The Ethics Of Mods In Competitive Play

Following a recent discussion on the Uber Entertainment forums around whether the use of mods in competitive play was fair or not, we invited two Uber league players on opposing sides of the argument to share their thoughts.

In the article The Ethics Of Mods In Competitive Play, Elodea and Cola_Colin argue over what fair really means.

Good article. I'm on the cola side

However elodeas suggestion of a mod announcer seems like something that uber should build in?

As usual, I side with what will encourage new players to participate. Getting wrecked because you didn't have a minimal mod installed is a fantastic way to discourage involvement in ranked. Not that they need any more of that. After all, we still have staticky, repetitive maps and few regular players.

On top of the unfair mods lol.

The arguement presented by colin basically shows the problem i am trying to get across - UI modding changes the rules. One players action point is no longer necessarily the same as another players action point. Which is basically as unhelpful for the competitive scene as saying the rules of chess allow one player who finds some unofficial loophole by way of ommission to perform two moves per turn for every one of the other player. And that this is not only technically legit, but ethically legit.

It also has running contradictions and can't seem to definitively decide whether the UI is part of the competitive game or not. On one hand, to argue that UI modding should be allowed, the UI isn't part of the game and not a variable that the player should be evaluated on. But on the other hand when it comes to the problem of fairness, suddenly UI modding is part of the game and well... tough luck for new players because they should be judged and evaluated based on their ability to research and mod the ui to the best ability they can.

Talking about the sc2 ui as being arbitrarily limited was also not helpful to the discussion I feel. All it did was paint a false dichotomy that puts you either in the camp for the PA paradigm, or the 'apm spam' paradigm, which is neither true nor relevant. All i'm looking for is a high degree of fairness between players, regardless of what the underlying UI design paradigm may be.

Anyway, i've said what i wanted to say. What happens into the future isn't really mine to control, though i've been starting to feel more and more weary of spending time on PA when the fundamental basis for competitive evaluation seems inherently unfair. Uber map for one is just way too powerful and often game winning when it comes to spotting air fabbers and metal with scouts on the other side of the planet on a timely basis. I've come up against example after example of this and many others in my own games.

*Anyway, nice work quitch with the pretty pictures and thanks for allowing me to express what i think in long form.

I just want to highlight this paragraph (not sure who it's attributed to, sorry colin / Elodea / whomever):

Bolded for emphasis. This is horrendous logic.

The article has already stated that there are mods that count as "i win" buttons are inherently unfair. Why? They're just tools that help someone play the game.

I realise it is very hard to accept that because you use mods it isn't just your skill that is enabling you to beat your opponents, but that is something mod users need to understand. You are granting yourself an advantage. Pure and simple. Granting yourself an advantage your opponent does not possess is the dictionary definition of an unfair playing field.

Accept that, and perhaps you might be able to have a better discussion on the subject. It is perfectly fair to want UI mods to ease the user experience and remove tedium. But it is still an advantage.

Honestly, the best solution would be to mirror mods for players in the same game, at a competitive level. There would be conflict-based issues that would need resolving with this approach, but on a fundamental level this would go some way to evening the playing field, which is very skewed against new players at the moment.

I don't have much time today, so this will be a short post.

Nice article, but there is a point that was left out - and I would guess it also didn't get mentioned in the monster of a thread either. And it is UX (<- that's just the funky way to write those lame words "user experience").

If we really accept the premise that UI mods will be a part of the competitive gameplay, it will put pressure on people to install mods in order to be competitive, because we defined it to be part of that gameplay.
The risk I see here is that people will feel to be pressured to use mods regardless its state of UX just because they think it will give them an advantage. And we all know, that the possibility that a new mod that would give you a edge over the competition and is really polished, tends toward zero.

Yes, UberMap has evolved really good, but it still isn't at a point where I would call it compliant to Uber's visual style.
And there are other small details, which are subtle most of the time but have a negative impact as well, just for the simple reason mods are made for a specific use case for usually one person, which means you do get things working for you rather than stick to details like internationalization, localisation or other issues that are outside of personal reach.
An example is the keyboard layout in Hotbuild2, which (AFAIK) only displays a US layout. That is fine for its purpose, but it looks not finished for people with polish or french keyboards.

(To be clear, this isn't meant as critic on the mods mentioned above - they are fine for their purpose -, these are just examples to illustrate a point. I know myself and I'm really helpless when it comes to UX. If I would do a mod for auto-raiding it would be controlled by some funky looking boxes, which must be pressed in a certain combination unless you want your computer to spawn dragons near you. It would do the job for me, but it would look awful as hell for everybody else.)

To end this with an exaggerated polemical question:
Do we really want to risk that PA gets remembered as that "hacky thing that was sticked together by tape with some wonky mods to make it playable fairly"?

