Is Surround Gaming cheating?

[Kruzin]

Matrox has posted a poll on their developer relations page reguarding Surround gaming, and the implications of such an advantage to gamers:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/developer/poll.cfm

Since only registered developers can vote on that poll, I thought I'd start our own here...

[BuddMan]

I voted no. I look at it like this: I have a crappy 8MB card that gets at the most 30fps in UT, usually averages 20. Now just because I have an older card and someone else has a card that will allow them to go 60+fps in UT, does that mean they are cheating?? No, I would think not. Same principle applies here.

[xortam]

I'd say any equipment that gives a player an advantage is cheating. LPB players cheat compared to HPBs. I'd still suck if I had every cheating edge available though.

[MadScot]

Xortam, doesnt the advantage have to be unfair for it to be cheating? Wearing glasses is cheating? It gives advantage to those that are handicapped by poor site, but I wouldnt call that advantage cheating.

MadScot

[103er-Fan]

Hey, my first post here! I am currently using a V5 5500 AGP and decided pretty soon that I will get a Parhelia as soon as it's available
About the topic:
I say no. People with an old 2-button mouse can also call users with high-tech optical 5-button mice a cheater. Of course everytime you have better equipment you can play better, gamers with high quality sourround-soundsystems will also have an advantage over poor 2 speaker users. And on the other note who has three monitors? You pay 550€ for the card, I don't think anybody would have money left to buy new monitors then. On the sidenote you also need enough room to get 3 monitors in a good positions, I couldn't do that here, not enough room.

To make it short I say no, it is not cheating.

[Parhelia Pro256]

YES!

nyanya nyanya nyanya

[TdB]

I voted undecided.
I know alot of people who plays with a high FOV-setting, so it wouldn´t make a difference if they had triplehead or not. however there is alot of things that can be viewed as cheating, it all depends on, if the ones you are playing with, considering it cheating or not. for example some would consider it cheating if I used dualhead-zoom, in first-person-shooters (sniper-view on second-head), as this would give me an advantage over players without dual-head.
while you culd argue that surround gaming doesn´t give any advantage over people playing with FOV 160 on a 24" monitor and all surround gaming does is to make it look cooler.
If i had 3 monitors i would use it, but i would also disable it the minute, the other players would demand it, without argueing.

After all, i play to have fun with friends, not to win.

[az]

Yes, it is... any FoV adjustment is - I say, include a server-set flag to allow/forbid triplehead or to set a max FoV. Although I think it's great, it simply isn't fair.

AZ

[TdB]

however, among all the cheats i have heard of, I would consider this a very little one, the asus see-trough-walls-drivers comes to mind.

[BuddMan]

Well, cheating pretty much ruined the fun of CS. I don't think I've ever seen much cheating go on in UT though...

[Snake-Eyes]

I voted yes.

But I don't really think so. Barring someone seeing through things, I don't see a problem with this. Good players can still win over worse players, even though the worse players have this 'advantage', so it's just something nice to have. (Okay, I admit it- it's actually darned awesome! )

[Parhelia Pro256]

Actually, it adds a little more of a challenge when others cheat

[Lizzard[MPE]]

i dont play with any music or announcer sounds on .. is that cheating? dont think so

[Jammrock]

It's not our fault if the competition is playing on inferior hardware.

Jammrock

[Beezer]

I think "cheating" is perhaps a poor choice of words. Strictly speaking, if any game manufacturer sanctions it, then it's not cheating.
However, triple-head could indeed make the gameplay "unbalanced".