Since I am already on the multi-posting train, I somehow felt like rehashing some past thoughts on the topic of experience vs cheating - will make for a rather boring reading, I'm sure, but indulge an old metabolic end product gas.
Lets start by looking at the gains and losses in general, boring by the sound of it, but rather fascinating when you think about it at the very basic human level. If we think about the national sports team of a totalitarian regime, a long-reigning world champion, a Kaspersky security analyst writing bots and farming gold, or that-guy-who-took-your-puppy-off-your-hands-and-sold-it-later-for-several-hundred-bucks-to-a-chinese-restaurant, we notice that while some degree of personal gratification and joy of fame and attention is a shared factor, all of these different access points to an unfair/immoral conduct are somewhat different.
Entire Russia's 2014 World Cup team being suspected of doping cover-up.
link
In cases of totalitarian regime, the values are enforced differently at the state level, especially when it comes to marketing and appearance. Since Soviet Union, it has been a common practice for totalitarian regimes to artificially make them look better than they really are. Commonly, this serves as a
message towards its own population rather than to the outside world that can catch up to the truth quite quickly. Russian Federation or North Korea are no exceptions to that today, just it is a bit harder to cheat today than it was thirty years ago. Like with the next example, we must also assume here, that majority of the performance boost will come from the placebo effect.
We all know about Lance Armstrong. A hugely talented cyclist that shat on his entire career by doping. Which may have been for nothing, to boot.
link
When with the previous example it was all about Impression and particularly about population control, in the case of top athletes doping it is mostly about money, big.. big money. You can also read interesting wrap-up
details of the Pacquaio vs Mayweather Jr. where Pacquaio (or both of the parties, probably) cheated audience by hiding Pacquaios injury (lawsuits followed), and Mayweather Jr. cheated Pacquaio by barring him from painkiller injections (previously approved) whilst re-hydrating (suspicious if not outright banned), all under the cover of a personal testing firm. Big money.
When we think about a security analyst for a major anti-virus company writing bots and farming gold in popular MMOs, we can certainly see how the know-how would be there and how it could be a hobby meeting business within such an individuals expertise, but it is extremely difficult to see how that would at all distinguish such a person from another that writes trojans and ransomware for profit, or worms for lulz. Here is an informative and potentially entertaining DEFCON upload to watch:
link. They also make a pretty clear point what happens when you get caught. For other cases when you can get your ass sued into bankruptcy, you can watch the crowdfunded The Story of Technoviking.
When someone plants a virus in your computer, you immediately get concerned about your private information, but also about bank details and other passwords. Suddenly your home has been invaded. You know it is bad, wrong, but often we don't label it as immoral - mainly because the matter of human morality is much deeper subject with much more far-reaching consequences than your three hundred bucks and pictures of your granny. But with or without giving it any deeper thought, you can't help but to think something is really off.
Or when it comes to simple exploitation and opportunism, it is much harder for either party to shake off the feeling of wrongdoing or having been wronged. For the offending party, think gypsies selling NASA grade-and-made space alloy pans to your mother or grandmother, or the guy who stole a radio from your car, they usually fill their life with excuses to justify avoiding hard work and-or honest life. You are probably more rich than they are. They were hungry. Needed a fix for a drug habit that would've otherwise killed them. It was your fault for being gullible. You won't even notice what you lost. Everybody else is doing it as well.
Everybody else is doing it aswell. If there is one many metabolic end product of an excuse that I have ever heard, every time someone fucks up but will not - at any cost or effort - admit the wrongdoing, it is *always* everybody else does it as well. Do they? No. Is there some reason to warrant such a suspicion? Poor regulation may make it easier to find such an excuse.
But much more interesting subject is what the simple act of doing something wrong does to human psyche. Making a mistake is difficult for a mind to deal with as it is, leading to either denial, beating oneself up, projecting blame upon others. Now imagine living in a perpetual state of mistake. It changes and damages behaviour and reasoning, at the very least. The psychological damage from being addicted to crime is likely to run much deeper than anyone can guess.
To sum it all up, none of us will have a problem with acknowledging that cheating is bad, even cheaters will agree with that - kid you not. What we don't think about, is how bad it exactly is, what motivates and keeps them on the path of high risk vs temporary reward, all the while having guilt hammer on the conscience. But if all else fails, just remember: everybody else is doing it too. That makes everything right.
Part II - DXMP
In an effort to save the original idea behind this post and make a late effort on introducing DXMP into the rant after I got a little carried away with examples, lets look at cheating in DXMP and how they might relate to previous examples.
Lets start with regulation, framework of our frogpond society. There was a time when server admins knew that they had full responsibility for the quality of game play in their servers. But since no server has ever been maintained by a robot, its the personal bias that has plagued nearly all the servers where and when neglect wasn't the issue already. If it is made very clear that cheating is forbidden in your server (because common knowledge isn't as common as you might think, and remember, everybody else is doing it as well and you're probably richer and have more hands or are just a male sex organ that deserves all the cheating you can get; excuses), then you immediately have a framework within which you can lower the rate of justifications, as well as avoid what I am about to describe next.
