Happy Friday! I thought I’d start the weekend by trying to rile everyone up in a debate.
Do you consider using a crosshair overlay (adding a center dot to your aim where the game doesn’t include one) cheating?
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Personally, I’d put this one in the cheating column. On the cheating scale, it’s definitely one of the most benign cheats, (I’d argue it doesn’t even provide much of an advantage), but it still constitutes using an outside method to gain an upper hand over other players.
Now, you can add a crosshair overlay to games with a third party app, or you can get some monitors with it as a built-in setting. Or you can even just go super old-school, and stick a bit of tape or blue-tac on your monitor as an aiming device.
None of these methods are actually altering any game files, which leads people to argue that it isn’t cheating; its no different from upping the contrast of your monitor to see in darker games, or using a fancy mouse with better precision to get an edge, they say.
And I understand that side of the argument. I can almost see it from that point of view. But most games also have a brightness/contrast or mouse sensitivity slider in their settings, so I’d argue that adjusting those elements to personal preference falls within the game designer’s scope of what they wanted possible in their game (even if upping the contrast to see enemies in shadows is outside the spirit of the intention).
But if a game doesn’t provide you with a persistent “here is exactly where your bullet is aiming” reticle, it would be because the game designers chose not to include one for gameplay reasons. For instance, sometimes only the scope of a weapon provides that much pinpoint accuracy, meaning you’re balancing precision for the smaller field of view of a zoomed-in scope.
However if you can always track your center point, and you’re now able to hip fire with greater accuracy without the scope/ADS, that feels like you are operating at an advantage beyond how other people may be playing.
Now obviously, if you stick a piece of tape on your monitor, no one is going to know. There is not an anti-cheat system on the planet that will catch that. So you can do this with impunity. But I don’t think the lack of looming consequences lessens the fact that this is, no matter how miniscule or irrelevant (and it is, to be sure, such a barely-over-the-line cheat), still an attempt to play unfairly. In spirit.
That’s my thought on the subject. I know the people that believe in its use can argue passionately in its defense, so I’d love to hear your opinions on crosshair overlays via external methods.
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if you have to modify the game so it’ll fit your tastes, while the option is not present in the game, then it’s cheating, play it in the same f*cked up way as everyone else lmao
or draw a dot on the center of your monitor so you don’t get caught XD
Despite the downvotes you seem to be getting, I agree with you. Everyone should be playing on the same level, as much as possible. When you add modifications not intended by the developers, you *are* cheating. And that goes for downloaded mods, or crosshairs on your monitor, or special programmable controllers, even. And there’s exceptions, of course. Depending on the game, the community at large, and the devs. A good rule of thumb, I find, is asking myself if it would be allowed in an in-person tournament. If certain mods are taken as given that everyone will have, then it’s… Read more »
“special programmable controllers”
Thank you for your garbage opinion that disabled gamers are all cheating. ?
Most people would take the kind road and assume he means special programmable controllers used by non-disabled players to gain an advantage
Players who cheat are disabled! They have a handicap “they can’t play so they ruin it for others”
I don’t thing that’s what the dude meant. I think he meant non disabled players using those to amp up their game experience.
So if I program an arduino “keyboard” / “mouse” that click-grinds while I’m AKF, that’s not cheating?
That’s not a keyboard. It’s an Arduino pretending to be a keyboard.
I draw the line at firing input events that cannot be directly 1:1 mapped to a player input.
And in today’s episode of “purposefully looking for things to get offended by”…
Woke cult acolytes who exist to create imaginary offenses to be outraged by are a disease to society and a blight on public discourse.
I don’t care if this offends you. Sometimes the truth hurts.
Woke-cult acolyte haters who exist to become outraged by those who exist to create imaginary offenses to be outraged by are also a disease to society and an additional blight on public discourse.
