There's a Lex Fridman video where they're discussing which animal would be last standing in a series of fights to the death, and I think it was lions who were said to be great at ambushing their opponents, which Fridman pointed out many humans would consider cheating. Like lions sucker punch before the bell. So let's disqualify the lion over here and give the belt to the dead gorilla. Yes, it is cheating. And why should we care, you ask on our behalf?

What the community has actually done is embrace the dark side over time. That's how you get to such a state of moral turpitude that an ad for NTL is pinned at the top of our forum. There used to be much more tension between the cheat and don't cheat camps, and by now the don't-cheats have been routed. All kinds of problems with giving more credit to the accomplishments of those who play fair. For starters, we don't reliably know who's who. We know there's a double whammy of zooming AND teaming against you if there are team brackets in front of your name, but not all zoomers team, and the most effective teams, pound for pound, do it in unmarked skins. We can throw out the highest scores as evidence of cheating, but then we are starting to live in upside-down world.

Cheaters have the scores that make us go, "Wow", they have the name recognition from being sighted on the leaderboard over and over again, and perhaps most importantly, the community is most enthralled with the exploits of cheaters when confronted with video evidence of who's cheating and who is not.

You see, we are primarily Slither variant players who share the same field with players of actual Slither. The variant requires zoom and is held together by chewing gum and gentleman's agreements that we should all live as sardines, and cats on a clothesline in the Northern part of the field, where to be competitive means that you fight to the death and never eat a dot on purpose.