When do you cheat and why?

[Deleted User]

As a general rule we don't like people who cheat in online games. It gives them an unfair advantage. But cheats aren't some forbidden fruit bestowed to us by the devil to corrupt us. It's a matter of how you use them.

If anyone were to cheat online in Mario Kart or Splatoon I and most other people would be happy to see them banned. But even in this situation, a legit player who manages to win against a cheater through vastly superior skill wins satisfaction and bragging rights.

Pokemon is more subjective when it comes to cheating. On one hand it can take hours to get a Pokemon with the desired egg moves and optimal IVs and EVs. Some Pokemon with a limited distribution are now unobtainable without cheating. On the other hand legit players might feel upset if someone picks up the game and uses cheats to get optimal Pokemon in a much shorter timeframe along with Pokemon which are no longer available. My personal opinion here is that as long as you don't play online with illegal Pokemon eg. Huge Power/Speed Boost Slacking/Garchomp it's ok. Don't go trading semi-legal Pokemon either.

If you're playing offline then you can use cheats for a bit of fun. You can get laughably strong characters to destroy everything in your path. Balanced Brawl uses cheat codes to go in the opposite direction and give the roster some desperately needed balance. You can explore out of bounds areas and beta material that never made it into the final game. If your friends are coming over you can instantly unlock all the multiplayer content.

The game which prompted me to make this post is The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC. I played it's prequel many years ago and loved it but the game ended on a massive cliffhanger. These days I think the battles are a fucking waste of time so I'm using a hacked save with Godly characters just to experience the story.

 

[Deleted User]

I think the best way to cheat is just to play through a game normally and then mess around with cheats after you finish it, though a lot of games don't even include cheats these days which is a shame.

 

[Ricken]

I cheat when it directly serves as a timesaver. Like in Bravely Default with the village rebuilding or restoring SP, or in Pokemon where I would really rather not spend 6 hours looking for bottle caps or, in the case of D/P/Pt, catching Feebas.

 

[DodgyJudge]

Aim bot/wall hack/ speed hack/ESP/teleport hack are all made be a loser for losers ...i still cant understand why people prefer to hack online on competitive game and prefer as a last resort some hack than trying to be better.
There is a difference between a user that hack for the fun of his completed game than a loser that cant play legit, but online that where it break the point of being legit...getting killed be a hacker is not very cool when it is a competitive games.
There is nothing worst than a loser hacking to be "better" and not even trying really to do any effort with all other legit people trying and finally getting melted be those bastards...no wonder why so many player quit trying be better.
Then there the hacker that wait for a free hack to not pay any games and sell his service online on to poor people that dont know it is free....
Of cource you can hack to help you like some simple looting script but to be honest those lead to bad script like aimbots or worst. THOSE WHO HACK ONLINE TO BE BETTER ARE ASSHOLE! FUCK ALL OF THEM!!

 

[Deleted User]

I cheat when it directly serves as a timesaver. Like in Bravely Default with the village rebuilding or restoring SP, or in Pokemon where I would really rather not spend 6 hours looking for bottle caps or, in the case of D/P/Pt, catching Feebas.

In Pokemon Sapphire there were only two Pokemon missing from my Pokedex: Feebas and Milotic. Catching Feebas was fucking ridiculous.

 

[Ricken]

In Pokemon Sapphire there were only two Pokemon missing from my Pokedex: Feebas and Milotic. Catching the two of them was fucking ridiculous.

It is incredibly irksome.
As a side note I'll also cheat on request, like if a friend of mine wants a pokemon duped or something

 

[LanHikariDS]

Personally, I try to even stay away from in-game cheat codes, unless they're the only way of unlocking something (i.e. the Naboo Starfighter and Buick in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron). Unfortunately, not everything is specified of how to unlock outside of a cheat/if said cheat is the only way to unlock a given thing...

 

[Pedeadstrian]

I cheat when it directly serves as a timesaver. Like in Bravely Default with the village rebuilding or restoring SP, or in Pokemon where I would really rather not spend 6 hours looking for bottle caps or, in the case of D/P/Pt, catching Feebas.

You can pretty much rationalize any cheating in-game as a "timesaver." It became quite a slippery slope for me before I had to quit cold turkey. Not wanting to spend many hours gathering collectibles can lead to not wanting to grind gold, rare items, exp, etc. I mean, isn't instantly making yourself max level the ultimate timesaver?

Nowadays I only cheat to bypass bugs/glitches. A recent example: I was playing Borderlands 2 and I killed the last enemy of a level that dropped a quest item, but the quest item fell in a location I couldn't reach. I was playing on the hardest difficulty, and it took me quite a while to get there, so I was frustrated. I used cheat engine to give myself fly, ghost, and god mode to quickly (and safely) reach the end of the level to retrieve the item. I have no qualms cheating if it "rewards" me with something I should have already rightfully earned.

 

[Jayro]

I cheat in Splatoon 2 to give myself bottomless chunks. Because fuck endless hours of grinding for chunks.

 

[Deleted User]

I'm fine with cheating as long as it's contained to singleplayer or local multiplayer. If you cheat in public online multiplayer, though, then you deserve to be banned.

