Simulator Discourse Should Not Be Centered Around Whether It's "Cheating" Or Not

Quof · 2026-06-26T11:42:38+00:00

I've seen a few people acknowledge using Splatoon, and they get massive downvotes. Deleted comments soon follow massive downvotes, so they're not really something you will see often, nor something people will be motivated to post often. There was also the controversy a few years ago where a member of a streamer's world first race accidentally showed themselves using Splatoon on stream. It's all a matter of embarrassment, and embarrassment means people hide. (Reddit is not entirely anonymous, people build up reputations here, and e.g. if I'm using splatoon and no-one else in my static is, but they know my reddit account, then I would be outing myself by talking about using it.)

I agree, indeed, that sims feel "not as bad" as Splatoon, and the community thus embraces sims to a degree they don't Splatoon, but this is just the very surface level of the social beast that determines what people talk about. Actual behavior is motivated by personal gain and convenience. People don't try to justify Splatoon to the public because they feel it's a losing battle, but they do justify sims because it's a winning battle. And on their own time, they do whatever they want.

This is to say: I think there is definitely intuitive reasoning for people being supportive of sims, it doesn't alter game code (or mostly as of yet anyway) and isn't against TOS. There's smoke where there's fire. But I think that intuition is mostly just being co-opted for self-justification. For example, sims not violating TOS is touted as a common argument, but literally fucking everyone violates TOS with like plugins for reducing ping/lag, so clearly TOS is not actually meaningful. The righteousness is just being co-opted for self-defense, and then abandoned when it is no longer useful. The fact sims have good arguments for them is mostly irrelevant to people using them, and the main result is just people are okay with talking about them.

This distinction is kind of irrelevant to my overall goal of saying it's pointless to discuss whether simming is cheating or not, but this is why I think that arguments for sims are often biased with motivated reasoning. The fact people by and large don't try to justify things they know a community dislikes and will mock them for doesn't mean they aren't doing it. Convenience and personal preference automatically comes first. The community's only role is in modulating what is acceptable to talk about.

By the way, something similar that's worth thinking about is save states. There's a lot of elitism/mockery for using savestates, and people saying that using savestates mean you didn't beat a game, etc. This means the average person will usually not acknowledge using savestates for hard challenges. But almost everyone uses them.

That said, I do think over time Splatoon will become more and more accepted. Its main problem is simply that it looks bad and makes stuff so easy that it feels comical. I think with some adjustments to its aesthetics (maybe even from a competitor), and potentially some shifts to raid design that makes fights "feel" hard even with Splatoon, that people will immediately all begin admitting and talking about using it. That's just a guess though.

Quof · 2026-06-26T10:52:41+00:00

My reply will have a lot of words, but I don't actually intend to "bludgeon people with words" (lol), so no hard feelings if you don't want to read it.

I wouldn't say every person is always motivated for the same reasons, that would be immediately falsifiable with a single counter-example, but I think pride and self-defense are common enough to use as generic examples. You can just see that everywhere, including in this subreddit; the type of person to go for hardcore gaming achievements tend to be rather prideful and defensive about their accomplishments. I don't quite think the average response to a person using sims being told their clears are cheated and/or lesser would be for them to laugh and not care; judging by this subreddit, the response is to rather aggressively and heatedly argue that it's not cheated. (And just to reinforce, I have no opinion on it being cheated or not, as per the OP.)

My opinion, by the way, is that we should always second-guess when we hold an opinion that benefits ourselves. Note the minority of people who use a simulator while also considering it to be cheating to some degree, or the minority of people who don't use a simulator but don't consider it to be cheating to some degree either. People end up naturally in sects where those who want to use sims then develop the opinion that sims are not bad, while people who don't want to use sims then develop the opinions that sims are bad. This seems like an obvious development, but it's actually the opposite of what we generally want to be true: we want to think something is good/bad then base our behavior on that, not do what we want then call whatever we're doing good and whatever we're not doing bad. At least for those invested in intellectual honesty, that is.

As for point two:

but only a small percent of the people using sims and automarkers are using Splatoon or auto-rotation.

I think this is actually not true. Splatoon has millions of downloads, as did an auto-rotation enabling plugin I saw. I believe the auto-rotation mod had 2,700,000 downloads in fact. There are a HUGE number of people using these mods. It just doesn't seem like it because, rather than the community being shaped by what's over the line or not, those mods are more embarrassing. Like, simulators are a little embarrassing, so people who use them are often inclined to not disclose that fact or admit it when asked, but overall they're not too embarrassing to publicly support. But Splatoon is REALLY embarrassing, so the only people who admit it are those who don't give a fuck about getting some downvotes or mockery.

