Part V: The Cheater Within by Danny Internets February 13th, 2010 - 12:06 pm

For as long as there have been rules there have been those who break them. More so than the mixed bag of complex rules and probabilities that the game is often painted as, Warhammer is a battle of two opposing personalities, each complete with their own morals, egos, and psychological underpinnings. Even those who portray themselves as fastidious bastions of fair play can fall prey to the temptation of material rewards or succumb to perceived threats to self image. In this chapter of the Competitive Gamer series I’m going to talk about various forms of cheating and some of the reasons why people engage in this behavior.

In the Warhammer community, direct accusations of cheating are rare, even in large tournaments when hefty prizes and bragging rights are on the line. On the occasions when they are made these accusations are generally met with disdain in full force from others players, even when the facts are substantiated. A good example of this comes from the 2008 ‘Ard Boyz Tournament finals in which the overall winner was found to have disregarded his army’s disadvantageous deployment rules (the Daemonic Assault rule) in one of the scenarios, one in which he happened to score a massacre against his opponent. When news of what transpired was broken on Dakka Dakka an astonishing number of posters immediately tried to play down the events, claiming that everything was on the up-and-up, it was an honest mistake, and so on—anything other than to confront the possibility that someone had cheated their way to victory in a premiere community event.

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