Deleted useless posts. Any more of this and this thread WILL get locked, you have my word on this.
My view on discussing cheaters is this. As I have said before, it is okay to discuss cheats in general. It is not, however, okay to accuse a certain user of cheating,
no matter how obvious and blatant it is. We may be the mainstream CTB players, but we are not Gods. We can never know for 100% if a user is cheating (yes, and I mean never.)
In this game, there are certain procedures that must be taken for a user to be banned for foul play. For now, peppy is the one who takes care of that. While we cannot be 100% sure that a user is cheating, on occasions, peppy
can be 100% sure that a user is cheating. I've discussed this before, but will bring it up again: he has a set of anti-cheating measures, some automatic and some not, that establishes without doubt the falsity of a user's records before the user is banned. It is possible that users are developing ways to cheat and bypass these measures at the same time, but it is also plausible that the same users aren't cheating after all.
Truth is, any player with common sense can pick out the obvious cheaters. Besides cheaters who 4mod SS's on Insanes and obtain impossibly large scores (cases which do not require common sense for one to understand that the users are cheating), there are users who get multiple Flashlight records in suspiciously short intervals of time and suddenly set records that are way out of their leagues.
But in this kind of games, common sense is not enough for banning. Banning an account is not a light action. The consequences of a mistaken ban is huge, and as a game dev/admin, you must take every possible measure to ensure that the user deserves a ban before actually placing a ban. People must be aware of this fact before wondering why certain users have not been banned yet.
As for the really obvious cheaters, I am not going to defend peppy for his lack of response on these users. I saw VelperK's post in the Help and Support forum, and although he should have been more careful before posting (one of the rules in that sub-forum is that you should not report cheaters in that forum, which is clearly stated in one of the stickied posts), I am quite disappointed by the admins' response to this situation. As a CTB player, I will be contacting peppy personally to address the situation, and I think anyone who considers himself a member of the global CTB community should find other means to solve the situation, like contacting the admins directly or using the report button more often (the report button works better if more people use it, as more reports mean higher priority of attention from peppy). Understand that there are much, much more standard mode users in this game than there are CTB users, and there are people who cheat in standard too. These people also get reported, so it is natural that CTB cheaters will get less reports, and therefore less attention, than people who cheat in standard mode.
Meanwhile, stop accusing a player directly of cheating and telling him to prove his legitimacy. A player has every right to refuse such demands, unless the demand was from one of the admins of the game; that is how a gaming community works. Accept it.
personal view on cheatersAs for the obvious cheaters, I do not care in the slightest. Getting my #1 taken by an obvious cheater does not bother me, since nobody will see the record and think the user is better than I am. Getting an #1 could be largely due to self-satisfaction, but it is also for bragging rights -to prove that i am skilled enough to be better than anybody else in the world on this particular map. Cheating blatantly to take #1 beats this purpose, and I am not disturbed by them.
However, subtle cheats that are hard to detect at first sight (Flashlights cheats on maps that may be FLable after a large amount of retries, HardRock cheats) do bother me. Since these kind of cheats are not detectable at first sight, a fair amount of people may think that I have been beaten by this cheater. This greatly disturbs me. I have a lot of pride in my gaming skills, and I don't like it when a user uses unfair methods to deceive people that he may be better than I am in a particular map.
As for cheating in general, I despise of the act and think all attempts of cheating should result in an outright and permanent ban.
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