Now quick, someone add another level to the chain and implicate me! 😀
Woke-cult acolyte hater haters who exist to become outraged by those who hate those who exist to create imaginary offenses to be outraged by are also a disease to society and an additional blight on public discourse.
You ask, we deliver! 😀
Well put.
The very first thing I said was, “Everyone should be playing on the same level, as much as possible.”
I didn’t think it needed to be said, but “situations where disabled players need specialized controllers to be able to play a game they otherwise could not” is *not* what I’m talking about.
As a disabled person who uses a mouse with a gazillion buttons, I fully understood you were talking about people who want to use what a lot of people consider cheats and not talking about people who have to use them. I also agree with SomeoneHadToSayIt.
So you’re a disabled gamer who is also cheating. Thanks for letting us know
M’lord doth protest too much
Omg you are such a brave hero! Be sure to SS this and post it on Twitter so all of the other virtue signalers can pat your back… while patting their own back for patting yours.
Where did you pull that from the comic? Pair this comic with your argument in an actual disability help forum, and see how far your crap flies…
Did someone press r1 while moving because this longest jump of the century
I like your qualifier of “would it be allowed in tournament play?” That to me is the most telling if something is a cheat or not.
Or get a monitor with a crosshair overlay option.
Even back in the CS 1.4~1.6 days it was pretty common for people to put a bit of cello tape on their monitor and put a dot on it (or use whiteboard marker) to give themselves a crosshair while using the scout. As it had full unscoped accuracy while standing still.
No modification of the game. So according to your “definition” that was not a cheat. But it had the exact same result.
I agree, equality should be the primary factor here. But also, devs? Stop doing this. If you want it to be hard to aim in a certain mode, make the shot have random jitter. Overwatch of all games lets you put whatever crosshair you want on all weapons and you always have a center dot. Doesn’t mean it’s going to be where the bullet lands due to whatever you’re doing. Keeping pinpoint accuracy but just removing the reticle seems ASKING for this type of modification to gain an upper hand. Or people practicing for hours to get a feel for… Read more »
Borderlands also has it in terms of every gun having a certain level of accuracy as well as badass ranks to bump up your accuracy and Gaige’s Anarchy ability (Your shots get more powerful at the cost of decreased accuracy). As for the original question: Eh. Arguments on both sides up to and including physical disabilities. Also, I can’t help but feel that this is the video game equivalent of “first world problems”.* If it’s not an actual gaming tournament, I’d have trouble getting riled over someone beating me because they have a crosshair where I don’t. Is it cheating?… Read more »
I actually drew a dot on the game tv for the Star Trek Generations gameboy game which we played on the snes emulator
The flying missions were impossible otherwise
I mean, this is similar logic to one of my arguments against allowing PC/console crossplay. No matter what you try to argue, PC will always have an edge because they can alter things others can’t, at least console players all play in the same level of playing field. Change settings so you can see people hiding in a bush that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see? cheating in my books, but that’s allowed on PC, however not on console. So allowed on one but not the other is cheating if you pit them against each other despite technichally being… Read more »
The thing is people will define “cheating” in different ways. To some it’s only making actual alteration to the game files, and anything external is fair game. To others, it will be anything giving an advantage that’s not readily available in the game as is. And to me and other people, it’s anything that’s simply contrary to the spirit of the game and of fun and fair competition, which is admittedly very subjective unless the devs took a very strong stance about it. I’d argue that ANY change made in or outside the game to gain an advantage that’s not… Read more »
The contrast thing is debatable. Not all monitors/screens/TVs/projectors have similar characteristics, so a game designed for one screen may be unplayable on another without adjusting the settings.
oh absolutely, I don’t believe for one second that people shouldn’t be allowed to change those settings.
But I do believe people changing them to the extremes with the clear aim to remove a whole gameplay aspect (instead of simply trying to make the game actually playable for them on their own monitor) and give themselves an edge in competitive games are sorely lacking in sportsmanship and doing something akin to cheating in my mind.
