That’s a question I’m sure I’ll never understand the answer to, but it’s also one that comes to my mind frequently.
Specifically, I don’t understand why people attempt to cheat at C:SI combat. There have been quite a number of people who’ve done so, and most of the time it’s the most naive, blatantly obvious, pitiful kind of cheating that just makes me shake my head in disgust.
Take, for instance, this guy I was fighting several months ago in Samurai Edo. He had on an attachment that, when he pressed an attack key, would just hammer me with invisible physical spheres. Of course, he wasn’t even sly enough to make these prims silent, so my first clue was the massive collision noises I heard every time he slashed. Secondly, the collision of these prims with an avatar creates a pretty noticeable impact effect, and only someone relatively new to Second Life® would fail to notice. I could quite clearly see them in View Transparent mode, so I asked him what the heck he was doing it for (since it simply would never work), and… He denied having any such device. I mean, seriously, that’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence.
Recently, Shindo mentioned to me that he’d seen someone that was using another extremely obvious cheat that allowed him to remain blocking at all times. Um, like nobody is going to notice that, right? Esprite mentioned a similar cheater to me the other day, but I’m not sure whether it’s the same person or someone else.
There have been countless other examples, but the point is that I can’t understand the confusion of thinking and absence of character that drives people to do this stuff.
So, what gets done about it? Well, here’s what I think is likely to happen to someone that is caught cheating at C:SI, though every situation is different :
- Their win/loss record could get permanently wiped, depending on the severity of the cheat. This might take some of the motivation away from cheating, though I don’t understand the cheater’s mindset enough to know for sure if that’s actually effective. This is extremely rare, but we do reserve the right to do so.
- Banning from C:SI regions, both official and otherwise. Again, this depends on the cheat as well as the region. The criteria is likely different for me banning someone from Samurai Edo, for instance, than someone else banning them from Meiji. Every region administrator has their own tolerance for cheaters, but it’s not at all uncommon to see the ban-stick come out no matter where the cheating happens. By and large, the C:SI community is made up of honorable and skillful warriors with utter disdain for and little tolerance of cheaters.
- Abuse Report : This is uncommon, but I have personally met people who claim to be using Second Life® exploits on C:SI scripts and objects in order to cheat (or worse). In every case I’ve doubted that the person was telling the truth, but as they say, "tell it to the judge". Linden Labs has the capability to verify or disprove that claim, and I believe that it is appropriate to report them.
- Public "name and shame". If someone is caught cheating, it’s likely that the people that catch them are going to tell others they know, with the likely result that the person will no longer be welcome in many places, and will have a hard time finding good sparring partners. This probably wouldn’t bother many noob-farmers, but that’s a subject for a different day.
Okay, sorry for the long and pointless rant, I just get really irked when I see this kind of stuff. I know so many people that are dedicated, work hard, and train regularly, and I respect them for it. Cheaters, on the other hand, are just slime, and I felt like griping about it this morning 
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I’m glad you posted this. I just googled ‘combat:samurai island cheats’ and it was one of the top hits.
hehe, that’s great. Now if only I could google-bomb it so it would stay at the top, lol!
I personally like the “name and shame” part. I think the mind set would be the “winning” part and not the record so much. So if we name them, that prevents others from sparring them and therefore removes the winning part.
JulieAnne
I agree that such “societal pressures” are likely more effective than more punitive measures, though I am reminded of times that I’ve seen people accused of cheating that were simply very, very good at fighting
In cases like I mentioned above, however, there can be no doubt and I am completely comfortable with “name and shame” in such instances
I think the reason people cheat is that they want people to know that they are cooler than them, and it’s easier to cheat and say “I’m cooler because I can cheat better than you” than to get good at fighting and be able to say “I’m cooler because I can fight better than you”. They don’t care that people know they are cheating, as long as they think they are cool because the other people don’t have the means to cheat. Note that for these people, considering themselves cool is equivalent to them thinking that everyone considers them cool, and if you don’t agree that they’re cool, then you’re obviously gay. I don’t think the “name and shame” pressure will work, because all they will see is everyone talking about how “l33t” they are because they can cheat.
