Comic for Friday 9/9 (Early High Res)
I thought I'd start the weekend by trying to rile everyone up in a debate. :)
Do you consider using a crosshair overlay (adding a center dot to your aim where the game doesn't include one) cheating?
Personally, I'd put this one in the cheating column. On the cheating scale, it's definitely one of the most benign cheats, (I'd argue it doesn't even provide much of an advantage), but it still constitutes using an outside method to gain an upper hand over other players.
Now, you can add a crosshair overlay to games with a third party app, or you can get some monitors with it as a built-in setting. Or you can even just go super old-school, and stick a bit of tape or blue-tac on your monitor as an aiming device.
None of these methods are actually altering any game files, which leads people to argue that it isn't cheating; its no different from upping the contrast of your monitor to see in darker games, or using a fancy mouse with better precision to get an edge, they say.
And I understand that side of the argument. I can almost see it from that point of view. But most games also have a brightness/contrast or mouse sensitivity slider in their settings, so I'd argue that adjusting those elements to personal preference falls within the game designer's scope of what they wanted possible in their game (even if upping the contrast to see enemies in shadows is outside the spirit of the intention).
But if a game doesn't provide you with a persistent "here is exactly where your bullet is aiming" reticle, it would be because the game designers chose not to include one for gameplay reasons. For instance, sometimes only the scope of a weapon provides that much pinpoint accuracy, meaning you're balancing precision for the smaller field of view of a zoomed-in scope.
However if you can always track your center point, and you're now able to hip fire with greater accuracy without the scope/ADS, that feels like you are operating at an advantage beyond how other people may be playing.
Now obviously, if you stick a piece of tape on your monitor, no one is going to know. There is not an anti-cheat system on the planet that will catch that. So you can do this with impunity. But I don't think the lack of looming consequences lessens the fact that this is, no matter how miniscule or irrelevant (and it is, to be sure, such a barely-over-the-line cheat), still an attempt to play unfairly. In spirit.
That's my thought on the subject. I know the people that believe in its use can argue passionately in its defense, so I'd love to hear your opinions on crosshair overlays via external methods.
Comments (10)
Yes it's a cheat, doesn't have to be big or effective to count as a cheat. The reason I classify it as such is this, if they wanted you to have it, it'd be in the settings menu.
It's also worth mentioning though that players with significantly better eyesight have a natural advantage over others that they can't realistically compete with. Or even faster natural reflexes. At most, I'd say maybe half of what it takes to play in a competitive game is skill. The rest is just stuff you're either born with or born without. So given that, what's "cheating" is relative when you're talking about something that doesn't alter the actual game at all.
Depends. If it's PVP? Sure it's a cheat. If it's PVE? No. Because honestly the bar for "cheating" in a PVE game is pretty high, because it's like "cheating" on a Rorschach test, no one is genuinely harmed by it, including yourself.
Haha, my standard of gaming is low enough that it wouldn't help me anyways! In BL2 I usually play as the Mechromancer, and with any decent level of anarchy you'll hit more by aiming at the floor!
I'm generally not too concerned about the cross hairs. The game developer has the option to implement preventative measures like weapon specific randomness and offsets to aiming. In general I only play single player games and frequently mod or edit characters.
For a game with any competetive elements, I'd put it in the cheat(if fairly low on severity) category. PvP, Leaderboards, etc. It'd likely be higher if games didn't regularly include bullet deviation for things like hip fire deviation for sniper rifles and the like. It's a bit like using a ruler/cheat sheet in Worms Armageddon(or similar games). In strictly PvE settings, with no leaderboards or the like, I'd label it a QoL change(since the enemies are already literally aimbotting you).
Every shooter has a cross hair somewhere. Much like everyone of them has a debug mode that shows exactly where the bullet will go. Most FPS games do not allow for where the exact bullet is going to land to be the norm view mode. On the flipside most FPS allow a cross hair of sometime. This makes a set of tiers. Most Precise: showing where the bullet would hit. More Precise: Showing a crosshair which is generally where the bullet will hit varying with gun. (There is the crosshairs that also take into account the area it can hit) Least Precise: Only what is on the gun model. This is a knob that a developer tweaks to make the game feel more realistic or adjust skill level. All that to say if the game has the option for a cross hair then yeah, do the cross hair however you want. If the game doesn't have the option then in official competition they should not be allowed.
Simply "has crosshair" isn't an argument for using an overlay, because as you said, not all crosshairs give you dead center. Some change style based on the gun, some crosshairs condense into a rough area without becoming an actual cross pinpointing the dead center, leaving some margin of error. So if the developer decided not to put a "most precise" crosshair in the game/on every gun, if you then go and add one, you're giving yourself an advantage not everyone has.
I am with you on this 100% ..every single word. The defining part is this: using an outside method to gain an upper hand. As soon as you are doing anything the game is not built for it will be doing something that was not intended and it is cheating ... and that goes for the old tape trick too. ...and I actually don't think about "victims" ...it is actually that feeling that you actually did not beat the game or win fairly that hits after the fact ...takes the fun completely out of it.
On the high-DPI mouse side, what about mice that have a toggle or pre-button DPI/sensitivity swap? I had a mouse like that a while back (one of the Madcatz line), where there was a red button on the side, right where your thumb could hit it, that while pressed would cut your mouse sensitivity by a selectable amount. Meant you could do the wild spins with the high-sensitivity spins and such, but when you were going for a precision shot, you held down that button and suddenly had amazing precision with your mouse movements. It's not really doing anything you couldn't do, with a lot more hand precision, without such a setting, but it certainly makes certain things easier Also, what about macros? Back when I was playing Warframe, I had two mouse macros I considered indispensable, one for their Bullet Jump (basically a very fast jump forwards, good for getting around quickly), which required crouch -> jump in succession, and one for their melee spin attack, which required crouch -> melee in succession. Hitting C->Space or C->T over and over was a pain, so I made macros for them instead. There have been a number of game mechanics over the years that fall into that category, where the macro is making something easier that otherwise requires two or more key presses, but really is just there to save me from RMI and such. Things that require *timing*, I consider to be more in the cheat category (for example, a fighting game that requires you to hit a button a fraction of a second before another button, or a specific sequence of buttons inside a small period of time, to land a combo or something), but ones that are just automating an otherwise benign sequencing of buttons, a sequence that was put in as much to avoid button bloat (and, potentially, to make the game work on consoles with much more limited buttons) as it was to add proper complexity/difficulty, are much more in that grey area.