If you've read any of these posts on this BBS, you've noticed a couple of names keep popping up. "Mitsu" and "Torque" are two that come to mind.
The more of the hacking posts you see, the more you see acceptance and name association.
So many people just know these two were cheaters, they just couldn't prove it.
I flew Warbirds until 2.0 was released. I was a closed-beta tester for 2.0 and had flown Warbirds since .96 was out. When 2.0 lost its NT 4.0 compatability, it lost me as a customer.
I floundered around for some time playing various sims until I stumbled across a game called "Flying Circus". It was a pretty simple WWI simulation with each country having two different planes that were identical in performance to the other side's planes. Camel Vs Fokker.D1 and Albatros vs (can't remember). No realism in flight charateristics... just identically matched aircraft.
After 2 years of Warbirds, this game was cake. I eventually latched on with the AKs and hooked up with some awesome wingmen.. and as I learned more about the limits of the aircraft I began doing better in the game. Eventually, I found that I was leading in virtually every statistical category.. by a large ammount. Yet, I wasn't flying for stats. I was flying to kill and then make it home.
I learned that putting rounds into the same wing was the most reliable way to take someone down... and I mastered it. This game had a simple damage mode where 25 hits to a wing damaged it, and 30 broke it. Very straight forward. Combine that with some practiced gunnery and it was easy to kill an aircraft and move on.
After a year, the accusations started rolling out. You see, someone had discovered that there were two other aircraft about to be introduced and edited the FE code to "release" them. The patch was distributed amongst the community and then all hell broke lose.
If this was possible, then surely it was possible that I was cheating in order to be so successfull in the game. And, the more it was discussed, the more it became likely that I was cheating at the game. And if I wasn't cheating, then I obviously had some kind of unfair advantage (even had squadies buying into this).
How do you disprove this? What are the options for pilots that get bombarded with this? The community gets together and theorizes about the actions of individuals and ZERO good comes out of it.
To this day, I resent that community for what was done there.
I can't help but get the feeling that Torque falls into that same category, as does Mitsu.
<S> to those that do so well everyone assumes they are cheating.
<Finger> to those that have nothing better to do but try to figure out how someone is cheating.
AKDejaVu
