Cheating - Discussion

[thekyz]

I actually never have seen the usefulness of cobblegen since I accumulate so much by just mining / strip mining / clearing space for my builds. As FC said, it wouldn't be as satisfying to build if i knew i hadn't invested time in acquiring those resources. And at the same time I was doing something else while acquiring those so, it's not frustrating either ...

[dawnraider]

Honestly, cobble and stone gen machines are not cheating to me. It is legitimate use of an in game mechanic. Obsidian generators using Redstone are pushing it as fat as cheating goes, as they make use of a bug, but require a fair amount of resources for little gain. String-based ones are a bit worse just because they cost less, but still are only pushing it. I never use them, as they don't feel right to me, but i don't object to them.

[erikdk321]

I really dont think they are cheating either simply because theres no skill or anything involved, just takes away some of the grinding you have to do to get an enderchest beacon. I personally dont use them but thats mainly because i cant be bothered to build one.

[devak]

Honestly, cobble and stone gen machines are not cheating to me. It is legitimate use of an in game mechanic.

For me, it's not something i build on a regular basis. The "recent" changes have incentivized the production of cobble more because stripmining is harder to do, but i've had plenty of worlds where just mining was enough to mass-produce cobble.

Especially since i find that no matter HOW much stuff i have, i hate wasting it. Even throwing excess bones from my mobtrap into lava aches and makes me not want to watch it.

[Mud]

I don't see generators as cheating, nor do I see a particular reason to use them either. By the time I've reached a point in which I would require massive quantities of stone, I'd probably also have a crucible. Given this, I'd much prefer to do a bit of branch mining, gain the stone and acquire some more valuable resources in the process, without really losing anything but some time and a handful of Shafts.

[EtherealWrath]

Pigman gold- its worth the risk, but being underhanded and pushing him off a cliff so the others don't notice?
(or crushing with sand/gravel/piston?)

[dawnraider]

I'm not sure that that counts as cheating, since it requires a fair amount of effort to pull off (and a bit of self restraint), and makes sense in terms of wanting to silently smother an enemy without alerting the others. Just think: if you were faced with a bunch of powerful enemies that you wanted to kill but not fight, you would try some roundabout stuff like that. And if you need to resort to such methods, you're pretty much fucked if you mess up.

[erikdk321]

Nah, crushing pigmen isn't cheating at all, im pretty sure this was the point with few pigmen having goldswords, Flowerchild wanted us to take their loot. You also need to be aware of Ghasts

[gaga654]

A related question: under what circumstances would you consider it okay to cheat?

For example, (I may be wrong but) I think most people would agree that if, for example, your computer crashed and messed up your inventory, causing you to lose some expensive items, it would be reasonable to cheat those items back in. Another example, what if you were running through a forest at night and met with a giant lag spike (I don't know about the rest of you, but this is wont to happen to me occasionally), and by the time you regained control, a zombie had gleefully devoured your remains. On the one hand you couldn't really prevent that since it was caused by computer lag, but on the other hand, running through a forest at night is something you shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

[erikdk321]

I dont think you should cheat if you ran through a forest at night :) But losing items due to a bug and cheating them in is fine IMO

[Lenburg1]

I used to always back up my saves so that if I hit a lag spike I wouldn't loose my stuff if I died. I no longer do that because I would always justify my bad chooses and reload the backup even if there was no lag. I have learned that by backing up my saves, I have lost a lot of game play enjoyment and actually regret doing so. We play BTW because its fun; its fun for a reason.

Edit: I know that last night I actually died from a zombie during a lag spike but I actually enjoy (after the rage quite) the return to home.

[Nabetsu122]

I remember running a vanilla server with a modified backup wrapper a long while ago, and we had multiple maps, so every couple of weeks, there would be a new flavor of world gen. There was one bug that I would randomly encounter in the wrapper where the world would switch without warning, causing players to spawn wherever the were last (eg: someone up 100 blocks, another one caving) and dying. Because we had backups, we would roll everyone back to the last save, restart the server, and try to monitor it until the next reset. Of course, there would be dumba**es who would attempt to cheat their way out of a creeper blast, stating it was a glitch, but then that is where server logs come in handy.

In short: Rollbacks are good for tremendous errors and bugs, but with backups come those trying to cheat the system.

[OldMarriedDude]

A related question: under what circumstances would you consider it okay to cheat?

For example, (I may be wrong but) I think most people would agree that if, for example, your computer crashed and messed up your inventory, causing you to lose some expensive items, it would be reasonable to cheat those items back in.

This wouldnt be a cheat - replacing items lost due to an issue you didnt cause I dont see as cheating. Last night I finished a really long walk. Wife wanted pc so i dug a little hidey hole about a half a day from home. When I got back on my hidey hole had filled in and I died from suffocation and gloom. as a result I lost 2 stacks of gold ingots 10 diamonds and 3 stacks of iron. If I knew how I would have replaced those items. Being able to replace that stuff wouldnt be cheating; however, dying from being outside at night - well that is player controllable and would be cheating.

[FlowerChild]

My personal definition of "cheating" is using an out of game solution to an in-game problem. So no, I don't think correcting an out of game problem, like a crash, with an out of game solution ever really qualifies.

This conversation is getting a tad silly. What was trying to be accomplished here again? :)

[DNoved1]

The original idea was to have people point out things which might be borderline "cheating" (things like BUD switches, generators, slabs, the like), and to get people to consider apposing viewpoints on the manner.

