Mod's and Degrees of Cheating

[Nightwolf]

So here is the thing. Its super easy (roughly) to cheat DRG right now. Its literally a matter of how lazy you are. And yet in the US I can count the number of cheaters I have ever seen on both hand after almost 2700 hours. Other regions seem to have higher proportions. Some guy posted a guide on how to cheat all the time limited cosmetics to your save file.

Do I care? eh not really, i now routinely see noobs that have had this game for 2 weeks with cosmetics that were only available years ago.

You want to give yourself 1,000,000 jadiz? go ahead could care less.

You want to cheat yourself to lvl 300...That I care about if you play on coop. You play only solo, could care less.

Why? because the grind to unlock all of that is what teaches you not to be a burden and dead weight to your team. If you just cheat unlock it all, it completely undermines the level system. Like those nuggets that were using the old iron will to zombie limp through haz 5 or using bunkering to cheat the games combat mechanics in haz 5 when they could barely handle haz 2.

So if it is sooooo easy to cheat, why (At least in the US) do we not see cheaters in most matches? It is certainly not for a lack of want, other games are packed to the gills with cheaters in the same region.

Partly:
1) lack of incentive: its a coop game, there is nobody to compete against. There is also a team based attitude prevalent in most matches so if everybody else is willing to try without cheats that herds the rest of the noobs into trying too.

2) Laziness: most people dont want to download risky third party software for a non-competitive game or are outright too lazy to do so. Some are too lazy to hex edit a save file to alter minerals and player level. Some are too lazy to even do it to their experimental save and rename it.

3) No attraction for hardcore players: for much of the population this is a game you pickup for a few runs after work or maybe a hour or two here in the evening. You dont have professional streamers slamming this 8 hours a day or anything that amounts to hardcore players. Why cheat something you only play an hour or two a week.


Mods risk changing all of that...................................................

certain mod hubs have established software for one click installation of mods into your game. there is no risky 3rd party software and it completely eliminates the lazy factor.


you have two players

one sticks to vanilla and one plays almost exclusively modded servers.

both start at the same time and play the same amounts each week. 10 hours later, the vanilla player is lvl 50 with a few hundred minerals in the bank and only a handful of overclocks and cosmetics. the modded player is lvl 290 with everything unlocked and millions of minerals. neither player cheated.

the modded player simply used mods to bypass the time-gated content and get 100 blank cores from the weekly mission and events on every map. Since his maps have 10x the amount of bugs as normal and near unlimited ammo the modded player simply got huge amounts of xp per each map vs the vanilla.

so if neither player cheated what does it matter. it matters due to the vanilla player gets punished for playing the game the way the devs designed it. The vanilla player gets locked out of servers that have rank requirements (you can argue thats a non-factor but there are far more of them now than used to be) but the modded player does not even tho both have exactly the same play time. the vanilla player has to grind all the unlocks over time, the modded player just gets it all handed to him in a few hours. the vanilla player who put in his legit 10 hours for lvl 50 has his worked demeaned because the modded player is running around spouting hes pro with his 290 so it undermines the reward and respect you get (yes it is a real thing in game atm) for the work to get that rank.

You can argue the vanilla player chose not to use mods and there is nothing stopping him from using them to get everything unlocked too. But both are allowed to play on the same public servers.

its worth noting devs time-gated what they called "end-game content" because this game has no end game and it was the only way to stretch out the content as opposed to players being able to grind hard and unlock everything in a week.

its pretty meaningless to pollute the base game by allowing players to bypass all that work with a 1 click mod....if they are simply waiting to see if anyone does that....i can whip up a mod to let the player base do that if the modding tools open up that ability.

[Chibbity]

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

The vast majority of players would never think of downloading a trainer themselves to cheat their progression. However, a far fewer number of people will be opposed to simply joined a modded server that speeds up their progression. This is common sense that people here tend to ignore.

Careful now, you're making too much sense.

