Are custom clients considered *cheating*?

[MagicManICT]

Should I simply not playing this game cause it would be cheating to play it the way I (and 95% of the community) actually enjoy playing it? I don't want to be a cheater, I have some OCD or whatever that literally makes me feel zero pleasure if I were to cheat in any way. I hate cheaters, always hated cheating, and I would simply feel no satisfaction in playing the game just cause *I'd be cheating*.
This is why I ask where we draw the line.

Exploits. Severity dictates the "official" line on it. Something simple that 90% of the players can accomplish, like boat hunting, using palisades, etc. are ignored, but don't expect the game mechanics to remain static on such issues. Overall, if you find something that appears to be a bug, report it and get an opinion on it.

In some cases, it's gotten realms and villages nuked and salted. In one case, world 4, a new mechanic was added for mining (basically the current system, but only 5 underground levels). One group did what they had been doing--running bots. Innocuous enough for the most part, but because we didn't have curios yet, and it was a LP/action system, they ran so far ahead that they broke progression for the world in just a couple of weeks. Shortest world at about 7 weeks, and we got the curio system for LP earning.

I'd have to dig back a bit for some other cases on exploits. One that came up last world (w11) was the "seasoned roasting spit" exploit that allowed a certain group of players gain FEP was faster than they otherwise should have. I don't think anyone ever revealed the exploit, but the mechanic was fixed in a way that nobody should be able to replicate it. The offending village had a lot of characters nuked as well as the village infrastructure itself. Several other cases of exploits bringing big sanctions exist.

And don't worry about a wall of text... it's a wall of text type discussion!

[boshaw]

There was an inventory bug in w8 that could only be done through custom clients or packet manipulation that let you have many more items than what your inventory size was. So from that perspective yeah custom clients may be considered *cheating*.

[shubla]

If they provide any in-game advantage (and not just different color UI for example) that you cannot get with default clients they are cheating.
And pretty much all features provide direct in-game advantage.

Or actually, it is only cheating when it is explicitly disallowed. And mods are not yet banned, so.. Then its actually not cheating.

[Nightdawg]

Exploits.

I'd like to think this too... I was thinking that is where we're supposed to draw the line.

But then...

If they provide any in-game advantage (and not just different color UI for example) that you cannot get with default clients they are cheating.

I'm starting to think I was just lucky to have Ender, Romovs, Ardennes and Shubla actually post their clients on the forums. I can't even compile the default client on my own, let alone make changes in it. People can simply not share their clients, cause they don't have to. I can't even imagine playing this game without all of those custom client features, let alone imagine those clients being hidden and used only by some players, without even knowing what they offer at all.

I could compare hiding trees to using a wallhack in a shooter game. I'm less likely to get stuck and die in combat by hiding trees after all. Maybe it is intended for me to get stuck into a tree, it would take a higher skill to focus on this stuff too, during combat. The player direction vector also shows me if there's stuff in my path, so I don't mess up.

I guess in conclusion it is cheating, which is saddening man, damn.

[shubla]

I can't even imagine playing this game without all of those custom client features, let alone imagine those clients being hidden and used only by some players, without even knowing what they offer at all.

Yeah it's pretty terrible. I once got killed in legacy, because you could see farther out with custom clients than with the default client, so if you were using default client somebody could one-shot kill you with a bow, shooting you from outside of your view. I tracked some scents to brickwalled place, then out of nowhere I just died, because he shot me with rbow. Since that I started using custom clients, and haven't used default client much since.

[insanechef]

the answer is to not spend 3 hours of your life chasing someone down in pvp