Is using Equalizers Cheating? Hens vs Ayrun debate

no, I mean in the sense where you have a sound program analyse what sounds you have and eliminating certain sounds. - I'm not a sound person, so I don't know the terms, so maybe it's the wrong one. - Like, you know how if you display sound it shows up at waves - and now you pick certain patterns that you want to remove/alter in a specific way.

While with calibrating headphones if you reduce the base it's reduced for all sounds - not just a specific one. Does that make more sense?

I have no clue what the 3-band-fixed-frequency-part means but I take the rest of what your write as; the equaliser does what you could do in your headphone settings - just a lot better. And in that case no, using an equaliser would not be cheating. - It'd be like bringing your 5 kg carbon bike to the city race where most folks have some average 15kg+ bike but it's not cheating - they're both bikes and the force that makes you move is you pedalling - but one will do a significantly better job at moving. Cheating would be bringing an e-bike.

It's tryhard, sweaty, unneccessary, in my book scummy, and once again an instance of parts of the community optimising the fun out of the game but not cheating.
I have the same opinion on shaders and using vpn. I'd say that's why I use neither of these things - but I do in fact use a Luma sharpen filter cause choosing between the bluriness of the game with anti aliasing on and the pixelated mess and seeing hair cards with anti aliasing off is like choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea.

I take the rest of what your write as; the equaliser does what you could do in your headphone settings - just a lot better.

This is exactly correct. Typically you get 3 knobs: volume levels (gain) for bass, mid, high. The frequency and width of each band are preset and cannot by changed.

A 4-band parametric EQ (PEQ) gives you 4 bands to work with and lets you select the frequency, gain, and width for each band. Sometimes you can turn the highest and lowest bands into shelves. So you get 12-14 knobs for this kind of EQ. Obviously, the number of knobs increases the more bands the PEQ has.

Here's the 8-band PEQ I have on my mic (I'm only using 3 bands currently):

There are also graphic EQs (GEQ), which give you a gain control for evenly-spaced (logarithmically speaking) frequencies. Often you'll have somewhere between 16 and 32 bands. You can't change the width or frequencies. This is probably the kind of EQ most people are familiar with. The 3-band bass/mid/high EQ many headphones and stereos have is really just a 3-band GEQ.

This is an example of a 16-band GEQ (at initial "flat" settings):

Ultimately they all do the same thing: adjust the volumes of certain frequencies. They can't "untangle" some sounds from others, unless all of the sounds primarily live in completely non-overlapping frequency spaces.

To be clear, I don't have any EQ on my game audio. I don't really have a bone in this fight, so to speak, but I find that people who think using an EQ is cheating have no idea how an EQ actually works or what it's capable of. The analogy to visual filters is very good, except that visual filters are more effective than an EQ at isolating important information. Between the two, if any should be classified as cheating then it should be visual filters.

I would definitely agree that it's sweaty, but there's a big difference between sweaty and cheating.

On the killer side, for the key moments, hearing is often more important than watching. I don't believe many will disagree with that (not the multi-thousand hours players anyway).

As for how an EQ works, having worked for two years in the field of psychoacoustics, I believe I have a decent understanding of the thing. 😉 (And are there so many people who don't know what an EQ does and how it works?)

I still consider using such a tool in this context is tantamount to cheating. It's an unfair advantage, plain and simple.

Most headsets I use just have them base. Same with monitors. So it'd be difficult I feel for them to ban it.

What is acceptable or not is only dictated by the game's host themselves, not the hired help who aid in keeping the house in order in their stead. If a security guard was super kind and, as a general rule, let employees on company property after hours for whatever reason (say they claimed to forget something), that would still be trespassing if the company had a policy against doing so.

This tweet just acknowledges that EAC has made a general rule to permit it in their software - nothing more, nothing less.

Even if it were the devs who whitelisted it (which I have heard claims about, but have never seen for myself), then it would not be cheating in the dbd sense of the definition under 4b. Keep in mind, 4a would still be in breach since there's typically no way for the average player to know their opponent is running shaders, nor do they give consent to go against it. So even in that case, while allowable in DBD as a whole, in general sense it would still be cheating.

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Edit:
Come to think of it, I misspoke a bit.

If the devs were to clearly whitelist shaders in a visible manner, 4a could be argued as irrelevant since its accessible public knowledge and one could argue they have an expectation to know then (and still playing could be argued as an implied consent). However, condition 3, which I failed to even acknowledge pre-edit, would still be in breach if shader-level of visual supplements were not available in the game itself as then the average player would not have access to it; thus giving the user an extraordinary advantage that violates competitive integrity. So if the devs allowed it, it would still be cheating in the general sense (albeit for a different reason than I claimed earlier).

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Either way, the result is the game. Shaders, EQ, and any external programs that assist the user are still cheating in the general sense and even in DBD specifically until clearly and specifically whitelisted by the devs. The only questions afterwards is whether or not the people who use it can accept that they are cheating, and whether or not they think it's wrong to do so.