[Mr. Ape]

Malidictus님이 먼저 게시:

Do you have evidence to support that? Because to me, this reads like a similar fallacious argument as "video games cause violence." It assumes that a plurality of people are looking to cheat, but are stopped only by their inability to do so. What reason do you have to believe that there's a meaningful amount of these kinds of players? Because time and again, video games which support modding seem to just not have that problem. What makes DRG unique in ways that Payday 2 or XCOM 2 or Subnautica aren't?

The good old call for evidence argument. You know for a fact that there are no scientific studies on this topic. I can simply ask you to provide evidence on why having readily accessible modded servers won't increase the incidence of cheating progress. You won't be able to do that.

Also your examples are terrible. Payday 2 is known to be filled with hackers. I've got over 1000 hours in Payday 2. There are so many hackers in that game that some people routinely check the steam profile of anyone who joins with a high rank. The progression system in Payday 2 has no integrity.

I don't know about XCOM 2 because I've never played it, but I know you're being disingenuous when you list a singleplayer game like Subnautica. We're talking "protecting the integrity of the progression system" (as the devs put it) in a multiplayer game.

[Malidictus]

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

So you apologise for sounding like an ad hominem attack, but then proceed to do ad hominem attack on my ethics and understanding of player behaviour. How ironic. By your logic, anyone who wants to protect the integrity of anything must be thinking of committing the act they hope to prevent.

No, the mere act of wanting to "preserve the integrity" of a theoeretical thing doesn't by itself imply wanting to commit an illicit act, loaded terminology notwithstanding. Boiling the situation down a belief in the certainty that people will commit illicit acts unless physically prevented is what gives me this impression. It sounds a lot like the Fundamentalist Christian argument on objective morality, where the lack of belief in god should in theory empower one to want to commit all the illicit acts they can imagine.

My point with the above argument is that you're basing your premise on the CERTAINTY that people will cheat as long as the option is given to them. That's not really a safe premise because plenty of people simply won't. In fact, I'd argue that a plurality if not a majority of people won't cheat no matter how easy it becomes. Not unless the game's own design fails and becomes so onerous that players no longer respect intended modes of play.

You're also vastly overstating the ease of access of cheats. You act as though "mod pushers" will PM me, offering me a free sample of cheats like some 1980s PSA about saying no to drugs. Are you aware of how the Steam Workshop works? It doesn't come to me telling me "Hey, you want some cheats?" I have to actively go to the Workshop and start pulling mods. Yes, it does have a list of featured popular mods, but guess what - those are never cheats by dint of cheats not being that popular.

Players looking to cheat still have to go to the workshop, decide what cheat they want, search for it, potentially go through several pages of unrelated results, only to find it. At that point, those people could have found it on any other site. Hence, the ad hominem - either you're deliberately misrepresenting the situation or you're unaware of the mechanics of the situation. I don't like saying this, but I don't know of a polite way to bring this information across.

The fear you're projecting is not based in reality, at least not that I can determine. Unless you have a means of first establishing your basic premise, then I don't have any other way to read your text.

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

All I've ever done was point of the naivety of those who think having trainers as visible modded servers will not increase the number of cheaters.

As a general rule of thumb - don't accuse people of ad hominem arguments if you're going to make one of your own. It's a bad look.

But to your point - this argument lacks substance. It's an argument from personal incredulity, with the only supporting evidence boiling down to "Aw, come on!" and "You're naive if you think otherwise." Am I? Because I'm not willing to accept their claim on nothing more than your incredulity, especially when it demonstrates a (probably unintentional) lack of interest in the broader context.

I covered this above so I'm not going to repeat, but the situation you paint of innocent people being exposed to trainers and somehow being currputed by them is not real. That's not how mods work, that's not how the Steam Workshop works, that's not how people work. If you have actual evidence with which to convince me then by all means - I'm interested. But I'm not willing to take your word for it.

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

The vast majority of players would never think of downloading a trainer themselves to cheat their progression. However, a far fewer number of people will be opposed to simply joined a modded server that speeds up their progression. This is common sense that people here tend to ignore.

