Hot take: GUI mods are NOT cheats and we should not regulate their use (+ general discussion about cheat prevention)

[TheCJ]

darn, @WiseKind got time on his hands and a fire in his heart. If you were to become a programmer for 0ad, you could have such a positive impact on this project (not saying you aren't having a positive impact right now).

 

My good fella @WiseKind, I gotta say, we ain't gettin nowhere. This thread's lookin productive to ya? Must be cause' its yer first.

 

The main problem is precisely that we can not agree on what is cheating and what is not.

You are truly correct with what you said about us not having to subscribe to any specific notion of what constitutes cheating. Indeed, we can make up what cheating is to 0ad.

But to actually create a definition of "cheating in 0ad", atleast the core team would have to agree on that issue (and since they seem to listen to us lowly players, we all would have to agree). That will not happen, because we all like different aspects of the game and we all have different believes of what this game should become and different backgrounds, under which we interact with the game and its community.

 

The one thing we do agree about (even @WiseKind, the total freedom representative) is that cheating should not become widespread.

@WiseKind says only "stuff like revealing the map" (I know thats a sloppy phrase, you know what I mean) is a cheat and the best way to suppress that is by programming a different networking system, (with the goal of making "cheating" simply impossible).

Other people say that even extensive GUI changes (without any sort of automation) can be cheating, as it makes the game unfair. Obviously, "cheating" like that cannot be stopped entirely and a suppression needs certain measures, whose use @WiseKind disagrees with (saying the measures would inherently stop the game from being open source).

I imagine there are also some people that think GUIs are fine, as long as they do not train any units for you/build any buildings for you or smt similar (Im not talking about proGUI here, btw). The measures against this kind of "cheating" would again differ from the other two.

 

But to actually determine which measures should be taken (if any), we need to precisely formulate the issue (and agree that it is indeed an issue).

In so far this thread was a little helpful, as we got a pretty precise look into what @WiseKind believes is cheating and what should be done about that.

(For @WiseKind this thread was even more valuable, as he got to hear each of our standpoints.)

 

Now, to move on:

How would we decide on what "cheating" is in 0ad? 

In essence, when somebody talks about cheating, they mean any kind of modification that works against the concept of fair, competitive play, or would anybody disagree with that description?

If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should truly only be "in your head", meaning that the only relevant part of the game is in your decisions, and not at all in the execution of those decisions, then any GUI mod can never be cheating (up to the point where you let a script make decisions for you).

If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should include not only the decisions, but also their execution ("micro"), (as is the case in every other RTS), then any GUI mod that reduces the amount of inputs you have to give for the same result is cheating.

[guerringuerrin]

@Seleucids Yeka, why are you liking almost every message on this thread? 

[chrstgtr]

5 hours ago, WiseKind said:

Perhaps I have not been concise enough for you.

/thread

[WiseKind]

Thought I wasn't going to be back until the end of the week, but I can't sleep so I guess I'll say a few more things.

7 hours ago, TheCJ said:

The measures against this kind of "cheating" would again differ from the other two.

I don't think the measures for preventing scripted automation would be much different from the measures for preventing any other GUI change on the client side. I know about the specific examples that have been brought up as for how people were found to be using automation, but as a general principle, it's impossible to be completely sure that someone didn't use automation during a rated game, for the same reason that it's impossible to enforce a modder transparency requirement.

My main thing to say about scripted automation is that I think that there is a certain point in which a mod literally becomes capable of playing the game for you. At that point, it is no longer a GUI mod, and instead becomes a new A.I. player for the game. Then it becomes the discussion of "should a robot be allowed to compete in the lobby service?".

Personally, I do think that robots should be able to participate in anything that humans can, provided that they are competent enough, and that's a completely different extreme opinion that I hold, which is also based on freedom absolutism. I disagree with all captcha systems, and other anti-robot technology because I believe that at the end of the day, there are plenty of reasons to automate nearly anything one would do on the Internet. Anti-robot tech is mainly used to prevent overwhelming a network server with bogus requests, but I think that we should rely on other technologies to do this. I'm not going to go into much more detail here, because this is mainly for context.

But, when it comes to automation like ProGUI's auto-trainer, I see that this blurs the line between a simple GUI mod that doesn't automate any part of the game, and a full-blown A.I. client that can play the game competitively, without any user input whatsoever (you literally click the join button and then check back in an hour to see if you won). If we suppose, for the sake of argument, that the latter technology is problematic, then there should obviously be a limit to how much automation can be done. I disagree with this, but only because I believe that even an entire lobby account that's run by an A.I. wouldn't be an issue with me.