That’s why you use the in game brightness settings, and the provided images, to tweak your image back into line with what the developers expected people to be seeing.
If you instead tweak brightness and contrast to completely remove shadows and thus any intended stealth mechanics in the game, you’re cheating.
Stealth mechanics should not rely on monitor contrast to be set up properly to work. False color processing (especially things like solarization or wild curves) may then change things which are hardly detectable to very visible outlines.
> If a game is designed to play around darkness and low visibility, making a change that negate this is cheating to me, at least in spirit. I’d argue that if a game depends on monitor contrast being properly set up for these features to work, it’s bad design. Testers will run the game on a properly calibrated screen, frequently on an OLED in a darkened room where the infinite contrast and very defined differences between the smallest black steps will be immediately visible. Contrast (pardon the pun) with a monitor in a brightly lit room (or a lower contrast… Read more »
Oh, absolutely agree on the bad design thing !
And you’re right, the best (and probably only) way to circumvent that kind of behaviour is to entirely avoid tying game mechanics to effects that can be affected by game settings in multiplayer games (in single player games can have some more leeway on this since you’re only affecting yourself).
But I don’t believe it changes the fact that doing this kind of change in settings in games that implement it wrong with the sole purpose of giving yourself an edge is a type of despicable cheating, at least to me.
How the hell else are you supposed to make a game around hiding in the dark but to use monitor contrast?
The game should provide solutions to avoid this kind of cases, e.g. not having the player shooting at the center of the screen, but where the weapon aims (Arma does this), not looking into shadows by upping brightness etc.
Yeah that’s pretty much why when I read “tape on the screen” I went “WTF would that be useful for ^^”
it seems trivial to add a mechanic whereby when hip firing (for example), the probability of the bullet hitting the exact centre-point of the screen is reduced
Its a common thing for years for games to have that. CoD for example has had it pretty much forever.
The other thing Singulativ mentioned was something they put in stuff like Insurgency (both) and Red Orchestra (iirc) as well as an upcoming change in Tarkov, where the gun moves slightly out of sync with the player so you actually need to pay attention to where the barrel is pointing, making crosshairs useless.
Fun note: the AH-9 attack helicopter in ArmA3 has an aiming dot sloppily painted onto the cockpit glass for when you fire unguided rockets
I remember people pasting a tiny piece of tape at the center of their CRT monitor, to more easily no-scope with the AWP in CS1.6.
Definitely got you disqualified at LAN party competitions when spotted.
I just remembered there was also a glitch, where if you Alt-Tab’d fully out of the game, and then back in, your mouse pointer would be visible at the center of the screen (BTW, to this day, FPS games simply lock your mouse pointer to the center of the screen and make it invisible). The pointer would stay visible until you clicked (i.e. shot), so you could use it to no-scope aim once with the AWP or Scout, before needing to Alt-Tab again to reactivate it, which obviously leaves you blind and unable to act for at least a second… Read more »
Take some duct tape and an edding like we did or get off my LAN!
If this would be a problem, the developers could just “move” the center a a short distance. Could even move it a bit in regular intervals. Wouldn’t affect a person much I guess, but would invalidate aid systems.
I think that would affect both cheaters and non-cheaters.
I avoid this problem by not playing multiplayer games, not because of cheating but because of all the drama.
I’m with you here. Give me co-op or give me a good AI. On a side note I’m really bothered by games that fail to make a decent AI for single player stuff, and instead, just allow the computer to cheat. Civ3 is my best example – beyond Regent difficulty, the computer does things that are impossible just because they couldn’t actually bother to make the AI any smarter.
I’ve certainly cheated in single player to get through a tough spot. GOD mode in Duke Nukem 3D just to get to the end. Extra moves in XCom, just to get to the end.
But cheating with an overlay or wallhack in multiplayer? What’s the point? Just to see your name at the top of the board? If that is the case, you need to turn off the computer and get help.
