Addon

Okay, I’m not a kitten anymore, and some good ideas just popped up too late (read: after having posted the editorial).

Regarding the ’leveling the field’- and ’cheat or no cheat’-aspect of the discussion I remembered something which caused a lot of turmoil one year ago (plus/minus, don’t bother me with accuracy).
When ASUS introduced their range of GeForce3 cards they developed drivers which enabled the user to switch to a wireframe-view during the game. In short they offered a driver-based wallhack which they even boldly advertised as an edge in online gaming (Dear ASUS PR-department: Nice idea, but terrible execution. Go to jail, don’t move over start, etc). In response to public pressure ASUS removed that feature from later versions of the driver.

Now let’s just imagine ASUS would have kept this feature (and of course would have used it on the GF4 as well) ...
In consequence one could argue that in order to level the field between ASUS-users and those of other graphic cards the use of wallhacks should be allowed. And I’m sure a lot of people would have argued exactly that way, with a quite similar reasoning than they do today with the underwater fog.

So where do we draw the line? Is the definition of cheat just bound to technical questions, completely separated from any ethical question, from any respect of what the game should be like? Does ’right’ or ’wrong’ no longer matter in regards of technical possibilities (or problems, as in case of D3D cards)?
And how can we uphold any ethical standards when we allow such issues to erode our understanding of a clean and fair game?

I understand that an issue like underwater fog create a difficult situation for leagues and how to create a compromise which keep games fair and even on matches. On the other hand do understand that I don’t care (yes, I agree that I’m in an easy position here . In my book removing underwater fog is a cheat and officially allowing people to use this cheat is a highly questionable approach towards the ethics of a game.
And what’s worse is that it’s giving way on the stand on cheats. It signals that - under certain circumstances - a cheat might be acceptable. So consequently some cheats might not be as bad as others. And maybe if that cheat is not that bad, maybe another might be okay, too.

Come on, that’s not a path we want to follow. There’s a line where cheating starts. Allow this line to be pushed backwards - perhaps repeatedly - and we’ll end up having to argue what cheats would be questionable at all.

You can join the discussion in this thread on the PF forums.