This context should help clarify my stance on automation, since I know that is the primary controversy surrounding GUI mods. But (and here's where I say once again that I haven't tried ProGUI yet), as you all have been describing, ProGUI's autotrainer works by taking as input the desired army composition, distributes the required training across all available structures, and starts each batch with a different value based on resource counts. If that is a fair assessment of ProGUI's autotrainer, then I would say that this isn't too far into the realm of automation, as it would still require significant strategic thinking and planning by the human player, in order to get the best use out of it. This is just a more in-depth analysis of an argument that I have already made more than once.

7 hours ago, TheCJ said:

In essence, when somebody talks about cheating, they mean any kind of modification that works against the concept of fair, competitive play, or would anybody disagree with that description?

I just think we need to be careful. Under that definition, it's easy to make the case that having a bigger monitor or something can be a cheat. This is why we need to draw the line somewhere, and acknowledge that not every circumstantial difference between players should be banned.

7 hours ago, TheCJ said:

If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should include not only the decisions, but also their execution ("micro"), (as is the case in every other RTS), then any GUI mod that reduces the amount of inputs you have to give for the same result is cheating.

I would really like a more in-depth definition of the word "micro" in order to truly understand this derivation. Previously I thought of "micro" as the smaller, more detailed choices that you make, which are not as noticeable when getting an overview of what is happening in a game.

When I am constructing a stone wall, I try to keep all of my builders on one side of the wall, so I don't have some of them trapped outside of my base when the wall is complete. I do this by issuing a "push order in front" action to move the units to one side of the wall while they are building, so that they will walk around and then continue.

When capturing an enemy civic center, I will use the line-drawing movement mechanic to draw a circle around the structure, and then queue the order to capture, so that the units will more quickly wrap around the structure (depending on the size of my army, I may be able to prevent garrisoning inside by covering the entire perimiter).

These are the kinds of decisions that I would consider "micro", and I do think they matter. However, I don't think automating them would be considered cheating, because of a point I made earlier. I notice that even when playing in vanilla, I am not really limited by my input speed. I am limited by my ability to concentrate and think ahead, but this is different. Whether I am using a mod or not, I will still be able to draw the circle around the civic center, and this will not take away precious time for clicking on something else. The mod just makes it easier and less annoying, but I still have to think about it.

Again, maybe the examples I have given are not what anyone else thinks of when they hear "micro", so I think an in-depth explanation of what that means will be helpful.

I do think that this game should have more of an emphasis on tactics and strategy, and should not be based on where exactly on the ground you click, or how fast you are able to click it, based on the paragraphs of the 0 A.D. vision saying that "First click wins" is a snare that will make 0 A.D. a worse game.

"Every other RTS" may be designed in such a way that the first click wins, or has much more of an advantage, but 0 A.D. treats this as a flaw and tries to avoid it by designing the game to be deeper than that. So far, I think they are succeeding.

 

@TheCJ, I would like to say that your previous post was very enlightening. I think you have a stellar understanding of my position and the current status of this thread. I don't mean to sound dismissive by addressing your counterarguments. It's just that if someone agrees with me, then what do I have to say to that?

A compromise

Even I am starting to feel the frustration in this thread. It seems that some people really strongly hold the position that the individual key presses on someone else's keyboard is part of the game, and insist that we should limit how other people are allowed to play our game.

I think the community would benefit from a compromise, where both viewpoints are equally respected. I don't think we are ever going to come to a complete agreement, so here's what I think we should do

• As far as the lobby TOS goes, the rule of no cheating should be clarified to say that cheating only happens when a player uses tools to break a game mechanic, such as fog of war. A.K.A. my definition of cheating. However:
• Individual hosts should be empowered to write their own rules for what should be allowed in their games, even in rated games. This could include 'no mods', or it could include 'no turtling' (i.e. never attacking the enemy and basically waiting the game out, which I think is fun but others may think is boring).
• It should be accepted that hosts who include their own rules should generally be responsible for enforcing their own rules. If an individual host finds out that another player broke their 'no mods' rule, they can ban that individual player from future games, but they will not be banned from the lobby. This is like saying that if you start spamming offensive memes on this forum, you get banned from the forum, but not the whole Internet.
• A convenience feature may be implemented in the lobby where hosts can list out what mods they allow, or even require, and clients will automatically honor those policies. Clients should not always disclose what mods are currently enabled for every host, but some hosts can require that mods be disclosed in order to connect to them, and the client can be programmed to automatically honor this.
  