It worked somewhat in the beginning at least, I'm curious if anyone else has any other considerations. I set this as a fairly general thread, it doesn't have to be just BTW ;) However I'd prefer if the topics were closer to uncertain grey areas.

[eternal8phoenix]

Ok then...to push this to slightly out of BTW ranges...

I used to play skyblock maps a fair bit before I got into BTW, just for the challenge. I would almost invariably get bored with the limited resources for building with and work out an "Exchange system" for non-renewable resources. For example, I think I priced 1 piece of gravel at a stack of cobblestone, and sand as a stack of gravel. So if I wanted the sand, I'd mine and burn that much cobble/gravel before allowing myself the sand. But I'd only do it for resources I couldn't get in other ways, so no hacking in saplings or iron.

Is that cheating?

[CreeperCannibal]

My yay or nay if that's cheating falls on how custom maps are seen. I'd say nay on the cheating due to how I see them as an out of game problem. The map was made by a player, not the game.

My turn with the talking stick! I have a 2D version of MC (1.8 beta equivlent) on my cell phone. The problem is that trees in the game rarely drop a sapling creating a limited wood source. My solution is using a duping glitch only for saplings. I'm thinking cheat but I would like to see what anyone else has to say.

[erikdk321]

If its a bug then i wouldnt say its cheat

[devak]

My turn with the talking stick! I have a 2D version of MC (1.8 beta equivlent) on my cell phone. The problem is that trees in the game rarely drop a sapling creating a limited wood source. My solution is using a duping glitch only for saplings. I'm thinking cheat but I would like to see what anyone else has to say.

IMO, a big part of wheter something is cheating or not, is the amount of control you have and what the endgoal is.

Sometimes, i get bored with HC spawn and i hack in a SFS beacon. Interestingly, i've found that i still play like HC spawn is on, but without the fun-killing aspect of death. I know why that feature is there, i know what it does and what i'm missing out on. But i'd rather cheat a tiny bit and play the game than never touch it again. Mostly because i have the personality flaw that if i die with HC spawn, it feels like everything i've been doing for the past hours feels like it was for nothing. It's why i quit FTL after two playthroughs (and died only at the end).

[erikdk321]

Thats difentently cheating, but if you can barely enjoy the mod without HCSpawn its probably best to turn it off.
I didn't like it in the beginning so i turned it off as well, when i had learned about btw and learned how to survive i turned it on.

[jkievlan]

You know, I originally started playing BTW specifically for HC Spawn :) I had been playing in Hardcore mode because I got tired of how ridiculously easy Minecraft was, and a friend told me that there was a mod out there that punishes death in a more reasonable way, namely by dropping you in a random location and forcing you to find/build your way back. So I downloaded and installed BTW and discovered how much more there is to this mod than just HCS. Still, HCS is one of my favorite features and for the life of me I can't figure out why you guys keep trying to turn it off :)

[erikdk321]

I would never turn it off now, but the first month i played BTW (after the hardcore changes, i hadnt played it for about a year), i had it turned off.

[FlowerChild]

You know, I originally started playing BTW specifically for HC Spawn :) I had been playing in Hardcore mode because I got tired of how ridiculously easy Minecraft was, and a friend told me that there was a mod out there that punishes death in a more reasonable way, namely by dropping you in a random location and forcing you to find/build your way back. So I downloaded and installed BTW and discovered how much more there is to this mod than just HCS. Still, HCS is one of my favorite features and for the life of me I can't figure out why you guys keep trying to turn it off :)

It's a side effect of the evolution of the mod man. BTW is a very different beast than when it started, and having a feature like HCS come in so far into its life cycle turned off a lot of the older players that were used to playing a particular way.

BTW has gone through several cycles like that. People come and go as the mod has developed based on who its feature set appeals to at any particular moment. A very few have been with it throughout its life. Heck, I had people flipping out on me when I even introduced any concept of a tech tree to tie the whole thing together a couple of years ago :)

[devak]

It's a side effect of the evolution of the mod man. BTW is a very different beast than when it started, and having a feature like HCS come in so far into its life cycle turned off a lot of the older players that were used to playing a particular way.

BTW has gone through several cycles like that. People come and go as the mod has developed based on who its feature set appeals to at any particular moment. A very few have been with it throughout its life. Heck, I had people flipping out on me when I even introduced any concept of a tech tree to tie the whole thing together a couple of years ago :)

And i don´t blame you. Not at all. I´ve played this since before it went Forge (and then not forge) and i've seen a lot of stuff come (and some of it go) and i fully understand the hows and why's.
It's just my character flaw that it feels like everything i've done before death is pointless. Hell, i'm playing The Witcher 2 right now, and if i die and reset to 10 minutes earlier i'm getting the same effect.

BTW has definitely changed the way i play games, whether it's my attitude toward cheating (i cheated the crap out of most games before), challenge, basically everything. Dishonored changed that further, so i try to be the good guy now *which is usually a LOT harder than just killing everyone*, but this is something that hasn't changed. (yet?)

[BinoAl]

Heck, I had people flipping out on me when I even introduced any concept of a tech tree to tie the whole thing together a couple of years ago :)

Heh, I had my reservations when you first introduced the mill stone/hand crank. I remember I stopped playing for a while, and I think it was shortly after the introduction of them. It worked out *far* better than just some utility blocks, though :)