborate fakes, especially if they were invested enough in the game to piss off that many people and learn how to cheat that well.
Typically when it comes down to questions of "skill" it's a matter of putting a bunch of pugging Newbies into the same queues with veterans using pre-made groups. When you see games where this kind of thing happens again and again it largely occurs because there is so much routine steamrolling that the newbies generally can't ever learn anything, and if they just want to do PVP or whatever part time, and don't want to get into a group that queues constsntly there is an issue. This applies in one form or another to both shooters (with solitary players who want to play online) and MMO-type PVP.
Another issue is of course that automated queues and matchmaking don't always work as there are ways of cheating on them, and you DO see people that are skilled doing things like making new accounts just so they can terorize newbies. In spirit some guy who is capable of in theory getting a 108-1 kill/death ration should never be fighting opponents capable of giving him that kind of success if matchmaking works. Ditto premade groups, guilds, clans, should never, ever be going up against anything but more of the same.
One way or another the guy cheated when this kind of thing happens, either by hacking the game in some unexpcted way, the more incredible a success is the more likely (ie the game code just makes certain things impossible, even in a shooter Noobs spraying bullets everywhere are going to take out a skilled player occasionally), or exploited, or in many cases both since they DO tend to go together with the same players.
Of course on some levels I will say the game companies can be blamed. In cases as extreme as your example hardcore bans are in order (I mean it's obvious just by the numbers), in other cases it's because companies design things badly, and in many cases set things up intentionally so the good/organized players can frag and terorize newbs "because it's fun" and thus wind up shooting themselves in the foot. This is especially true in MMOs where PVP oftentimes becomes a token grind and the big PVP guilds and such don't want constanty series of nail biting matches against equally skilled opponents, they want tokens as fast as possible to gear up, and game companies stupidly cater to this, giving rewards to what amount to the biggest bullies more than anything.
What's more an attitude of dominance is also the problem, there is a point at which people in shooters and MMO PVP tend to become entitled. The idea that "I'm going to win easily, so why not just speed up the process" convincing people involved that for them it's not really cheating because they are just that good to begin with. Not to mention arguements that cheating this way is justified by game mechanics intended to balance things, or weapons like the infamous "Noob Tube" which were pretty much designed so even a complete incompetant to get some kills by firing it in the right general direction... which has caused massive complaints by people claiming it robs them of their "kill death ratio" unfairly, and has in the past caused arguements that it makes cheating justified. Weapons like that in a lot of current shooters are also incidently why a 108-1 K/D ratio in a match is pretty much impossible to do without cheating. The code and design means that simple dumb luck is going to ruin your day if nothing else.
It's sort of like "script hacking" in MMOs. Computers are incapable of true randomness, and instead tend to run a script of numbers in a specific order to emulate it (which can be hard to follow). In a stat based game there are numbers being generated in coordination with your stats that dictate hits/resists/evades/crits/damage rolls, etc... While allegedly impossible, there are people who have basically been able to cheat by getting into the code one way or another and pretty much adjusting the numbers that are going to come up for them to give a far better ratio of results. Better damage rolls on average, more crits than their stats allow, better resists, etc... which isn't as overt as many forms of cheating, but has a huge effect, and is justified by the people doing it by simply "removing/reducing the chance of being screwed by the RNG" while keeping it intact for others. There have been recurring rumors of gaming companies pretty much giving favorable scripts to their own characters, friends, or people selling them since almost the beginning of the game. Right up there with the old Everquest rumor (that turned out to be true) that one of the Devs put a banker into the then-semi-abandoned newbie dungeon "Befallen" that would spawn only at very specific times and which he could generate money by using a special script attached to it whereby it would covert money to higher denominations (ie copper to Platinum) which he would then sell for real money. It was a big scandal at the time, and kind of illustrates exactly the kind of garbage that goes on with Devs (behind the company's back) despite assistance that
it doesn't happen. Chances are if you meet the right guy and have a few hundred bucks handy you can get secret cheats insalled into just about any online game you want for your own benefit.
