I'm pretty sure it's you. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, October 15, 2015, 18:17 (3422 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

If I'm a baseball player, and I notice the outfield wall has a whole in it, am I cheating if I manage to hit a ball straight through the hole for an automatic ground-rule double? No. I'm exploiting a flaw, but that is not actually the same as cheating. Modifying my bat with illegal materials? THAT is cheating.

If I'm a basketball player and I notice the rim of the net is slanted to one side, making it easier to dunk from the left, am I "cheating" for dunking from the left? No.

If bungie ships a subclass that has infinite super abilities simply by hitting the menu button, then the player is not "cheating" for exploiting that. Not playing the game "as intended" does not automatically mean cheating. That's where my rocket-jump example came in. Rocket jumps were not originally designed in to Quake. It lead to players reaching ledges in ways the designers didn't expect. But those players weren't "cheating". They were working with the tools that the game presented them.

There is a distinct difference between using outside hardware (or other methods) to screw with the game, vs exploiting a design flaw. Should the flaw be fixed? Absolutely. Should the players be punished? Absolutely not.

Your examples are bad because the playspace geometry is an equal "cheat" for all players and does not actually present an unfair advantage to anyone involved. Take the basketball "cheat" for example. To make that relate to this shadow shot cheat, it would be to figure out that, after slam dunking, you could just pick up the ball and slam dunk it again, over and over and over, forever, as long as you waved to the bench after every two slams. It would also be only asian players who could do this, for some reason. Then it's similar to the shadow shot cheat. They're taking a game mechanic with very clear intended rules and doing something, on purpose, to play outside of those rules. That's cheating.

Read the earlier post that contains the definition of cheating again. The intention to circumvent the rules in order to gain an advantage is very clear with infinite shadow shot. To be clear: I do not think being a sunbreaker is cheating even though I do think being a sunbreaker is a distinct advantage, because the sunbreaker was designed to be game breakingly overpowered. I DO think - nay, I know - that infinite shadow shot is cheating, for the many reasons I have enumerated. You're supposed to only get 3 shots, you trick the game into giving you more, that's cheating.