  This should not be considered a security feature, as this would go against the principles of free software, but it should be a convenience feature so that the "what mods are allowed" conversation doesn't need to happen on every single match start.

I don't think the no-mods policy should be the global default, enforceable with a global ban, because that would present a tricky situation for hosts who want to welcome individual mod preferences.

If the other side insists that the no-mods policy should be global, then there could possibly be a further compromise where there are differnet game categories (don't use rated/unrated for this) for the different groups and whether or not they allow mods, and using mods in the wrong group could result in a ban (though, as described above, this would require using a modified engine, as the vanilla engine would have safeguards in place to prevent accidental violation).

There may be a different option where different lobby services are used for the different groups and their policies, if it turns out that we're such savages that these two opinions can't coexist at all. You would need to edit your user.cfg to switch lobbies, which it is possible to do, by the way.

I believe in freedom, first in foremost. I think that with this belief comes the acceptance that I cannot control what code is running on other people's computers, just like they shouldn't be able to control what code is running on my computer. But, just like all other free software supporters out there, I also accept that the vast majority of the Internet is irredeemably nonfree, and we must relegate ourselves to a small corner of the Internet in order to retain that perfect standard of freedom that we place on ourselves. But to me, the alternative, which is to accept a partially nonfree setup, is worse.

So I wouldn't mind if the 0 A.D. community is fragmented even further for the people who have different standards that they hold their games to. Personally, I don't even see fragmentation as a bad thing; it's good to allow the Internet to be diverse and decentralized, precisely because that way, we don't have to all agree on the same thing.

Let's just acknowledge that there is still what I would consider to be a severe critical vulnerability in 0 A.D. that allows anyone to bypass the fog of war and see the entire game state in a rated match, if they are so inclined. Can we at least all agree on that much? Please? It doesn't mean you need fiber internet just to play a 1v1, trust me.

[Seleucids]

14 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

Yeka, why are you liking almost every message on this thread? 

Because i think the post was well written and the author put in effort. 

[TheCJ]

10 hours ago, WiseKind said:

• As far as the lobby TOS goes, the rule of no cheating should be clarified to say that cheating only happens when a player uses tools to break a game mechanic, such as fog of war. A.K.A. my definition of cheating. However:
• Individual hosts should be empowered to write their own rules for what should be allowed in their games, even in rated games. This could include 'no mods', or it could include 'no turtling' (i.e. never attacking the enemy and basically waiting the game out, which I think is fun but others may think is boring).
• It should be accepted that hosts who include their own rules should generally be responsible for enforcing their own rules. If an individual host finds out that another player broke their 'no mods' rule, they can ban that individual player from future games, but they will not be banned from the lobby. This is like saying that if you start spamming offensive memes on this forum, you get banned from the forum, but not the whole Internet.

All of this essentially just means "Dont change anything"...

10 hours ago, WiseKind said:

A convenience feature may be implemented in the lobby where hosts can list out what mods they allow, or even require, and clients will automatically honor those policies. Clients should not always disclose what mods are currently enabled for every host, but some hosts can require that mods be disclosed in order to connect to them, and the client can be programmed to automatically honor this

... except maybe add a convenience feature, that lets hosts list what mods they allow.

I have no idea how you would add the "automatically honor those policies", as that is literally the same as adding some anti-cheat system, no? If the host declares "no mods" and you somehow force all clients that join to honor this policy, thats an anti-cheat system.

 

Ah, btw, I agree with @WiseKind. I believe that at this point in time, there is no change needed to address "cheating" in any way. Any energy spent on that would be better spent on improving the balance and performance, adding to the content (through maps, scenarios, civs) or just... playing the game.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I'm not going to continue to develop for or play a game that's riven by cheating. 

[Classic-Burger]

6 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I'm not going to continue to develop for or play a game that's riven by cheating. 

How do you avoid that if it is opensource?

[Genava55]

6 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I'm not going to continue to develop for or play a game that's riven by cheating. 

Sadly the means for cheating are disproportionate in comparison to the means to fight them.

[Genava55]

3 hours ago, Classic-Burger said:

How do you avoid that if it is opensource?

Opensource and linux compatible.

