Playing to win, where do you draw the line

It has been discussed, debating, and argued about for as long competitions have existed.  The question is how far are you willing to go to try to win.  The line between being morally questionable, to down right cheating is always a blurry one especially when it comes to gaming.

In almost all sports, the rules for what is acceptable are clearly defined for the most part.  Most if it comes down to is what are you willing to do when the ref isn't looking if you think you can get away with.

Having played sports all my life, I've heard all the stories of the things people will do when the refs can't see you to try and get an edge.

In football if there was ever a dog pile and you had the ball, you were praying you wore your cup that day because you groin area was going to be assaulted to try and force you to cough up that ball.

In soccer I know I would give people flat tires on corner kicks to try and get an advantage when the ball was kicked.

I could go on for hours about all the dirty little tricks that exist in different sports that players use to get an advantage over their opponents.  At the end of the day, it all came down to how badly you wanted to win, and how much respect and dignity you were willing to sacrifice to do it.

Personally I always took the middle road, I wasn't playing sports to try and make friends, but I certainly never went out of my way to do anything morally questionable unless provoked first.

This brings us to professional gaming, the gray area of where morally questionable becomes exploiting or cheating is a million shades.

Thankfully for the most part developers and league admins are usually on the ball with making rulings when exploits are discovered.  Valve is a perfect example, look how quickly the slew of exploits where patched in Left 4 Dead.  They even made a judgement call, and a good one, to remove quick swap melee.

Not all games are this fortunate, I know WoW arena suffered quite a bit from exploiters, and to a lesser extent counterstrike.

The most prominent instances of playing to win vs crossing the line of morally questionable was all the win trading in an effort to obtain the "rare" arena titles.  Thankfully blizzard stripped many of the teams who committed win trading of their titles.  Unfortunately there was a negative backlash in later seasons where all you simply had to do was accuse people and have there be questionable contextual evidence to support your case and you could assure your opponents would be banned.

Much of this turned live arena into a joke, and between this and rating issues with team swapping ultimately caused me to quit the game once and for all.  A situation like this to me is a clear example of people blatantly crossing the line of playing to win, to exploiting/cheating to get ahead.  In the end the people hurt worst by this were the innocents who incurred bans for being wrongfully accused of win trading.

Another less clear instance of the line between exploiting and morally questionable actions occured on a much larger stage.  Now bear with me as my memory is a little foggy, but during a CPL one of the european teams utilized bunny hopping to get an advantage on de_nuke.  They would be able to make it down the ramp in nuke before the CTs were able to enter the ramp area.  Under normal circumstances CTs arrive slightly before the Ts so this was a huge advantage.  I don't believe anything was done about this, however bunny hopping was banned from later tournaments.

Which brings me to Left 4 Dead, I read over the forums quite often looking for new material to write about and there is no shortage of people whining.  Some of it is justified, such as finale skip exploits, quick swap melee exploits, and the infamous mass infected spawn exploit.  However there are many more people crying about closet camping, auto shotguns, tanks, etc..

I myself have adopted the idealogy that if I feel something goes against "the spirit of the game" I won't do it.  Understand though, that I am willing to fight fire with fire if my opponent doesn't adopt the same moral standards.

But where in Left 4 Dead does morally questionable cross over to exploiting or cheating?

Obviously any sort of hacks or cheats qualify since it is publicly accepted that modifying the game via 3rd party software to give yourself a distinct advantage is indeed cheating.  But what about playing cheap?  Many looked down upon ramp camping in No Mercy rooftop finale, and I was on the fence about it.  My main issue with ramp camping was that the tank cannot move correctly when crouching to go under something, and thus it was an exploit of mechanics.  Leagues had already banned vent camping vs tanks for the same reasons, so it came as no surprised when Valve blocked access to the ramp in one of the most recent patches.

Many people will ***** and moan and call closet camping cheat,  but the fact of the matter is an effective tactic which in no way shape or form exploits game mechanics to gain an unfair advantage.  What it is however is taking knowledge of game mechanics and employing a strategy that plays to your teams strengths (melee) and the other teams weaknesses (close quarters).

The other big topic of debate right now is scripting.  I've already stated my stance previously, and CAL admins have said that it is fair game unless it is an exploit of mechanics (melee spam script).