As title says , whats its stopping me from cheating in this videogame other than losing all my dignity and maybe around 25 euros?
There’s no anti-cheat, theres no feedback from Funcom, there’s no monitoring…And of course, there’s noone adressing this because their post get hidden.
There is a problem when you can ban someone by false-reporting someone who has a compound wall but not cheaters for…cheating.
Self restraint, you know, like an adult.
As Deacon said, dignity should stop this type of behavior. Adults are supposed to be displaying the appropriate behavior and the children follow suit. Online and anonymous life has reversed this. Step up.
The fact that it’s not a competitive PvP game so nobody cares if you do…
It’s a sandbox… if you want to ruin your game, that’s on you.
The reason you do get banned when you get caught is because you’re also ruining other peoples games by cheating, but seeing as it’s not a competitive game… there’s no rankings or ladder or tournaments… it’s still quite low priority cheating in PvP
You know what stops me from stealing from people? Or attacking them? Or defrauding them? Or killing them?
Its not consequences. Its because I don’t wish to cause someone harm.
If you need consequences to keep you from cheating (aka breaking established agreements to those you are playing with) then you have some major issues that need to be looked at.
And yet we have laws in organized society simply BECAUSE these kinds of people exist. Normal people don’t consider murder as a go-to tactic for solving a problem, nor do they think it’s a good idea in general. It’s for the people that don’t seem to understand that there’s a moral truth to everything. Unfortunately, in today’s society, it’s becoming far more blurred thanks to a degradation of moral values… and with anonymity and the internet, not having to see the faces of those you hurt makes it so much easier. I guarantee you most of these types of people won’t act in such a way in real life.
Have you ever watched @Ceronesthes of @SirDaveWolf to play pvp?
Did they even need to cheat for defeating “cheaters”…
No!
Anyway!
I don’t cheat for one basic reason. Fair play!
If you play fair, your Consciousness is clean!
If you loose from cheating, you are still better than your opponents, because they had to cheat to defeat you. So basically, you win!
Don’t ever forget what pvp means…
Player vs player! The winner is the one who plays better following the rules of the game, not the one who cheats.
It’s an ethical thing, if you cannot understand it, then i cannot explain it further.
But i will try one last effort.
So you are 3 persons and you see 1 opponent that’s avoiding you, will you hunt the opponent? Bottom line, do you see fair play on 3 vs 1?
I don’t, i see bullying!
Be ethical in your gaming and trust me, people in your server sooner or later will apply their respect on you.
C’mon now, even the most basic of moral behaviour is often disregarded irl. I could list so many examples but we’d get into social and politics talk.
That’s it isn’t it. If there was something to lose = marketability and revenue, then it would be taken seriously. What burns my ass here though is that IF Funcom cared more then the potential could have been realized. PVP in this game used to be very skilled. You could count on your hands in each region who were the most skilled in terms of combat. Getting to that point required practice and game knowledge.
They don’t. Most of them are regular everyday people. They saw how easy it was to do and have varying reasons for doing it. Most of the time it is because they were burned by hackers and exploiters and had enough of losing unfairly; they figure if that is what is status quo, might as well join it.
Most of the comments on here are about playing fairly. But @jmk1999 is the one that really hit the nail on the head. You can’t program morality into a game but you CAN implement measures to prevent ease of hacks and exploits. Funcom has failed in that department.
To answer the OP though, nothing is stopping you. There are no true consequences for hacking except for losing a little bit of money. The price of a coffee or a meal. Except for one method which doesn’t happen too often which can also be bypassed - depending on which method you play and have purchased the game.
We can still avoid that talk by looking at the root of the issue. For each of those scandalous acts there are probably a 1000 acts of sincere altruism that we ignore happening right in front of our faces. Why do we pay so much more attention to those that do wrong vs those that do right?
I get it. It’s a game. And regardless of how you play, the statement is the same.
“Come on. It’s only a game”
Now the question here is what are you saying with the statement? Are you saying that because it’s a game you can act like a narcissistic sociopath or are you saying that it’s game and there not worth soiling your dignity? That is the crossroads we each must decide when we log in as individuals.
