Poll: use mods competitively YES or NO?

he I wonder how bad the discussion of "what does that blatantly cheat mean?" among the yes voters would be.

I was curious to hear what competitive mods were out there.

Most ui mods are fine. Uber maps and infinite build can help players but it's not going to change you from gold to Plat or Plat to uber.

There maybe a slight competitive advantage but any player can download pamm if they want. So I wouldn't call it cheating. However, if there was a mod that is not public being used by a clan or a mod-er and it was being used in competitive play I might consider that cheating depending on what this mysterous mod does, but I highly doubt that is the case.

A perfected preset auto build which is based on the map which reduces the player to selecting and moving combat units I may consider cheating.

at least that won't be my concern anymore ... all i know is now that the competitive PA community is ok with muddying the water ...

I use Second Picture in Picture and I'm basically trading framerate for for the ability to better track my team mates bases (as I mostly play 3v3s). I have yet to try Ubermap but I'm hoping it is slightly less of a burden than Second PiP, because late game I'm hovering in the 20-30s and that's on a 780 (SLI but PA doesn't use SLI)

Edit: Fixing bad quote tags

@nateious you could recuperate frametrate by turning SLI off. it's not that's it's unsupported : it's worse. it actually deters performance if you have it on last I heard. btw missquote.

don't you mean modding ?? ehehheheh -hehe

Heh yeah, didn't notice the misquote.

As for SLI yeah, I had to disable it (not entirely, but for PA in the nvidia control panel) because a while back PA started crashing a lot more often after some update and the solution was to disable SLI for PA. Good reminder though, I'm not sure if that forced disable carried over to PA: Titans. I'll have to check when I get home.

Either way, while I'd be happier 60FPS, I like the 2nd PiP enough to keep using it. Plus PA @ 2560x1600 with 2 PiP windows might just be too much for a single 780 to handle so disabling SLI might not help much for performance (though it may increase stability)

uhmmm ..yeah x'D
btw missquote still ^^

I voted yes, but don't use any mods as such when playing ranked. Personally I prefer to just suck, no excuses. And I think our community is small enough for any 'cheaters' get found out soon enough.

I'm sure you don't suck What rank are you?

Fixed, for real this time

A plat scrub.

I believe hotbuild 2 and infibuild are widely used..

platinum, Jesus if that makes you a scrub I'm pondlife. Getting out of bronze was easy, getting through silver is getting much harder now I'm near the top.

Check out elodea's cookie cutter series in the replay/vids section. Listen really well to the bit where he tells you to scout quite often.
Don't play with your food... This is ranked.
Big hint here... Don't go T2 too early.
That should do you to plat, and always remember you is doing this for fun.

I strongly dislikes how you only give black and white alternatives even though you are perfectly aware that a big part of the community argues against a couple mods, not them all. -1 from me. This is just ridiculous...

Define "blatantly cheat". To me, only disallowing "blatant cheating" means that you allow mods that merely do these things:

• Give any orders to any units which you own.
• Use and display any information that your units can see.

With this in mind what do people think about the "free energy" mod? What about a mod which keeps your units at their maximum range in battles? Or one that dodges projectiles? How about a mod which can set some constructors to automatically seek out and produce expansion?

I think given the level of play of the ai (which is written by a really good ai programmer), the majority of such tools would weaken a top level player.

Free energy is a special case as it exposes a flaw in the way eco works. Things that move your units around for you and expand though, well a human is going to do those tasks better.

Well, the vanilla game AI Sorian is working on, is designed as general player. Basically the goal is to survive as long as possible (and Quitch showed with Queller, that there is room for improvement, especially when you target a specific range of player skill with a given meta).
But this is vastly different from the concept of an "AI" that is augmenting a human player, namely mods like Free Energy, where you have a specific condition you want to optimize. And personally I have a feeling that there are a lot of little things you could optimize, just because a game like PA has a very complex interaction scheme.

The real problem I see here...
Wait, I would not call it a problem, it is rather a possible scenario. And since I do not play PA competitively I don't want to judge it.

The thing is that a user of one of those mods need to know exactly how this optimization is implemented to use this mod in any effective way. (You can see it at the comments on Free Energy: You need to know how the economics is bend by it and what this means to the display of metal and energy income) With mods that do more complex optimizations this might get even more complicated. Like the time point where the mod takes control over what kind of unit, etc
In the end we might have a situation where only the people, who are making those mods (or are deeply involved with making such optimizations) know the best way to use those mods - even if all mods are publicly shared.
Everybody else, who want to use those mods effectively in the competitive scene will, not play PA any more, but play a game which mostly revolves around trying to understand all those optimization mods and why they are behaving in a certain way which may or may not intuitive.

Yes, this scenario depends heavily on how far we can go in terms of optimizations - and how intuitive those things will be implemented in the end.
It is also highly likely that nothing like this will happening, just because no one will ever consider making a real sophisticated framework to implement those things. But I think we should keep this somewhere in our mind, just be aware of the possibilities.

Being able to form neural network controlled platoons is something that I would love to see in the vanilla game.

Ya I've watched a few vids from elodea, I use hotbuild 2 but I'm just not fast enough on the hot key's yet. Scouting with fighter's has paid of big time but still I can't seem to get out of silver.. I made it to rank 20 but then had a bad run and got knocked back to 98.