[perching_aix]

For the record, I did not downvote (and I do think there are valid reasons to downvote without saying anything, even if I appreciate that it is frustrating sometimes from the other side).

I think there's merit to recognizing how loose the concept of cheating can be, it's much akin to the concept of vulnerabilities.

That said, a very very very large part of cheating in videogames revolves around these points:

- ensuring the inputs are not altered: not shaped, not injected into, not filtered, not replaced

- ensuring the inputs are issued by a human

- ensuring that the inputs issued by said human are made in response to the output of the game being processed by said human

- ensuring the that these happen at roughly the same time, and in real time

- ensuring that the identity of the human in question is unique among the playerbase (to prevent veterans sockpuppeting as newbies, as well as multiboxing, and many other forms of abuse)

- [several more I probably forget]

And I'd go as far as to say that even individually these are impossible to actually solve, let alone combined. The equivalent problems for machine-to-machine communication are already hard enough, but making one of the participants a human really twists the knife. It's also essentially the analog hole problem.

[jchw]

Ultimately, I'd say it's all about trying to ensure a level playing field and trying to make sure nobody has an unfair advantage, and "unfair advantage" is always somewhat subjective. In real world sports, it often manifests in hard-to-interpret rules like F1's new-ish rules around moving under breaking. In "eSports" it manifests in many ways, like debate over what hardware and software is cheating.

> and I do think there are valid reasons to downvote without saying anything

I think people should be generally encouraged to reply. There's some comments where it's obvious why someone would disagree or take offense, but lately I've noticed that even comments that seem incredibly benign often get grayed out at least briefly. This is confusing and hard for observers to make sense of, less the poster themselves. With everything left implied, it's not even clear if people even agree on why they don't agree with the post.

Stack Overflow encourages people to explain themselves probably for the same basic reason. HN on the other hand asks commenters to not discuss votes. I do generally agree (in fact I wouldn't even really want people to start comments with "I'm down voting because...") but damnit, sometimes you just want to know why.

And of course, sometimes the reason why is someone mistapped on their mobile phone, or something like that, so you'll never know.