Poll: Do you spacebar?

Fair enough. I'm not choosing sides; just arguing a point. I recently made a snake game, being that I was bored and had a few hours to burn. I asked a few people to test it out, and they asked if they could pause the game to do something. I told them, "No such functionality exists. Although, it would be cheating." I was thinking about the pause functionality with the mindset that it would be spacebarring, should the right people find the game. With a game like Snake, it's meant to be played in one go. Or at least, mine is. So, a pause functionality wouldn't be necessary. However, I do plan on implementing it since they did enjoy my version better than the original (or Google Snake). One could argue both points equally.

 

8 years of FRHD and we are still on this topic, lol. I think that in the way the game was intended to be played, it could be considered as cheating for sure. However, it's definitely not illegal, considering that the pause functionality is a part of the game and that there's no actual limitation or rule about how to use it.

If the developers were so eager to "fix the spacebarring issue", as I think Char mentioned once, they would have already done it.

It's simple. Just not letting the pause functionality be activated through the keyboard or making a pausing menu show up (like in Free Rider 3) would pretty much fix the issue. But the devs didn't do it.

Since the developers didn't fix it and since it's not illegal, is it actually cheating? I didn't know that this was a thing when I started doing it, it just evolved naturally. If the way people play the game changed with time and the developers never did anything to fix this or to advertise it was illegal, I don't think it's actually considered cheating. Char was probably a bit mad with spacebarrers, but after all those years if he actually thought that spacebarring was illegal or was straight up cheating I think he wouldn't have given out Pro or coins to me and some other players for ghosting contests, since it's clear that all winners of the biggest ghosting contests are spacebarrers.

So to keep it short, I think spacebarring is cheating considering how the game was intended to be played, but I don't think it is cheating considering how the game evolved, especially considering how the developers didn't do anything even when they were active and could have easily fixed this. However, I do think it might be slightly unfair to new players, since it's not something advertised in the actual game, although we do have spacebarring discussions and a spacebarring tutorial pinned somewhere in the forums, but we know that most players don't use the forums, so yeah, that can be a bit unfair.

So, is it illegal? Definitely not. Is it cheating? Depends on your point of view. Years ago it definitely was, but I don't think it is now, especially among forum members. Is it unfair? To non-forum members, definitely yes, at least a bit. To forum members, I don't think so, since it's something that is discussed every single year, apparently sometimes by the same people, haha.

This is just my opinion, though.

 

In my case I didn't spammed the spacebar, and in many scenarios I still don't. I just paused before hard tricks to figure out what to do. I barely spacebar in smooth jumps tracks for example. It's worse for me. But in super technical tracks, if you know the movements necessary to complete the trick, it's helpful to actually complete the complex movements.