While originally I was on the side of considering it not as cheating and done some mental gymnastics to validate my opinion, especially as I did draw a dot on my monitor in the old days while playing CS 1.6 (scout reasons), Ultimately I considered the following scenario: Let’s say there’s a LAN tourney, we can stick with aforementioned CS, and one of the contestants is caught doing the exact thing I described. Would he be in trouble? Answer that yourself but IMO it’s a strong yes. The only case I can think of where it would be a ‘no’… Read more »
Ha, I see someone already mentioned that exact scenario :D.
Can you balance that to the brightness/contrast question?
IE: If you were at a tourney and someone saw your monitor was not adjusted to provide the right level of darkness. Would you also be in trouble?
I would put that in the same category as resolution change and no one’s having problems with it.
Plus it’s a double edged sword. When you go to a bright location you’re at a disadvantage.
LAN center operator here.
We actually just ran a large Valorant tournament about a week ago. Everyone was required to use our PCs and monitors (we provide 144Hz monitors, but didn’t want to hear crying about people having their own 240Hz etc) but are always welcome to bring their own peripherals and tweak brightness/contrast/LCD modes/resolution/nVidia control panel settings to their heart’s desire.
I effectively did this in tarkov. Each time I made an nvidia recording of the game, afterwards it left my mouse on the screen. So I’ll have a giant, white, slightly jittery moving triangle-with-a-stick-up-its-ass smack in the center of the screen. Apparently there isn’t really a fix to it, so I just changed the mouse to a very thin crosshair so it doesn’t bother me so much anymore.
If “adjust contrast” and using specialized equipment are shooing out a crosshairoverlay then they should move over the line as well. as i read other comments, if the game is too dark in some places, nightvision or some other means should be available for the players to circumvent it. Modifying the brightness of the screen is in a sense cheating too. There are plenty of games that ask you to “adjust the picture so the picture x is barely visible” and players dont do that correctly, it is to avoid the game how it is meant to be played from… Read more »
Jumping on this to add my two cents. Let’s use PUBG as an example. Was cranking down the graphics so bushes didn’t appear cheating? It meant people who thought they were hidden could now be seen. Dead by Daylight had similar problems with the graphics options.
Cranking up the brightness also meant that in many games with traps they would appear more obvious to the player. If something as benign as a crosshair overlay is cheating, then altering the graphics or video to achieve a goal that is at odds with the developers’ desired gameplay should be considered cheating.
what fps doesnt have a crosshair?
Many games that want the realism. FPS have had an aiming action almost forever. In those games, hip-firing should not be accurate, because IRL it isn’t. Some games will actively increase bullet spread when firing from hip. Others do hide the crosshair when not actively aiming, or rely on ironsights and scopes. Some do both. And while aiming you usually move slower, your field of vision gets narrower and takes a bit of time to bring up the gun before you can shoot, overall making you an easier target in exchange for that accuracy.
There are tons of games that don’t have such. My husband has made me play Hell Let Loose with him lately, for example, and that game does not have crosshairs; either you fire from the hip and basically guess where you’re hitting, or you use the actual iron sights on the weapon itself to aim through.
Honestly… I’d say, “slippery slope”. There are two trends I’d like to bring up: Anticheat = Rootkit, and Covid home-studying introducing proctoring. Please note that I’m writing specifically from a PC-POV because those are devices that alongside gaming are used for work, finance, taxes, and as the P in PC illustrates: are personal. Heck: usually they are the most sensitive of sensitive devices, making security a must as citizen service numbers/government logins/work/patented designs/etc can be on there: I can honestly say that my gaming PC often does run GIS/CAD kind of stuff. The rampant race between cheaters and anti-cheat created… Read more »
There are and have been in the past, some games that I have played, where the ToS spelled out what are considered cheats, and did/do so pretty thoroughly. I remember there was one game that spelled out using after-market overlays and/or keyboard macros to be cheating. If the game you are playing calls out those things as cheating, then using them is cheating, period. Using anything else that isn’t specifically called out, but is extremely closely related to things that are, such as the ToS not allowing third-party overlays, but you are using a monitor-based overlay (or tape), then I… Read more »
Thankfully, the whinging of a dev about overlays or what have you is irrelevant. They can’t detect it and they can’t do anything about it. Tough titty.