It is impossible to block all cheaters and too difficult for a small community.

However it is important to maintain the pure rejection and social shaming of people cheating on multiplayer games.

Ban them at sight.

Edited Friday at 09:41 by Genava55

[Stan`]

6 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I'm not going to continue to develop for or play a game that's riven by cheating. 

We're doing this for the 1500+ players playing the game each day, the 25k Ubuntu snap installs, the 300k download per year and the 150+ installs per day on Flathub.

[Classic-Burger]

2 minutes ago, Stan` said:

We're doing this for the 1500+ players playing the game each day, the 25k Ubuntu snap installs, the 300k download per year and the 150+ installs per day on Flathub.

Do all of them play multiplayer?

If that's multiplayer, the potential casual audience is larger.

[Stan`]

3 minutes ago, Classic-Burger said:

6 minutes ago, Stan` said:

 

Do all of them play multiplayer?

If that's multiplayer, the potential casual audience is larger.

No they do not. IIRC it's about 100 unique MP players per day. 

[Classic-Burger]

14 minutes ago, Genava55 said:

social shaming of people

It's hard to feel ashamed when the cheaters are shameless.

I think there is a need to foster a positive reputation among players.

[chrstgtr]

13 hours ago, Classic-Burger said:

Do all of them play multiplayer?

If that's multiplayer, the potential casual audience is larger.

It isn’t clear how many SPs there are or how long they play for. We do know that there are (at least) like 2K total players a day (split between SP and MP). But it isn’t clear how many of those players downloaded the game that day and are testing it out vs. how many of those players have been playing for multiple months.

No matter how you look at it, though, there is a huge retention problem if there are 300K downloads and we only observe a steady 2K players or so (i.e., no real growth in user count). It also means that some portion of that 2K player count is probably a stream new users that come play for a short time before they leave and are replaced by another new user that will only play for a short time. We also see this constant stream of new players in the forums where a new user comes along makes a few posts for a week or two and then disappears (sometimes forever)  

Personally, I suspect there are about an equal number of long-term SP and MP users, which reflects what we see on the forum. 

Edited Friday at 20:23 by chrstgtr

[TheCJ]

18 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

that's riven by cheating. 

what do you mean by that? Sorry, english is not my first language. Google says "riven by" means something like "split apart"?

Do you have the impression that our community is falling apart because of cheating?

[DIYARAKUZA]

21 hours ago, Stan` said:

No they do not. IIRC it's about 100 unique MP players per day. 

I'm one of the non-MP players  I don't like serious competition and putting in effort just to win. I prefer something lighthearted and beautiful I could amuse myself with as a relaxing activity, for which 0AD is one of my favorite choices. If I would ever play multiplayer, it would be with someone I'm quite familiar with so I could spend some quality time with them. In my opinion this game has much greater potential and I believe it is possible to develop it in ways that support all kinds of players, not just those who play multiplayer regularly.

For example, attention could also be given to campaigns, innovative different game types and ways to experience life and politics of the ancient world, like what @wowgetoffyourcellphone has done with Delenda Est. That's why I believe 0AD has the potential to become something greater than classic RTS games by integrating new and unique concepts into the gameplay. I'm sure the vast majority of players would be very excited to experience something like that, and you could let multiplayers have their cake too (sans cheating, of course) 

 

Edited Saturday at 04:52 by DIYARAKUZA

[Classic-Burger]

1 hour ago, DIYARAKUZA said:

That's why I believe 0AD has the potential to become something greater than classic RTS games by integrating new and unique concepts into the gameplay.

We have to take advantage of the fact that AoE is not having a good moment.

Companies aren't taking the risk of investing, and the video game industry in general is in a bad spot.

Therefore, I believe that Microsoft and World Edge are not going to take any more risks and are receiving criticism from many non-conformist players.

[Classic-Burger]

10 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

new user comes along makes a few posts for a week or two and then disappears (sometimes forever)  

It depends on a lot of things. What I like about 0 AD is that it's unique, and it's not easy to put down. There are people who have been away from this game for years, and there are people who would like to hear about new features.

There are people who abandon it because RTS games have learning curves.It is not a popular genre.

Casual players are the ones who spread the game the most since they are the majority in all video games.

[chrstgtr]

19 minutes ago, Classic-Burger said:

It depends on a lot of things. What I like about 0 AD is that it's unique, and it's not easy to put down. There are people who have been away from this game for years, and there are people who would like to hear about new features.