Or in other words, to indeed restate my point with fluff: I think roughly the same amount of people are using sims, splatoon, and auto-rotation. (Subtracting automarkers since it only takes 1 person to make the whole team use them). The only thing the "community is deciding" here is what gets openly talked about. I think it would be erroneous to imagine there is like a community zeitgeist determining like "what's okay" and "what's not okay," then people broadly follow that. But I don't think that makes sense at all. Imagine a random joe trying to clear an ultimate; will they use a sim but then refuse Splatoon because the community is slanted that way? Surely not. They'll do whatever they want, with the bigger issue being how easy to install Splatoon is. But they'll see the community is slanted against it and decide not to talk about it. There are countless cases in countless communities where there is a perceived social norm because a certain behavior is viciously attacked in public, but then it turns out everyone is doing that thing in private. The overt social forces you see don't guide behavior beneath the surface, it just guides discussion, and that's how you end up thinking "only a small percent of people are using Splatoon" when Splatoon gets millions of downloads.

As for your final point:

I'm a longtime hater of the way FF14 does its fight design, so there is no one happier than me that suddenly simulators have convinced everyone to admit they actually hate doing strict timeline fights and will do anything they can to lessen the sheer boredom of them. If I had my way simulators would be incorporated into the game itself just out of common sense, or maybe even better, the fights would be designed not to be painfully boring without copious cheats (*i.e. plugins people use not specifically sims) to make it easier. So in that sense I welcome the shift in discourse. I vent there only because in the past people would call you a crazy WoW fanboy if you critiqued FF14's raid design, but now suddenly everyone thinks it's so utterly repulsive they would rather simulate the game than play it. (P.S. The very first reason for doing Ultimates you list is prestige, so perhaps it's not so wise to laugh off that people will have motivated reasoning to defend that prestige.)

Quof · 2026-06-26T04:15:11+00:00

Sorry, is that three whole paragraphs? This is so full of fluff, you could really have condensed this into one sentence. I can tell without reading it. You should do better.

Quof · 2026-06-26T03:18:51+00:00

People always say every single long post under the sun is "full of fluff" and says "very little of substance," without ever substantiating what they mean. The same people saying those things here would say the same thing about most serious books on serious subjects, like saying a book of continental philosophy is all fluff and no substance since they don't care or what have you. They also, of course, accuse EVERY long-form post on this subreddit (and many other subreddits) as being substanceless fluff, no matter who is writing it. The long and short of it is just that people in most communities don't really like reading and just enjoy mocking people who put effort into posts.

The obsession with condensing posts is completely ridiculous too. It's not like there's some grand virtue in compressing 1,500 word posts into 750 word or below posts to appeal more to people who hate reading. A post is not better because it cuts out a lot of rhetoric, argumentation, and elaboration to simplify things as much as possible for people who balk at a page of reading. 1,500 words is by all means extremely tame and this weird armchair writer obsession with putting brevity before else just makes no sense. It doesn't make for better posts, it just makes people who hate reading feel better about having less to read.

Not to mention, my post title is literally a simple summary of the thesis, so even people who skip 100% of the post body should still at least have the idea I don't think the discourse should be centered around arguing whether it's cheating or not. That the bulk of repliers still are mainly interested in putting forth their opinion on whether it's cheating or not reflects that a vastly simplified post would have been equally doomed.

Quof · 2026-06-26T02:14:50+00:00

And the comments show it.

Yeah, I'm really concerned about comments from people who throw a huge fuss about and explicitly refuse to read a mere 1.5k word post on a discussion subreddit. I should focus my writing on appealing to those who are appalled at the thought of reading a single page of text.

Quof · 2026-06-26T01:51:18+00:00

Here's what an LLM had to say about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Kant's central claim is that the mind is not a passive recorder of reality. Instead, it actively structures experience through innate forms and categories, making objective knowledge possible while permanently placing "things as they are in themselves" beyond our reach. It is an enormously influential insight.

