Is password guessing cheating?

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Hadrian Tyrael S. Aventine:
It's still cheating to guess a password, even for the hell of it.

Things that expose cheaters that guess passwords

- Suddenly all thier ships move to another area with no reason
- If they are egotistical, they drop hints to thier own superiority (thus proving hwo dumb they are).
- They know stuff that can be gathered via cloaked ships -- but they don't have cloaking researched.....
- Suddenly they know where all your best shipyards are and destroy them.

Those are just some of the cheaters' ways.

Guessing passwords is cheating, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

No, it's not even remotly equatable to the intel ops of WWII, or even to any hypothetical Nazi brain reading technology that was or wasn't developed. But all that was during a war. And this is a game. All is fair in love and war. All is not fair in games.

Even real armies during war games don't allow unrestricted warfare. There are things you do during war that you don't do during games.

All that being said, if any of the things Hadrian and DavidG suggests happen to you during a game, PLEASE don't assume it's the work of cheaters. All of these things can just as easily be explained through perfectly legitimate game reasons.

Intelligence, Partnerships with empires that have cloaking technology, even just guessing or raw chance. During a war I will often avoid larger planets, or medium sized planets that are atmosphere correct. I will always check the population of a planet before attacking and make an educated guess about the defensive levels. You can also make supositions based on resource levels. Higher ones would tend to be colonized earlier, thus be older and have more defenses.

Cheating is cheating, but let's not let suspicion and paranoia ruin games either.

Geoschmo

[ June 30, 2002, 21:05: Message edited by: geoschmo ]