When Gamers Cheat!!!

The last article I wrote related to A.I. and how a game can make you feel cheated (When A.I. Cheats!!!). Continuing on with the theme I have decided to cover the issue of when gamers cheat!!!

In single player games I never really quite got the deal with using cheats or walkthroughs. After all, why spend that much money on a new game if you’re not even going to play through it properly. (Same reason I like my games to be challenging. If I complete it too quickly it doesn’t feel like its been worth what I paid for it and I’ll end up sitting agitatedly before the end credits regretting that I ever became so hooked in the first place.) Admittedly, when I have had walkthroughs placed before me I’ve had a little itch inside my skull daring me to have a look. More often than not I will cave, especially if I’m not sure where to go next. (I hate it when a game is unclear as to where you should be at a certain point. It’s the worst kind of stuck; wasting hours running backwards and forwards for the right location.) Sometimes people will use guides and cheats in a game on second play-through, either for fun (exploding/naked characters... etc...) or to find anything that they happened to miss the first time through (Final Fantasy I’ve found is terrible for having a lot of hidden quests and items you just couldn’t locate without either luck or instruction.) I guess in this case, it’s more understandable, either way however, why should it bother me? Each player to their own and all that...

... but then there’s online games, in which I find cheating to be unforgivable. It seems to me that there’s always one player who wants to ruin it for the rest, and it’s very unfair after having paid for the game for someone else to then dictate and affect how it should be played. Besides, what’s the point in taking part in a competitive match if you’re just going to cheat to win; it’s undeserved and dishonourable; yet if you beat everyone by your own skill it gives you a much greater boost because you ‘actually’ earned it. Of course you shouldn’t really go to these kinds of extremes (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=239999), but it’s still enough to make decent players boil with anger inside. In such cases, I will exit the game and not enter another match with that player ever again, (tried complaining once to get people banned, but didn’t make an ounce of difference without proof.)

I use to be really into the multiplayer side of “Resistance: Fall of Man.” I had a clan and we were pretty good at it. I worked really hard on my profile in this game, getting my kill count greater than my death one, attempting to get more wins than losses. Yet the moment somebody cheats in this game is messes up some of your well earned stats, (as you tend to get randomly put into matches in this game, it’s not really possible to avoid cheats. It’s just a case of if you get suspicious, leave!) At the start there was mostly talk of how certain people were using lag switches, which cause them to look Skippy on your screen making them hard to hit. (unfortunately if your connections acting up a bit you can also be mistakenly accused of this.) I never really noticed that much of an issue here but later on in the games release, a bug was found that allowed people at certain points in the map to walk outside of the walls. They could still shoot you through the walls, but you could not see or hit them back. Soon after this announcement I found myself in this very situation. My friends and I kept dying really rapidly on the spot after re-spawn and for a while we just thought that maybe the other team were really good. As time went on however, it became more and more obvious that they were abusing the glitch as we never saw the other team members. Now I’m the kind of gamer who hates quitting even when losing so I attempted to continue for as long as I could; needless to say, it was a complete slaughter. My clan felt pretty down and angry afterwards; we’d spent time practicing and getting good at the game, all of which meant nothing the moment we entered that match. What was worse was the fact that there was also nothing we could do about it. They’d gotten away with it and would probably continue to ruin other people’s enjoyment of the game.

Tibia is an MMORPG in which I have also come to notice people cheating. They like to use algorithms on their characters, which controls them and gets them to attack monsters. This allows them to leave the game and to come back to a high-level character. It’s a risk as most people who spot these bots will kill them on sight (although the botters high-level friend may end up being sent out to hunt them down), but some are really advanced and will try really hard to create the illusion that there is a player involved (such as getting them to post ‘hello’ when another player passes by.) For starters, this really irritates me because what’s the point of playing a game and yet not being present at the keyboard; coming back to a powerful character, it’s like getting a reward without all the work that other players like John and I put into it. Secondly, these people then often use these cheaply created high-levels to power abuse other players. Botting has also caused suspicion amongst the community and several times I have been mistaken for it and been attacked; giving me no choice but to set their beards alight to teach them a lesson. Once again, like in Resistance, it’s hard to do anything about it. You can’t report them because you have no proof. (Silkroad Online also had problems with bots, to the point where a lot of fans including myself, turned their backs on it.)

In summary, I hate cheating in games! There’s just no point to playing a game if you’re not going to do it properly. In single player games it’s not so frowned upon, as some people deem it necessary to improve their experience, other times they can be useful or fun. In multiplayer games, unless agreed upon by all players present, it should be a definite NO! It’s selfish to go and ruin the experience for another person just to benefit yourself (not that I can see any fun in cheating; it’s not like you’ll get any bragging rights for doing so.) There should definitely be more ways in games to deal with these little pests and the developers themselves should put more care into maintaining good solid communities; having too many unruly players and cheats usually results in a game being abandoned by the very people who actually care about it.

When A.I. Cheats!

