This is a distinct lack of understanding towards what motivates people to play games. Some do it for money (e-sports), some do it for fame (achievements, speed-runs, e-sports again).
Right. But when money and fame are your motivations, you aren't playing single player, non-competitive. Well, I'll accept that I'm wrong in the case of speed runs and the like, but those sorts of things are - as I had mentioned previously - player-instigated challenges. You're comparing apples to oranges, and so your point doesn't really contradict mine at all. So, I suppose, thank you for agreeing, sort of?
I believe it to be ignorant to consider something like this.
I don't mind you disagreeing, but the way you wrote that sentence is downright funny. However, as to the points from that paragraph, I can't agree with you on any of them except that - obviously - people have different preferences. Without an AI that can be as unpredictable and imaginative as a human opponent, single player is essentially a way to (for games with such tactical options) test out various tactics against an opponent that can be reliably expected to perform in a certain way. That there is no substitute for authentic practice is absolutely correct, and being good at the single-player campaign for Starcraft in no way prepared me for the intense butt-whooping delivered to me by real players; so to get good at *competitive* Starcraft I would have had to practice in MP. But just to get practice dealing with the game mechanics, to see the story written for we players, and to have fun? Single-player, all day.
Most cheat codes are built into the game during development in order to aid the developers in testing mechanics and features without wasting a lot of time (debugging). That they are left in is a service to players, but I have a hard time looking at them as a valid option of play (especially since they're almost never advertised within the game).
Sure, but disabling them is *trivially* easy. Depending on what language you're writing the code for (and a whole lot of games are still written in C or C++ or one of the direct variants) it's often as simple as !, #, or ## at the start of a line to comment it out. That such things are not removed is in fact a conscious business decision these days (I understand that 10, 15 years ago it was sometimes just the work of mischievous programmers/devs).
Having one choice that is clearly superior to anything else breaks the balance of the game. Why would the player choose an inferior tool? Why would he act in a masochistic manner?
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Singleplayer games need to be balanced in a way that it is fair towards the player, and in a way that it can challenge them from start to finish. The level of challenge is of course decided by the developers at the start, together with the intended audience.
I'm not surprised this came up. Firstly, as to why someone would deliberately choose an inferior tool, see what I said about XCOM and Jagged Alliance. Sometimes you just want to overcome something that's downright mean. As to the second, which goes back to the whole point I made from the beginning, the developers should design a generally acceptable difficulty setting, but it is absolutely up to the player in a game with as many options and choices as D:OS to fine-tune that difficulty. And it is essentially unfair - and intensely egotistical and conceited - to put forth an argument that says "I don't like this, so don't let anyone else do it because I don't want to." That's the whole point, and what nearly everyone who criticised me failed to understand.
I like the idea of giving Comeback Kid a cooldown. I'd like the idea even more of Leech only healing you at the end of the turn, so that multi-hit attacks can overcome Comeback Kid easily. And if the two of them are sufficiently changed, I'll even give one of my characters those traits and see how it goes. But I'm not selfish enough to say "this is so powerful that nobody should use it." I just decided that it was too powerful for me to use. Not hard at all.
