Is using Equalizers Cheating? Hens vs Ayrun debate

Let me recap:

_ The purpose of the chase music is specifically to make it harder to track survivors.

_ I know, and I don't like it to be that way, so removing it is fair

So the rule of the game is to chase survivors with a "deafening" noise to make chases more difficult and, knowing that, you want to remove it. That's called cheating. (a.k.a unfair advantage)

Also, I've seen video filters used by honourless streamers. It was ugly but it certainly helped the see better than normal players. That's clearly an unfair advantage. I don't remember their names because I don't care about their sort. I don't think they are rare though, alas.

Stretched resolution now is even more clear. That was blatant cheating and the devs, tankfully, have fixed that. (Bar some unsavory way that, hopefully, will flag and ban players using them.)

What amazes me here is that you casually cite various unfair advantages/cheats to justify adding one more to the list.

At least you are consistent.

But i thought its not possible to ban stuff like that cause they dont touch the game itself but only the video signal that gets produced

Reshade hooks shared libraries (.dll) to interact with the graphic API inside the game and draw on the screen of the game.

It's white-listed by EAC, as far as I know, but otherwise it's not exactly "clean".

Reshade is whitelisted by EAC

If survivors can use discord to communicate and call out my exact location and what I'm doing at every moment in the game, then I can use an equalizer to hear footsteps better, and filters to improve the colors and visual clarity.

Would you say coms are cheating as well then? Given it's an outside program and the game wasn't balanced around it.

If what matters is whether or not the devs allow it, then the whole, "outside program and the game wasn't balanced around it" is a meaningless statement. Either that's the criteria or it's not, otherwise this is inconsistent.

Personally I think "outside program and the game wasn't balanced around it." is the best criteria for judging "cheating" and I would apply it consistently across the board, so including coms. This seems a logical conclusion fitting the definition. The textbook definition is also generally just stating "dishonest or unfair acts". Really not anything relating to what is or isn't allowed.

If we judge by just "what the devs allow" this seems silly. If there was an outside program to let all killers move at 145% movespeed across the board, but the devs allowed it, is it now not cheating? I would still call that cheating.

No worries on the formatting, I know it can go haywire often on these forums

I 100% agree it should be fixed within the game, not third party programs. Unfortunately the devs vehemently disagree in many cases.

Only a small portion of the population has severe enough impairments to need visual or audio assistance to that degree.

Disagree. Audio acuity issues can range between a multitude of conditions, from APD to autism or even just getting older. Its a lot more often than you think, and many people can't even carry conversations in loud rooms like bars or restaurants because of it. As for visually the issue is that there is a wide range of severity of impact, both in reference to light and color. This is why they're often hard to pin down a perfect solution for, and presents a lot more often than one would assume. The colorblind mode that was introduced was an acceptable attempt, even if many like myself needed other options like changing the colors of auras and blood pools to have our issues resolved. It was a reasonable (if lazy) middleground.

So accessibility can only go so far. To the point that I just dont believe someone on the internet saying left right and center that they have all these issues. Its not probable to even begin with.

It can only go so far, but "so far" needs to be more than "nowhere."

As for advocacy, people aren't always advocated for themselves. Thats a side effect of empathy, you see other people struggling with an issue you can identify, so you raise awareness. When we address the issues of our neighbors just as much as our own, they will be in position to address our issues in turn. I know its rampant in this community, but not everyone is only looking for things that benefit themselves exclusively. Some actually want the game to improve.

Also shoutouts to the new rarity colors that nobody asked for causing issues for colorblind people yet again.

I was wondering why there were no down votes on any of the posts. Then I realized someone ressurected an old thread, and it all made sense.

If using Reshade to make traps bright pink is cheating, something that has an objectively higher gameplay advantage definitely is

The lengths some people go to to justify third party tools, unintended techs and glitches is insanse.

Yes, that is cheating.

Then so is Discord and/or console party chat.

False? No. They are the same as using an equalizer. A really good monitor has features to enhance dark areas and make them brighter and easer to see. A high quality headset will make sounds such as footsteps and grass more noticable. You miss a lot of audio when using just speakers. High DPI with some killers helps with making sharper turns. Some logitech mice come with a button that incresse the dpi only when you press it so having to play the whole match with high settings is not required.

All these thing create some advantage over another player using a controller playing on a 1000:1 contrast ratio 19in monitor with built in speakers.

Anyways as stated before, an Equalizer isn't some magic tool that can remove unwanted audio. The sound you get from the game is already mixed and cannot be separated. You cannot remove just chase music. You cannot just increase footsteps and breathing. You cannot just increase these things because other game audio blends into these frequences causing distortion.

No. You misunderstood. Having a better monitor is not using thrid party software.

You need some form of monitor to play games (as far as i know lol). Some people have better ones, some people have worse ones. If the game supports better refresh rate on those monitors, then the game was made with that in mind. No cheating there imo.