Just for the record - an argument from common sense is also a fallacy. Common sense is a rule of thumb - it's accurate more often than not, but it's very often badly inaccurate, especially when people have limited or biased experience on a subject. More to the point, an argument from common sense has no weight. If a thing is obviously true, then you shouldn't struggle to provide actual arguments in its support, rather than challenging your interlocutor to imagine your arguments for you.

You assert that the vast majority would never think to download a trainer. OK, I'm willing to accept that, since that's my impression as well. You assert that many people would willingly join an obviously cheating lobby for rapid rewards. That I'm not willing to accept without supporting evidence, because it runs counter to my own first-hand experience. I've seen many people posting threads asking for advice on how to remove money that a cheater gave them on the Payday 2 forums. I've seen plenty of people express resentment to just being given progression by a cheater - in this very forum, a few days before the modding support announcement was made. In my experience, people by and large inherently distrust cheaters and refuse their help.

Not all of them, not all of the time. I've seen calls of "Hey, can a cheater give me $10mil?" in GTA Online chat. But that's GTA Online, where mods require complex code injection and cheats result in account bans... Sometimes. No such thing is the case for DRG. So again - the assertion that there's a large number of innocent players who would be corrupted by cheats requires substantiation.

And I apologise for saying this, but when the substantiation comes down arguments from personal incredulity, arguments from common sense and other broad fallacies, I can't help but question one's understanding of the subject.



*edit*

Chibbity님이 먼저 게시:

Careful now, you're making too much sense.

And I know this is completely off-topic, but this right here is precisely what I mean. Proposing a logical fallacy is easy. Praising the logical fallacy as making sense is easy. Actually providing supporting evidence, not so much. When you move a discussion away from the substance of the issue and into piffy quips, most of its grounding goes away with it.

[Malidictus]

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

The good old call for evidence argument. You know for a fact that there are no scientific studies on this topic. I can simply ask you to provide evidence on why having readily accessible modded servers won't increase the incidence of cheating progress. You won't be able to do that.

The burden of proof is on you. I don't need to prove that all the other Holy Grails aren't the real Holy Grail. YOU need to prove that the one YOU propose is. Honestly, you're running through the apologetics playbook of fallacies by this point. If you make an assertion, you are the one who needs to prove it. People who disagree with it don't need to do a thing to disprove it, because you can't prove a negative. Making an assertion and then challenging people to refute it is poor form.

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

Also your examples are terrible. Payday 2 is known to be filled with hackers. I've got over 1000 hours in Payday 2. There are so many hackers in that game that some people routinely check the steam profile of anyone who joins with a high rank. The progression system in Payday 2 has no integrity.

Yes, Payday 2 is "known" to be full of cheaters. Here's an issue with this, though - it isn't. I have close to 3000 hours in the game and I can count the number of cheaters I've run into on the fingers of one hand. Payday 2 is also famous for large-scale, ruthless witch hunts of players trying to prove each to have cheated achievements, but the vast majority of those cases turned out to be false positives. If you've paid any attention to the forums, you may have noticed official threads warning against witch hunts.

Moreover, the Payday 2 of today is fully capable of tagging modded players, displaying a list of mods and even linking directly to the mod's page. This is true for hosted lobbies, this is true for remote clients. Yes, you can mod away the mod check, but few do.

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

I don't know about XCOM 2 because I've never played it, but I know you're being disingenuous when you list a singleplayer game like Subnautica. We're talking "protecting the integrity of the progression system" (as the devs put it) in a multiplayer game.

Yeah, that right there is a red herring. There's no difference between proecting the "integrity" of a progression system between single-player and multi-player games. It's all make-believe progression anyway - it has as much weight as you put into it. Here's a funny thing - right now, without the use of any mods, I can use the Steam Achievements Manager and give myself any achievement in the game, including hidden ones. No mods needed.

