Listen to Erathoniel ranting on and on in good ol' conservative Christian fashion.
Published on May 12, 2008 By erathoniel In Misc

    Just How Bad Is Cheating In Video Games?

    Now, I'm a "pro" gamer. In so much as I'm probably in the better 25%. I spend too much time at it, sure, but I am fairly decent. Sure I'm just below the Great Wall of Ownage, meaning that there are players who will destroy me repeatedly (most Tribes players and some Tremulous players fall into the upper category). However, I do pretty well, especially in MMO's. However, occasionally one will find the Dretch who lags so badly that it is impossible to land a bullet in his three-mile radius, or something else, or someone reporting a ping of 500+ moving perfectly normal in a game where 200 ping people lag. This is the sign of a cheater. I'm not talking about cheating in single player games, I'm talking about competitive cheating. And it's bad.

    People are incredibly inconsiderate. Even in cooperative or non-competitive games they insist on cheating to no short extent. I don't care which nation you're from, you will find somebody in an open-source community that has a server close enough to you to be lag free. 56k should do fine in Q3 engine games. Cheating is both obvious and wrong.

    On My Vision For Mechromancy

    My goal with Mechromancy is to create a huge, free content, original, exciting Shadowrun-Battletech-Elder Scrolls-Anime hybrid world using a wiki system, with a tabletop role-playing engine to allow players to play through that content as easily as possible and enjoy the many small aspects of the universe. There are many things in Mechromancy that are uncommon, but I feel that through the combination of all things, it results in an exciting play experience, and through the wiki system, the engine and core mechanics (USE) will be streamlined into a simple, easy, but complex system that beginners and experts alike can enjoy. All are welcome to bring their original content to the Mechromancy universe to create a complex web of myth and science. However, Mechromancy aims for a pseudo-diamond hard science fiction status. No "unobtanium", only "a wizard did it".


    Please Control Your Children

    Hey, this could be more tacky. I considered posting it yesterday. Yesterday, I was helping with kids at my church. Now, I know it's free babysitting for the duration of the church service, but it is also meant as an opportunity for learning. Do not give your children stimulants before sending them off to a place where they outnumber helpers 5:1, if they have more energy than the poor exhausted helpers (2 out of 3 of which should've had a holiday yesterday, except me), who will always be that way, due to your poor dietary choices.

    Quite frankly, I don't care if they prefer cold cereal to oatmeal. It keeps them from getting fat later on if you give 'em oatmeal. Plus, it saves us poor helpers twenty or fifteen ultra-hyper bundles of joy leaping around. We have to keep them from being hurt, while teaching them, and we're volunteers. We aren't paid, our job training is a one-hour meeting and experience (I have a few years of it, putting me in the middle experience level, and yesterday was really bad). When you have free babysitting, don't make the babysitters wear themselves out. Just because you can does not mean that you should. Especially considering that it's a free service in an attempt to get the little adorable bundles of joy and energy to learn something.


Comments
on May 13, 2008

I don't care which nation you're from, you will find somebody in an open-source community that has a server close enough to you to be lag free. 56k should do fine in Q3 engine games. Cheating is both obvious and wrong.

Not necessarily. In Eve-online there are quite often large fleet battles in which lag can make or break the fight depending on whose side gets hit worst. The problem lies mostly with the game mechanics and the servers of the game provider, not the connections of the players. There are some tactics in Eve which significantly enhance lag (like sending thousands upon thousands of players to swarm a particular area in worthless junk ships, thus "crashing" the node) but quite often the problem is out of the hands of the players entirely

on May 13, 2008

Yes, but in an open source community, servers can be chosen based on ping and geolocation, not what ones are available.

Plus, 56k is not good for MMORPG's, except maybe if they have an ultra-efficient engine that sends little data back and forth. A small-scale (relatively) FPS like Tremulous would have no problem on a 56k assuming the areas of the players were close enough.