What is cheating?

hey, I think the idea of an Ai assistance assigned to your things for them to mind themselves, is arbituarily a feature in context.

I mean, if one player elects not to use it but it is available, then it is like they are choosing not to shift click build their structures. You can build one at a time, but the feature helps.

turning features on and off per official competitive is one thing, that should expand to features and mods, but considering any thing others use as a mod is ridiculous for a game designed to be casual. Keep checks rules and regulation for competitives and server options.

There should be a type of id requirement that all mods for PA need in order to play online just to avoid the confusion of who has what installed

Um. Cheaters ruin everyone's game - they are a breed of person that must be watched for.

I dunno how I feel about AI assistance - I just like doing it all myself lol

If the feature is in game then it's not cheating, if it's not it is. This isn't hard.

I do agree that some form of AI assistance would be cool to have in game, but it's irrelevant in this discussion.

It's not my fault that everyone isn't using aimbots and wallhacks when I play first person shooters, I am not the one cheating, they are the ones that suck.

as long as said tool is available to everyone, it isn't cheating.

I generally believe that anything that uses what the game gives you to not be cheating.

By that I mean information that you having being more easily visible isn't cheating.
Automation isn't cheating, because everything is still happening within the scope of possible scenarios. Poorly using automation can screw you over just as easily as making a poor decision yourself.
Hacking in free eco is cheating. Hacking in full planet view without radar is cheating. Hacking in a self destruct command to the enemy commander is cheating.

If somebody were to develop an AI that outplayed people and join servers with it playing instead of themselves then I would simply consider myself to be playing against an AI, not that person. It doesn't matter who my opponent is, I will move to crush them. I don't care if they're human, AI, or AI-Assisted-Human.

I would totally do this

I'm more of the opinion that cheating is getting any information or doing any actions that the game actively prevents.

Ex:
-A mod that "turns off" fog of war
-The devs put fog of war in and actively make it so you can't see other units
-A mod that alowa you to build anywhere
-The devs actively code in build rules

The standard definition of cheating is "anything that you don't get caught doing".

Getting caught just makes you a bad cheater.

It's good that PA enforces all those things on the server, so that client-side hacks won't work. Any AI helpers etc. can only work with information that the player is allowed to see and do.

Some of my first programs were bots for AI competitions. I'd love to do it with PA which is a much more complex game than typical AI competitions.

I've played spring competitively for a while- and there are ALLOT of UI mods and so on available to all. I personally play Spring with the vanilla UI with virtually no assistance turned on as I actually find it interferes with the way I play more than it helps.

I don't view a player who has these mods turned on as cheating, if they want to download and install a mod that assists them play its fair enough- I have the same option so long as the unit set and resources we are playing with are the same it's really just a matter of preference as far as I'm concerned.

The type of things I consider cheating are quite simple and I don't think are achievable with a standard mod:
1: Gaining intel on your opponent via a spectator (e.g. an ally on a voice channel) or by signing into the game twice with a spectator account + the account your playing with (this is easy enough to spot by checking IP of players for duplicates).

2: Gaining a resource advantage against your enemy via some form of un-agreed eco boost that is concealed from other players- I think this is unlikely due to the client - server set up.

3: Any other increase in stats of units / reduction in build time and so on that the other player doesn't get and that is concealed through some form of hacking (again I would say difficult due to client / server set up).

I came from a community that welcomed you to bring your own assistance programs with you to play. Sone renegade servers legitimately used to. Also, I used a mod hack that let me see colors between primary and secondary fire, to moderate against damage hacks. Not cheating if arbitrarily agreed on. If the mod is agreeabletgen its fine. If it is agreed against or otherwise deeply shady then obviously not. Most important unit Information will be locked serverside, like blueprints andenemy unit information.

Since we are being philosophical here is what I call the UI.

It would be interesting to see if people agree. It is somewhat relevant to this discussion. As far as I am aware the only way which players can affect the game world is through commands given to units. But if there was some global ability then this ability would also be information which flows from the UI to the Game World. An example would be the powers from C&C:Generals.

The diagram is not meant to show how the game is actually implemented although in some cases it may be quite close.

Information is not just piped through the UI. It can swirl around, mingle and even go back to wherever it came from. For example when you click on a button on the UI there may be a noise to indicate that you clicked on the button. The idle factory task assigner is an example of a loop between the Game World and the UI. The UI is told that the economy is a certain way and that certain factories exist which are idle and then gives commands.

This may have been tedious but since we are being philosophical I thought I would make sure that people know what I mean by 'UI'. Most philosophical type things tend to decay into arguments about definitions. So, now that I have defined it I can say my main statement; I think UI modification is fine. There are a few reasons behind this.

The game mechanics should be strong enough to hold up against a powerful UI. Mechanics that rely on the fact that you can only directly a limited number of location are broken by a good reporting system. Similarly, mechanics which have the player perform some simple repetitive task would be made void.

In a sense the possibility of a powerful UI keeps the mechanics of the game honest. Degenerate mechanics can be dismissed by showing that there is some UI which makes them irrelevant. For example the spy mechanic from Red Alert 2 could be defeated by constantly trying to select and move every one of your units.

Designing a powerful and usable UI is very hard and is particularly hard to do before anyone has really explored the game. It takes a lot of testing and experience to determine whether a particular feature is useful enough to warrant the space it inhabits. With the community effectively developing the advanced UI many ideas can be tried in parallel and iterated on rapidly. This is what happened in the Spring community.

I think that most people will share their UI changes and there will probably even be packages of them. Again, this is what happened with Spring. Such sharing will improve the UI all-round and make long term unfairness not an issue.

In competitive play i think some mods should not be allowed. Every good rts player has to have good micro and macro. A program to remind you too build something should not be allowed. if thats the case its like the ai auto doing it for you. But i do like some of the mods. The ones i usd are the timer and commandder health. Those are all i need for competitive play.

I would say that this is a big point of contention in PC gaming, where obvious bugs can create "gameplay" which was clearly not intended.

Like the pathing is broken in this corner so when you stand there, the dragon runs around in circles rather than attacking you and you can just poke him to death. Clearly not intended and often enough a good way to get your account banned if caught doing this in an MMORPG but the people who do it always argue that they are just using what the game gave them.

Or maybe someone finds out that if you destruct a metal extractor, rebuild it to 90%, shoot it with the Ubercannon and then quickly build another one, you end up with 3 metal extractors on the same spot. Clearly a bug. Cheating or "using what the game gives you"?

Agree it should be done by yourself .

cheating

Bug exploits are cheating.
Using information the game doesn't give your client is cheating (watching opponent's twitch stream, watching live PA Stats updates, getting help from a spectator)

Everything else is fair game. If you can make an ai that reduces micro and leaves you to do just the serious thinking, great! Also, please share it with the rest of us.

I think that sort of AI aid will have to be up to the *leagues* that people play in.
Kind of how the NFL bans steroids.