Depends on the game and on how you cheat. A game of true skill is ruined by cheating. Other types of games might not be. Some games deserve to be ruined by cheaters.
I've played games so ludicrously exploitative I don't even consider them games anymore. They were spending competitions. Yes, I was competing with whales to see who could pay the game company the biggest amount of money. I also fell for their little daily login habit forming tricks such as timer-based daily tasks. I was one of the poor bastards waking up at 4 AM to press buttons in a stupid fucking mobile game! It took me months and about a hundred dollars to realize the stupidity of it.
You bet I started cheating at that game. I admit it proudly. I did it out of spite. I wrote a bot to automate it for me. I don't even consider it cheating, to me it was a cure for my addiction. With the boring stuff automated away, the game was no longer punishing me for not logging in. I no longer felt guilty because I was missing out on meaningless virtual tasks. You know the funniest thing? My bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player. There's no way they could analyze some data and say "yeah, here's the one outlier". Everyone played like bots because they were all slaves of the timer.
In the end I never published my hack... But yeah, I had fun making it and I seriously hope it frustrated other people into quitting the game too. The less people suckered into these money sinks the better. Maybe if I had published my bot it would have significantly reduced the amount of addicted players out there, reducing their bottom line.
Depends on the game and on how you cheat. A game of true skill is ruined by cheating. Other types of games might not be. Some games deserve to be ruined by cheaters.
I've played games so ludicrously exploitative I don't even consider them games anymore. They were spending competitions. Yes, I was competing with whales to see who could pay the game company the biggest amount of money. I also fell for their little daily login habit forming tricks such as timer-based daily tasks. I was one of the poor bastards waking up at 4 AM to press buttons in a stupid fucking mobile game! It took me months and about a hundred dollars to realize the stupidity of it.
You bet I started cheating at that game. I admit it proudly. I did it out of spite. I wrote a bot to automate it for me. I don't even consider it cheating, to me it was a cure for my addiction. With the boring stuff automated away, the game was no longer punishing me for not logging in. I no longer felt guilty because I was missing out on meaningless virtual tasks. You know the funniest thing? My bot was statistically indistinguishable from a sufficiently addicted player. There's no way they could analyze some data and say "yeah, here's the one outlier". Everyone played like bots because they were all slaves of the timer.
In the end I never published my hack... But yeah, I had fun making it and I seriously hope it frustrated other people into quitting the game too. The less people suckered into these money sinks the better. Maybe if I had published my bot it would have significantly reduced the amount of addicted players out there, reducing their bottom line.