IDKFA, IDDQD

DNKROZ, DNSTUFF

Cheating in multiplayer games is lame and defeats one of the main reasons people play games with each other.

There is nothing you can do to cheat in a single player game. You decide how you play single player.

If I cheat to fix a bug or bypass some weird glitch, not cheating

If I cheat for fun or to bypass part of gameloop/gameplay, that’s actually cheating and it’s fucking shameful, but as long as I play alone and don’t boast, who cares.

If you cheat and then try to boast, you’re a lying scum not worth of whatever you achieved in game. If you cheat in multiplayer, same. Any other case, whatevs. And I consider unlocking achievements via cheats boasting, that’s what they are for after all.

I would consider dev mode in rimworld to be cheating in a “technically it is” sort of way… spawning infant thralls that are then adopted by my colony, or spawning whatever activity site I choose are definitely not how the game is supposed to work. The mods are sort of also cheating I guess, tho most of them are content heavy… there are definitely several hacky mods in my list, like minify everything.

But while it’s cheating in a technical sense, it doesn’t impact anyone and it’s teaching me a lot about how video games function, which I find more entertaining than completing hard-coded objectives. It’s the first game I ever put a lot of mods on, and between troubleshooting and testing stuff, it’s been nearly as illuminating as rendering lag that adds each texture layer individually starting from low poly (my ps4 is having some major lag issues I’m trying to sort out, and horizon zero dawn is fascinating for this rendering issue, so so many layers! And then to realize it usually gets processed in real time! 🤯)

As for cheating in multiplayer, it hasn’t come up in decades. WoW was the last multiplayer game I played, and I stopped that when whatever the third expansion was came out. So like 2010 or so?

Only if it’s single player and there’s some bullshit time consuming part I don’t want to deal with or some bug fucks me over. I wouldn’t in multiplayer. I can’t even bring myself to murder people in arc raiders unless its self defense.

Depends on the game and platform really.

Been using game cheats since IDDQD and IDKFA. I’ve never used a cheat in a multiplayer competitive game, that’s like cheating at golf. No one really cares what your fucking score is, and cheating ruins any and all accomplishment and personal validation from competing. At that point, you’re just being an asshole to other people for imaginary clout, and you should really consider what is gratifying about playing in the first place.

I don’t, because I find that as soon as I do, the game feels permanently pointless. It’s like grinding to get some random chance item, and then someone gives you a magic menu enabling you to just put any items you want in your inventory whenever you want. Items mentally become zero value. And then any game mechanics built around scarcity and the intended emotional impact of that scarcity become permanently meaningless too.

It’s pulling back the curtain. You can’t unsee what’s going on back there. Any further interaction with the game just leaves me feeling “this is just a video game, the rules are pointless and with that menu I can get it to do whatever”. Even partial cheats, like infinite ammo with no reloading needed, break the illusion for me permanently and leave further gameplay even without cheats feeling unsatisfying and pointless.

For me, it’s rare that a game can survive its mechanics or overall gameplay loop being destroyed by cheats when those are what make games…games. You’re left with either a creative mode sandbox, or a movie, neither of which I care for in a video game format.

When an aspect of a game is ass (usually grinding, and I tend to be tolerant), even if I try to engage with it. Or if I’m about to drop the game anyway and cheats means seeing an ending. Last time I did was Megaman ZX, the game was already tedious and expects you to then also do a boss rush with limited ways to recover between fights, so I cheated infinite lives to get it over with.

Changing stuff on a single player video game is not cheating.

Cheating can only exist on a competition, like on multiplayer, because you are expected to fair play with another human being.

To think that playing on your own and changing the parameters of play is cheating is a limiting and constrained, and honestly sad, point of view. It’s like punishing a kid for imagining that a toy has super powers. Extremely soul crushing and anti-creativity. If you are playing on your own, then there’s no cheat. Your play, your rules, no punishment for changing your mind. The play field exist to play, not to impose arbitrary and oppressing notions of real life judgement. You can’t cheat, when you are just playing for fun.

That said, if you cheat to make the game easier and access content that you can’t access by skill. It is not cheating, it is a failure of accessibility features. There’s nothing more stupid that the sense of gamer honor.

single player games? yeah, especially if I’ve already beaten the game

other times I’m just skipping tedious grinding

definitely never in mp games

Sometimes. I tend to have quite hard lines about what feels like acceptable levels of cheating though.

To use Terraria as an example, I remember going mad searching for a lava charm, and I ended up using a map viewer to check whether my world actually had one. It didn’t so I used a save editor to give me the charm. This part was a mistake, and felt like the kind of cheating that makes the game less fun in a slippery slope kind of way. I regretted what I did.

In future games, I would sometimes check to see if a Lava charm existed on my world if I had spent a while searching for it to no avail, and if there wasn’t one, I’d try going to a different world. If there was one in my world, I’d try to not pay attention to where in my world the chest(s) with the lava charm(s) were (and in some cases, I’d get a friend to confirm whether one existed on my world, so I wouldn’t even know the rough area where the chest was. Sometimes cheats can make the game more fun and engaging, if used wisely and in moderation.

On my old Pokémon games, sometimes, but say I am doing it on Blue, then on red I will use none. Sometimes I wanna walk through walls on my gameboy games. That’s pretty much it. Unless you consider the old Halo 1 gernade jumps out of the map. Those were Hella fun

I consider cheat codes to be an accessibility tool for disabled gamers, and I think it is really sad that they are far less common than they once were, and it’s even sadder to see some devs/publishers (Ubisoft comes to mind) try to monetize cheat codes.

I never cheat online multiplayer. I like to be challenged and cheating ruins it.

I hate that modding is considered cheating by some games when all I want is quality of life improvement. Divinity 2 does this by disabling achievements if you installed any mods but thankfully there is another mod that re-enables achievements.

I cheat the fuck out of Skyrim. I add all my perk points bc I don’t feel like grinding for 200 hours to get my build.