"Cheap" and "fair" in MP games

[Cyber Rat]

So,Mike Fahey's little rage article after getting curbstomped in RDR inspired this question in me:

 

"What do you consider unfair/cheap in MP games?"

 

If someone is spamming a certain move in a fighting game and beating you with it, is it fair? Is it cheap? One could argue that it makes the game dull, and of course, we play games for fun. But what if someone's fun takes into account winning as well? And if it's just one move being spammed over and over, shouldn't you take the effort and learn how to evade it?

 

If a weapon is clearly OP in the right hands, like say a sniper rifle or rocket launcher, should they be banned from use? It's pretty frustrating to keep getting killed by camping snipers or rocket spammers, but aren't those weapons available to you as well? If you feel revolted by turning to the "dark side" and using those cheap weapons, do you have any real right to complain when you get ganked with your pistol pride?

 

Whether you agree with it or not, this article is a good read: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

 

I like playing the underdog in fighting games, I won't lie. If I find a character I like, I play him no matter where the next tier list throws him or her. I will cringe when I see the "cheap" characters as my opponents, but I won't complain. I could have just as easily learned to play that character, but I didn't.

 

What's your stance on this? Any inspiring tales to share?

Edited December 30, 2010 by Cyber Rat

[docsfox]

Cheap kills to me are usaully something happening that has a one in a million chance of killing me. Examples: a granade being thrown randomly completly accross a map and exploding in my face or being headshot by a sniper in TF2 when you are a cloaked spy.

 

Other cheap kills come from things in games not working correctly. Like facestabs in TF2 or getting stuck inside objects in Counter Strike: Source

[Outkastprince]

Might be silly, but the rule among my brother and I anytime we together for a little Mario Kart was that the "flying blue shell" was off limits. It was a bit cheap, you could keep it for awhile and just used it at the end to pretty much take a person out of the race.

[TheMightyEthan]

To me something is "cheap" if it gives a very disproportionate advantage compared to the amount of skill required to use it. So a strategy/tactic/whatever that requires little to no skill to use, but is extremely difficult or impossible to beat, is cheap.

[Hot Heart]

So,Mike Fahey's little rage article after getting curbstomped in RDR inspired this question in me:

 

Wasn't his article about his experiences.

 

Originally, the guy who wrote that comment had actually been complaining about people ruining Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood because the game allowed them to win by sheer quantity of kills over quality. I believe Ethan had mentioned that point before, and I guess it speaks more for poor balancing on the developer's behalf.

[Outkastprince]

Everyone knows about Street Fighter, fireballs and Honda's moves are cheap in general. Back in the days it was a pain to battle anyone who kept spamming the crap out of fireballs, which seems to still be the case today.

[Bouchart]

80% of Command and Conquer 3 games I played online involved this one map that favored GDI over Nod considerably, with basecrawling and building mass juggernauts. That was cheap.

[mintycrys]

I'm going to repost my comment from that article, with a couple of additions. I actually gained about 15 followers in the last few hours (and had a few scrubs rage on me), and I suspect it was because of this post:

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Cheap. It's a loaded word. What does it mean, exactly? Well, the main issue is that it means many different things to many different people.

 

Some people think that "cheap" tactics are tactics that openly show that the user lacks skill to a great degree, and that their entire strategy relies on repeatedly utilizing a particular tactic that many people have a hard time dealing with. This causes many people who view this behavior to be "cheap" to become angry that somebody of obviously lesser skill defeated them in a MP match. Examples include nonstop projectile throwing in fighting games, noob tubing, dropping into armor lock repeatedly.

 

Some people think that "cheap" tactics are tactics whereby a player or group of players is allowed to pursue and hold an immediate advantage, without having the fairness in mind to allow adversaries to gain a foothold from which to launch a counterattack. Camping of all flavors comes to mind, here, whether it be holding a particular advantageous position or spawn camping, whether the developers encourage it or not.

 

The thing to note is that all of the aforementioned game mechanics or play styles I mentioned are completely legitimate. If a fighting game character has a move in his/her repertoire, why shouldn't you be able to use it as much as you want? Because it doesn't fall into somebody else's definition of what constitutes fair play? If a shooter does not have randomized spawn points and one team is clearly better than the other, why shouldn't they sit at your spawn point and shoot you as you respawn? The onus is on the developers to fix that, not on the players to change the way they play the game to accommodate poor game design, especially if your spawn-campers have to wait until you respawn in order to continue playing the game. It might be a little unfair, but if you're in that position in the first place, it's doubtful luck got you into it. You were likely outclassed from the outset, and the dodgy game design simply makes it even less fun. Find a less broken game to enjoy. If one weapon is far better than the other, you can feel as righteous and magnanimous as you please when you take the weaker weapon into battle and get blown to bits by someone carrying the better weapon. Just don't cry about it.

 

Lots of different people have their own ideas about how a game should be played, and when others do not adhere to their whims, they cry foul and become angry. This is where the concept of "cheap" comes from. "Cheap" is whatever you don't like at the moment you got killed. If it's somebody using better tactics than you, those tactics are cheap. If it's some weapon that kills you in a second flat, and you don't have that weapon, it's cheap. If someone did something to you that you either can't do, or don't know how to do, then that action is cheap. The definition of "cheap" is subject to change at a moment's notice. See, if you have an idea in your head about how a specific game should be played, and you won't accept any other variations or changes to that formula, please don't play online. Other people, far more skilled than you, have ideas as to how the game should played, and most of them involve beating you at the game you willingly went online to play. If they find that beating you online provides them with the fun that they're looking for, why should they deny their own fun just so that players looking to have their own brand of fun can run and jump around while bouncing explosives off of walls and into themselves?

