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

[Seleucids]

7 hours ago, victorcrimea said:

While I'm against "wild west" in competitive gaming (in extremes it will become a challenge of automation tools). I completely agree with the incentive to make game fair by-design.

1. In order to make game fair and truly transparent it is essential to play competitive matches without fog of war. I understand it is not THAT fun, but at least it eliminates a possible map reveal hack.

2. I do not agree with the quote above that sharing only relevant state is not possible and here is where I come from: I can easily play 0ad game via Parsec(remote desktop application). So my host computer simulates and renders 0ad, captures frames and sends me only video stream which is limited to 10 mbit/s. Total video stream lag is 20ms (encode 7ms, network(LAN) 13ms, decode 10ms) and game is very much playable. Which is an extreme edge case showing that sending only relevant information is possible. So let's derive a useful solution from that: if two players Alice and Bob want to play a very important competitive match I could host a game for them on my computer. Running two vanilla instances of 0ad, and give them access via remote desktop(be it parsec or whatever else). Thus they won't be able to reveal what's under fog of war in any way and their computers will never access the full simstate.

This last example shows that it is ultimately possible to do that. I assume that video stream(knowing nothing about it's content) is way less optimized that the game could be. I also totally understand that my network is low latency and supporting less reliable connections is harder, but again if you look at a video stream it gets jelly and pixelated when network has hiccups, it doesn't make game OOS.

@bb_ what do you think about this?

Taking your idea further: some "fair" third guy with an OP computer hosts 2 virtual machine instances each with a 0ad process running inside. Then each VM is made accessible 1 player via parsec or TeamViewer or whatever. Both will then have to play according to the rules that you have set up in your VM.

And then the latency and network lags kick in...

[bb_]

7 hours ago, victorcrimea said:

network(LAN) 13ms

One of the problems in the above suggestion is in the above. This might work on a LAN, but one should consider the case when the server is on the other side of the globe than the client. In that case the ping becomes much higher (at least 133ms since that is the time that light would need to travel the distance, so it probably will be 250-300ms, try https://www.meter.net/tools/world-ping-test/). This will give noticeable lag on moving the camera, opening any menu, highlighting units etc.

Secondly, I doubt many players will have a computer able to compute the rendering for all players and observers. Sure one can come up with neutral servers who are able to compute it for small matches (and yes dedicated/headless servers are definitely something wanted), but having a reliable ecosystem for this is another (financial among other things) issue.

[Deicide4u]

Any tool, be it GUI mod or any other mod, that helps one player play the game faster than the other player, is cheating.

In RTS games, time is a very important factor. It's in the name. If something helps me play faster than you and it's not an official part of the game, then that something is a "cheat" tool.

I think this is obvious.

[Emacz]

3 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Any tool, be it GUI mod or any other mod, that helps one player play the game faster than the other player, is cheating.

In RTS games, time is a very important factor. It's in the name. If something helps me play faster than you and it's not an official part of the game, then that something is a "cheat" tool.

I think this is obvious.

I don't completely agree... GUI makes me faster cause i can diffiernciate between berries and trees better.  The colors are more clear.  So for older people, people with poor vision etc, I think gui is necessary to play the game well.  If the base game wanted to make brighter more vibrant colors then I wouldn't need gui

Are we also saying that Autociv is cheating because it allows for more hot keys? hot keys tend to be very important in all RTS game no? But if the base game doesn't have standard hot keys, people are going to make their own.