Forget about patches & updates, maybe it's YOU?

I recently engaged in some commenting around here on a subject that I feel just begs of a conversation worth having.

Most of this comes from some of the "responses" to the Live patch just released (which, if you do play it, you should take a gander at, if you haven't already), but I think it applies to almost every sports game in general. IMO, regardless of the level of depth a developer puts into their game, the human mind will almost always find a way of manipulating that system. It's been true since the dawn of gaming, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. The issue for me comes when we speak about competitive titles (sports, fighting, first person shooters etc.) and the players who seem to feel the need to bash these companies for tricking them out of their hard earned cash, for a broken game that they can't win at with "sim" tactics.

Let's be clear, in no way do I condone anyone who takes advantage of a game's inherent glitches or loopholes. That being said though, at some point, maybe the truth is your just not as good as you think you should be at a given game. I can tell you personally, that I thought Street Fighter 4 sucked, but after further examination, I realized it wasn't the game that sucked, it was me. It was bruising to the ego, for a person that used to play the Japanese version of Street Fighter 2 on a modified SNES, to get man-handled by the world so easily. So I complained how the Ultra Combos were just a cheesy element for people that couldn't "really" fight in the traditional Street Fighter sense, but in the slightly altered words of one Denny Green "I wasn't who I thought I was."

In sports games especially, it seems that you guys want a patch or fix for everything, to the point where whatever a developer releases seems like a half hearted attempt. I've been playing Madden since it's first iteration on Sega Genesis. Does it bother me that people can cheese while still acting as if they have true skill. Certainly. Does it warrant a torrent of disrespect for all things Madden for the next 100 years? Probably not.

These updates should be appreciated for what they are, and not for what you want them to be. I know. Your the consumer. It's we, the people, who put money in their pockets. I understand, I really do, I get it. But we also live in America, and nobody made you buy any of it in the first place, so all that self-righteous sense of entitlement crap that's consumed the Sports video game community colon really could use some cleansing. They could make the perfect Football or Basketball game tomorrow, and I guarantee, within hours, people would run on here crying about......something. Some of us just like to get news here, not incessant whining.

But really, what are they supposed to do to balance the fun and competition of the game with the reality of said athletes? Live in particular, had people complaining that the 3 point cheesers could still hit 3's with Steve Nash or Mo Williams at a pretty good clip. Well, if somebody chooses to manipulate the game and shoot a large amount of 3 pointers with these two instead of running a traditional offense, what can possibly be done about that? If the game is to be true to their real world abilites, I don't think it's too far fetched for Steve Nash to hit 15 or so shots out of 30 from the arc. Has the automatic 3 from the corner hot spot been cooled down? Absolutely! Does that mean that someone still can't beat you with nothing but trifectas from Steve Nash? Of course not.

And in closing that all comes back to preference. If you choose to play online against people you don't know, then you should expect some of those people to choose to play the game in a different, and IMO, wrong way. No developer, not EA, not SCE, and no true believers, not even 2k Sports, can figure out how to make a game smarter than a human being determined to cheese. At least not yet....