Yeah but thankfully YOU know you couldn’t actually make the grade without cheating.
It must suck to be second rate.
Not only can I inevitably kick ass at the game, but I’ll slap an overlay on anyway if I feel like it works just a bit better. :^)
Don’t people do this already in real life with scopes with range markings on them?
But they still have to aim through the scope and estimate the distance correctly to use the respective range mark. They do not fire their scoped rifles from the hip.
Bit of the Devil’s Advocate for both sides of this, some (MMO) games don’t have features that they do allow addons to.. well… add on, ESO for instance has many legitimate mods. Some people feel like they’re a cheat while others point to the fact that they’re supported by the game.
However if a game doesn’t allow a mod then imo yes it is a cheat
Well then let’s up the ante. How about using a high end rig over a slower computer? Higher FPS means you can react better and faster then someone who struggles to have the game running. Has nothing to do with the game files, just the rig that runs it. If you ask me, that is the same kind of benefit. Therefor, is it cheating? No. Is it an advantage? Yes. Is it an unfair advantage, that depends. If it’s during a tournament (where everyone should have equal opportunity and the only factor that determines if you stand a chance of… Read more »
Different situation, I think. It’s not so much that the person who has a high end rig has an advantage; it’s that the low-end rig is at a disadvantage. The person with the high-end rig is playing the “ideal” way, the way that the developers likely envisioned their game played.
Any non-console game, be it PC or mobile, has to deal with their player base playing the game on vastly different hardware. That’s the nature of the beast. It’s not cheating if there’s no “correct” hardware. It just means that the barrier to entry for competitive play is higher.
I dunno, the whole “adjust constrast so much that you can see in shadows” thing sounds like just as much of a cheat to me as the crosshair thing. Most games have a brightness/contrast slider in their settings, but it exists to help dial your monitor, which is likely different from the developer’s monitor, back into the range the developer expected it to be in. They almost always have the on screen logos and instructions to adjust the slider until the image is barely visible or whatever. It’s there to make sure your shadows are just as shadowy as every… Read more »
What about people just having better monitors with deeper blacks and darker rooms so they see more detail even when adjusted “honestly?” Conversely, what about players that are in environments where the level of ambient light varies wildly, rendering any golden calibration constantly out of date? Do we have to add light meters to meet competitive fairness standards? This is a definition of cheating that has literally no bounds and no way of even reliably measuring let alone legislating play conditions. The onus is on developers design gameplay around minimizing these impacts, and beyond that just gotta suck it up… Read more »
Well. This clearly is up to everyones personal oppinion.
And this complicates things. So for me personally things are cheating if they are against the TOS.
Doesn’t mean I do like or do what others do and is not meantioned in the TOS.
But considering everything cheating that is not already available in the game and considering everything that is not gets hazy if considering monitor contrast and things.
Speaking as the dev for a RedM server, who has disabled the aiming reticle, its not cheating imo. its shitty, but if all it takes to “cheat” is some whiteboard marker on your monitor, its not a cheat.
If the game specifically removes crosshairs as part of the challenge, then yes, it is cheating. You also gain an advantage over players that is entirely skill independent. Take counting cards: if you have this skill you have way better chances at Black Jack. It’s not cheating imo because you use no outside means and it is comparable to practicing shots without crossair. Now if you bring a notebook to write down the cards dealt, that’s cheating. You use a tool that is not part of your aquired skill and it’s only one step removed from having a computer play… Read more »
Outside of PvP games, I really don’t care about the game designer’s scope of what they wanted possible in their game. I think at some point designers need to take a step back and give a game to the audience, its consumer. When you buy a painting or sculpture, it is yours to do with as you please. Why are video games now so different?
