The Ethics Of Mods In Competitive Play

They are illegal because they can be harmful. It's not about fairness, it's about requiring people to potentially harm themselves in order to be competitive.

Mods are not harmful.

Yeah people are going all hyperbole on this. If we are taking it as a sport, mods are the same as a good diet and training regime. Both require knowledge or know how to obtain and give a significant advantage over somebody that eats or trains wrong.

Researching a diet, training regime and when to eat or not eat helped me a lot when it came to sports. Looking for more/ tips/ tricks and learning from the best is not illegal it's just part of the process in my eyes if you want to get good.

Mods are not tips and tricks. They are real tools used to give advantageous interactions with the game environment.

Unlike diet and training regime, mods are tools external to the player that directly change the rules affecting how those players interact with the game. It's more like one side playing football with shoes and the other team not.

It just simply isn't the same.

Sorry you are wrong. Steroids are ban purely bc they can give you a competitive advantage. Most steroids substance exist naturally in your body. There are people who argue steroid should be allowed because they occur naturally and create gray areas when banned. For example, athletes can't use growth hormones, but other natural substances like creatine which behave similarly are okay (both don't have the necessary studies to determine possible long term side effects). Health issues are not the primary reason steroids are banned in sports.

Cocaine is banned because it's deemed unhealthy.

So does diet and training, it's knowledge external to the player that you need to research or be thought to get a huge advantage. Having no football boots is a hyperbole example. It's like playing with a pair of the cheapest boots to somebody playing with expensive boots if anything.

I just saw an article about Fifa banning India because of barefoot play in soccer.
Quite funny

Some people are serious aswell, read Elodeas post and see that its not the same as practising or eating better.
Tips and tricks are make sure you make enough military, and try to not walk the commander toomuch in the first few minutes. Not install this mod that does X Y and Z for you so you got more time for other things.

What you say is just an opinion not a fact. And i disagree with it. I would say if you compare to sports mods are more like racing with an automated car or playing tennis with a bigger racket or boxing with reach increasing gloves or cycling with an electric bike or playing cards with something that counts them for you or shooting with a selfaiming gun or bow. What you are describing i would keep in the category a practising, a good night sleep and a healthy meal, not a bigger and better toolbox wich is more how i see it.

Its just that in PA it gets really difficult to do anything about it wich makes it easier to go down that road yourself aswell and abuse the gaps in the rules then to do anything else (practise to overcome the downsides of whats presented in the client for example). Its obviously nice to be as close to equal with other users of mods like minimap and autofactory and what mods have you that are designed to stretch the rules, but at the cost of the vanilla players that get to fight against people with a better client and the spectators that think they are looking at an fair and equal fight.

In my eyes it just makes you fight on unequal footing and therefor the fights are completely pointless and dull unless its just casual or practise games (its nice to fight someone who is better, mods make someone better without him requiring as much practise as normal). This all is really demotivating me bigtime, i like this game A LOT and i wanna play it more competitive but not like the ''you have to be unfair to be equal'' kinda way. If anything would be done to upgrade vanilla to modded standards and further modding (for competitive benefits) slowed down to match vanilla to ensure no imbalances excist whatsoever in the game or outside from it. And something to demotivate, slow or stop the smurfs in a big way (ladderwise its just annoying and demotivating for everyone but the smurfer himself. Nobody ever said im so happy *insert smurfer here* is in the top 10 twice, except the smurfer or maybe his/her friends or other smurfers and i play this game since alpha). Also a better mappool (like andreas G suggested in his topic) and something like a map veto system like PA STATS had . This all would make competitive play more interesting and i am expecting to see a huge boost in motivation to train again if this would happen. Now to me it seems like competitive PA doesn't care at all for any of this and it makes it a lot less good.

1 last thing. I am not against modding at all. I like mods a lot and i use them myself all the time. The thing i don't like are the mods that are designed because they give certain advantages. Advantages that are obvious to people who don't have them, but appearantly difficult to spot for people who use them all the time.

right, but these are clearly distinct from tools used to manipulate how you interact with the game. Tools that actually do some of the work for you, as opposed to the player learning some knowledge and then doing that work him or herself.

If everyone played barefoot football and the indians were the best at it because they were most trained and knowledgeable about this, then it's legit because everyone is using the same toolset to interact with the game. The difference being evaluated truly being the difference in player skills, not the difference in advantageous tools they use.

Or for example in the case of ubermap. If a player learned to have such a high level of map awareness and efficient camera control that they were able to have 100% situational awareness, then this is legit. As opposed to a player downloading a tool that does most of the work for them in order to achieve this.

I'm not meaning to put sorian on the spot. His views might have changed since, he doesn't say to what degree he feels about the issue, and it might not be his job to deal with this kind of stuff. However, i do think what he says carries enough weight to be food for thought at the very least.