Oh, and BTW:
@cola_colin : I told you so.

I looked at it that time and it's not so easy, first you can't detect keyboard in javascript. The only way to get this polished is to let users select their layout but there are waaaay too many keyboard layouts so not worth the effort for my laziness.

But being better is all about an uneven playing field. When I learn a cookie cutter build order I do the exact same thing. It's a MASSIVE advantage to know it. It's far more powerful than any mod in fact.
If the playing field is even then you'll draw every game. What makes you better is always knowledge. Knowledge about build orders or knowledge about mods. It's the same thing really.

I don't think anybody would want that. I do not want to play with all the mods my opponent has. It's about customization after all. I might find a mod really helpful, you might find another mod very helpful. The idea of the mod announcer is a nice one though: Knowing what UI mods my opponent has is nice.

Yes it certainly is all about rules. Chess rules say: You may only make one move. PA's rules however say: You may mod the UI. And that is probably the rule you want to reject, which is what the whole discussion is about. Constantly claiming this would hurt competitive play to me looks like you're assuming competitive players are rather unintelligent and won't find info about mods. Seriously that is something I can't follow at all. If you want to be good you'll read up on so many things anyway.

There's not a contradiction there. UI limitations are not part of the game. What is part of the game is putting some knowledge into how to have a better user interface.
UI limits are not a part of the game, so it is a part of the game to know how to best use UI mods that make the UI as limitless as possible.

But what fairness means is solely a question of what you demand of a player and what you think the game should be about. You're definition of fairness is heavily tinted into Starcraft really.

Even with mods every player has the exact same chance to play the game the best way possible. PAMM is public. Anybody can access it in a totally fair way. We're not talking about some magic secret mods, as you tried to imply in your article. Not knowing about pamm means you're missing knowledge. Missing knowledge is a good and fair reason to lose over.

the knowledge for this game is how to navigate the planets and how to use each structure and units and how/when to build them ... THIS is what each player should and can learn
as those are constanly part of the game


mods aren't

by learning to play the game with what it has hardimplemented there is more a chance for an even game
than a game were one person uses mods and the other doesn't or doesn't know about them ...

Being better is an uneven playing field, yes.

That is not a reason to make it more uneven.

Additionally, assuming two players of similar competence, you do not want the deciding factor to be what mods one of you has installed. That isn't the right way to develop a competitive sport that people will watch. Nobody wants to watch something that's been pre-decided (to any extent) by leverage r.e. installed mods.

If you don't want to play with the mods your opponent has, why do you assume your opponent wants you to play with the mods you have installed?

I have an absolutely absurd amount of time for your insight about PA, but I don't understand how you can't see this. Have you considered that you're biased by your usage of mods? Have you taken some time play vanilla (i.e. unmodded) against players of your (high) level using the mods they feel enhance their experience? If so, have you gotten frustrated at not being able to do things with the ease that they can?

Because if so, that's the unfairness that compromises the point of competitive play.

Here we go again. A lot of whining, almost hysterical nonsense about a possible situation where someone might be harmed by the use of some hypothetical super mod that doesn't exist and therefore it should be banned.

Stop trying to turn this into bloody starcraft please. There are lots of games that cater to that audience already. PA isn't the next great esport (not like starcraft or lol), it's a smaller (and friendlier imo) environment and the current rules haven't actually proven to be a problem.

so let's not try at all to have a semiserious competitive playerbase at all .. lets always have tourneys with players that steamroll each other because that is fun to watch ... because the game lacks attracting any competitive player ... ( "you have to use mods to be a good competitive player" - way to kill any motivation to ever play ranked or competitive )
may as well let the multiplayer part of the game completely die off because non will take it even a bit serious ...

why are we doing anything at all ...

/whining/rant

The article crystallized something for me: people want to play different games, but PA is only one game (with a few variants - ladder, community tournaments, and custom)

In game design there is the concept of the magic circle - a special space that exists only by the mutual consent of the players, who adopt certain restrictions on their actions (a certain number of moves, a certain number of spaces, buy only what you can afford, etc) because they believe that doing so will create an enjoyable experience. Games have been played with boom-bots only or fabbers only because the players thought it would be fun. People are arguing because they have different ideas about what kind of circle PA should be.

Some people want a magic circle where RTS experience, strategy, and tactics are the primary determents of success, and someone like Elodea can use his years of gaming experience and many hours spent training PA to achieve improved results.

Some people want a magic circle where more of their skills and experience - primarily coding ability, in the current context - can be determents of success, and someone like Cola can use his years of coding experience and many hours spent building mods to achieve improved results.

Who's years of experience and many hours of effort should be more important? What kind of circle are we in?

