HellsingerAngel said:
I actually thought I covered everything you said quite nicely. However, we come to a crossroads: your idelogical view is different from mine. Unfortunately, that's just going to lead to circling. I believe freedom should be limited, as people as a whole are ignorant. I believe companies like Blizzard have a right to say what is and isn't appropriate on their game, especially when they give complete freedom to edit anything but the base engine of the game. I believe the law, in most cases, favours the just and the correct, though there will always be exceptions we enjoy focusing on.
No, you didn't cover anything I said (you didn't even bother to address my points individually). You simply repeated (to paraphrase) "they give you the means to mod and cheat and that should be enough, because everything else is spitting in the face of Blizzard".
That is not even remotely true, and you've yet to make a strong case otherwise. And we wouldn't be circling if you didn't keep repeat the same arguments but with different details.
HellsingerAngel said:
Anyway, I'm just going to quickly shoot off what points I can and that'll be that. It won't make a lick of difference to keep this going because you seem to believe freedom should be absolute (or are playing Devil's Advocat to that end) and I believe freedom should be limited. They're core values and you can't change that.
I don't think it should be absolute. I never once said that. The freedom to use a trainer in the single player is not an absolute freedom and I never said it was.
People shouldn't be allowed to modify the game and then sell it for a profit, for example, unless they create a whole Blizzard sanctioned campaign, as was the case for the first game. You seem to think that limiting people when people's actions do no harm to anyone is a good thing, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why. What we are talking about is not giving freedom to people at the cost of Blizzard losing any freedom, so that line of reasoning is moot.
HellsingerAngel said:
-In most cases, copywrite is applied fairly. There are exceptions. We are only human and humans make mistakes. If the laws didn't work, they'd be changed. There are just some things you need to get beyond questioning until something earth shattering happens.
You clearly have not read anything on copy
right if you think this to be the case. Copyright limits have been disappearing for years, as large corporations have been lobbying to have them extended on behalf of their more valuable characters. So yes, the laws have been changing, but not in favour of the common man. You put too much faith in the legal system in this case. Why do you think I included a link to the Lessig book (it's free by the way, you can download a PDF).
Copyright, while useful as an incentive for creativity, must be limited to a degree to ensure that fair use actually happens and that creativity can continue into the future, and that has not been the case at all recently.
HellsingerAngel said:
-"If Valve can do it, as has been pointed out, I'm sure Blizzard could have." That would be exactly why I put all that. People who seem to say "well just disable achievements" don't realise that there are people who pain stakingly work towards maxxing those little buggers out, cheaters included. As I said, it's not as easy as it sounds, I'm certain. I have had my hand in coding and even the most basic programs (like the Windows calculator) require hundreds of lines of coding. It's not a matter of laziness, just a matter of priority.
-No, they shouldn't because they've got much bigger fish to fry. I'm sure about half the team that coded SC2 has already moved on, where as the rest are working on important things like balance patches. Then you have community events, server maintenance and, yes, using the ban hammer on cheaters. If people want to cheat, regardless of how they do so outside of the boundries of the game, they should be banned. Simple as that for me. People who break the law should go to jail. People who do wrong should be punished. It's a very simple concept and overcomplicating it can blind you just as easily as oversimplifying it can.
What does how hard people work towards getting achievements have to do with getting them disabled? That argument doesn't follow in the least.
And you've again repeated yourself. I know that coding takes time, you've already said that, but if they cared about their customers or wanted a solution that could satisfy everyone, they'd take the time. That you apologize for them being lazy is unfortunate, as that is the place I suspect they want most of their customers to be at. That way, they can roll out whatever foolish measures they wish, and no one will bother to complain.
And I'm sorry, but the law is nothing but simple, and it should
never be simple. These are complicated issues that should be talked through. Simplifying things is dangerous and lazy thinking and leads to things like stereotyping (like how all people who use trainers are cheaters, in your mind) and stereotyping leads to bigotry. This is small "b" bigotry, obviously and doesn't affect many in all likelihood, but that sort of mindset is a dangerous one, if you ask me.