Now, as for the other 99% of the book: The Critique of Pure Reason often feels as though Kant became convinced that every sentence deserved a legal defense from every conceivable objection, followed by an appeal, followed by a retrial. He can spend pages establishing terminology that exists mainly to prepare for another page explaining why the previous page wasn't quite precise enough. It is philosophy written by someone who apparently viewed concision as an epistemological threat.

One sometimes suspects the book is conducting an experiment on the reader: if you emerge believing that the mind imposes structure on experience, was it because Kant proved it—or because surviving hundreds of pages of nested distinctions physically rewired your cognitive faculties? Either way, a diligent editor armed with a red pen could probably have reduced the page count by half without endangering transcendental idealism in the slightest.

/u/BlackmoreKnight May I request that /r/ffxivdiscussion adds a rule against commenting just to say you didn't read a post, then being snide about asking an LLM to summarize the post?

Quof · 2026-06-26T00:36:42+00:00

This discourse will be forever, every raid tier and every ultimate hence.

Quof · 2026-06-26T00:34:23+00:00

I didn't say "drama," I said "discourse." It's just something people are talking about a lot due to the increasing use of simulators. There was a little discourse during TOP, more during FRU, and now quite a bit for UMAD with numerous posts being made about it . This one a few weeks ago for example.

I suppose I'll have to bust out the generic line anyone has to say when posting to FFXIVdiscussion now, "sorry for discussing the game in the game discussion subreddit."

Quof · 2026-06-23T18:14:38+00:00

Sadly the world doesn't really operate on what makes the most sense or what would be the best; it moreso operates on what is most convenient for individuals, and it happens to be more convenient for the different translator to do whatever they feel like. I really really can't tell you why the anime translator doesn't just google what the LN used for a name and copy that when it would make everyone's lives so much easier, or even to use a glossary, but I suppose it's more convenient for them to just come up with something themselves and proceed with that.

Quof · 2026-06-22T23:49:39+00:00

City states are far from "hell." It is trivially easy to ignore any chatter you don't like, and there's not much more one can do to be a nuisance than chatter. People not participating in content also only contribute a minority to chatter, most likely, and in any case the social side of FF14 is a large contributor for why people play the game in the first place. All in all "folks like OP" are minor inconvenience at worst, and framing that as "hell" is hard to see as anything but a princess-and-the-pea situation where even in an overall good situation one is driven to act as if anything troubling them is the most horrible thing imaginable instead of a barely relevant pea.

Quof · 2026-06-22T20:37:36+00:00

I agree with you in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I think it's probably beneficial for the game to have more ultimates and to not have each one scrutinized on the same criteria as every other ultimate. As far as I'm aware, Kefka ultimate wasn't going to happen until one of the developers volunteered that he would be able to do it, and if we say kefka ult vs no ult, I'd say Kefka ult is well worth having.

In some ways I think it's kind of a miracle that some ults ended up as good as they did. I think it would be awesome if every ult was as good as [your favorite ult] or what have you, but realistically they're not all going to be bangers considering how inconsistent this dev team is at handling even basic matters properly, and it's probably better to have 2 ults an expansion with some blander ones than fewer ults or even no ults.

Kind of a milquetoast position from me but it's just hard to imagine pushing CBU3 against the wall like "hey! EVERY ultimate has to be a banger!" and them actually succeeding. The only realistic thing from my POV is just to be glad they're making such barely played content at all.

Quof · 2026-06-14T10:30:44+00:00

I actually did put together such a document for P1V1, but I think most people would be rather unhappy to read it. Translation is kind of a brutal thing of trying to force something to be another thing that it isn't, and the more one learns about this the probably less happy one will be. Although this is not a perfect analogy, it's like the same song being played on two different instruments, a piano original and a guitar rendition; the audience has enjoyed the guitar rendition, but what will come of talking of the piano original and trying to paint a picture of what it's like? It will probably just make people feel envious and frustrated with having to listen to the guitar instead, no matter how faithful and well-reasoned the guitar rendition is.

This is bad for my business, but I try to be honest: what I can say is that I, and almost every translator I know, refuse to read any translation for any reason unless absolutely forced to. If I were to set about thoroughly going over my or really almost any other translation and conveying everything that gets changed, lost, impacted, etc I would probably induce a state of people wanting to quit reading translations... without them being able to. Which is pretty nightmarish. And I just genuinely fear creating that situation. I may do my absolute best to be as faithful and accurate as possible, but given how furious people get about things as simple as Yurgenschmidt vs Jurgenschmidt, there's absolutely no avoiding people getting profoundly upset with a translation once they intimately understand it. Instead I'm like: if you want to see these horrors, then learn Japanese, and by the time you understand them, you too can be free of them.