There are people who abandon it because RTS games have learning curves.It is not a popular genre.

Casual players are the ones who spread the game the most since they are the majority in all video games.

I'm just talking about what the user base most likely looks like. When you have hundred of thousands of new installs/downloads and virtually no observable user growth then you have a retention problem. That is obvious. With how many downloads/installs we have, I think it is pretty likely that most new players play the game for an extremely short period of time (because it is too difficult--learning curve that a better tutorial could help with) or never play it at all (because there isn't a campaign mode--more on that later).

It's often said that the SP community is larger. But there is virtually no evidence to support that. The inverse is largely true too. 

It's been said many times, but the SP experience needs to improve if we want the user base to grow. Some of those SPs will then convert to MP, which will cause the MP base to grow too.

I think a better AI and campaign mode are the obvious ways to improve the SP experience. A dumb AI means that most players will eventually get bored by the game because it is too easy. I don't think I need to explain why a campaign mode is needed. 

One thing that is almost certain is that the retention problem will not be fixed by new features. New players are much more likely to be initially overwhelmed than wanting for a new spy functionality (or whatever). 

[Classic-Burger]

22 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

because there isn't a campaign mode--more on that later).

The campaigns generate videos on YouTube and in quite a lot of them.

[Classic-Burger]

22 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

It's often said that the SP community is larger. But there is virtually no evidence to support that. The inverse is largely true too. 

It is an assumption that 0AD being an RTS game has more casual games.because all RTS have higher casual audiences than competitive ones.

The only difference is that 0 AD doesn't have any content geared toward that audience.

22 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

I think a better AI and campaign mode are the obvious ways to improve the SP experience. A dumb AI means that most players will eventually get bored by the game because it is too easy. I don't think I need to explain why a campaign mode is needed

In most RTS the AI are not very smart.The complexity is given by the map and the resources in addition to being an asymmetric challenge.

 

22 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

One thing that is almost certain is that the retention problem will not be fixed by new features. New players are much more likely to be initially overwhelmed than wanting for a new spy functionality (or whatever). 

I highly doubt it, gamers always want new things to test.

Obviously performance and quality in controlling units and play helps a lot.

That's why new installments are expected, with new civs in Age of Empires.

People want the same old stuff but with new features...But at the same time people want a classic burger than a new mushroom bacon  cheeseburger...

You get it? I mean, it's not just the novelty itself, but also how all these mechanics work together.

Although here the conversation started talking about cheats online.

I don't know why people aren't honest about something that brings you nothing but fun.

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, Classic-Burger said:

The campaigns generate videos on YouTube and in quite a lot of them.

It's not a full campaign mode. It lacks a lot of hallmarks of a classic campaign mode too. It was only a side project for one of the devs. 

1 hour ago, Classic-Burger said:

It is an assumption that 0AD being an RTS game has more casual games.because all RTS have higher casual audiences than competitive ones.

"Competitive" doesn't mean SP. Most MP games aren't "competitive." There just isn't anything to suggest the long-term SP audience is larger than the MP audience. 

1 hour ago, Classic-Burger said:

In most RTS the AI are not very smart.The complexity is given by the map and the resources in addition to being an asymmetric challenge.

I don't know how long you've been playing. But the AI for 0AD is really dumb. It literally doesn't know how to use all the buildings. It attacks the closest/building and then follows it until it kills it. There are literally videos online where players exploit how dumb AI is to win 1v7 while only making women. That isn't an AI that can retain many long-term SPs because once you get decent at the game it very quickly becomes too easy and boring. 

4 hours ago, Classic-Burger said:

I highly doubt it, gamers always want new things to test.

Obviously performance and quality in controlling units and play helps a lot.

That's why new installments are expected, with new civs in Age of Empires.

People want the same old stuff but with new features...But at the same time people want a classic burger than a new mushroom bacon  cheeseburger...

You get it? I mean, it's not just the novelty itself, but also how all these mechanics work together.

Although here the conversation started talking about cheats online.

I don't know why people aren't honest about something that brings you nothing but fun.

You, again, have absolutely zero basis for this. There are literally hundreds of thousands of downloads/installs. Yet the observable user count doesn't go up. That means most users only for an extremely short period of time. So short that most users cannot possibly learn all the features that exist. I do not understand how you can possibly think adding more features will retain more users when the typical user hasn't discovered most of what already exists. To them there are no "old features." Everyone wants a game where it's mechanics work together.