Mods for DRG already exist. Cheats for DRG already exists. Ways of completely trivialising progression already exist. I fail to see how official mod support will have any effect on this.

[Chibbity]

Malidictus님이 먼저 게시:

-snip-

I didn't say anything of those things guy?

[ShugoTheRipper]

Mr. Ape님이 먼저 게시:

However, a far fewer number of people will be opposed to simply joining a modded server that speeds up their progression. This is common sense that people here tend to ignore.

Mountains out of mole hills.

[Chibbity]

Malidictus님이 먼저 게시:

Chibbity님이 먼저 게시:

Careful now, you're making too much sense.

And I know this is completely off-topic, but this right here is precisely what I mean. Proposing a logical fallacy is easy. Praising the logical fallacy as making sense is easy. Actually providing supporting evidence, not so much. When you move a discussion away from the substance of the issue and into piffy quips, most of its grounding goes away with it.

You can't provide any evidence either, we're discussing something that hasn't happened yet. No one can know what it's actually going to be like.

Typing umpteen paragraphs full of word salad doesn't constitute evidence, no offense.

[JeanneOskoure]

Chibbity님이 먼저 게시:

I didn't say anything of those things guy?

Probably a quoting mistake. I guess Malidictus wanted to quote you at one point, then quote Mr. Ape but ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the formatting. It happens.

[Chibbity]

JeanneOskoure님이 먼저 게시:

Chibbity님이 먼저 게시:

I didn't say anything of those things guy?

Probably a quoting mistake. I guess Malidictus wanted to quote you at one point, then quote Mr. Ape but ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the formatting. It happens.

Yeah, it's no biggie; I just want to make sure he's clear on who he's responding to.

[Malidictus]

JeanneOskoure님이 먼저 게시:

Probably a quoting mistake. I guess Malidictus wanted to quote you at one point, then quote Mr. Ape but ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the formatting. It happens.

That was indeed a technical error on my part. I grabbed the wrong quote tag. It's fixed now. Thanks for bringing it up.

[ShugoTheRipper]

Steam needs a live preview or something, we need to move out of 1998 message boards markup.

[Chibbity]

ShugoTheRipper님이 먼저 게시:

Steam needs a live preview or something, we need to move out of 1998 message boards markup.

I mean dude, if you don't immediately re-read what you wrote from the other parties point of view after posting it; are you even foruming at full autism?

[ShugoTheRipper]

Chibbity님이 먼저 게시:

ShugoTheRipper님이 먼저 게시:

Steam needs a live preview or something, we need to move out of 1998 message boards markup.

I mean dude, if you don't immediately re-read what you wrote from the other parties point of view after posting it; are you even foruming at full autism?

Jokes aside I just want it all to be easy.

Formatting my guides in this markup style was hell.

[Mr. Ape]

Malidictus님이 먼저 게시:

snip

All you've ever done was argue from your own intuition and then demand evidence to contrary. I love the part where you said you believe the player base to be adverse to cheating based on the threads of people "feeling resentment over being given rewards by a cheater". Did you forget the many threads made this month by people who wanted to 'skip the grind'?

Regardless, you don't have any evidence outside of subjective experiences that support your claims. The burden of evidence is not just on me to prove that the blatant advertisement of XP leveling by modded servers will increase the number of people 'cheating' their ranks; it is also on you to prove that it won't. No matter how many anecdotes you provide, it does not make your position the default position. You have to show me evidence too. Otherwise, all you've ever said are conjecture.

[JeanneOskoure]

ShugoTheRipper님이 먼저 게시:

Chibbity님이 먼저 게시:

I mean dude, if you don't immediately re-read what you wrote from the other parties point of view after posting it; are you even foruming at full autism?

Jokes aside I just want it all to be easy.

Formatting my guides in this markup style was hell.

I can't believe steam doesn't have a button at the bottom to automatically paste the markdown template for whatever at the bottom of your post or around your current highlighted selection. Are we in 2010?