Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-99.73.35.159-20181005201301/@comment-99.73.35.159-20181011202757

I'm the original poster of this thread. Just to clarify, I posted more than once because my posts were not appearing until days after I submitted them. Not sure what went wrong.

I did read the T&C and its pretty clear that TT is against the terms (ie altering your content/data to circumvent the controls game). It also seems clear that Mytona considers it cheating from their responses to some forum members. My question wasn't whether Mytona thinks its cheating but whether the TTs believe it is cheating, and whether they see this as unfair etc.

In the past, I have seen forum members express dismay that its too difficult to rank high on the leaderboard because the top spots are dominated by cheating players. It surprised me then to see such excitement and celebration from forum members actively cheating together to increase the ranks of their chosen players. I was curious whether people just got caught up in the moment or whether this was an excellent example of tribalism. (Within American politics the  phenomena where supporters seem to accept continuous blatent flasehoods is much more eloquently answered by looking at research into tribalsm or how people act in groups. These individuals are not  so "uneducated" as to actually believe the falsehoods but falling into tribalism where acceptance of cheating or lying is OK as long as it protects your groups against others. )

I also find it interesting how cheating in virtual/digital games is much more acceptable than say cheating in physical sports or games where you must be present. For the argument-I don't have 29 days to plays -well that is perfectly fine but then you don't really deserve to progress as high as someone who does, correct? Lets say I want to finish in the top 50 of a marathon but I really don't want to run 26 whole miles. Is it OK then for me to find a way to sneak off the route on the 3rd mile and Uber over to the 20th mile marker so in the end I only ran 9 miles but got the achievement of being in the top 50 faster finishing 26 miles?

Another consideration is that by cheating you may inadverantly be downgrading the game playing experience for everyone including yourself in the future. Game developers may not be implicitly allowing something by not putting controls in place but may be trying to balance game experience vs controls. Controls to close exploit holes can often require more complexity to stop the cheaters slowing down the game experience for everyone. It requires reallocating resources to chase the cheaters instead of optimizing the game. Its just something to think about as you consider how you want to play the game.

Regardless, this is a discussion board and I thought that this would be an interesting topic.