Why do people cheat?
Note: this entry has moved.
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 