Besides, the line between cheats and mods can get quite messy at times. Many improvement mods exist for games, which can range from UI and control changes to altering several aspects of the game to make it easier or harder. This can be construed as cheating by some people, even if it's just getting rid of fake difficulty. From there, you get into the whole debate between playing the game the way the developers intended versus playing the game your own way and which is objectively better and whatnot.

 

[The Catboy]

I only cheat after I've beaten the game and for 2 reasons
1: When unlockables are just stupid and I don't care to replay the entire game again to get them.
2: Fuck about and see what I can do
Basically once the game is beaten, I find it fair game to see what kind of mess I can make of it.

 

[Deleted User]

You can pretty much rationalize any cheating in-game as a "timesaver." It became quite a slippery slope for me before I had to quit cold turkey. Not wanting to spend many hours gathering collectibles can lead to not wanting to grind gold, rare items, exp, etc. I mean, isn't instantly making yourself max level the ultimate timesaver?

Now that you mention it I don't think there isn't always a clear cut line between saving time spent grinding and artificially making the game easier.

If you use cheats to give yourself endgame equipment long before it should be available and destroy the fuck out of everything then you're ruining the game by making it too easy.

I remember on Pokemon gen 1 & 2 I'd duplicate items because it's not worth replaying a game to grab an extra TM. Even Gamefreak realised the error of their ways and now TMs have unlimited uses.

Hyrule Warriors is a 300+ hour grind; its very difficult to draw the line between saving time and cheating.

 

[FAST6191]

Cheats are a useful thing to play with as a ROM hacker as they can be fairly potent and allow you to tweak things in games that are annoying to do otherwise. That is more cheats as a tool than as a thing understood by most game playing types so I will spare that for now.

Anyway "the way the dev wanted me to play the game"/"the vision of the dev" means only slightly more to me than what said dev had for lunch on a random Tuesday during the game's creation. In practice this amounts to I might listen to what their vision was where there is almost no scenario in which I care about their lunch that day. This is to say if I find a mechanic boring then I will nerf it, if I find a section boring I will make some cheats such that I can skip it with minimal effort and get back to the good stuff, if a game has devolved into making me repeat boring tests I have already proven I can overcome I will make something to lessen them, if I find my own amusement within a game by trying to do something completely unintended then I will often make cheats to allow that to happen easier, though in practice it is more commonly a savestate, if I feel like being silly and ramping up a mechanic to ridiculous levels.
I have occasionally met people that dislike that people would mess with said vision (for some reason the remove the touch screen mechanics from various games threads brought them out of the woodwork). It is however a notion I find to be completely and utterly alien.

 

[Taleweaver]

Does abusing savestates / the rewind function in emulators count as cheating?

I don't play online games anymore. And never liked the tendency of developers to basically send their customers on grinding missions.

 

[Pedeadstrian]

Does abusing savestates / the rewind function in emulators count as cheating?

I don't play online games anymore. And never liked the tendency of developers to basically send their customers on grinding missions.

Some people would say no, but it's hard to distinguish, and it ultimately depends on what you're savescumming for. If you make a save state immediately before a boss to save a few minutes of walking from the save point, I think that's fine. If dying sends you basically to the same point, i.e. you're not playing hardcore/ironman mode, I don't see the problem. But, if you're saving before every RNG-based event (like I did before picking pockets in Skyrim) you're guaranteeing yourself the best outcomes each time, and it definitely ruins some of the challenge/point of the game, at least in my opinion.

 

[FAST6191]

Some might also go further and argue that the timing, the walk and the cooldown are part of tension building/story telling (think would you cut a film to show all action and replace any slower story bits with text cards) and can promote a different style of gameplay (maybe not the random numbers of a given game a la the example above, though random might well be bad, but leading me to greater or lower risks in gameplay -- few are ever more considerate than when it is their resources on the line).

With all this said I refer back to my earlier point about making a thing to play rather than having an experience thrust upon you.

 

[DinohScene]

Cheating in videogames...
Just no.

 

[Rabbid4240]

Usually I cheat when I get extremely frustrated with a game. I then imagine a set limit of tries I have, when the limit is done, i cheat. (10 more tries, then I'll resort to cheating)

 

[nWo]

I like using cheats or infinite items once I have finished the game at least once. I fucking hate cheaters online, or just beating a game with no effort nor appreciating the trip. Just what`s the point, just watch a gameplay footage or something. I`m old school, so I played rough games back then. Today all the new generations look like they are a bunch of wussies.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Depends on the game. If I've played it before, and I want to skip certain sections that are annoying or tedious, I'll turn on cheats of some kind. Pokemon games are a great example here, if I ever replay a game at this point I'll just give myself my team (unless it's something I can easily grab, or a legendary or something), I almost always play with 2-3x EXP so I don't have to spend hours grinding, and I usually turn on 2x movement speed so I can get around quicker.

I almost never cheat in games I haven't played though, kinda ruins the whole thing really.

 

[nWo]

I remember the first time online I saw somebody cheating was on Metroid Primer Hunters on DS.

 

[FAST6191]

Cheating in videogames...
Just no.

You should try it more.
You might grow to like it.
It can open up some strange and exciting things you had not thought about before.
Don't be bound by what the man says is the right way to do things.

 

[DinohScene]

You should try it more.
You might grow to like it.
It can open up some strange and exciting things you had not thought about before.
Don't be bound by what the man says is the right way to do things.

Nah, debug menus to test things.
Cheat for progression or w/e, just nope.