Cheating will always be a thing. There will always be an exploit and the company should fix critical ones but to blame them for the state of the game plagued by cheaters? Yeah wrong root cause there. Blame the cheaters. Shame them. Blame the content providers that gain profits sharing exploits and turning the game into the cess pool it is now. Finally, praise those that play with a sense of honor.
And please keep in mind that this is an ideal. Therefore no one is without sin here or can be said to be blameless but if the ideal is embraced, then we all strive to the same goal. A fun experience that brings people together.
As for the game itself I can confidently say that I have praised my opponents whether I lost or won with the fact that they played without hacks/exploits. It’s refreshing. It feels great. I seek out servers that have little to no hacking activity and GG along the way.
I have had the opportunity, with each decision I and my clan have made, each server we have explored and every individual player we have encountered to hack if we chose to. It has been made available by word of mouth or directly.
What has held us back from taking advantage of that opportunity? Morality and the ideal of fair play. It’s a reputation we have upheld and are known for.
What I am saying is that despite doing the right thing, it CANNOT be prevented solely by “doing the right thing”. There needs to be proper systems in place to address hacking. Oversight. Clarity. Communication. A want to keep the game safe within the best of their abilities. But Funcom has not done that.
Right now it is the worst that it has ever been. OP brought this forward to point out why it is so prevalent currently - I see that. Because there are no real consequences in place. It is so rampant now dude, there’s entire clans of hackers, they’re on every popular server and not just 1 here and there like it used to be.
They’re so blatant about it that they talk about being hackers, making jokes and laughing. There’s no denial anymore, they don’t care because Funcom doesn’t.
So while I would agree with you the root cause is not Funcom it is their responsibility to address and mitigate. We cannot do that as players alone. The anti-cheat does not work to the extent of which most would expect. We have to report them with video evidence and wait 3 weeks to over a month to see action on hacking. This is embarrassing and inexcusable.
Because good guys are suckers, when they’re being raided. There’s a reason they call them/us Boy Scouts, because we often hoist ourselves with our own petards.
My Brother and I were getting the tar raided out of us, and they were starting to target our underwater vaults. At the time there was an exploit where you put a thing under a thing and then sit on it and you can breathe underwater forever. And Breathing Potions were scarce, despite our having an underwater section.
Boy Scout here knows the chair exploit. Refuses to use it vs guys using it. Dies like a Boy Scout, has to run away with all our Lucky Charms.
It’s insidious, and makes actual good guy players like my Brother feel a little more tarnished by it.
Honour
Cheating only cheat’s yourself.
You cheat yourself of the feeling you get when you do something the right way and succeed.
Once long ago, I was playing Doom, or Duke Nukem I don’t remember which.
I got stuck on some level I don’t remember, and a friend told me he had beaten the game.
I asked for tips on how to get past that one level.
Turned out he had won by using cheat codes. And thought I just didn’t know them.
I never could make him understand what winning honestly really feels like.
Ultimately we play these games for how they make us feel,
a cheated victory is hollow and not a victory at all.
A feeling of accomplishment comes with a true victory.
So, pride, honour and self worth is why not to cheat.
You can do better, you can be better.
Honestly, I think this is definitely more an issue with PvP. Case in point, I don’t really care about the idea of using an exploit or “cheat” on my PvE server. So long as it’s not something that causes issues with other players. My philosophy, if you wanna make a game “easier” for you, NOT at the expense of other players’ enjoyment of the game, it makes no difference to me, nor should it for anyone else. While it is nice to get a sense of satisfaction, sometimes it’s just nicer to avoid the uphill battle when you’re playing for relaxation and enjoyment.
That being said, those that play PvP are playing for thrills and competition. If a game is meant for competition and fairness to allow all to enjoy that aspect of the game, it should absolutely make a difference. You have no business playing PvP if you’re going to cheat, hack, or exploit as that gives you an unfair advantage. As much as I hate MOBAs and battle royales, they make sense in that they make all players start the same. This is why I understand the desire for requests to wipe servers… but ONLY on pvp servers. I honestly don’t care if PvE players have Arena Champions or tons of alchemical base, or whatever else might be considered “unfair” on PvP.
