BrainΦΠΦTemple wrote:
so his hand hUrt? oH. uH, k. tHat's why hand exercises are important whether yOu are a gamer or a musician or both
Hand exercises aren't always enough.
oH yeah, the argument tHat the japanese use autofire, so it's fine is a dumbsHit argument. tHat's literally just an appeal to authority + i've even seen them using auto fOr beat 'em upz, which is fukken pointless :/
Autofire for beat 'em ups isn't pointless, in some cases it's very helpful.
Anyways, I don't think it's an appeal to authority, it's just stating the reality of the top level, hardcore scene. The playerbase for videogames may not always see eye to eye with how the game was originally designed, so they may make their own rules. Of course that doesn't mean everyone has to abide by player-made rules. It's just a fact that in Japan autofire has been common place. We are able to view top tier gameplay and tell what autofire has done for them, to what extent it has broken games, etc. We can use this knowledge to decide whether or not allowing autofire makes sense.
Top scores are frequently tracked both with or without autofire in cases where autofire isn't built in precisely so we don't need these arguments to dictate how to play.
It doesn't do anyone any good to make cheating accusations because of autofire, because we're not following the same rulebook.
Instead of being absolutist on the topic and deciding that it's cheating just because it wasn't built in originally, it should be more than enough to make an objective list of pros and cons and let all gamers decide for themselves which rulesets suit them the best. I've made my own decision and decided that I prefer allowing autofire, for various reasons.
Going over all the reasons for and against autofire would be beating a dead horse at this point as everything has already been said, if not here, then elsewhere, many times.
There's many reasons why using autofire could be seen as cheap, cheaty gameplay, most people who use it understand this.
Opponents of autofire also need to understand that there are many reasons why allowing it is a good thing.
Everyone understands that autofire also can give gameplay advantages, sometimes substantial.
So we can separate autofire and non autofire on leaderboards. On completely equivalent achievements, the one without autofire tends to be harder (sometimes slightly, sometimes substantially) rather than equivalent. In many cases, what can be done with autofire, is impossible without.
I also would like to mention something that some people get wrong. Developer intentions are not the same thing as the game itself. I've sometimes seen two people, when arguing, argue about two separate things. One person argues about the game itself, while the opponent, misunderstands and think they are arguing about developer intentions.
If we're talking about rulebooks to follow, like with the cheating debacle, then Dev intentions and the game itself are entirely different things.
Dev intentions are bad for deciding rules because devs probably know their games a lot worse than the players do, and, making things worse, is that what's a dev intention is just beyond nebulous. In essence it becomes like a more ill defined version of players rulebook.
Game itself has its own fair share of problems because of lots of things such as ports, emulation, etc, but can at least be worked out more logically. For example with autofire, it's seemingly simple. If the game didn't have built in autofire, then playing with it is cheating. That's a mostly logically consistent claim. Though there are lots of ways to muddy the waters...
For example, you are playing on console, and an official controller has autofire? In this case it's not only about the game, but also the console and peripherals
Meanwhile, what about players rulebook. That's the one we follow when using autofire, after all. We decided it's ok, so we use it. Players rulebook has its own problems. First one is that it's arbitrary. No matter what rules the players bend, and what reasoning, it can ultimately be decided arbitrary compared to "Just follow games own rules".
But I would argue there is something more important than this. That is to use reasoning, and experience to decide how to maximize your own satisfaction, as the player. Because sometimes, in various communities, players will bend the games rules, and agree on these new rules, because they have decided it is best so. That is exactly what happened with autofire among the Japanese. I personally have thought a lot about why I decided to allow myself to use autofire. It would've been harder come to that conclusion independently, but looking at japanese superplays and leaderboards, have given complete clarity on the topic of how this opened pandoras box autofire has affected shmups.
Everyone else is free to use all the available information to come to the opposite conclusion and decide they will not use autofire.
).