 

The word "exploit" is another word that people have taken to very liberal definitions of. Just because you find something abusable and "exploit" it, doesn't necessarily mean that you are doing something wrong. You're just doing something that some people haven't quite figured out how to deal with, yet, and they'll whine at you for doing it. Glitching, however, is definitely a poor thing to do, and should be considered cheating if intentional, but if you're not exploiting a glitch, you're not doing anything wrong.

Edited December 30, 2010 by mintycrys

[TheMightyEthan]

Oh yeah, when I say "cheap" I'm definitely referring to the mechanics themselves, and you're right that the onus is on the developer to fix that. I do not blame players for utilizing mechanics, however stupidly designed they are, and I will do so myself at every opportunity.

 

*Edit* - The exception being in friendly games with my actual friends. Then I will agree to extra rules (like no lighting before the jump in Mario Kart) in the interest of keeping the game more fun.

 

The only situation I'll get mad at someone for using a "cheap" mechanic is if they previously agreed not to. But in the absence of such an agreement, any mechanic is fair game.

[Zenia-chan]

I agree with most of this, but I play games for fun. I don't really care so much about winning or losing. That being said, some games can be pretty frustrating when you just end up losing all the time, and others get pretty boring if it's easy to win every time. As for the means to the ends, I suppose I play somewhere in the middle. I'm not totally cheap, nor do I really see myself as a "scrub", but I sometimes do experiment with unconventional tactics in the hopes of discovering something effective. I don't really care if others use "cheap" tactics, as long as there's some way to counter it (and I'll probably figure that out too, eventually.)

[TheForgetfulBrain]

When I think 'cheap' I tend to think of MW2.

 

In a sense, the game was so balanced, it was unbalanced - because unless you were ridiculous, it was almost impossible to stay alive for a few minutes, since there was a ridiculous amount of ways to die, either from overpowered class combinations or constant killstreaks and grenades covering every inch of the map in instant death. Often, you'd spawn, turn around and die. Sometimes it felt like in order to well, you had to use tactics that felt cheap - such as camping or being one of those assholes running around and stabbing/shooting everyone in the back or spamming everything with explosives. It was a mess, but I still enjoyed it - it just had a massive ratio of deaths that felt cheap, as opposed to earned.

 

Black Ops felt a little more balanced in that sense, but it was still pretty bad.

 

Playing Bad Company: Vietnam though, I rarely get that sense.

 

The game feels balanced and far less about 'cheap' kills - they are rare in that game, and the gameplay becomes far more about skill. Perhaps it's also the larger maps? Random grenades are far less of an issue, and the game doesn't have anonymous, random death falling from the sky without pause.

 

Does time alive for a skilled player (camping excluded) = 'not cheap'? Not entirely (particularly depending on game modes), but it does feel like a good indicator for me in FPS MP games.

Edited December 31, 2010 by TheForgetfulBrain

[Commander Shepard]

 

This is war, gentleman. The enemy does not care what is fair and what is not. They want you dead, no matter what it takes. It is our solemn duty to go out there and dish it back out to them, whether it is noobtubes, AWP sniping, stun-lock combos, or one-hit knife kills that hit you in the pinky toe. Victory must be achieved at any cost! So go out there, lads, and spam those grenades, quick-scope those fools, shoot wildly through walls with penetrating perks, abuse those cooldowns that make the enemy foam at the mouth, because they would not hesitate to do the same to you!

 

Except you aimbot, wallhacking, fog-of-war cheating bastards. You can burn in hell. I don't care that "everybody" does it and that I should be forced to download a questionable cheating tool. (So many bad memories in the era of "Damnation" hack in Starcraft and Left 4 Dead)

[Mal]

Eh. I always try to break "cheap" tactics. It gives me something to aim for while I play. Sure it may mean I will take on a cheap tactic myself but I usually don't hang on to it. The one that stuck to me most was that rocket launch that the engineer had in BC2. I used that for my long range "sniping" weapon since the engineer didn't really had one... unless you chaneg the shotgun... lordy was that fun. Counter snipe a sniper with a shotgun?

 

SO yeah, I am fine with everything besides glitches and such like aimbot. Those folks I take down with extreme prejudice.

[Yantelope]

Usually I blame the developers more than I blame the players for playing "cheap". If a game has a move or weapon that is blatantly overpowered it should be the responsibility of teh developer to nerf said weapon. I know MW2 saw a lot of that in the early days of dual 1887 shotgun runners.

 

There's also the typical n00b tactics that people hate but I wouldn't classify those as cheap. The n00b tube in Modern Warfare doesn't require much skill but you're also not going to get a 15 kill streak using it because it's only got two shots. It's a bit annoying but it can be defeated by a skilled player pretty easily. N00bs may spam dragon punches in Street Fighter all day but they're still gonna get whooped by somebody who's skilled unless you're playing Dead or Alive 4 and you have Ryu Hyabusa who beats everything.

 

So TLDR: if a game is imbalanced I curse the developers and quit playing. Players themselves are going to play to win and that means exploiting whatever they can to win (super jumping in Halo 2), nothing is going to change that so don't hate the player hate the game.