Re: How is cheating possible?
 

Stormbinder,

As another who thought of you in terms of Stormwhiner, please accept both my thanks and apologies. Norfleet is a better propagandist than you, but you had right on your side, as well as the will to follow what you knew was right. May you always stick to your convictions and may you have better success in getting others to support you.

On a related topic, does this revelation put all of the debates about balance into a new perspective? Norfleet's favorite strategies, the VQ and Mad Castling, look less strong when you realize how he really did it. He was fond of saying the strategies were not that overwhelming, he knew lots of people who could not make them work. I, for one, could never get the resources to spam castles across the landscape or get the VQ fully decked out so early. Now I know why he was so much better at it than I.

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

Fixed. Thanks!

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

yeah i thought some days ago i have improved my dominionskills from newbie to an already quite good player . then i read the thread what norfleet had at turn 23 with ermor and only thought : WOW i have so much still to learn . i have never tried e.g. the raven feast because i remembered how small the gains are . now i thought perhaps i was wrong .
so thnx for revealing this stormbinder .
about 30h ago when norfleet was still defending i almost believed him that he was really lucky and got this through lots of good events ... .
it was still a bit unbelievable but i thought well norfleet is known as probably the best dominionsplayer so it can be possible .

now after revealing his cheating i still miss his funny or informative Posts . i think norfleet deserves a new chance because he is a loss not for the game probably because he cheated there but for the community .
he always gave good advice and his view of the world was bizarre but funny to read .

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

Pfft...
I was at stormbinder's side all along (even though thats not that long =P).
Usually the guys accused of cheating that try and weasel their way out of it with (albeit minor) flames and vague explanations are actually cheating.
This reminds me of a guy in another forum I was in, only he was a much better propagandist (or had more alter egoes) since the community was split roughly in the middle, with half of it cheering for the flaming beast and the other half was recieving flames and acting quite sedate.
He was caught in the act of hacking (with screenshots) and tried to get away with it accusing other people of hacking and other stuff like that.
Only he kept trolling the Boards (in a much more sedate fashion) and ended up as a forum joke.
Although... There was another cheater that was also caught in the act which accused his brother of hacking his heroes...
And another guy which was caught hacking and ended up reformed and cheat-free AFAIK.

Anyway, Im opposed to cheating, yet I do believe you can change your cheaty ways.
When I was younger I cheated all the time (and never played MP) but after I grew a bit older I realized (with help from my brother) that cheating isnt fun, and Im cheat-free-clean ever since (unless in very specific games under very specific conditions, only SP, only FPS games and only after I finished the game atleast once).

BTW, check out the second mod in my signature, its SO COOL!
And it takes seconds to realize why, all you need to do is create a new pretender!

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

oh and i think norfleet almost didn't need that cheating because he already had lots of wisdom in dominions .
so even without he would probably have won the majority of his games .

perhaps he was forced to cheating though :
i speculate a bit now because i only own dominions since 2 months so i have no knowledge about the time before but here my guess lol :

norfleet was good in the beginning and always won without cheating . then because the community is so small in the new games everybody allied secretly against him and he had no chance to win against others because even the best player can't win against 3-4 others in no game if the others are not complete noobs .
so the community forced him to either play under different nicks each time or to his solution : "cheating" .

perhaps he found now a new game and got really tired from dominions and so he chose that in his eyes "funny" way to say adios .

although i don't know norfleet personally i still have a kinda high opinion of him and he is a loss for the board .

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

that's exactly my viewpoint too . no cheating in mp .
i even don't cheat normally in sp only rarely for fun after i completed the game already or if a bug doesn't allow you to continue normal .

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

no. even the earliest games w/ norfleet, other than his initial "map of the world campaigns", which I wasn't in, had him demolishing alliances made of everyone else. These alliances were in no way secret, or set up beforehand, but emerged naturally because he was so dominating, and able to put up castle/temple/labs every turn in every new territory. This was months ago.

And a number of players in those games, who were pretty good and were initially enthusiastic about the game, just left the scene. Perhaps they would have left anyways, or perhaps the impossibility and frustration, and the seeming refusal by the old guard to take their concerns seriously, encouraged them to give up on Dominions.

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

I find it ... implausible that you can come up to this conclusion ("He gave himself 200 gems every turn") when you have _ONE_ turn file to examine.

Unless of you you know the exact nature of the cheat that was used?

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

That wasn't what he said. He was saying that Norfleet seems to have been resetting the value of his gem stockpiles to 200 whenever he needed to, since most of the gem types he didn't have much use for were sitting at about 200 in the turn file. This seems pretty reasonable, since it sounds like about the simplest kind of edit possible.

Re: How is cheating possible?
 

I agree with a lot of what Boron says. I will miss Norfleet as a member of this forum, since he was both very helpful in many contexts (not just in giving out advice which may or may not now be judged in retrospect as bogus) as well as often entertaining. Additionally, he was often the instigator of (productive) conflict, and (productive) conflict is vital and good for any discourse context. I am sure the Boards will suffer from his absence.
It is a crying shame that this has turned out this way. I had never ever considered Norfleet a cheater, and really couldn't even imagine it.
Of course hat's off to Stormbinder for sticking to his guns and being stubborn in this respect.
No one can expect Norfleet to be able to show his virtual face here again, but I would welcome a "new and cheat-free" Norfleet back as a forum member willingly, and propose that if Norfleet (surely under a different nickname or sig) were to come back perhaps in a few weeks or months and should he have foresworn cheating (and perhaps even help in preventing it in the future by yielding up his computer knowledge), that no attempt be made to shoo him off despite hard feelings.