From Nov-14

"I can see the argument". Well I can see the argument as well, just like I can see huge arguments that speak against it.
Also you certainly did put @Sorian on the spot now

I just think you are dumbing down the argument to suit yourself. Extremely hard to compare soccer and online gaming. But I will try.

The jerseys socks shorts and boots are like mouse keyboards and Internet etc. people wearing polyester and fancy boots that swerve the ball are the guys with mechanical keyboards and mouse with 10 buttons.

The formations and knowledge of opponent are the tactics map knowledge etc.

Having better any of the above will give you an advantage. Not major but for sure an advantage.

I know we use uber map as the bases for these mod debates. But what reason would someone have to not use this mod to those that use it?

Mods are free, easy to find out about with any kind of Google search. It's quite simply the persons fault if they are not using one if its legal and gives a huge advantage. Just pregame scouting and knowledge.

As is diet and training fitness. If you run long distances for 2 hours a week and I run sprints for 2 hours a week, I'll be much more match fit than you but we both put the same time in. Is it my fault that you didn't reaearch the best way to train?

It's more like one side wearing normal shoes and the other side replacing the laces with velcro so they can put them on quicker. The end result of a game is still going to be determined much more by the player's skills than the velcro lace mod.

I find the soccer analogy kind of strange. It is too tough to make a good point because the two topics are dissimilar. How would you feel about playing me in online chess? I can use blunder alert and all possible moves. You can use vanilla gameplay. The rules of the game are the same, a pawn is still a pawn and the objective is to capture the king. I see no difference then the mod Sorian was referring to that can move idle fabs to collect mexs (which would be really cool and I hope someone makes it) or ubermap allowing me to see the whole map and my units and enemy ghost/structures without scrolling around the world.

Based on the name, I'm assuming blunder alert tells you if you are about to make a horrible move. I assume the way it does this is look at the current setup of the board, and figure out what moves are available to you and your opponent. In essence, it's playing the same game as you are simultaneously, and trying to figure out what will happen if you make what it thinks is a bad move.

First I would point out that chess, unlike PA, was not designed to allow "mods" There is no API to let you plug in a computer to predict the outcome of moves and make recommendations.

Ignoring that, Ubermap doesn't make any recommendations for you, it doesn't play the game for you, it just gives you already available information in a different format. You still have to process that information yourself and then make gameplay decisions based on the information you have.

Soran mod is blunder alert by preventing mistakes
Ubermap is all possible moves

Online chess has many modifications to the game.

I'm actually a bit confused on what the goal of an all possible moves "mod" for chess would be. Unless you don't understand how pieces move, you can "see" all possible moves just by looking at the board. If all it did was show you where a piece could move when you clicked on it, well I'd have no issue with that.

As for moving idle fabbers to build mexes, well that doesn't exist at the moment, I don't know enough about creating PA UI mods to say that it could or couldn't but advantage wise, I'd compare it to something like Autofactory, which does exist. It takes idle factories and tells them to build units. This could possibly help, but in reality, you are better off setting a factory to build units that are useful to the situation than whatever units autofactory starts pumping out. Autofactory doesn't analyze the current game and pick the most optimal set of units.

Auto building mexes would be the same. It's possible that it could help but you might not want to spend the metal / energy on those mexes for a good reason.

Depends on the modification. Basic principle it let's you see all your moves. Advance settings let you see how many pieces can be moved on each square. Competitive chess is timed so it can really help you don't have time to sit there and review every possible outcome.

PA is timed too but in a different manner.

I would point out that against a good chess player, these modifications will have no benefit as it's information they are already aware of. These sound like training tools more than anything.

The whole skill in high level chess is looking 10, 20, 50 or even more moves ahead each turn. A player doing this already knows every move open to them, and the outcomes of these for several iterations beyond that by sight.

These mods help train new players to see the same.

I think in that respect some of the ui mods in PA fulfil the same roles.

For example, mods that stop you forgetting to build units, hardly a mistake I'd expect any uber ranked player to be making on a regular basis, so probably no advantage to them.

But that all goes back to the rules that define chess. Computerized chess is a recreation of the physical game of chess. Chess was not designed to allow any sort of mods. Almost certainly in any sort of chess competition use of something like that would be explicitly against the rules, it would be cheating.

The same is not true for PA. PA was designed to allow two types of mods. Server side and client side (UI). UI mods can only modify certain aspects of the game. There is no rule against their use, no way to detect people using them, no way to force someone to stop. Using a UI mod is not against any known rule and is not cheating.

I have no problem (and I suspect many people who are fine with mods would agree with me) with someone hosting a PA tourney and explicitly denying the use of UI mods for that tournament. If someone then used one, then they would be breaking a rule that they agreed to. This would obviously be wrong.

High level chess still applies. There have been grandmaster that have made moves that cost them a game that simple! blunder alert programs would have corrected. Same applies in PA to uber players.