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Study Finds Online Cheating Is Infectious
Freddybear writes "A study of online gamers in the Steam community finds that those who are friends with cheaters are more likely to begin cheating themselves. From the article: 'First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters. Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters, you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community. Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings.'"
This isn't about my ex-wife....
Awkward post then.
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The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters.
Whereas the likelihood of a fair player being labelled as a noob, faggot, or the son of a whore is directly correlated to both their opponent's self-perceived skills and their opponent's lack of actual skills.
There are 2 major types of cheating:
The acceptable kind, which serves to spare the user the expense of unnecessary tedium. They include using a bot to automate grinding in WoW and unfairly receiving help during tests for mandatory fluff classes that will have no effect on your future.
The unacceptable kind, which are blatant misrepresentation of true skill. Those include exploiting a bug in WoW to make you invincible and a prospective structural engineer cheating their engineering classes.
The acceptable kind, which serves to spare the user the expense of unnecessary tedium. They include using a bot to automate grinding in WoW and unfairly receiving help during tests for mandatory fluff classes that will have no effect on your future.
Why is it "acceptable" then? I atleast do not find it acceptable to use a bot to do anything like that, it still gives you an edge over those people who stay completely honest.
The incentive to cheat in moneyless games like Valve's FPSes is unfortunately quite simple and immune to your logic. It's a desire to torture and torment non-cheaters. Most people who are simply bad at the game don't download aimbots and wallhacks, because that would be admitting defeat. Putting up a "trolls OK here!" sign doesn't generally stop trolls from attempting to troll other communities.
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Actually this happens more than you might think. Anyone who spends a LOT of time on specific games
can achieve a skill level that looks like cheating to the newbie player.
The solution to that problem is easy. Go find a better group of opponents instead of beating up on newbies.
Really good players don't enjoy waxing a newbie 100 to 0 time after time. It takes a pretty juvenile mentality to do that,
and playing against the bots ends up being more fun. Many really good players will start offering
tips to newbies to help build their skills. It makes game play more fun for all.
Just asking, "wow cool, how do you do that move" on the chat will get you a lesson from an honest GOOD player
and a taunt or "just practice" from the cheater.
But all too often good players will spot actual cheating, and hacked clients which evade server detection, etc.
The better you are at any given game the more likely you will see things which you know to be impossible.
Recording movies of this (if you have the computer horsepower) will actually allow you to replay
something enough times to see rockets coming out of a guys ass and going thru walls etc.
And cheaters often come in pairs. Lurk long and quiet like you are away from the machine and you will
often catch them chatting about the cheat.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There are obvious analogies to be made with cheating in school, doping in sports, government bureaucracies where bribery is universal, ... and obvious caveats about whether those analogies are really valid (online games aren't real, so cheating doesn't hurt people in the tangible way that a bribe-taking Russian cop does).
I teach physics at a community college. It certainly makes sense that students are more likely to cheat if they see their friends getting away with it, or if they see that cheating is so rampant that they start to believe that they have to cheat or else they'll be at an unfair disadvantage. The obvious fix for that would be to take it very seriously if students cheat. Suspend them, expel them, give them an F in the course with a note on their transcript saying why. But it seems to be a nearly universal thing at schools in the US these days that none of that happens. My school's lawyers have advised the administration that they can't allow faculty to give anything beyond an F on the assignment -- which is typically not a penalty at all, since usually the reason students cheat is that they're already failing, so they have nothing to lose.
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You're quite right, of course. Mod parent up and whatnot.
I played a lot of TF2 for a very long time, up until I was exiled from my favorite community for reasons that don't deserve airing. I even played some competitive, and I saw and learned things about classes, maps, and moves that would make the average "pub" player's hair stand on end. I knew soldiers who had perfected the art of the rocket, snipers who almost never missed, scouts who executed heavy classes and were impossible to hit, and spies who are so sneaky they could literally hide in plain sight. Playing with and against these people honed my skills so much that I can tell the difference between skill and cheating with ease. It's all about the attitude. Despite the public perception, few if any competitive players are assholes. Being part of a "comp" team necessitates a good attitude and an instinct for rapport that belies the usual arrogance and casual asshattery of a cheater. As you said, an honest to goodness GOOD player will give tips and be courteous. A cheater will respond with insults.
In all my literal thousands of hours of TF2, I only saw a handful of cheaters. I could count the number on two hands. You know why? It's the community. If you don't want to deal with cheaters, find a server that has a boisterous community and a conclave of attentive admins. Good players will gravitate towards servers with other good players, and as long as there's enough friendly admins around to keep a lid on the jerks the server will remain pure and enjoyable.
You should turn signatures off.
Generally, when someone speaks of the "acceptable" forms of cheating, they mean "the forms of cheating I use"....
And I'm pleased to see that someone managed to start justifying cheating within a handful of posts. When I read online gaming forums discussing cheating, it generally takes not more than six comments to find someone justifying cheating....
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