First of all, I was allowed this Rant of a certain someone. He wanted to post it himself but then he did not felt like it!
I was hoping to make a quite and dignified exit this time, but it seems Tenboro won't be happy until I've made a scene, so I will.
I've been cheating the entire time!
I've never played the game and was cheating with both this account and my Fritzl account! Tenboro is well aware of this but for some reason never banned me. I expected to be banned when I started running 24/7 after he removed the round limit in 0.5.2, but despite my patently inhuman playing patterns I was never banned. Even if running 24/7 didn't make it abundantly clear I was cheating, Sushi posted on the forum multiple times saying I was cheating (Sushi's a blabbermouth!). There's no way Tenboro didn't know, yet he did nothing.
It's apparent that a lot of other players are cheating as well. The players who reach level 300 in a week, the players who can generate inhuman quantities of items, the high-profile forum participants who appear to be able to do the impossible - I very much doubt they're achieving these things manually. But even when it's obvious somebody is cheating Tenboro does nothing about it. Bizarrely, he takes auto-bidding on the hath auctions very seriously, with many players being banned for that, but nobody ever gets banned for cheating in game, even when it's obvious that they are.
Rather than ban/punish cheaters Tenboro takes the rather strange step of punishing the legitimate players. The first way legitimate players are punished is with the Riddlemaster. Mazes are pointlessly simple so solve automatically but are a real nuisance to solve manually, so they cause no problems for cheaters but represent a massive annoyance for legitimate players. Tenboro is well aware of this, yet he continues to punish the legitimate players by leaving mazes in the game. The ponies are considerably better, but still fail to stop cheating while successfully pissing of a lot of people. Really, the whole Riddlemaster idea needs scrapping as there are far more effective at preventing cheating without inconveniencing legitimate players.
I can't help but note Tenboro's hypocrisy in using the Riddlemaster. He rails against commercial software companies for their use of DRM and other restrictions that punish legitimate users, yet me himself is operating a cheat protection system which has all the attributes of DRM:
Like DRM the Riddlemaster largely fails to achieve its intended goal.
Like DRM the Riddlemaster inconveniences legitimate users while causing relatively few problems for cheaters.
Like DRM the Riddlemaster results in false positives, with players losing stamina despite the fact they're not cheating.
It's ridiculous to criticise commercial companies for their use of mechanisms that restrict and punish legitimate users and then go on to do the exact same thing yourself.
Another way in which Tenboro punishes legitimate players is that he actively designs the game around the cheaters. If he sees cheaters getting too many artefacts/credits/crystals/items/shards/whatever he nerfs the game for everyone. When he's deciding the cost of a particular upgrade/training/whatever he seems to look at what the cheaters are capable of getting and then chooses a price based on that. It's the people who aren't cheating that suffer most from this. Their meagre income is cut further when he nerfs things for the cheaters, and the chance of legitimate players achieving anything is reduced when he sets prices that are completely out of their reach.
Tenboro has admitted himself that he makes design decisions purely to piss me off, but in many cases this lead to other players suffering more. Instead of designing the game around the cheaters and punishing the legitimate players, why not ban the cheaters and design the game around the legitimate players?
Despite knowing I was cheating Tenboro didn't appear to want me to quit. I thought he'd be happy to see me retire when I deleted my witches the first time, but instead he took action that stopped me retiring. On the day of the 0.76 patch I sent him a PM politely asking him to disable Eila so I could retire, but rather than do that he replied saying, "Eh, you'll be back". Why does he want me to come back if he knows I'm cheating? Not only is he failing to ban people who are cheating, he's actively encouraging them to continue.
I've often said nothing Tenboro does makes any sense, but the way in which he handles cheating is particularly nonsensical:
1) Why isn't he banning players who he knows are cheating?
2) Why is he continuing to use the Riddlemaster when the whole system is ineffective, and the mazes in particular are totally useless while being very annoying for legitimate players?
3) Why is he designing the game around the players who are cheating and thus making it very hard for the players who aren't cheating?
4) Why is he encouraging people who he knows are cheating to continue playing?
The whole way in which Tenboro handles cheating is an outrage and he should be ashamed of himself! I, on the other hand, am totally innocent! In fact, I'm a victim of the whole situation and should be compensated with free upgrades to Eila and free wins/kills (IMG:[
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Cheating the HV!
Jun 17 2013, 15:17
