This argument ignores the situational context of the discussion at hand. By your logic here, they should just go ahead and implement every single little frivolous thing players want in the game so that they don't have to go download a mod for it.
No, they should implement
this thing that
I want. You don't actually need a larger justification to want something in the game. You're demanding one from me right now, sure, but I don't see you applying that standard to any other random thing people want in this thread.
What you are suggesting is more than just a feature support, it's a conflict with the existing core design of how the game handles cheaters.
No it's not, if you want the "existing core design" you just don't enable the option.
Your take on my take is bad. You're missing the fundamental point that Chezi and I have been making entirely. The game already doesn't roadblock you from modding and cheating, it just disables unlockables and saving when you do. As an additional note, only some mods actually disable unlockables and progress. If you are just modding the music for example, the game doesn't care and doesn't flag the game as modified.
Your fundamental point is a bad one. I want it
in the game. I want custom savedata to be a thing you can just enable.
Games are entertainment activities performed within given rule sets. In rock paper scissors, it is fundamental to the game that paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, and scissors beats paper. These are the conditions to victory. Without these conditions, you do not have a game. If you arbitrarily decide to add in "Dragon" which beats everything and then use it every time, you aren't winning the game legitimately. You are bending the rules into your favor, cheating them to get your desired result without having to do so within the previously established ruleset. This makes your win illegitimate.
Single-player video games do not work the same way as rock paper scissors.
Granted, it is possible to cheat to do one thing but then later in the same session not cheat to do another thing. However, unless it's figured out how to get the game to be able to tell the difference, a flag for having modified the game is better than just ignoring it.
Again, nobody is asking for it to
ignore anything if people don't want it to.
That's not particularly constructive.
I disagree. I think it would be very constructive if you started listening to me.
If players want something different, they can modify it. If this blocks them from progressing, they can modify it so that it doesn't. If something a player wants conflicts with the design of the game, the devs aren't obligated to change their design to make them happy.
Again, not seeing why you wouldn't just say this to literally anything in this thread. There are doubtless hundreds of posts here asking for things that "conflict with the design of the game", that you could reply to with "the devs aren't obligated to change it just to make you happy"", except that would be really obnoxious, just like it is right now.
"Cheats shouldn't inherently disable unlockables" is a different kind of suggestion from "This character should be in the base game" or "this thing is overpowered and should be nerfed" or etc. in that they don't conflict with the core design of the game. That still wouldn't guarantee they get added though. Even if something like new characters or balance changes doesn't conflict with the core design of the game, it is still the kind of thing that needs to be taken into careful consideration in regards to whether or not it has a place in the vanilla, unmodified version of the game.
Who gets to decide what is and isn't "the core design of the game"? A new character is a complete upheaval of the way the game fundamentally plays a lot of the time, and if you say "this character should be added permanently" in one of those instances, you are essentially arguing for the entire game to be given at-best a once-over, and at worst completely rebalanced to account for that character. How is that a smaller conflict than a menu toggle that enables or disables saving?
Once again you take what I am saying and go a whole different direction with it. All I was asking for was that you outline how your suggestion could actually be done. I never once stated anything along the lines of this being an infraction of the rules or anything. Is it really asking so much for you to try to be constructive?
If you actually wanted elaboration on how I wanted this, maybe you shouldn't have gone on the offensive right out the gate and accused me of trying to force other players into a structure of gameplay progression they weren't comfortable with?
And let's be honest, you've spent way more time calling any reply you don't like "disingenuous" than pushing for any "constructive" discourse yourself.
A strawman is a misrepresentation or distortion of what someone is saying because it's easier to debunk than their real argument. For instance, to imply that Chezi or I are against the game being changed in any way whatsoever, or that the "legitimacy" I was referring to was somehow based on my own standards and not those of the game itself.
I never implied that either of you were against that, only correctly stated that that was the logical conclusion your bad rhetoric
suggested. And I never said your standard of "legitimacy" was outside that of the game, because the game doesn't have a standard. It's a video game, not a person. The standards of single player games are whatever you want them to be. It could only ever be personal.
A game without rules is not a game. All games have rules, single player or otherwise. These rules are very plain and obvious. In SRB2 for example, if you touch the sharp end of spikes, you get hurt. If you touch one ring, one ring gets added to your counter. If you break an invincibility monitor, you are granted temporary invincibility for about 20 seconds. You are tasked with getting to the goal of each level and defeating each boss within the rules the game establishes, and breaking these rules is cheating.
Wrong. These are not rules, they are laws. Rules are a thing you agree to to make sure a certain game is played a certain way, and punishing deviation. This is why sports are boring. A rule in SRB2 would be something like "don't be horny to people on public co-op servers". Nobody
consents to all the enemies respawning when you use a bonfire in Dark Souls, and if something happened that made you get the health and estus regen without the respawn, you're not breaking a rule, you just got a lucky break to walk to the boss without having to fight all the enemies again.
Rules only matter if you're playing with other people, or if you're imposing them on yourself. Anything else, and you're trying to gatekeep how people play.
I'm not saying that playing with cheats enabled is "illegitimate" in the sense that you are in the wrong for doing it. Nobody cares if you are cheating in a single player game. We've all done it. Nobody is trying to act all holier than thou in that regard. What I am saying is that within the given ruleset established within the game itself, to use these cheats to bend around the conditions required to progress is treated as illegitimate progress due to the aforementioned cheating, and therefore doesn't count. To change this without mods would be to change the core design of how the game handles cheating, and undermines the entire point of there even being given conditions to progress to begin with.
There is no "given ruleset". There is only the rules that each player subconsciously constructs in their own minds. To suggest that someone who doesn't construct the same rules is going against the game is to delegitimize that person's experience. The game is not making demands of anyone here. It's not a human being.
Games are defined by their rules, not by how well you can snap those rules in half. Just because doing so is fun doesn't make the game about that.
Rules/laws difference as usual, but also, no. The game is about whatever players want it to be about or indeed
make it about. If you define your experience by how hard you can break the game,
that is what the game is about.
Take Team Fortress 2 for example. There is no multiplayer gameplay benefit to hoarding cosmetics and trading to get the rarest hats possible. But for someone, that is what that game is about. The game for another person is about nothing except the specific strategies and reflexes necessary to win a match. Both of these people are correct.
It's even simpler in a single player game, where nothing you do will alter the experience for other people. TF2 players have rules, because they have to be on equal footing. SRB2 has no rules, you can play it however you like and it will be as genuine an experience as anyone else, because that experience will always be personal to that specific player.
The only thing that you're doing wrong here is being a dick. The actual conversation is fine and it's probably worth all these words if it's something you both care about and have such strong opinions on, but wow, chill out and be respectful. You can disagree with someone and you can even vehemently disagree with someone without being sarcastic and dramatic like this.
I understand, I will take care to calm down in the future, but this is admittedly a pretty frustrating argument to deal with.