Mostly, two factors. We are hardwired to recognize and weed out behaviours that put us in danger, collectively and individually. We compare our situation to dangerous scenarios or other’s wrong doings and feel relief, good about ourselves and our conditions, etc.
These are the main normative reasons.
I agree to an extent what you’re saying about PVE. It does not directly affect your opponents because technically, unless you’re playing RP or placing down a flag, there are no player opponents.
But you raise a big point and one of which I have attempted to emphasize for a long time: hackers and exploiters are on every multiplayer server in Conan to some degree. Whether it be a private PVP server or an Official PVE.
The plus for privates are that a considerate admin will deal with them swiftly.
I’m pointing this out is that while it is most felt on Official PVP, it’s a plague to the game in general for multiplayer. It should be concerning to the company.
It shouldn’t be up to us to deal with something this egregious on our own. We’re left to the wolves so to speak and begging for help while being ignored. But look! Here’s a reskin or a broken building set.
I think this goes a bit further than cheating oneself, well if not further a little more insidious.
When talking about playing a game entirely in singleplayer, you play by the rules set by everyone playing. Which in singleplayer… whatever you decide gets 100% approval by default.
When you play a game like Super Mario Bros. 3, you have several options to go through it. You can do the warp whistles, you can do no whistles but the shortest path, or you can do the whole game, every stage. You can also use Game Genie to get an edge (or insert more difficulty) and play through that way.
Are any of those ways the right way? Are any of them wrong?
Well the question is flawed. There is no wrong or right being performed, just a player playing a game by themselves in any way they wish. You could argue that there is a developer intent. And there is means expressed that the developer did not intend. But I guarantee if you spoke to Miyomoto himself about using a Game Genie, he’s not going to say you were wrong.
In your example of Duke Nukem (or Doom), where cheats were available. One could suggest the developer left those options in for the player to enjoy. So in your own example, the developer intent isn’t being crossed here. The rhetorical question is, were those cheat codes the shooter’s version of SMB3’s warp whistles?
Again the question is flawed, there is no right or wrong being done.
In all of the exampled explored thusfar, we have a player playing a game in a manner they wish to play. Their enjoyment is based on what they like to do and their enjoyment is all that matters. In these examples at least.
Let’s use another analogy, lets say you have a person jogging down the street in their local suburb. They are timing themselves in their head running from telephone pole to telephone pole. Their timing is internal, no clock or watch. Its entirely arbitrary, inaccurate, but something someone is doing on their own because its a silly little fun while jogging.
But let’s say they want to race their friend the next day. Friend is going to ask, where’s the starting point? Where’s the end? Is it when we pass the pole, is it when we touch the pole? Are we doing it at the same time? If not, how are we timing it?
The moment you add another person to the contest, it becomes almost exponentially more complex. And the reason being is the enjoyment is now competition. Where before, it was just a silly little self indulgence.
Competition requires a set of standards and rules. Competition means that there is a winner and a loser. To gauge a competition it requires a level of trust, and cooperation. And gauging one’s ability is important especially to those who wish to self improve. It can be quite hard to measure one’s potential in a vacuum. You can have a friendly competition where its not so serious. To where it is mostly like a self indulgence shared with another person.
But the latter of course is not what we speak about when engaging with unknown persons over the internet. Not suggesting it couldn’t be, but when talking about the activities and mindsets that lead to cheating in the context of this thread… its not silly little indulgences.
So why is cheating wrong when engaging outside of singleplayer only scenarios or those involving only a single person?
There’s two main points.
One is actually breaking an agreement you have with another. When you login to a PVP server on Conan Exiles, there is game mechanics you agree to (server settings), there’s developer intent (aka not using glitches), server rules (attributes that are not handled by game mechanics or servers, and game integrity (not using tools or hacks) that everyone agrees to before the contest (acts of PVP and general gameplay) begin. What is wrong here is you are breaking agreements and trust between players. Introducing distrust and paranoia.
The other point is one of malicious nature. You are taking the achievements of others and cheapening them. If they know cheating is going on, then they lose the drive and competitive nature they had prior. And if they don’t know that it is happening, then they are not able to accurately measure their own ability to those who are artificially inflated.