Well, the ironic thing is that the majority of the cheats are absurdly simplistic in nature. There are a few that exploit some combination of SL physics and viewer quirks that actually take some practice to use, and there’s even arguments that can be made for some because they require skill to use effectively, but for the most part they are just laughable
I’ve been hearing about an exploit/technique that has been regaining popularity recently. As I understand it, some of the people who are doing it, are doing it by accident and wish they could stop. The others know what they are doing. I’m referring to a variant of the Laffer/Loon “launch” that received so much attention some months ago. This is where you can somehow slide across the ground faster than a run, break an opponent’s block with the ensuing push, and attack. In people who practice it purposefully, it’s actually easy to see coming and you can counter by slashes. But in people who do it accidentally, it’s pretty random and half the time they don’t know what’s going on. And it can be pretty embarrassing even though they’re not doing it on purpose. So I would suggest that we watch for this sliding launch and also to not not automatically assume it’s a purposeful exploit all the time.
I would also ask that those people who *do* know how to reproduce it (it has been described to me in detail but I cannot seem to recall now) file a JIRA bug so that Linden Lab can take a look at it. This seems to me to be something that they’d at least like to be aware of, and I don’t think it’s exclusive to C:SI
No you are quite right Tak. This is how it’s been explained to me. It appears that it’s an error in how your computer or perhaps SL (or both) interprets keystrokes. If you kept your forward key down while in a non-translational (non-forward moving) anim, as soon as the anim was over, the system (whichever it is) over-interprets the key that you’d been mashing. So you end up zooming about. Ok that was a terrible description. But regardless the idea should be applicable to any non-translational anim. Is the same thing happens when I land after a jump? I will usually keep my forward key down in the air to direct my jump trajectory. Perhaps when I land, that forward keystroke gets misinterpreted. And we end up with that familiar whipping half-way round the sim effect. Maybe not?
just for the record, Colin used the term cool or cooler 7 times in his post. I get it Colin! At Money Island, there is a 10L for 10 minutes bench there. It is very crowded as you can imagine. If your sitting on the bench, at the end of 10 minutes; the bench will pay but ejects your avatar. The trick is to resit again before anyone else does. Because I spar and turn everything down on my system, I’m usually pretty fast at resitting. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been accused of cheating or people have assumed I’m a bot. Now how can anyone get confused with my cute face in comparisons to a bots?
JulieAnne
I like the ban and score wipe options, but you are right about people jumping to the conclusion that someone is cheating when they are just way better. I think 99% of cheating accusations are a case of someone trying to win even though they lost (”I didn’t really lose, they just cheat!”).
I remember when I was new to CSI there were rumors about Alyssa because she was so much better than everyone, and for a while I sorta wondered myself. Then I got to know her, and spent a ton of time dueling her, and it became really clear she was just plain way more skilled than everyone at the time.
So long as sim admins are judicious about it I think the ban and score wipe would be good enough. The social chastising will follow without a public list.
Hey Kas, how am I to know who is cheating then? Is that how rumors start? psst… they got there score whipped so they must be cheating?
JulieAnne
Good points, and I was thinking of you Kasumi, and Alyssa, when I mentioned that.
I’ll give an example of a score-wipe-worthy cheat : Someone recently had figured out how to directly rez guard prims so that he wouldn’t get hit even though he wasn’t in block. That kind of blatantly obvious cheat is worthy of banning and wiping the score, in my opinion. Maybe not if just done as a gag with a friend, but when done against several opponents with the clear intention of being “unbeatable”, it’s disgusting.
Oh, and I don’t necessarily mean a public list, but rather if you personally knew someone used a cheat like I mentioned above, you’d (or most people would) be pretty likely to tell their friends about it. Word gets around through purely organic channels when stuff like that occurs, there’s no need for a public list.
@ Julie.. yeah, what do you think people are doing when they are standing around not sparring? Gossiping! lolz, jk
LOL Kas… sounds easier to just make a list!
I’ll give you a LIST!!! (I don’t even know what that means)
We should use Robby’s comment section like a personal IM, lol
lol
In the last eight years of be seriously gaming in several different genres. And it honestly never fails, cheaters exist everywhere. Throughout these eight years about the five most recent of them have been spent pro gaming off and on in LAN, and tournament type scenarios. Its always the same in every game, and in every situation, a cheater is almost always blatantly obvious.
Very rarely have I ever ran into a situation where I honestly thought that someone was cheating and couldn’t prove it.