Foodstamp, it's time for you to quit baiting the newer people, because that's mainly what your last few posts have been. Or it at least looks that way at a casual glance.
This whole RP/non-RP division is completely ridiculous and a red herring for the purposes of this discussion and making unsupported claims and statements about people being such, therefore having to conform to some sort of arbitrary ruleset or whatever is pure bull droppings.
From where I stand, both the "anything but hacking 2h files goes" crowd and the "house rules" side have points in their favor with regard to specific arguments, but neither side can claim being 100% correct.
Most of the stuff in the buglist is not something that can be turned around and used to wring an unintended advantage. Some things can be and those can be divided into categories according to just how they act.
- One example being the reverse communion issue, which acts like a feature and gives more options for all players who can access it (meaning anyone with astral magic).
- Another one is the army movement bug set, where stratmove 1 units can be made to march 10 provinces in one turn with the right commander (e.g. a horror) or more commonly 2 or 3. This is not intended and never has been or else the units would have greater stratmove. The sneaking out of siege bug is another one where Johan has gone on record saying it is a bug that should not be there.
- Then there's the Mists of Deception + BF Enchantment combo, which again has been confirmed to not work as it should.
- Demons with Twiceborn is another unintended consequence of something in the code, something that should work differently than it currently does
Out of that above list of examples, the first one is an equal opportunity exploit that does not give any kind of overwhelming instakill advantage and is widely available to various nations. The last one is basically specific to Lanka and can be used on a few unique blood summons and some Mictlan specific summons, so while it's still playing a crooked game to avoid losing units that would otherwise die (at least the second time around), but has its drawbacks and is limited.
MoD+DBFE is an instakill advantage when used by defender and should not work as it does, which at least in my mind places it in the category of being a dishonest tactic and playing a crooked game, therefore cheating. The same can be said of the movement bugs and I suppose on some level that I should have just sent those reports to Johan by PM and just put them in the list as "Movement 1 and Movement 2, reported by PM". Doesn't matter that the movement bugs are available to everyone equally, using them is playing a dishonest, crooked game in my book at least. I'd qualify that as cheating straight out, despite some of the rather torturous and hairsplitting definitions of cheating I've seen in this thread.
With that said, if somebody wants to play a game with house rules, fine, put as much restrictions as you like and use an honor system. Fine. If you enter a general game with few (if any) house rules, it's generally pointless to whine about some tactic being used (like he Wrathful Skies/AQ combo mentioned earlier) and in such games the only such complaints I'd take seriously are the MoD+DBFE and movement bug issues for the reasons given above.
It also seems that most MP games can eliminate at least one of these points of contention by just using a mod that removes Mists of Deception from the game entirely. That'll leave only its abusers as the complainers.