To put it simply a cheater is wasting people’s time, energy, and effort. They are destroying people’s enjoyment of an activity. All for a cheap thrill.
Why do people do this? Well this is where their own abilities and enjoyment have been already cheapened. It is ego and envy that causes them to want to ‘beat’ another player by any means. It is malice that they wish to see the anguish of defeat in the eyes of their victims. And yes it is quite evil by its very definition. The reason they are cheating isn’t to have fun alongside other players. It is to make them miserable.
Its not fun to cheat other players. Its not fun to steal from people. Its not fun to hurt others. Its not fun to nastily assault them in unspeakable ways. Its not fun to murder. People do it because they have an empty void that they can never fill. They do so out of jealousy because they wish to see those who have improved themselves through effort and experience be taken down to a level they feel is deserving, even though they have not themselves made the effort for such improvement.
Why do I not consider these people as having fun. Surely the depraved take pleasure in the anguish of others. While they do feel some semblance of instant gratification. Having fun instead requires a feeling of satisfaction instead. Which you cannot obtain from cheap petty indulgences that require very little effort in personal improvement and the willful harming of others.
But it is pretty self-evident that someone using cheat codes in a singleplayer game is not causing any harm to others or even to themselves. While it would be nice that they could enjoy the full game in its normal intended routes. It isn’t a requirement, and isn’t an indicator of behaviors that would be destructive in a competitive environment.
Earlier in the thread I answered the question of “What stops me from cheating.” I said this:
I’m going to elaborate on that more. While yes the primary reason is because I wish to avoid harming the enjoyment of others. I also wish to avoid harming myself. Cheating does not allow me to measure my own ability accurately. By simply winning without self improvement also means that I cannot self improve.
Self improvement is why I enjoy video games. Its the primary reason why most people play video games. Getting better at stage one so that you can see and play stage 2 is the most primary reason for fun in a video game. Its been that way since the 1970s and hasn’t changed very much in the last half century. There’s been stuff tacked on, but at the very basics, that’s what it is.
And of course there is a philosophy that one can hold that if you cannot love oneself, how do you love others? Easy and pointless self-gratification does very nasty things to one’s self. It doesn’t take much for self harm to harm others.
So while one can cheat themselves by cheating in a game like Conan Exiles. The implications are far more dire.
I agree, it comes down to the fact that the coding doesn’t change between PvE and PvP. However, that’s not exactly the point I’m trying to make. The issue is that exploits and hacks are going to happen regardless. The difference is in the fact that PvP uses them for malicious purposes while PvE uses them for convenience. Is it right to exploit? That’s debatable based upon intent and environment. That doesn’t change the fact that Funcom needs to find ways to prevent them across the board… but realistically, it’s never gonna be perfect. As with any game, there’s always going to be people looking for exploits and glitches. We all love to make tedious tasks a bit easier and I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of using an exploit or two, if not in Conan, in some other game. I won’t point fingers, but I certainly won’t condone those that use them to give advantages in competitive gaming. It just makes no sense to me to win when you didn’t actually prove to yourself and others that you did it with your own skills. It’s just a silly and prideful mentality. It doesn’t last. I assume they just get a rush out of winning, regardless of the way it’s done. Idk.
And let’s be clear here the pvp community has determined that “winning” is for the others to leave the server.
Even if playing fair, you entire mission if you view this as competition and winning is literally defined as trolling.
Exactly.
It’s not about other folks. It’s about me.
I think that’s been a long time mentality for a lot of PvP players—not everyone mind you, just a lot, mainly teens and man-children. I’ve seen many people get their rocks off on a game by PvPing someone (whether by choice or not) until that individual “rage quits” the server. I use to see people on fallout 76 laugh about this same thing a while back when PvP was more prevalent. Some will do it by whatever means necessary, so long as they pissed off the other player to the point of logging off or hopping to another server. It’s like some sorta victory.
The difference here is that servers on Conan can’t be changed. People can’t just hop to a different server and pick up where they left off. When they quit the server, they’re gone for good and all you’re left with is a handful of toxic players. Sadly, that same mentality gets brought over from instance-based PvP games and these types of individuals don’t quite get it.