Using filters, like the one i showed above, is not something the devs stated that they want it in the game. Otherwise, it would be in the game as an option to select. Similarly to voice communication though, they tolerate its existance. I do as well. If you want to make your game look like that, more power to you.

It is at the end of the day cheating though. I have no issue to say that im doing some form of tolerated cheating, when im playing survivor with friends and tell them the exact locaton of the killer and what path they take in order to get to them. Without the usage of thrid party software, my friends would (probably) not know from which direction the killer would approach, making them more vulnerable.

Obviously voice comms gives an even bigger advantage than reshade, but it is what it is.

I feel like the term cheating has so many bad connotations connected to it, that people feel bad to admit when they do it. You are using something, that was not intended, to make it easier for you. Its bad if the people making the decisions dont tolerate your action, resulting in consequences. In the case of voice comms and reshade, it is tolerated and therefore will not result in consequences.

I dont really know what there is to discuss here. It seems pretty logical to me honestly.

Like just about everything else, BHVR is very permissive about these things because they are trying not to alienate any of their player base. One could argue that being so permissive leads to as many people leaving as banning the use of these things would, but that's another discussion.

As for whether third party software like ReShade and EQ are cheating, there are two ways to look at it:

1. If it's not explicitly forbidden by the devs, it's not cheating
2. If it's not intended or accounted for by the game's design, it's cheating

I'm probably more in the second camp than the first. Personally, I look at it like anything that changes the experience from the stock standard game lands on spectrum of angling for an unintended advantage. Like at the most mild/benign end you'd have something very simple like tweaking your monitor settings to increase visibility. On the extreme end you'd have blatant cheating/hacking.

I personally view stuff like ReShade/EQ as being more toward the extreme end than the benign end, even if they're technically permissible. I would also add voice comms to the middle here, though unlike ReShade/EQ I wouldn't call for them to banned (though I would just kinda shrug if they were, lol).

To make a real world reference here, many people (mostly Americans, so forgive me here) might recall the steroid era in baseball, and that the performance/accomplishments of players from that era are regarded as illegitimate, few are taken seriously, and almost none will make into the sports' hall of fame.

What many don't remember is that steroid use was not technically forbidden during most of that era.

Now DBD is just a dumb mess of a video game and not a tightly regulated professional sports league, but I (and I think many others) look at this sort of the same way: yeah, it's technically legal, but I don't take anything you do while using them seriously.

Nor when I use them because I wouldn't be able to take myself seriously if I did.

But at the end of the day DBD is a profoundly unserious game, even if some people look it like it's life and death, so beyond blatant cheating I just don't care all that much.

I just don't agree that something that modifies the final output of the game is cheating. Yes it is cheating by the definition "third party software that gives you an advantage", but this definition is in my opinion way too broad, and also includes software like Discord, which ironically DOES give you more information but is not considered cheating. So the people saying this do not have a sound logical argument.

An EQ doesn't give you more information, it makes information already there possibly easier to hear (with the previously mentioned issues of distorting all other sounds), same with ReShade making pixels of a certain kind easier to see. I need to reiterate again that EQs do not give you the ability to pick out certain sounds, you can only modify the finished audio mix of all the sounds summed together.

I feel like I'm going crazy, people here are comparing EQs to stuff like stretched res when they are in no way comparable at all. Stretched res was cheating because it gave you additional information and was a quirk with the game itself, allowing you to see over walls and rocks. Stretched res is cheating and it's good that it was removed.

This community is waaaaay too strict on what is considered cheating, as if "an advantage" and "cheating" is the same thing. These tools don't make you a god at the game. They don't even make you instantly better, they only make the information that's already there, more accessible by a negligible amount. You still have to employ your own skills and game sense to actually get results. You still have to train your ears and eyes to pick out these details.

Now are you scummy for using these tools? Are you sweaty? Those are different discussions that I feel might have more merit, bar the accessibility argument. But cheating it is not.

I think part of all this is how the extreme ends of this feel to the opposite side.

Over here we have the hardcore PC gamer with an awesome headset perched 4 inches from a fantastic monitor enjoying 120 frames and entity knows what bells & whistles running for audio and visual "alterations."

Over there we have the casual consoler on a super comfy couch twenty feet from an aging TV and its aging speakers not even messing with the brightness nor contrast so it all doesn't look like nuclear winter.

The average DBD player is of course in between those extremes, but pure raw numbers place most of the playerbase much closer to that second bunch. Most likely over 70% at least.

In a game like DBD sound and visuals matter so much, probably more than even frames and ping, once you have become competent in either role. The inherent advantages of an very customizable platform are even more pronounced in this game due to how it was originally coded, much more than it should be for a CrossPlay game.

There really is no way to reconcile these extremes sadly.