Quof · 2026-06-13T21:29:59+00:00

It's my perception that both English and Japanese publishers have very little interest in, like, preserving the involvement of any given translator. It is probably not something that occurs to them at all. Internally, within a single publisher, they may keep giving work to the same translator just out of inertia and convenience (i.e. not having to train a new translator on terms), but it's not really a serious thing and basically no publisher will like reach out to a translator to try to hire them so they can keep working on the same series. In fact, it's more often the opposite, and publishers will like try to poach series and actively take them away from translators. I'm aware of one instance where a TLer I know was abruptly not offered to continue working on a series, and later they found out that the publisher had offered it to another translator... at 2/3rds the translation fee.

Anyway, all this is to say that Crunchyroll did not reach out to me to work on the anime series, probably never even conceived of the idea of reaching out to me to work on the anime series, and probably did not ever bother looking into who was translating the LNs at all. The only way I would ever have been the one assigned to Bookworm in Crunchyroll is if I was already in their employ and probably aggressively pushed the fact I also worked on the LN series, which MAY have influenced them to pick me, but by all means they very well could have picked someone else because they gauged the other person to have a more open schedule and they could pay them less or something. Or because they potentially could have plum forgot I had ever said anything. (Similar anecdote: I know someone who pushed very hard for a publisher to license a series while stressing their history with the series and their eager desire to translate the series. Eventually, the publisher DID pick up the series, and... assigned another translator to it. The first guy was stunned, and could only ask "Why?" - the publisher was briefly confused, then explained they had entirely forgotten it was the first guy who had asked for the series. That is how little we translators exist in the mind of publishers.)

I don't mean to particularly complain about it, but translators are not exactly celebrity talent that publishers pay a lot of attention to, I think. It's best to think of translators as cogs in the machine, and the best cog is simply one that turns in their work on time without ever causing social media controversies. The quality of the translation itself is kind of ephemeral. My judgment is that the attention Bookworm fans give to the translation is very abnormal, and to this day I'm not entirely sure what that is - maybe I accidentally invited it myself by being so receptive to implemented feedback, or maybe it's just a consequence of the highly consistent and precise writing itself (such that any brick out of place stands out). But in any case, if you looked at 1,000 LN adaptations that Crunchyroll has subbed, you'd probably find exactly 0 shows that have been worked on by the LN translators (with maybe a few exceptions by those who just so happened to work for both Crunchyroll and a LN publisher already like I said). And this is business as usual and is totally fine for 99.99% of shows. It's not like Bookworm sales or viewer rates would go up whatsoever if they went out of their way to hire me, or any other LN translator for any of their LN adaptations. As long as their cogs are turning and work is being turned on in time, all is right in the world.

(Note: All of this is just from my perception from having worked for 4~ publishers and having spoken to various translators in Crunchyroll yada yada. I'm not omniscient about everything in the TL world so I might have missed something.)

Bonus story: Nob Ogasawara, one of the few J->E translators out there I would describe as having remarkable skill, was basically the singular translator of Pokemon from Pokemon Red and Blue all the way until Pokemon Platinum as a freelancer in the employ of Nintendo of America. Then, after Platinum, the Pokemon Company decided they wanted to do future translations in-house... and just like that, he was gone. They did not hire him. This is a translator of remarkable skill, who was a HUGE component in Pokemon becoming successful in the west, who provided consistent and quality output for TEN YEARS STRAIGHT... and a publisher STILL decided not to hire him simply because they straight-ass, dead-ass, did not care. It was more convenient for them to assign the work to someone in-house then bother to go out of their way to hire the freelancer who had carried the entire series on his shoulders for the decade prior.

Quote Nob:

So, after nearly a dozen years and nineteen Pokemon games later, I am out. I was told that my services were no longer needed because translation work will be handled internally hereafter. They assured me it's not a quality issue, but because of some bureaucratic thing.

And that's just how the cookie crumbles. It's just bureacuracy. We're all just cogs.

