Let me share my thoughts about hacking in games. In single player games, I hack openly. I've been doing it since I was a kid starting from Game Genie to Pro Action Replay then to Game Shark/Gold Finger/Code Breaker, name it, I probably tried those cheating tools at one point of my life or another lol! I do so without shame because the cheats only affect my own experience. Why be limited by what the game programmers want, when you could change things in a game to suit your own playing style? I treat computer and video games the same as how I treated action figures. I do what I want with them for fun as much as possible. Of course, for computer and video games, what I can do is only limited by my knowledge in coding and some game theory, which to put bluntly, isn't at the elite levels. So yeah, every game that I "Try Before I Buy", I usually download trainers for or make my own trainers for them if I can't find any. To me, cheating isn't an evil thing, it's just something that I do for fun without harming anyone else.
As for cheating in multiplayer games such as Vindictus, I've never really done it a lot. Vindictus is actually the first game where I used very powerful commands to change the gameplay to what I want. The closest I've gotten to what I am currently doing in Vindictus now was buying a lot of expensive swords for 10K (they were 200K each on the npc) and reselling them back. The reason for this is that I have very limited knowledge in packet editing and assembly language (I almost failed assembly in my course lol!), and I haven't practiced C and C+ in a long time that due to inactivity, I only retain bits of information with no practical use.
I think that cheating in multiplayer games is something that should be done a lot more discreetly and thoughtfully since you're not the only person playing. It is also possible that cheating in an online game can get you banned, no matter if you make alt accounts or not. This is why I'm very inhibited when in comes to this kind of cheating. I don't go overboard with cheats, and I tell nobody, whether they're guild friends or real life friends who play the same game, about what I'm doing for fear of being reported.
Cheating in multiplayer games to me is not about showing off that you have superior stats and armor and bragging about it all the time. To me, cheating in multiplayer games needs a good balance between getting what you want, as much as you want, without causing anyone to pay attention to you. For example, in this game, there was a time when we could generate any item that we wanted. Some people who created items meant for developers only got banned, while a lot of people who just generated normal items (not cash shop items) are still safely cheating right now. In other words, one must limit his/her greed when cheating in an mmo game, otherwise, it would be very easy to single you out as a cheater.
If you were to ask me "What would you do if there's a way to generate items again, would you use it?". My answer would be YES. I'd use it but only in limited ways. No generation of cash shop items (you pay real money for those, and loss of real money means serious trouble from the angry company), no generation of developer limited items (why bother with this when I already have access to almost everything?), good division of gold among alternate characters not reaching 100M each, and most of all, no showing off to anyone.
In the end, although cheating is supposed to be "morally wrong", I think that cheating is not that bad as long as you know how to limit yourself. Just think about it as smoking, drinking beer/alcoholic stuff, getting high. If you overdose yourself on those things, it will someday come back to kill you. Moderate and planned cheating at least will give you a chance to get away with your ill-gotten stuff so that you can have more fun with the game and others
Originally Posted by undernorma