HellsingerAngel said:
-Well, how about you give someone a sandwich and then get spat in your face as they proceed to make their own sandwich. That's a fairly good comparison to what trainers are to the set up Blizzard has given players to "cheat". Believe it or not, people don't just make games for money. They have a passion for it and when programers actually take the time to consider how a gamer might want to dick around in SC2 and input somne cheat codes to do so, a player then using a trainer looks suspicious and feels like they're just punching the devs in the gut for being considerate.
More repetition. Most excellent.
No, that comparison is not "fairly good". It's not even remotely good. Wanting to tamper with something that someone has made for any reason is not the same as spitting in their face. You generalize, and generalizations only make your argument weaker, not stronger.
So, sorry but your argument is completely illogical. Tinkering with a game can happen for any number of reasons, use of trainers included. Naturally, various reasons were included in the article posted above, and those are just a fraction of the potential reasons.
HellsingerAngel said:
Furthermore, people may be complicated, but going out and getting a complicated program and learning to install it instead of, I don't know, taking thirty seconds to look up the list of cheat codes seems very pointless if all you want is Godmode. It stinks of alterior motives and I believe Blizzard smells it too. Hoenstly, cheathappens.com is a fairly unreputable site from what I can see. People pay good money to feel like they're cheating someone, which just shows to me how morally inferior we are to previous generations.
Also, FYI, a trainer does change the source code by re-arranging it or turning certain integers on.
-That freedom you speak of, upon which video games were based upon, destroy it as well. I'd rather have limitations on stupid stuff like "not cheating" than have the entire market crash aagin because shovel ware becomes the norm. Also, saying that the map editor has limitations really speaks to that fact that you don't seem to have even played the game. Not sure why you're even arguing this with that lack of knowledge here, but anyway. The editor lets you do whatever the programers could, so that's a fairly straight-forward point. Anything else would be changing the engine and at that point you should just take up coding and make your own game from scratch.
Trainers, on the other hand, hack the source code directly and don't give you an understanding of how the game works, but rather crushes how it works into a "click here, you win" scenario. Trainers are used to cheat! Nothing more, nothing less. They're used to augment the game in your favour. I'm not sure how many times I need to repeat that before it sinks in. I'm not against innovation, I'm against cheaters that seem to have some alternate motive because all the cheats they could want were handed on a silver platter. The big issue is that trainers also don't trigger the achievement blocking code, which brings us back to one of my previous points about achievements actually being important to some people.
Holy fuck, how many times does it need to be said:
not all people who use trainers do so just to win the game. Until you acknowledge that not all people of a single group are the exact same, all you've posted above is more repetitious narrow-mindedness and there is no point in even trying to chip away at is.
HellsingerAngel said:
-The fact of the matter is, they want to exploit the product. There is no other reasoning. Every single cheat you could want is on there, plus the ability to edit anything ever within the engine, so whether it's the gamer themselves or the fine folks at cheathappens.com it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is they have software that can cause issues with the multiplayer balance on their PC, ready to use, and have used it within single player to boost, because there's no other reason to have that software there but to cheat in multiplayer or boost. Period!
"
There is no other reasoning."
This line basically sums up why discussing this with you is a waste of my time. You don't want to bother seeing other perspectives, and figure if you repeat yourself enough, people will see it your way. People who use trainers are cheaters in the absolute and Blizzard shouldn't have people shit in their cereal, because that is the equivalent of them using trainers. Never mind that not all people who use them are doing so just to cheat. Never mind that they have the resources to disable the achievements for those who do use them. Never mind the long history of tinkering that helped make this industry as powerful as it is today. Never mind that copyright is being used as a weapon by those with power and money. Never mind all of this, trainer users are all cheaters and wish to spit in the face of Blizzard.
Fortunately, most people realize (I hope) that this type of POV is extremely simple and narrow one. The world doesn't exist in a strict black and white framework and an inflexibility on such issues will only harm you in the long run.
And by the way, thanks for ignoring all the historical precedent that has already been set by the industry, in lieu of repeating yourself once more. I'd love to see a reasonable response, but I'm not responding if all I get is another wall of text filled with strange analogies and the repetition of the same points you've been saying all along.