While I assume the discussion here is really only about PvP games, it shouldn’t need to be said yet I’m thankful someone did.
It does us well to remember that our gaming overlords are not in fact overlords but actually only have as much authority as we give them – and they deserve none whatsoever.
I dunno, I guess I’d classify it as cheating, but at the same time, it’s such a minor thing that I just don’t care. Typically the people who cheat go for something much more involved than…adding crosshairs to a game. If you suck at the game, you’ll stick suck even with the crosshairs, so it’s not even like it’ll really make much of a difference, like e.g. whenever I’ve played Battlefield or Hell Let Loose with my husband, many of the other players had absolutely ZERO situational awareness — crosshairs won’t fix that. But oh well, when it comes to… Read more »
I can literally just draw a dot on my screen. With black paint.
Can some one explain how putting a piece of tape on your screen helps you aim?
For example using transparent piece of tape right in the middle of the screen is enough to have a pretty good guide. Add a point on top with permanent marker and you have a perfectly visible point where a crosshair is supposed to be. For example people did that way back in CS for no scope shots since snipers didn’t have a crosshair when not aiming down the scope.
Does that really help now that you can aim in any direction, not necessarily in the exact center of the direction your facing?
One counter point argument. It seems one ‘spirit’ of cheating gets a pass, but another is bad because it breaks the ‘spirit’. Seems off for lack of a better description.
Personally, if you use an outside program or alter files you are cheating. Single player, play as makes you happy. Multi-player, you are not the only person there, knock it off.
Yeah you had to stick this grey area mess on me for the weekend. So I guess I would put it with. If you would not do it in front of other people, it is cheating.
But don’t most games today have a random bullet spread when firing from the hip (and a smaller one when aiming) already to simulate the lack of accuracy? I didn’t even think about this until now. When playing CS, even when I aim perfectly at someone’s head, many times the bullet hits somewhere else. When firing in bursts it is even worse (much worse).
What about quick scoping or similar? You can already aim on or lead the target, making scoping much easier. It is a sum of parts, not a single thing.
Your question makes me realize I may have misunderstood the matter being discussed (English isn’t my native language). I had interpreted the question at hand as being if it was legitimate to add a center point to crosshairs that didn’t have it for better precision, while now I see that maybe we are talking about adding a center point for aiming with a weapon that has no crosshairs whatsoever (except perhaps when using its scope). If this second interpretation is the correct one, then yes, I feel it is cheating to add a center point overlay (or gluing/painting it to… Read more »
If a crosshair overlay helps, then I don’t get why they game doesn’t show one anyway.
If you’re not supposed to have one, they shouldn’t make the weapon fire directly at the center of the screen.
What is this? 1993?
I don’t think people have considered this cheating for decades!
What on earth prompted this?
As for my two-cents on the matter. It’s an accessibility option, not a cheat. And if you have to jury-rig an accessibility option into the game, it’s still not cheating. I mean come on, most people know where the center of the screen is.
But I can understand the opposing point of view, although I disagree with it wholeheartedly.
If the game ditched a crosshair when firing from the hip, then having one is cheating. The whole point of using scope or front/rear sight that limits Your view and often slows movement is to add risk and realism to the gameplay. Pinpoint-aiming from the hip (so without those limiting factors) is not fair and against the rules of the game.
This isn’t the ’90’s anymore, a cross hair for hip firing is about as effective as putting a 2x on a garden hose in any game with devs worth their salt. Increased spread and recoil for hip fire better be implemented for any competitive FPS that wants to be taken seriously as skill based these days and mean there is no such thing as “pinpoint-aming from the hip” without actual cheating to modify those factors.
That is only part of the story. If you scope, you want to be as close as possible. So if your crosshair is already on top or leading the target thanks to hip aiming with the crosshair:
Very definite advantage over someone who needs to guess.
