If you have strong soft skills this isn’t so much of an issue, and I highly recommend that. AI can do such a good job in so many avenues, but being able to show up with confidence and understand and present materials to leadership is a very important skillset to possess. In addition, having the ability to solve problems on the fly is also a large asset from my perspective.

I just joined here from Reddit mere weeks ago and many of the posts I have made have been hit with a hell of a lot of negativity. I seem myself as very intelligent. I have multiple degrees, I’m in my 40’s, I have a family, I make a lot of money and own a big house, I own and run a philosophy blog, I’ve been published - and I point this out to simply detail that I think some of the things I have to say are well thought out, utilizing logic, reason, facts, and philosophy, both formal and informal, yet many posts already that I have made have been met with such shallow, stupid comments calling me names or telling me my opinion is stupid.

It’s like walking into conversations with preteens who have no parents around.

While I accept that for many developers, mods are seen as welcome, my problem with mods is, if you’re playing a game of chess with someone and both of you agree to change the rules, then that’s perfectly fine, but that’s no longer chess. You could in theory not even know the rules of chess and make up your own game using the chessboard and its pieces, but if someone were to ask you if you know how to play chess and you say yes, you wouldn’t be able to explain a single rule, so you don’t really know how to play chess at all.

If you’re modding a game, it’s no longer that game anymore, it’s something else - which is fine. Some people prefer mods over the “vanilla” game itself, but then we should be honest with the fact that you don’t really like the game as much as the version you’ve frankensteined together.

In addition, a lot of mods make games easier, which is the reason why many players “enjoy them”. Some people - and I’ve been gaming since I was about 3 on an Atari 2600 for over 40 years - seem to just enjoy when a game is “easy” and do not really like anything that makes it harder for them to “win”, but those people rarely realize - from my experience, anyway - that this is what they are actually enjoying about mods.

For example, you could play a game that introduces new vehicles or weapons, not understanding that these vehicles and weapons are better than those currently in the vanilla build of the game.

Game developers often do this to their own games in the form of power creep, which almost ALWAYS ruins games (compared to their initial release and/or their highest point.) Take World of Warcraft as an example of this. The power creep got so ridiculous multiple times that they had to rework the entire game’s mechanics, skills, and even numbers just to keep the game “working” on a fundamental level.

Well it depends on what you mean by cheating. Cheating tends to be a concept where more than one player is agreeing to a single ruleset and when one of those players breaks that ruleset, that’s the cheating.

You cannot compete in a system if you don’t both work in the same system. How do you know who’s won in a game of chess for example if the other player is playing as if all of their pawns are queens, and you are not? From their perspective they won, but from yours, they didn’t play the same game you’re playing.

So it changes when you play a game by yourself. In my view, the ruleset was created by the developers. Now clearly you could say that maybe the devs wanted additional rulesets and didn’t have the time, money, or inclination to make them, and you could also say that some devs are actively accepting of alterations to their game, but you have to ask yourself then what the rulesets of that game really are.

For me, and this is just for me, even when the devs themselves make sweeping changes to a game I can lose interest - especially when those changes “dumb down” the content and make it more accessible/simpler. Take mmo’s for example: If for 2 years the game required other players and a lot of time investment and then suddenly the devs make a huge patch where you can now solo everything and achieve the same past accomplishments in a quarter of the time, I feel like that’s “cheating”. Generally I just quit when that happens.

Obviously this isn’t an objective thing here, it’s just my personal opinion. I think generally the original vision of the game is the “intended” vision, so altering it in certain ways just seems like it’s going against the spirit of the game itself.

Never. I literally never use cheats. I do not even use mods.