The real victim

The real victim? Our mindzzzzzz!!!!


I'm not sure where I read it exactly but I heard something about "cheating-paranoia". The idea is that we all fell to paranoia when the cheating-wave gripped the community. Consequently suspecting every good player from malicious acts. Although I admit that this is a very serious problem regarding professional ET, I do not agree it makes the game less attractive to the public players. There's another victim.

I play publics. I enjoy the game. With me, there stand hundreds of "cazjuals" (yes, a WoW reference) who never heard of this or other community sites. Recently I came across various articles concerning the future of ET. A lot of them dealt with the specific problem of the pubs, places that got overflowed (and still are) with cheaters and thus giving ET a bad name. I would like to say something about this.

A lot of people play on ET publics for a long time. Some of them (like me for example) have some experience playing in clans, however on noob level. These players know how to recognise the (sometimes elaborate) cheater and if they come across one on their pubs they'll 'deal' with him/her. They will try to kick that player and if that somehow fails, they'll cope with them using various methods, or leaving the server all together.

What am I getting at? Players won't quit because of "obvious" cheaters. Players will quit because of the paranoia. Not the mass paranoia in the pro-community, but the everyday-paranoia. If you get killed on a public you ask yourself the simple question: "Why?" Usually, in most games, this answer considers the individual talent: 'Did I make a mistake? And if I did, how can I improve?' These questions however are not the first to arise anymore. The first question I (and with me the vast majority of pubbies) try to answer is: 'Did that ********* cheat ??'.

In other words: cheaters occupy our minds. They are there, even when everyone is clean we still try to believe that the opponents cheat. Why?: because it is the easiest way to feel warm and fuzzy inside. We will use the excuse to whine instead of improve our gameplay.
What we need is a revolution. A revolution that changes our paranoia and lets us play the game without being anoyed by someone who is just plain better than us. We need to protect our minds from the cheating-para.

It doesn't matter how many cheaters run around, as long as they don't become an "excuse" it's not that big of deal.

This is of course not more than a one-liner to literary 'shock' people, but it is worth thinking about in my opinion.
Maybe a lot of people already said this in more elegant ways, but I just wanted to get this of my chest.



Jera


P.S.: I wanted to write a column about this but I don't really read that much on this site (and others). I don't want to bother you all with the umptieth cheat column.