“Fair” is for suckers. Long as you aren’t breaking the game with actual cheats, then giving yourself any advantage possible makes perfect sense.
An emotional response like this is by default flawed. Your own words tell you so. ‘Gaining any advantage possible.’ What about destroying the computer of the opponent? Plugging in a Bluetooth mouse in his pc and giving it a yank now and then? Swatting him?
Don’t we have this exact thing with other sports? Doping isn’t allowed, but you should get any advantage possible? You’re not breaking the ‘game’ of biking, swimming or running by using doping are you? Or adding an electric engine to the bike?
Physically attacking another player or his computer would fall under “breaking the game”, like an aimbot or wallhacks. Amusing of an image as that is. Having a superior rig or an overlay isn’t a direct attack. People can squeal and cope, but they can always put a dot up on their own monitor. :^)
But if a simple overlay is all it takes to dominate you, then either you’re bad at the game or it’s it’s unbalanced. Either way, though, I’m gonna do it.
It may be cheating, but I also think that any game that doesn’t include at least that is dumb. It’s a replacement for the actual crosshairs/aiming device that would be used by whatever weapon the character is using. So, even though it might be cheating, I think it’s just making up for a shortcoming in the game.
I actually used this in God of War 2018 recently. There’s an ice beam attack that MELTS through the strongest enemies and can one-shot them on Give Me A Story, but it’s aim isn’t where the usual reticle is. So I used a hole-punch on a 3M sticker, paused the game when I was making contact, and stuck it there so I’d have better aim with that specific move. Also, more and more games are displaying aiming reticles all the time as an option, both to help with motion sickness and to assist with aiming quickly before you’ve drawn your… Read more »
I’d call it a cheat. It gives yourself an advantage that the developers didn’t intend, by you modifying your playing experience. But yes, I do think it’s a very minor cheat.
Crosshair overlays are cheating just about as much as playing on the lowest details possible to remove foliage and hiding spots is. I’m pretty sure the devs would rather have kept the foliage but they had to be mindful of the lowest system requirements in order to increase sales as much as possible. I don’t see overlay crosshair as any more of an advantage as having better hardware over other players. Aimbots play the game for you, wallhacks give you the enemy positions without any danger to you, allowing you to aim as soon as they’re barely visible on your… Read more »
I would approach this from another angle, and I would say that simulating “inaccurate hip-firing” by simply hiding the crosshair but keeping a 100%-center-of-screen accuracy is both lazy and unrealistic. If you increase the bullet spread/reduce the accuracy when hip firing, then this question becomes a non-issue because then there is a clear accuracy difference between Scoping/ADS and hip-firing. So I would say people adding a crosshair overlay to take advantage of the lazy design option are similar to people abusing bugs. They’re exploiting a flaw in the rules/design to gain an advantage. Does this go against fair-play? Yes. Does… Read more »
I’ve never been into competitive gaming, so for me the most important aspect would be: “does it make the game significantly less fun for your opponents and teammates?”. And from this point of view, the crosshair, I think, is alright. In most games being able to actually point that crosshair at a target would be much more important. The contrast thing, however, would immediately cross over to the “cheating” camp – it’s very much not fun to get killed, while you are hiding in complete darkness. For ranked queues or similar equivalent of strictly competitive context – if it were… Read more »
Had a cross-hair on my scope in the service had iron-sights on pistol and also on the rifle… So I say no it is not a cheat if they are on. 3rd person shooters are already out of the realm of reality and if it is a first person there is no reason to not use these on a weapon. And a “benign” cheat is still a cheat Tim, just like a white lie is still a lie. Gradients allow us to make laws to fit circumstances, which is a good thing, and debate is healthy. So, please, no flame… Read more »
Why is everyone talking about this like every FPS that’s trying to take it’s PvP seriously doesn’t already implement increased spread and recoil when firing from the hip?