You know that feeling, when you’re stuck on a game for hours on a boss battle; the sweat is pouring from your brow and your muscles are tense from frustration; you can feel your heart beating faster and you’re about to blow, possibly chucking your very expensive game controller to the floor or at the head of your best friend sat next to you. Know it well? Well I’ve always prided myself on the ability to keep calm; to not act as described above. I always brag about how I enjoy the challenge and I can keep trying over and over repeatedly until the task is complete. It’s mostly true, except, I admit, to nearly blowing a fuse during Pokémon yesterday. There is one thing in a game that I really can’t stand, and that’s when something happens that’s unfair because it’s weighted against you; when the A.I. cheats!

I bought Pokémon Silver on the day of its release and I had been enjoying it very much. It had felt a bit weighted here and there, for example, hypnosis used against me seemed to hit way more than it really should do (considering the fact that it has an accuracy value of 70), but it wasn’t enough to make me feel aggravated at all. My team isn’t the strongest team on stats or types, because on a proper play through of a Pokémon game I like to use what I like; I am however, a bit of a grinder, so I spent a fair bit of time strengthening them up. It’s not that I want to be overpowered, I don’t like my games too easy after all, but there’s something about the training aspect in Pokémon that I enjoy.

Anyway, I came to the elite 4 in Johto feeling pretty confident because I knew my Pokémon were a higher level than any of the ones I would be up against. The first 4 members weren’t too difficult. They were a tad annoying with their evasiveness, but in time I managed to take them all down. Then I came to the final, Lance, who uses Dragon type Pokémon. I had always really liked Lance since meeting him because of his choice of type, and that cool hairdo/outfit. Unfortunately my liking for him soon died; he was a nightmare.

I knew it was going to be a little tricky, because I didn’t have any ice/dragon moves, but it felt hard in a way that it seemed to be weighted against me. I had decided to give Furret the move ‘Me First,’ thinking that it may be able to help me to do the damage back to the dragons. I had been looking forward to trying it out to see if it would make any difference, but to my disappointment I didn’t get the chance to, for every time I tried I got paralysed. It seems a bit weird to me that they wouldn’t use that move for ages, and yet the moment I selected ‘Me First,’ it’d get used against me, as if they knew what I was doing.



It wasn’t that what started to make my blood boil however, for I could have simply been very unlucky, but the confusion in this game is starting to get on my nerves. My Ninetails knows the move ‘Confuse Ray,’ but I hardly ever use it because when I do they’ll either snap out of it really quickly, or it won’t affect them very much. Yet in contrast to that, almost every single time one of my Pokémon gets confused, they end up hurting themselves 4 to 5 times in a row. (Seriously, it’s practically every single time and there’s no way I’m putting that down to sheer bad luck as I’ve never seen it happen that badly to an opponent yet and I don’t remember it being that horrendous in Pearl.) So what has this got to do with Lance then? Well one of his Dragonites uses the move ‘Outrage,’ an incredibly powerful dragon type move with 120 base power, 100 accuracy and 15pp. Every powerful move tends to have a negative consequence to balance it out, and this one is no exception, causing the user to become confused if they use it for 2-3 turns. Well this Dragonite seems to spam it over and over again none stop and is almost permanently confused. You’d think in the entirety of that time it would have hurt itself a few times, giving me a change to get through and strike. Well, it only happened once, and the rest of the time I was using revives constantly until eventually all of my Pokémon fell and I failed. It’s pretty overpowered being able to use this move while virtually talking away all negative consequence from using it.

Second time through I did manage to get my vengeance on Lance. I gave Nidoqueen the move ‘Dragon Pulse’ and the hold item dragon fang (even so it didn’t do more than half damage to them, and as his Pokémon are incredibly fast it meant I had to use a fair few Full Restores before getting through.) It felt so good to finally take down that Dragonite. I really hate Lance!

I really think it’s stupid when they try to make a game hard by having it weighted against the player. (In Pokémon, for example, each move has its own stats, so stick to it from both sides.) Games with difficulty settings tend to only ever improve enemy damage or armour, and allow them to see more of what the player is doing. I always thought a game should be made harder by increasing the number of enemies and making them more intelligent. (For example, in Pokémon, Sneeze is a really hard player to beat; all our Pokémon are the same level and it’s fair, but he’s good because he uses strong Pokémon, picks his moves carefully and uses them in a tactful way.) I know it’s very hard to program A.I. to be quite as good as another human player, but surely instead of relying on cheats, it could have had more tactics programmed into it. On so many occasions I also see an opponent doing the exact opposite, doing something really stupid, like trying to make mine confused again when it’s already stood there repeatedly punching itself in the face – I just don’t get it. Cheating A.I. makes you feel like all your skills or efforts in training mean nothing. At the very least, if a game is going to do that, the designer could hide it a little better so that I don’t start to sense that something is up.



*Lucario was not hurt during the writing of this article*(Well, mostly)