Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199
I really hope not. Multiple people (including people from WAVE) posted here that using such scripts simply isn't right. It's cheating, it's likely against the rules of the program and, if caught, would DQ Wave, and finally it's not GP to try to go around the purpose of something like this.
While certainly a creative and educational way to tackle the problem, I suggest the next time someone asks you to do something like this, you think of the purpose behind it, the sponsor(s) behind it, and how doing something like that is likely to go completely against the intent and values of the program you are attempting to support.
I certainly encourage people who want to tackle a project like automating something like this to attempt to do so... it's a great educational tool and you'll learn a lot doing it. But to please, please not actually use it.
Big mammoth corporations (Like Activision, for example) have spent millions of dollars combating scripts like those you suggest in their multiplayer games. Pick your favorite online multiplayer game, and think about the repetitive stuff you have to do to improve your character/team/account/whatever. Creating a script to do it for you seems very tempting... but doing so also gives you an unfair advantage over everyone else playing. To equate this to FIRST... it's like a team going into a competition this past year with 6 CIM motors. It's against the rules and gives them an unfair advantage... but if they bury them in the robot so they aren't visible and no one catches them, they win, right?
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Believe me, I'm aware of the issues surrounding cheating in FIRST, and I make a conscious distinction between the obeying the rules in FIRST (and other sports/games), obeying the law in real-life challenges, and obeying nebulous constraints in pointless activities.
In sports, the rules are obeyed because all the participants are aware of the expectations, and follow them. What ideally results is an entertaining spectacle that is representative of the skill of the competitors. I'd tend to put FIRST in this category.
But you mentioned a computer game, and this lends itself to an exploration of some situations where the logic above doesn't completely apply. Under less-than-ideal circumstances, some people will decide that their own experience may be improved by (for example) automating tasks in an RPG. Insofar as that actually ruins the game for others, it's clearly a breach of the expected standards of conduct. But what if the game has potential, but is flawed enough that the only enjoyable way to play it is by making modifications that are not sanctioned by the free-spending developers/publishers? I'd say there's a situation in which it may not be wrong to break the rules, at least from the perspective of the user's experience. (There are other considerations that enter into that example, like copyright, and maybe this question has the potential to spawn a Chit-Chat thread—for now, I introduce this as evidence that it's important to understand why you're following rules, and to be aware that sometimes breaking a rule can be the right thing to do.)
In real life, the laws are obeyed either out of fear of the consequences, or better still, out of trust that they will ensure a more equitable outcome. The implication here is that laws and customs ought to be beneficial to society as a whole, and not unduly exploitative of any of its members.
In an online piggybank, there may be an implied constraint against feeding it in a scripted manner. On the other hand, this contest, even when played straight, provides neither an entertaining spectacle, nor an equitable result—as I described, it's probably a significant net loss to society, because feeding a piggybank is by definition among the least productive uses of labour. And that's to say nothing of the layers of perversity embodied in choosing the winner based on that process. It is clearly open to manipulation, and the organizers of the contest have failed to impose even modest safeguards against that possibility (they didn't even post a conspicuous notice, as they ought to have if this was important to them). It is not representative of the true needs of the community—at best it encourages the two organizations to mobilize their bases of support, and therefore is little but a comparison of the marketing skills of two worthy organizations. (
It's not even a popularity contest, because the competitors self-select the majority of the participants.) In fact, intentionally or not, it allows the granting organization to dodge the (more difficult) question of how to allocate resources based on need or merit, instead substituting a quasi-democratic exercise that resembles a vote, but doesn't really have anything to do with the will of the people.
I'll allow the possibility that the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation is of limited capabilities, and is therefore unable to tackle the problem of allocating resources in a reasonable way. In that case, if the only alternative was not to disburse the funds, then sure, a silly Flash game would be better than nothing. But under those constraints, they could just have given $500 to each candidate organization, and moved on. So I can only hope that they're of the belief that by organizing this song and dance, they can counteract the overall negative effect of the program by drumming up enough support to encourage other sorts of contributions to the team—like someone seeing the pig, and thinking, "I could do this so much better if I just wrote the team a cheque". That's why the
real solution is to figure out a way to eliminate the middleman, and get the team some money that isn't tainted by hundreds of wasted person-hours.
So, failing that, because this is obviously not a democratic exercise (unless the franchise is actually supposed to be defined by "how many fake coins you can
manually deposit into a virtual pig"), is it
actually wrong to use a script to automate the process in favour of the organization you believe most worthy? Aren't we just relying on preconceptions of voting behaviour that don't actually apply to piggybanks? And isn't there room for legitimate protest in response to the absurdity of it all? Perhaps something along the lines of causing someone to realize "these million votes from the same IP address can't be real...maybe we ought to re-think our strategy for disbursing funds".
Now of course, it might be better to simply communicate these concerns directly to the donor, rather than engage in a script war. If they're willing to respond on a policy-based level, then you've won the battle without firing a shot.
There's actually one other interesting fact about this particular contest: if you were depositing scripted coins of your own volition, Wave played no part in causing you to do that (except maybe introducing you to the contest). So if Wave got disqualified because of your actions, it would expose another inequity in the competition's design—punishing an innocent party for the sins of another isn't fair. In fact, if you knew this was a potential consequence, you might deposit millions of coins in the "opponent's" piggybank, in the hopes of getting them disqualified. (Malice aforethought probably makes you complicit in the stupidity, but it's an equivalent demonstration of the flawed system.)
And you know what: getting Wave disqualified early in the contest would probably have been a better overall outcome than letting the contest run its course. That would have avoided the waste of the majority of those person-hours, and guaranteed that Emmeline Cook Elementary School would win $1000. Now that's an insane situation: even if you "cheat", and get caught, and get thrown out, society is better off.