Putting a crosshair on your screen for hip firing in these games is more useful for showing you where your bullets won’t land than giving any sort real advantage.
And that’s why I don’t play multi, because I know what brings me satisfaction with the game and what just irritates me
I’m reading all this as an old former gamer, all I can do is bang my head against the wall for never even thinking of this simple measure as putting a dot on my screen in Counterstrike, I would have kicked ass with the AWP.
So by my accidental clear conscience, yes it is definetly cheating! :-p
I think a cross hair is a quality of life thing and should be an option in every game.
it’s the slippery slope that leads you to actually cheating in my mind. I even hate the fact that people on high end pcs can run games at super low settings (eg like in fortnite to be better see through builds etc). But stuff like this, the tac on the screen was super common among awpers when i played cs 1.6 competitively way, way back in the day. So many of them did it to be able to no scope with ease. We went to a lot of LANs, most of the prominent team awpers did it, so then a… Read more »
Your argument is based entirely around the idea that the only reason people use tac on their screens is either because they know it’s cheating and they’re ok with it, or because they know it’s cheating but they have to cheat to keep up with the original cheaters. You never proved that it was cheating in the first place. If you start with the assumption that tac is valid, then when the “cheaters” move on to the “next step” of installing actual cheats such as wallhacks, the non-cheaters will simply call them out and ban them. And then they’ll go… Read more »
How is an overlay different from any other physical hardware advantage? An overlay is no more cheating than having a prohibitively expensive equipment setup. It doesn’t provide you information that isn’t normally available to you (wall hacks) or automate output on your behalf (aimbots). Arguably, if you’re playing a game where a reticle isn’t provided but a physical modification is all you need to compensate for its lack, I argue that the devs should have just included a reticle to begin with. This is especially true if there’s a PvP element, and I’m going to be trusting other players to… Read more »
Any game where the challenge comes from bad UI instead of actual gameplay is a bad game
This. Make it a toggleable setting and make sure you have some amount of jitter on firing (especially from the hip)
Settings graphics to Low in warthunder so that foliage and fences don’t render past a certain distance, so that you can see the enemy hiding from you as if they were in the open. It’s in the game options, but…yeah…
Genuine question as to where we draw the line – if someone is visually impaired and needs brighter sprites, a bigger crosshair etc. to perform on par / enjoy the game is that cheating? So much of it is intent (are you trying to get an unfair advantage), so personally I don’t consider GUI overlays cheating but agree that it should be a built in rather than moddable feature of the game. P.S. I do agree if there is no crosshair to begin with that would be cheating (can think back to the competitive days of a dot of blu… Read more »
If it’s not a built-in feature, it IS at least kind of a cheat.
Also, if the game aims (*wink*) at being realistic by not providing you with a crosshair overlay… Adding one goes against its spirit and intent.
I mean…don’t the best players turn that dot off in games that offer it, because it is distracting and blocks vision? I mean…is it really cheating if it makes you worse at the game?
“you are operating at an advantage beyond how other people may be playing.” is pretty broad. Your high dpi mice are covered, high resolution monitors are covered, heck not having a condition that makes you hands shake is covered by that statement.
Might want to rethink your logic on where you draw that line.
People will disagree and that’s fine. Simply put, life isn’t fair. At all. The point in life is to make it fair for yourself and, if you have the luxury, make it fair for others like your friends, family, and/or even strangers. There is no such thing in the world outside of morality and ethics that says the playing field needs to be leveled. It’s survival of the fittest. It’s whatever edge you can take over whoever in life and can get away with it. If you can extend fairness and equality to others then it’s a luxury. Outside that,… Read more »
If your game is so crappy that it doesn’t provide a crosshair of any kind at the time you can shoot, then fixing that externally doesn’t bother me.
That said, the only games I know of like that are games that either I have no desire to play, or are not competitive, so I would not be harming anyone.