Are intentional glitches considered cheating?

Glitches are unexpected errors/bugs that can occur in video games? However, some glitches have been known to be intentional. The question is, "Are intentional glitches considered cheating?" Explain your answer in detail.

If you're circumventing the core game mechanics in a way that benefits you hugely then it's cheating. But cheating doesn't always mean you're being bad. If cheating is actually making you enjoy the game more because you're busting through levels and having fun in something that you might have thought was a slog, well you're hurting nobody.

I'm presuming all this is one player stuff. If it's multiplayer and you're taking advantage and causing somebody else grief then it's a different story.

Intentional glitches? What, like skiing in Tribes? No, if it's intentionally put in the game and not labeled a cheat by devs then it's intended to be used in standard gameplay.

Easy peasy

@itwongo: I would assume he means if you intentionally use a glitch. If it's intentionally put in the game, then it's clearly not a glitch.

I would call using glitches "exploiting", not "cheating". Technically different things, but both are dick moves. Things like Super Bouncing and BXR from Halo 2 are stupid glitches, being good at exploiting them doesn't mean you're good at the game.

If it's intentional then it is not a glitch. If it started out as a glitch but the devs decided to expand it, then that's a little muddier.

I don't think glitches ever occur intentionally.

Glitches are unintentional cheats, not unintentional gameplay mechanics. Abusing a glitch still makes you a dirty cheating bastard.

It;s like corporations using tax loop holes to rob their employees pensions. Just because its technically legal doesnt mean its right.

I spawned a helicopter or stunt plane and flew to every mission in GTA 5. Would you say that was cheating or alternative fast travel?

How do I know this forum thread isn't an intentional glitch made by the Giant Bomb to distract me?

The real conversation lies in the glitches being used when they become part of the meta. When almost everybody but brand new players are using it and it becomes a core convention of gameplay, though still unintentional, is it then considered cheating still?

It depends on the game, its community and the developers. There is no one answer.

Give us examples of glitches that are intentional... Like plink dashing in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3?

It's part of the game and hopefully doesn't detract too strongly in the overall spectrum.

Yeah, this sounds too vague to me. The only good example (of what I think you mean) that I can come up with off the top of my head is that there's a Fusion Forecast day sometime between Yukiko/Kanji's dungeons in Persona 4 where you can fuse a persona that might learn Victory Cry, and endgame skill that fully refills the player's HP and SP after every battle.

To me, that isn't cheating. It's a pretty massive, totally fair advantage.

I think he's referring to something like an item duplication glitch. You aren't using outside tools, but you are doing something that gives you an unintended advantage.

When you say intentional glitch, I think of Muta-stacking in the original Starcraft. It wasn't intended to be like that, but it became so popular Blizzard never fixed it, and even made sure it was possible in Starcraft 2. It was an extremely popular zerg build in the pro scene, and there were still ways to counter it, so I wouldn't say it's considered cheating.

Right, there are plenty of examples of this in fighting games and a lot of them actually really improve the games. Things like kara cancelling, renda cancelling, CVS2 roll cancelling, I think smash wave dashing was a glitch? Kara cancelling arose from the developers trying to make inputs more lenient and now they're actually quite important to the way some characters are played. Or something like how in Super Turbo, Chun-Li can store her super and walk forward with it. It's a glitch, but it makes her more interesting without being horribly busted.

I guess it's personal preference in a lot of those instances whether it's bad or not. If you thought Marvel 3 TAC glitches were stupid, I wouldn't really argue. They all really need to be judged individually.

So I guess general rule of thumb should be don't do dickish broken glitches to grief people in multiplayer but also don't get all uppity if a speedrunner uses a glitch that actually takes skill to execute in order to post a faster time.

It's a bit exploitative, but I suppose as long as it's not game-breaking, it's fine.

For example, in Steam Train's LP of Skyrim, they did a speedrun using a glitch that let them teleport through walls. It was actually kind of hilarious.

#followthewhiterabbit

If the point of a lot of games is to beat them then finding an exploit that the developers didn't notice and using it to your advantage to beat it isn't totally cheating I'd say, it's beating the game in style. To beat a game is to master it enough to get to the end, so if you can master it beyond it's own built in limitations that's kind of cool.
But exploring/glitching is just dinkish in multiplayer games, at the very least when it comes to competitive games. I suppose in co-op ones it all comes down to how the other players feel about it.
Then again if you find something cool to do with an exploit in an MP game and everyone supports it that's not so bad, so long as everyone is on board with it. So I guess really it's always going to be defined as a good or bad thing by what the people affected by it/using it think.

but we will never know because the question is worded so poorly

@damodar: I dont think speed runs that exploit glitches to skip parts of the game should count. You're skipping parts of the game that are intended to be required to beat it. Thus you didn't beat it. Thus you didn't do a speed run. I don't care how much skill those glitches require, if you skip shit with a glitch or use a glitch to travel around faster, i think that should invalidate the speed run.

Glitching is cheating but there's various situations where this doesn't harmfully impact others and is thus fair game. Now, glitching and claiming that this makes your method of play more valid is total bullshit e.g. Broken% runs in Dark Souls II. Exploiting terrain is different than straight-up glitching though, so for example the early Dark Souls II speed runs had various jumps that were undoubtedly not intended to be possible; those were fine and even the winter shrine skip was fine except that it was patched out and thus invalidated; but noclipping because of a bug isn't. As long as you're still playing the game and doing things that should theoretically be possible within the rules of the game there's not really a problem even if whatever you happen to be doing is actually a small glitch; once you stop playing the game and start doing weird shit instead that's where the problem lies.