Having to deal with cheaters every day and seeing that the regulations are simply not there (anarchy), can force even fair players to cheat as a domino effect. The original cheaters that justified cheating by saying that "everybody else is doing it as well" were the ones that started a chain reaction where some (=! everybody) felt like not giving a *love*. I know some highly skilled players around even today that cranked their FPS up just because it was so annoying to see some noobs spray and pray and break atdm streak in a freak fight or break your flow in an otherwise enjoyable 0a match. Watching cheaters happily play in servers every day has even driven me to use speedhack two or three maps (ca 2013 vs phantom), and some trigbot for ca 3-4 maps (ca 2013 vs phantom). While you can count the amount of maps I might've played during my 12 year stay in DXMP and compare it to the amount of maps I've actually cheated on, it still is pretty bad to acknowledge what things got to here.
Next I would like to discuss the matter of detecting cheaters vs. paranoia. It is true that experienced players *can* detect when you are cheating, simply because we can play this game with eyes closed and know what every little action feels like and what every little sound sounds like. We know when you are cheating, with speedhack or bot or something else. But we also get paranoid. And we will suspect even those that are not cheating. This does not deal with known cheaters that have been around for years a la phantom, ermac/mango, solid, valex or other sidekicks, but with rivalry among skilled players in the context of lacking regulations and broken game. I have often suspected Hey of cheating. In 0a matches, Hey has probably suspected that I cheat. Clixor I have never suspect of cheating because he is a friend, Hey and Ricci on the other hand are competition. In competition emotions and adrenaline goes up and reason goes down. Late Ste suspected pretty much everyone of cheating, that could kill him, unless they were friends of his. Sometimes even being friends wasn't enough and the only context that still worked was that of sharing a clan together. I remember the accusations against someone he was friends with. Once the paranoia is that high, in ones thoughts such a person probably also suspects clanmates.
I don't think I've ever suspected my clanmates or friends, but I definitely can relate to paranoia.
Experienced players are never wrong when it comes to obvious noob-level cheating, but we get paranoid when it comes to really good flow of skill or other contributing circumstances a la latency differences. Ste said that he could hear by the sound when fire rate was off on assault rifle. I never thought of *that* particular aspect back then, but in retrospective I think it was brilliant observation. Considering the money and effort he put into sound quality in games, it should also not come as a huge surprise.
But why cheat in such an old game, and what we call cheating here at all? Easiest way to describe cheating is by focusing deliberate use of third party software and hacks, or pushing exploits as far as they can go. First cases of cheating I remember were names like System (it took me couple noob-months to realize that it was *not* UE/DCSB System, but another, older System), ApocalypseNow, and several script kids learing engine, I think Eagle was cheating as well but players like Monkee or Ricci can elaborate on those first years better than me. I am also quite certain that, much like the core of the recent NKz, most of TDH back then was cheating as well. I remember Nukem was at least rumored to, and his attitude at the time would've certainly given grounds for such suspicion, and SnakeyPoo was definitely cheating in newbie servers. Same goes for the spearhead of BIA with both Papparoach and later Controled cheating. So we have cheating clans that justify using exploits collectively. Usually these clans are shortlived, luckily.
But a different matter is cheating in prestigious, dominant clans. When you are teamed with highly skilled players, *someone* tends to be lacking enough self-confidence or feel left out to start cheating, or cheat in order to get in the clan. There was a famous case in DCSB where a person got kicked out for aimbotting (funbot). I remember that at least Mastaninja was cheating in [F], and while I honestly cant remember if it also had PappaRoach in there (in which case there wouldve been more cheaters than just MN), -- I think he was.. [F]Luger? was either him or his brother Controled - paired with 0a legends like Trollied and Smarties. I don't remember if Raiden ended up in [F] as well, but imagine Trollied, Smarties, Raiden in your clan, and you're an egomaniac like PappaRoach or fat WoW kid like Mastaninja. PappaRoach was already using FPS speedhack so he was just on his usual roll, but Mastaninja cracked and I heard later that his weapon would still frantically click even after killing someone and being out of ammo. And I heard it from someone that, for lulz, went on a two-three day cheating spree on his own. In REN we had one player that - while skilled - cracked under pressure and resorted to occasional botting, and another that made an entire decade long career out of cheating. They were sharing clan with Clixor and me at my prime. To make matters worse, I was always trying to work on practicing and teamwork and morale, bringing stress even further up for those that lacked confidence in the first place.
So far I've covered cheating clans cheating as a clan, peer pressure and self-confidence issues. I've briefly mentioned two other reasons for cheating: coders being bored or wanting to show *their* skill - i think pretty much every coder in dxmp has slipped at some point or another; and I've also mentioned cheating for lulz. Now and then we've had players in dxmp that whilst normally playing fair, have resorted to cheating spree with friends, usually when retiring or playing something else, and not giving much of a fck about those still here.
But one thing to note here is that all of the instances of cheating have been quite brief, lasting few days typically, month or few (some coders like Lionheart or MainMan, cheating clans), or in worst cases up to a year (PappaRoach & BIA). There is only one player that has cheated consistently for 10 years, with one sidekick stacking years slowly as well. On one hand I would like to see it as some sort of cancer of dxmp, or award some kind of special trophy for being so consistent for so long, but as painful as it is to admit it, I think where every previous cheater has only been around weeks to months, a late generation cheater can cheat for ten years only because of one reason: the game has died a very slow death and it is easier to quit dxmp than to actually bother doing something about it. And thus we've all quit the game, leaving him here. But I think this game was good enough to warrant keeping servers clean.