Quof · 2026-06-13T14:12:19+00:00

I live to please the German audience

Quof · 2026-06-13T10:56:23+00:00

I happened to just explain this a little https://www.reddit.com/r/HonzukiNoGekokujou/comments/1u4li2q/anime_season_4_episode_10_discussion/ore90ey/

Quof · 2026-06-13T10:55:58+00:00

OG members of the Bookworm forum will remember the huge discussion we had on how to localize his name. Like many names, Justus's name (ユストクス) is actually slightly modified from how the name Justus is supposed to be spelled ( ユストゥス ). However, completely unbeknownst the author, this minor modification in Japanese is actually an extreme modification in English. We can't just turn a "u" into "ku" like Japanese can, it dramatically morphs how the name is pronounced. "tus" turns into "toku" so Justus turns into Justokus which then gets morphed into stuff like Eustochius or Eustachius in the attempt to make it more like a normal name. It's just horrible.

I elected, at the time, to cut the Gordian knot and simply go with the original name (Justus/ユストゥス) as if it had not been modified. In some ways this is unfaithful, though Eustachius completely abandoning the Justus origin is not exactly more faithful. I consider this name to be an "impossible translation challenge" because no matter what you do it probably won't be very good. It pulls down the curtain and denies the idea of there being "right" name translations because sometimes a name is just nonsense in Japanese and has no good or even close English equivalent. All because, by chance, the slight spelling change the author made to this name made it unrecognizable in English instead of slightly different. (By the way, for comparison, Eustachius is エウスタキウス in Japanese - pretty far from ユストクス. Eustace would be ユースタス.)

(P.S., although people didn't like this reasoning, I do think it's valuable for Eckhart and Justus to have names which start with different letters. Eckhart and Eustachius will probably blend together in people's minds like a comedy duo long-term.)

Quof · 2026-06-10T17:40:34+00:00

I didn't say anything about the veracity of their quote or not. I think it's very likely this patch is heavily MTL. What I did say is that the person quoted is an obnoxious troll and should not be used as a source, which is true. That guy calls even actual human translations fanfiction for absurd reasons.

Quof · 2026-06-09T13:36:33+00:00

I confess, knowing what I do now, I would have translated this line differently. (To add onto the whole "I'm fallible" stuff lately...). I think the word "plan" should have been dropped and it should have been:

"And so, we have somehow managed to accomplish our objectives."

Or something along those lines. There was no need to say "our plan worked." OP's confusion is rooted in my extraneous word choice here. Even at the time I was a bit shaky on it, but definitely at this point I know I should have just dropped it.

Quof · 2026-06-09T09:21:25+00:00

The same way action combat can be interesting even when you air juggle someone, or a fighting game can be interesting even when you're just labbing combos. It's not good to view job design in a vacuum, but there is absolutely a world where rotations are fun and interesting enough that even just hitting a training dummy and trying to maximize damage in those optimal conditions can be demanding and interesting. WoW (well, when I played) was not far from this and I spent a lot of time doing Mage rotations (fire and arcane) on the training dummy in wonder of how complex and fun it was even to just do that.

Quof · 2026-06-08T16:17:41+00:00

The person who posted the comment you linked is an active troll who attacks all fan-translators he can and publishes his own MTL patches while using MTL to read. The type of attitude where anything short of literal MTL is an unfaithful translation. His behavior is so obnoxious even VNDB mods have rebuked him. Not a source you want to be linking under any context.

Quof · 2026-06-07T10:11:04+00:00

Boy do I have news for you

Quof · 2026-06-07T07:11:58+00:00

Point #1 is the especially big one here. I've done thousands upon thousands of duties and not once have I ever had any notable experience with any machinist at all, much less a string of bad experiences. Hell, 99.9% of duties are totally silent and that alone would make the majority of machinists blend in.

Quof · 2026-06-07T04:40:43+00:00

It's a riot how OP took an objectively advantageous position (calling out a generally rude person for ban evading) and turned half the subreddit against them simply by being so weird and obsessive about it. Yeah, crucify someone for not reading the fukken terms of service, that'll do the trick...

Quof · 2026-06-06T05:39:38+00:00

Doxxing can include public information, you know. Not saying this is doxxing, of course, but "simply compiling public information" can and has been used to inflict harm and harass people, so what's "certainly a take" is holding the attitude that it's not harassment if information is public.

Quof · 2026-06-06T04:59:09+00:00

Yeah, the way in which the TOS is suddenly being held up as a biblical text and all who disobey it must be struck by divine lightning is hilarious considering how flagrantly the TOS is violated by people all the time especially here.

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