It should be very easy to tell the difference between a gamebreaking glitch and something that's just a novelty that may grant you some slight advantage.

@aerobie: I disagree, being able to BXR and Doubleshot in Halo 2, made that game what it is..it's not like only certain people could do it, it was just timing.

Like Snaking in Mario Kart?

I would say that's not cheating. You find an exploit in a game and use it unaided by hacking, that's fair game.

nope Snaking in Mario Kart, wavedash in SSB (is that even a bug? not the most up on SSB) BXR in Halo 2, etc. are not cheating. Anyone playing the game can use them so it maintains a level playing field.

The best part of the Halo anniversary collection announcement was the in-engine, exactly as is thing. Cause I thought for years that any Halo 2 remake would have the button glitches taken out.

Yes, that is correct. :)

@clonedzero: I think my stance on that is that it should be up to the person running the game to define the terms of what they are trying to achieve. Speedrunning has all sorts of different categories. They differentiate between glitch and no glitch runs, 100% and any% completion etc, but all are accepted as equally legitimate. There are so many glitched runs that I enjoy watching that to just write a run off as invalid just because they didn't pass through every intended sequence just seems like a shame, also a bit like missing a large part of what speedrunning is actually about. There are glitched runs that I only actually like because they're so glitched. The pokemon yellow run involving rewriting actual memory addresses in the hardware is a great example. You acknowledge that glitched runs do still require incredible effort and ingenuity in regards to optimising, finding glitches that often require frame or pixel perfect accuracy etc. The runners are obviously so invested and passionate, questioning the validity just seems like unnecessary dogmatism.

I guess the interesting thing about the different categories is that there must be delineation between what is and what isn't a glitch. That's probably an interesting discussion.

Ok, you didn't phrase the question well. Glitches are not presumably not intentional by definition. I assume you mean that a player exploits a glitch on purpose. If so then whether or not that's cheating depends on a few things. David Sirlin would argue that glitching is NEVER cheating. But I disagree. I think it depends on the game. If it's a tournament, then he's right, technically glitching is not cheating, until the tournament holder says otherwise. Otherwise, glitching is probably cheating unless you're practicing for a tournament. It also depends on the kind of glitch. For instance I heard that combos in Street Fighter were originally a glitch.

Intentional glitches? You mean undocumented features? #programmerjokes

There's no such thing as an intentional glitch.

Glitches are often a big thing in fighting games. With so many people trying to come up with combos and setups there'll always be some weird thing that the devs themselves didn't intended to be there and never found but that can benefit the player. At that point it depends on how the community reacts. If it's okay to use it in tournaments (like unblockables in SF4 or the infamous DHC glich and infinites in UMvC3) then I wouldn't consider it cheating. If you flat out use stuff that makes it unfair for other players it most definitely is.

Also as others pointed out already glitches are never intentional. If it started as a glitch but intentionally ended up as part of the gameplay then that's not a glitch anymore.

I think some glitches can actually enhance the gameplay if they require skill to pull-off. For instance in Halo 2, Bungie left in BXB (a quicker way of meleeing an opponent) and BXR (a nearly instant melee, headshot combo). They also knew of people pulling off double-shots with the Battle Rifle but left it in as it was pretty difficult to land. I agree that glitches are not intentional but I think some can actually benefit the game competitively once they are found. In single-player I'd say all bets are off, do what you need to do to beat it or have a good time. Red Dead Redemption was so amazing for the first few days with the glitchy carriages, flying people, and donkey ladies. Sad they took it all out.

How can it be cheating if the devs put it in there themselves?

@starvinggamer: The video game production staff did not expect anyone to use glitches to their advantage.

If something is intentional, then it's meant to be there, and technically isn't a glitch. But, if they put a glitch in there by mistake, it should be considered cheating if you abuse it for online play. That's how I feel anyways.

Then everybody who plays fighting games is a cheater. Entire genre is built on finding ways to abuse input buffering, option selects, etc. Even combos were unintentional.

Its not really cheating, but it can force everyone to need to use sketchy mechanics to compete. The infinite boost thing in some Mario Kart games is a good example - everyone could do it, but it made online racing terrible since you had to mash your way around the track.

@antpatcan: But surely they can't expect players to be able to differentiate between intentional, and unintentional game play mechanics either, now can they? After all, the player did not design the system, the player is merely a part of it.

I don't consider it to be a cheat as long as the glitch is accessible to everyone, and doesn't result in an instant, or near instant victory. I also don't consider glitch-free gaming to be "purer" than any other form of gaming. I would even go so far as to say that I prefer the challenge of trying to optimize a strategy under given constraints.

Edit:

@corvak: This is the only real problem I can see with glitch use in a competitive environment, that it may take away some of the joy and variation of a game, making it predictable and bland.

intentional glitches are considered amazing.

It's cheating if done on online competitive multiplayer games, and cheaters should be castrated with a rusty spoon.

@victorboris1:

These days, there are online moderators in place to ensure fairness of all players in multiplayer competitions. Anyone caught cheating in multiplayer games are subject to disciplinary action.