Anyone have Moomba's Trainer?

[Nystul]

2. If everyone in the game knew that an individual was using such practices and were willing to accept it, would it still be cheating?

Of course it would be.

I disagree here. He explicitely worded the question like this, mentioning that all others know of and are willing to accept these practices.

That doesn't go far enough. He doesn't state that everyone in the game is playing by the same set of rules. He doesn't state that the characters will be consistent with regards to what rules they follow. Most importantly, he doesn't guarantee us that this whole group of characters will never game with any other characters since he has previously played with them using these unorthodox rules.

Even if he did say all of that, he is still cheating *within the context of the original game*. The only difference is that he can now claim he is playing a new game, with it's own rules, and that he is not cheating at that game. This is the ethos of the mod community, that you follow the rules of the mod and play within the framework of the mod, even though you are cheating from the standpoint of the original game. Without following the points I mentioned above, however, he is still cheating at every game known to mankind except CalvinBall.

As far as the "only cheating yourself" thing goes, here is how I see it...

If you play a game only by yourself, and never even mention it to anyobody else, then the concept of "cheating" becomes essentially irrelevant any way you look at it. But if you even make a claim about the game for the sake of discussion, such as "I beat Diablo in hell difficulty," or even "Diablo is such an easy game," then you are making statements that imply a game with a known set of rules. The concept of cheating at this stage is relevant. To the extent that people care about your claims in the first place, they will care whether you followed the rules or not as well.