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Personally, I want to engage in the core gameplay with as little friction as possible. I want to be thinking and acting in the space of map positioning, force composition and resource allocation. A lot of the rest is just in the way, and mods are how I reduce the distance between me and the core experience of the game, in order to make it a more enjoyable experience. I want to have that maximally enjoyable experience in every mode of play. Unless, perhaps, we're in a magic circle for a bit, because we think it will more fun that way.

Of note, other games have a "competitive" or "tournament" mode where most, if not all, mods are disabled for the point of fair and balanced play.

In normal mode(s), mods are allowed and encouraged. This preserves both the ethos and the effort of the modding scene (which I completely support) as well as allowing for enjoyable high-level "serious mode" tournaments.

You can even run tournaments outside of "tournament" mode, but the option would exist for those who wish for balanced games.

Nobody said anything about banning anything, mate

The point of the article was to demonstrate the positives and negatives of allowing mods at high levels of play; their impact on game balance, player enjoyment and thus by extension viewer retention.

Why do you think athletes aren't allowed performance enhancers?

Like @elodea's and @cola_colin 's posts because they are both well constructed arguments and it's a good discussion to have.

Liked @wondible's because he mentioned Boom Bots <3

I'm still on the side of mods are good, but would fully understand if some rules were used in tournaments, e.g. "don't use mods that affect units directly (like... click for you), like the free energy mod".

I can't speak for colin, but this is not what I want at all. Nor is it the core of what i'm arguing for.

The issue here for me is not game design but the effect of prolific mod use on the health of the competitive scene. Whatever that magic circle is as you put it, there needs to be fairness and mutual consent among other things.

If both players know they are using certain mods and consent to competing against each other using them, then I have no problem with that.

what i am most concerned about mods in the competitive scene is not that they are usefull but the potential wrong picture they give off to people we would like to get into the game ..
people should not think "oh these players can't play/win without mods ... bunch of losers"
or " well crap ... have to use mods in order to be any good"

The issue certainly is all about game design. Wondible is completely right about that: You're describing a different type of game than I am. It certainly can be considered completely fair that everyone has access to all UI mods that might prove helpful. Or you can say that players should be in a fair environment even if they never open a webbrowser and just play the game. Both are valid arguments. I honestly don't believe either view is right or wrong, they are different demands based on subjective feelings.

I don't want coding ability to determine anything. Nobody has to make mods, just getting to understand there are mods and install them if the player thinks they are helpful is all really.
I also think if I had never started making mods I would be a much much better player.

I do not, which is why I think it is a bad idea to force exactly equal mods. Mods are a lot about customization, everyone has different tastes.

Yes you can consider me biased. As I said above: This is all not an objective discussion. It depends on what you -subjective- want from the game. There is no unbiased view in a subjective discussion really.

In playing the Titans beta version I had a bunch of games with no mods at all, as the first version we had had bugged mod loading. The only mod I was really absolutely missing was hotbuild2. I can't play without that mod, mainly because of year long practice for that specific set of hotkeys. Taking it away is nearly like taking away the keyboard. Apart from that I am pretty bad at using ubermap and I am still not certain if free energy is an advantage or if it screws me over because it makes the economy harder to read.

Thing is, even if I were to get highly frustrated (let's say I am not even allowed to use hotbuild2, then I am frustrated because I would need to learn a new set of hotkeys that is less efficient on top of that). I would ask: "What mods do you use?" Install them and have an even playing field in that regard at least. Unfair? No. Easy to fix.

Something being fixable, in your opinion as a mod-user, does not mean that it isn't unfair.

And yah, I get that this is subjective discussion. However some things are objective, i.e:

If you have an advantage someone else doesn't, that has an objective, demonstrative effect on the matchup.
If someone is at a disadvantage that you are not, that has an objective, demonstrative effect on the matchup.

Competitive games are by nature expected to come down to player skill.

If you count 'equipment' such as modifications as a relation to that, then by your logic there is nothing that stops a player from employing a theoretical "i win" button. None whatsoever. They're simply equipping the gear that allows them to enjoy the game in the manner that they want to.

The difference is that it wouldn't be fun for you. And that's the problem here. You are taking your own satisfaction and presuming that just because mods exist everyone else can automatically exist at your level. Mods imbalance competitive play. This is objective and not in any way subjective.

The subjective is to what extent mods imbalance competitive play. And how much you can tolerate that. And how much the players watching you trying to create a new e-sports game, can tolerate that.

If people think you have a constant advantage due to a particular set of mods being installed, they're going to lose interest. The odds are stacked in your favour. The game is more imbalanced than it otherwise would be.

And that's no fun for anyone, perhaps other than yourself.

That's an objective statement, but it's wrong. An "I win" button removes the actual gameplay. It's vastly different from a mod that allows you to better interface with the game. The game is about building a base, an army and outhinking your opponent in doing these things. An "I win" button removes that.

They do not as long as both player can use the mods in question.