Hello
Please read the whole thing before commenting. I see that many comments are made about things that I explicitly mention so please read thoroughly.
This is my first post here. I've mostly been lurking here and on Reddit but I thought I'd throw this out there to the more dedicated players. Apologies if this has been discussed before but the search functionality did not yield fruitful results. Above all else I hope that I placed this thread in the right place.
This post is about a certain type of mods that provide a clear visual aid to the player that may give them an edge over other players. The ones that I can think of are Range Mod and that block mod where everything is very blocky (don't recall the name). I guess there are many additional ones out there, and one could easily create many more I believe. (For instance, I think it should be quite easy to make a mod that highlights wall segments that are not connected to at least two other wall segments - effectively making holes less frequent.) So I am not talking about actual _cheats_ but more about the ones that provide clear visual benefit over the regular game. (But "where do we draw the line?")
My concern is the consequences of our beloved game gaining popularity quickly. The RTS genre is, perhaps unexpectedly, gaining traction supported by larger S-tier/high prize pool tournaments. That is great! But it also means that all downsides of large eSports come into play. Most notably toxicity and cheating. Focusing on the latter, I fear that the freedom in "mods" may cause unfair advantage in the future. Sure, one could argue that "because everyone is free to use mods, it is a fair competition", but is that really what we want? Being able to completely overhaul the game to get every slight advantage? I'd much rather see the game being played without any of such mods. (But "where do we draw the line?")
In the end, what I would match prefer to see is a system where it is possible to allow/disallow mods when creating a custom game. this way, the host of the tournament can only allow a predefined set of mods that was agreed upon beforehand (e.g. small trees, improved grid). I am not sure how "hackable" that would be, but this is just a starting point.
The intention of this topic is to have a discussion about how "dangerous" mods can be in a tournament settings - not only the current mods, but any ones that can be created with the tools at hand. How do we draw the line on what is an acceptable mod and what is cheating, should tournaments be able to decide which mods one uses, and so on.
Please read the whole thing before commenting. I see that many comments are made about things that I explicitly mention so please read thoroughly.
This is my first post here. I've mostly been lurking here and on Reddit but I thought I'd throw this out there to the more dedicated players. Apologies if this has been discussed before but the search functionality did not yield fruitful results. Above all else I hope that I placed this thread in the right place.
This post is about a certain type of mods that provide a clear visual aid to the player that may give them an edge over other players. The ones that I can think of are Range Mod and that block mod where everything is very blocky (don't recall the name). I guess there are many additional ones out there, and one could easily create many more I believe. (For instance, I think it should be quite easy to make a mod that highlights wall segments that are not connected to at least two other wall segments - effectively making holes less frequent.) So I am not talking about actual _cheats_ but more about the ones that provide clear visual benefit over the regular game. (But "where do we draw the line?")
My concern is the consequences of our beloved game gaining popularity quickly. The RTS genre is, perhaps unexpectedly, gaining traction supported by larger S-tier/high prize pool tournaments. That is great! But it also means that all downsides of large eSports come into play. Most notably toxicity and cheating. Focusing on the latter, I fear that the freedom in "mods" may cause unfair advantage in the future. Sure, one could argue that "because everyone is free to use mods, it is a fair competition", but is that really what we want? Being able to completely overhaul the game to get every slight advantage? I'd much rather see the game being played without any of such mods. (But "where do we draw the line?")
In the end, what I would match prefer to see is a system where it is possible to allow/disallow mods when creating a custom game. this way, the host of the tournament can only allow a predefined set of mods that was agreed upon beforehand (e.g. small trees, improved grid). I am not sure how "hackable" that would be, but this is just a starting point.
The intention of this topic is to have a discussion about how "dangerous" mods can be in a tournament settings - not only the current mods, but any ones that can be created with the tools at hand. How do we draw the line on what is an acceptable mod and what is cheating, should tournaments be able to decide which mods one uses, and so on.
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