Cheating

Is it possible to cheat at Oolite? Does the term actually mean anything?

Cheat: definition (from www.thefreedictionary.com)

verb - transitive: ie it is done to somebody else: I cheated you

1. To deceive by trickery; swindle: cheated customers by overcharging them for purchases.

2. To deprive by trickery; defraud: cheated them of their land.

3. To mislead; fool: illusions that cheat the eye.

4. To elude; escape: cheat death.

verb - intransitive: ie it is not done to somebody else: I cheated. I can add you, but I don't need to!

1. To act dishonestly; practice fraud.

2. To violate rules deliberately, as in a game: was accused of cheating at cards.

3. Informal To be sexually unfaithful: cheat on a spouse.

4. Sports To position oneself closer to a certain area than is normal or expected: The shortstop cheated toward second base.

noun

1. An act of cheating; a fraud or swindle.

2. One who cheats; a swindler.

3. A technique that exploits a flaw or hidden feature in a video game or computer program.

4. Law Fraudulent acquisition of another's property.

5. Botany Any of several species of brome, especially Bromus secalinus, an annual European grass widespread as a weed.

Etymology: Middle English cheten, to confiscate, short for acheten, variant of escheten, from eschete, escheat; see escheat.

• So. I'm not playing Oolite with anybody else, so I can't cheat them!

• Can I cheat "Oolite" itself? Oolite is not "fixed", like the rules of Chess or Cricket (although they are changed every once in a while). And, I can rewrite Oolite (if I have the skills) to do what I like, with the rules that I like - it is "Open Code". Or, I can use OoCheat OXP to give myself oodles of dosh, or even just write the extra dosh into my Oolite save file. But is any of this cheating?

There has been much discussion on this subject, needless to say!

Player-centric gaming

The one area regarded by many as cheating is to have some advantage which the NPCs cannot get: that the playing field is unfairly tipped towards the player. This is tied in with the doctrine of player-centrism which it is felt that Oolite eschews (see Diziet Sma more recently - and Winston back at the start). Compared to Classic Elite, Oolite is indeed far less player-centric: it's not just that your ship moves inside the Ooniverse (rather than the universe moving around your ship - as in Elite). The debates about the Energy Bomb (see there) show the importance of this - and how many people felt it was a cheat (the people who wanted to keep it, wanted to keep faith with Classic Elite where it was one of the five weapons in the original game). Oolite being Oolite, it was eventually removed but preserved as an OXP option. Also see the debates over Norby's Telescope OXP in the 2013 thread below, and the discussion half way through the 2012 thread.

But there are still two areas where Oolite retains some of Elite's player centrism: the Torus Drive (NPCs don't have it) and the existence of Shields (NPCs just have Energy banks). And again, Oolite being Oolite, people such as Ngalo ("equal rights for NPC's"), Rustem & Dybal started writing OXPs to try and even the playing field.

Svengali was very much against 'cheating' (whatever he meant by it), and tried to create a set of icons in the 2013 thread to let people know what the effects of an OXP would be on game balance. He had already in 2010 developed the OXP Levelindicators to indicate what sort of Elite Rating one would need to tackle the OXP (if a ship or a mission for example).

Smivs seemed to feel that cheating was adding an OXP which made the modified Oolite easier than the Vanilla game. He devised the Gameplay and Balance Indicator to show this (in July 2014).

OXPs

• OoCheat OXP by Thargoid (2010)
• Killit OXP
• OMGLaser
• Energy Bomb
• Illicit Unlock OXP - still seen as a cheat? (see below)
• How to tweak OXZ's

Anti-cheating OXPs

• N-Shields by Ngalo (2016)
• NPC Energy Units OXP by Dybal (2020)
• Military Shields Ships OXP by Rustem (2018)

Links

• BB thread 2005/6 when flying an NPC ship was felt to be a cheat (even though Illicit Unlock OXP came out in 2005). This taboo did not last. See here (2011 - the feeling was already a minority feeling). And notice the Category at the bottom of this page which excludes Illicit Unlock (created by Jaz in 2013).

• BB thread 2010
• BB thread 2012 discussion in middle is based on player-centrist assumptions
• BB thread 2013 more focused on cheating OXPs (and with links to other relevant threads)
• BB thread 2017 rather short - but recent