I Hate Cheaters

Today I read and RTed an article on how The Conduit is easily hackable. This lead to a twitter conversation which then reminded me of a complaint I made to Nintendo some time back about people cheating in Mario Kart Wii.

If you do not already know, ghosts are a representation of someone's game play. The basis of my complaint was that after a long period of time I finally connected my Wii to the internet. I was really excited to download ghosts to see how I could improve my game. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that most of the ghosts were hacks. (There were some that were not actual hacks, but did not actually run the race either, but exploitation is more tolerable than straight up hacking.)

I ended up sending Nintendo an e-mail. It seemed to me that they would have some way of deleting these ghosts from the servers. OR make it so that ghosts would not be posted if the time is lower than what is actually possible.

I stated in my e-mail that I think that people should be free to hack as long as it does not hurt anyone else, but in the case of leaderboards it really is just not fair for those of us who do not cheat. Furthermore, it seems to me that the point of being able to race ghosts is to help the player improve their own game. Keeping hacker ghosts up and running hurts everyone and make Nintendo look bad, imo.

That all being said, this is the response I got:

"Hello and thank you for contacting Nintendo,

Sadly, cheating in games (even board or card games) is an unfortunate fact of life. We do respect the fact that you, and many others, do their best to enjoy gaming without cheating. At Nintendo, we do our best to make sure that our fans are able to have a fun gaming experience.

One way we have been able to accomplish this is through the Friend Code feature. We introduced the Friend Code feature as a way of allowing gamers to build their own personal online gaming community by choosing to play only with those they know and trust. This way, players are able to create an arena where they can enjoy a fair gaming experience.

Rest assured that your comments about this very important issue have been shared with the appropriate departments within Nintendo for review.

Sincerely,
David Glover Nintendo of America Inc."

Ok. So, people cheat and the honest people are the ones that must seclude ourselves from the world and only play with our friends? Right. It seems to me that this response was more of a blow off. "People cheat...deal with it! Don't like it? Play with your friends."