Cheating is endemic, its become a part competitive culture and so much so that once it becomes entrenched that it becomes super common to the point where a very large portion of the community defends it.
Its not unique to video games, and its not a new thing.
You need to look no further than speedrunning for cheating though speedrunners are probably the one community you never want to cheat in, you’d be ostracized as soon as you’re found out.
Yeah, we can’t even have games without cheating for some kind of profit or personal gain. It’s just depressing when there are obvious solutions that could be implemented but no one cares enough, or the people at the controls are in fact in on it.
I’ve been beating the “that’s cheating” drum pretty much since Classic has launched. Players aren’t just defending cheating. They simply deny it exists. Most folks chalk any suspect activities as “clever use of mechanics.”
Just because it’s endemic, does not mean you ignore it or let it slide.
Murder is illegal and damaging to society, but it’s also endemic to humanity since one caveman picked up a rock and attacked another.
I’d argue that there’s a subtle difference between doing something that Blizzard never imagined and finding a way to do what Blizzard has clearly and repeatedly tried to prevent.
In the early Wrath patch when Prot paladins stacked stamina beyond all logical needs because they got bonus spellpower from it and went into PvP as unstoppable killing machines, were they cheating?
Yup, its become so normalized to cheat that if you don’t then you’re no longer competitive.
Blizzards; old blizzards scorched earth policy on cheating is actually why I fell in love with Blizzards online games, more specifically early pre-wrath wow when cheating of any kind resulted in a permanent ban that had no chance of recovery.
I had friends who did cheat, who did bot and they were all perma-banned and all but 1 came back, those same players never cheated or botted again in wow. Its my opinion that perma ban works, especially when it kills an entire battlenet account.
My speculation here is Blizzard now actively gains from cheating and so has embraced it because they care less about the game than the money, but the problem with that is in this industry the quality and integrity of the game is what drives popularity, and without that this like many other AAA games are a flash in the pan of hope without the powder of quality required to drive the game to its full potential.
Another more cynical way to state it; Quarterly numbers > everything is their philosophy, but its the wrong way to run a game company.,
What matters is fun, and if you at blizzard embrace that again, the money and popularity will follow
or shield slam 1 shots, amazing time we’re skipping this time round 
I think the one missing piece of the puzzle here is that quality and popularity are no longer seen as things worth investing in, because corporations are pulling the strings with every major game company, and they’ve figured out that they can just monetize everything, including letting people swipe their credit cards to literally skip many tens or even hundreds of hours of the game. They punch money taps into the whales like they’re collecting sap from trees, and that makes these games profitable even when their populations die off and quality is completely lost.
I think the WoW team has done a pretty good job of providing as decent of a Classic experience as possible under the corporate constraints, but no amount of hard work and love poured into it is going to undo the damage that’s been done by the utter greed of Activision Blizzard.
the best way to achieve your goals if you’re not following the rules.
-many players get what they want to have by any means necessary & maybe that’s why they ninja items / Hard reserve items / buy gold to go gdkp’s / buy leveling boosts / in the end everyone just care for the results not the methods.
What do you mean cheating? The mage and pala “players” falling from the sky infront of zul’farrak do nothing wrong!
This is a satire piece, right?
If then, I blame a generation raised on hip hop! They steal others drum lines and bass lines and riffs, insert other’s very good work into their own and declare that is their art form. Once you think that is okay, your integrity and self-pride are out the door and you are only in it for the money, not art. In fact you might sing about the fact that you only in it for the bling and the cash.
Rubbin’ is racin’.
You’re just mad that I’m just better than you at everything.
The interesting thing about cheating in classic is because you know that person also cheated in retail originally. This was especially rampant in high level arena and reading the horror stories from arenajunkies back in the day not much really has changed. The only difference now is instead of being a kid or whatever they’re in their 30/40’s still doing the same thing.
Like hunters combat bugging in arena making them and partner unsappable. But they say it’s clever mechanics to completely be immune to one classes opener.
Classes get broken all the time with patches. They eventually get fixed.
aside from the fact that most speed runs themselves are borderline cheating anyway …
You’ll find that when people start to benefit from something they’ll become heavily invested in defending it’s practice. This is true for everything in business culture. So long as the consequences of ones behavior are removed from their sight, and the benefits are placed before them, it becomes very easy to cheat, or even spend money in ways that hurts other people.
Ethics demands a higher degree of consciousnesses and cultural awareness. Unfortunately the progress of our species is trapped by biological circumstances. Ethics and truth aren’t important in terms of natural selection. We’re are trapped by our biological circumstances, rather than ones of merit or reason.
I can do the same on my mage by means of my pet, tho in my case its unavoidable in certain circumstances because if the rogue does manage a re while my pet is out, I’m immune to sap (in combat) for the duration of my pet…, meanwhile I can drink…
Tho this in my situation is bad code, I have reported it but alas blizzard has no regard for quality.
I very much despise cheating and refuse to play with anyone who’s cheating because its disgusting to me, and if a player or team cheats to win, have they truly won? I say they win nothing, even if rewards are had.