I'm sick of the way people are treated in the gaming community these days. Today I stood up for myself against a botting punk in Quake 3 and I was put down for being a biggot and eventually kicked for complaining about it. What is with kids these days? What ever happened to the days where you could fight eachother and determine who was truly the most skilled without having to worry if the opponents were using bots or hacking? The nature of this generation of gamers is seriously disgusting, they lack honour and respect for games as a skillful exercise. It only shows the nature of this generation, which is to exploit everything to further benefit themselves, an inherently greedy characteristic which obviously stems from the corporate "sacrifice social benefit and cultural ideals for success" mentality.
It seems as if ideals have been thrown out the window in pursuit of success, even if the success you gain in the end is as rewarding as finding a worm in an apple after climbing so high to pick it. Today what people lack in intelligence and skill, they make up for in perfidious hacking, and a vendetta to get that ominous payback frag. I hope the creators of such hacking programs themselves know to what extent they affect the gaming community and this generation of gamers in general. Not only are they teaching kids that stomping on your peers with aimbots and wallhacks to benefit yourself is acceptable, they teach that it's the only way to win, which consequently decreases the skill level of the average gamer. What ever happened to practice makes perfect? Now practice makes perfect has been mutated into "Botting makes perfect, practice is for suckers" This not only discourages professional gaming, it inhibits it from existing. How are we to know if we're playing against an actual professional player or a scripted bot? If cheaters continue to prosper as they do now, online gaming will change from human vs human to bot vs bot, an exercise sharing more similarity to watching the game in contrast to actually playing it. Here is an analogy, find a sport that takes immense skill to play or do, say darts, or skateboarding. A skateboarder can't go to an underground market and purchase shoes that will do all the tricks for him or her, likewise a darts player can't wear magical gloves that give him or her perfect aim, why should a gamer receieve such benefit?
Perhaps technology is as big a curse as it is a gift. With the ability to make multidimensional environments with fully integral physical laws, and encorporate entities into them capable of killing eachother for points, there also comes the immoral ability to manipulate and take advantage of those programmed rules in ruthless pursuit of the points. The question now becomes how to make these laws strong enough that everyone must obey them. Or in programming logic, how to write code that is unhackable. Through many trials of anti cheating software, the pro-cheating community continually manages to find loopholes and exploit virtually every single anti cheating effort that has been made. Remarkably, game and console manufacturers such as Nintendo and Sony rarely encounter cheating issues within the console gaming industry, the only difference between PC and console being that consoles are external and a lot more intricuit to hack. This makes it much harder to widely distribute hacking software as it is on the internet for PC games. Perhaps the answer lies in the programming of the games themselves. Seeing as PC game cheating is a relatively new issue, this generation has been able to fully exploit games with minimal resistance in the way of anti cheating software. PC game cheating is not yet taken seriously, as PC gaming is deemed an activity in the pursuit of fun and not professionalism. The emergence of the CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League), OGL (Online Gaming League), Case's Ladder, and Quakecon, bring the element of reward for people with high skill level, which adds formality to PC gaming, deeming it a profession as well as a recreative activity. If PC Gaming is now a rewardable profession, why haven't we, as a whole, established anything in adversary to such discreditable activity. Presumably, when computerized gaming has reached such levels of popularity that is has established an international tournament equaling the olympics in importance, will people do anything to stop PC game cheaters in their pathetic tracks. Olympic athletes are tested for drugs, why shouldn't computers be tested for hacks.
Today, game hacking is an extremely trivial issue, there is very little documentation pertaining to the matter. As time progresses and the gaming industry itself increases in popularity, the issue should be addressed and dealt with accordingly. As for the avid online gamer, we're forced to bite the bullet, literally, in the head, every time. A depressing fate for those of us who have been gaming since gaming itself was created, and a travesty in the name of the human race in regards to its respect for rules and its lack of morality. In short, cheaters are skillless TOOLS.
