3 ms·

What you said about progression matches my personal experience. I jumped in the deep end of Q3 just before Quake Live came out with about 2-3 months of playing

What you said about progression matches my personal experience. I jumped in the deep end of Q3 just before Quake Live came out with about 2-3 months of playing every evening for hours (vacation/between contracts -- I can't recall). I started saying, "Woah, this guy is so good he has to be a bot!" to the best player one evening early in my journey, after he fragged me for the 10th time in a row with nary a scratch from my pathetic efforts. By the end I was about as good as that, and other players routinely called me a cheat. My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).

tharkun__ 5y ago
With you on progression. First time you see someone being super fast you call them a cheater. Then you learn about Strafe jumping and that it's just how q3 physics work (even if unintentional from the programmers perhaps) and you learn it suddenly you're called a cheater by n00bs. Same with jumping onto things of a certain height. If your graphics hardware could not do a certain framerate constantly it was impossible to do those jumps. Get a new graphics card that could render at the full frame rate cap constantly and you could literally just hold the forward key in front of that obstacle and jump and you were there. Someone with worse hardware would obviously call you a cheat because it was impossible. So at least back then it was also a hardware thing. Another one: I had a regular PS/2 ball mouse. I was just unable to do certain things. Until someone told me there was a setting in Windows to change the scan rate, which improved accuracy and also a USB infrared mouse. Huuuuge difference. In fact I still use that USB mouse today. I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't. Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating. Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc. Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.
- quickthrowman 5y ago
  > Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. This must’ve been early on in q3’s life, ‘keel/fb’ (bright green Keel) has been the preferred enemymodel for quite some time since it’s highly visible, has loud movement sounds, and fills out the hit box pretty well. I always assume my opponent forces fullbright Keel for my model too.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    I've probably not played q3 for well over 10 years now ;) probably more like 15 years ago. Man I'm getting old.
- mrslave 5y ago
  > Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating. The entirely black skin was 3rd-party content, not an artifact from the official game. But yeah, no big deal either way.

tharkun__ 5y ago

With you on progression. First time you see someone being super fast you call them a cheater. Then you learn about Strafe jumping and that it's just how q3 physics work (even if unintentional from the programmers perhaps) and you learn it suddenly you're called a cheater by n00bs. Same with jumping onto things of a certain height. If your graphics hardware could not do a certain framerate constantly it was impossible to do those jumps. Get a new graphics card that could render at the full frame rate cap constantly and you could literally just hold the forward key in front of that obstacle and jump and you were there. Someone with worse hardware would obviously call you a cheat because it was impossible. So at least back then it was also a hardware thing. Another one: I had a regular PS/2 ball mouse. I was just unable to do certain things. Until someone told me there was a setting in Windows to change the scan rate, which improved accuracy and also a USB infrared mouse. Huuuuge difference. In fact I still use that USB mouse today. I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't. Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating. Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc. Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.

quickthrowman 5y ago
> Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. This must’ve been early on in q3’s life, ‘keel/fb’ (bright green Keel) has been the preferred enemymodel for quite some time since it’s highly visible, has loud movement sounds, and fills out the hit box pretty well. I always assume my opponent forces fullbright Keel for my model too.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  I've probably not played q3 for well over 10 years now ;) probably more like 15 years ago. Man I'm getting old.
mrslave 5y ago
> Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating. The entirely black skin was 3rd-party content, not an artifact from the official game. But yeah, no big deal either way.