Save scumming

Shit like this are the worst.

What about using savestates if you are emulating an old game that uses passwords instead of files

git gud

You know, I had a idea while playing Ori in the blind Forrest. The game requires you to give energy to quick-save. So I was thinking that if someone where to implement it in a Thief like game costing some gold or allowing what type of items you could burn to get "quick-save points" would be interesting. It seems people save to much in similar stealth games even when it objectively would make the play-session and level less rewarding to conquer.

RNG defeats a point of video games.
It's kinda ok in games like Risk Of Rain and Binding of Sisaac, where RNG decides what enemies you fight and what upgrades you got, but when RNG decides whether you hit the enemy or not, or whether it hits you or not, it deafeats a point of video game - applying skill to overcome challenges. Your skill doesn't matter, only some bullshit does.
Fuck that.

Nigger you either have enough skill to convince a person or you don't.
RNG in dialogues is even worse than in fucking combat.

As long as you only save in places where you start off with a password it's ok.
Except those games where password doesn't save you stats like Castlevania, then it's cheating.

wew

gross

thats a good point. i don't believe that should be considered save scumming.

i always save scum when playing stealth games i just get to anxious

I've gotten a habit of savescumming in rpgs/dungeon crawls because I hate triggering some stupid event where a dozen enemies half my level show up to fuck me in the ass or some other ridiculously difficult/deadly obstacle shows itself because I dared to explore around a little. Redoing the last half-hour of content because "fuck you" is not fun and I won't apologize for it.

As I said - randomly dropping enemies on your head is fine. That's how you deal and plan with unexpected.

That's exactly what you call artificial difficulty.

Should be twice. Pardon.

Oh your one of those faggots, all the games that apply that are games not designed to be beaten through twitch based reactions but through planning, foresight, and using math. Those are very different games from action games and using your head to plan is a different skill that running around hitting guys in the head with the right timing caters to.

Next you're going to say morrowind is a shit game.

No. No it is not. If your game as %chances to hit, THE ENTIRE GAME IS BASED AROUND THEM. That IS part of the difficultly you stupid fuck.

Save scumming games (usually strategy games), with % chances to hit like that entirely negates all the gameplay and makes you a giant fag.

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Which is why such a system would be so good for a stealth game, it makes stealing, avoiding guards, and finishing a level that much more rewarding.

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What "apologism" you can't into math, fractions, chance, and percentages so yeah it's your own fault for not crunching the numbers. Dungeon Crawlers, turn based RPGs and strategy games it's all number crunching.

Maybe you need to plan your shit, dumbass. Thats the point of rpgs.

By your logic why play any game? There is a chance something out of your control could fuck up, you're better off just cheating to instantly win so you don't waste your precious time.

Yes, shit happens. You will also occasionally hit those 5% desperation hits that save the day.

Oh and XCOM Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 are terrible examples because the chances to hit and be hit shown on the UI is false.

yea i guess i'm just a fag that doesn't do well in high stress situations

rpg are all about planning you wouldn't rush someone with a shotgun to your chest
would ?

*would you ?

Holy fuck that shit is irritating. X-Com could be a lot better if the game didn't lie to you about fundamental shit.

It would be interesting to have a game built around this concept as a mechanic.

X-Com 2 actually cheats in your favor and is piss easy. Garbage game, modding community could potentially fix it in the future though if people got together and get some Long War type shit instead of a thousand cosmetic mods every day.

Yeah, you're basically cheating in a very slow way. Imagine putting in a literal cheat code that makes it so that you automatically pass every random chance check - obviously that would be a huge cheat and make any game with significant RNG pointless. Fundamentally save-scumming to pass random checks is that but slower.

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I savescum and I don't get care, fuck pic related

I savescum in Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee using an emulator. The PC version doesn't save after rescuing each Mudokon which I think is an oversight.

lets shift the conversation what about save scumming in fast-paced action games?

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I save scum when a game is too fucking reliant on rng.

fuck rng and everything it's been on in.

It's unacceptable,

No, lets shift it to stealth games!

Ruins all the suspense and risk. Mortality becomes more of a nuisance than a fear. Some action games are still about planning out your course of action or being skillful.
Similarly, compare games that punish death vs. does with quick respawns like cod

But then we'll have nothing to talk about.

Now I've gone and made myself sad.

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Eh, it just takes the fun out of it and makes the experience more hollow and forgettable for me. It's also really easy to form the bad habit of saving right at every opportunity where you could fail.

Whenever a game isn't properly balanced and relies on artificial fuck you difficulty to make it's game challenging.

I'm talking about the Xcom reboots, but honestly any shitty Number Generator that does this I have no qualms about save scumming. Since I played Morheim Cit of Damn and you can't and the number generator doesn't fuck you over every 10 seconds I don't ever need to.

Seriously great game in that regard, but the scripted levels are just shit.

You know you faggots who use artifical difficulty to mean "RNG" need to watch this, save scumming won't help you in this instance.

If a game employs noticeable randomization instead of proper deterministic mechanics.

Racing games have true artificial difficulty. I've seen a F-Zero TAS where the guy is going like 10x the speed the game intends you to go, and the AI keep up with him due to rubberbanding. That is some shit.

What eactly am I looking at here?
The last one of them I played was NFSU2, and I don't remember much of it, except it had Lancer Evloution, of which I still have this transformer toy.

The player is going at top speed, the AI car automatically went faster then him because he was being to good at the game. That is rubberbanding, it is essentially where the AI changes how well it does based on how well you do and it's the origin of the term artificial difficulty.

I only savescum when either autosave is on by default or I know the game is unstable and it'll crash at any second

Let's say you're playing a combat-based game. Is it savescumming to save between rooms (not levels/checkpoints, but separated encounters)?

Are there racing games that don't do that?

The RNG debate really comes to down a personal philosophy/preference in my opinion. Do you consider reflex, manual skill, and split second decision making to be the only true metric that needs to be considered or is planning, risk management, and reacting to improbable turns of bad fortune a equal metric to judge by?

I have the bad habit of playing RTS on the hardest difficulty, which is almost always bullshit with a cheating AI. Games can be pretty fucking long so I will savescum in case the enemy tries to pull a fast one on me.

doesn't most RTS games just give the ai more resources than you ?

Burnout?

i believe in self imposed checkpoints to a certain extent, usually after completing something tedious or time consuming and not for just clearing a room. also frequent savescumming creates groundhog day scenarios where you scum yourself into a pinch situation

Extra resources, build times, starting tech upgrades. Depends on the game really.

Rubberbanding was a thing since Mario Kart. The true definition of artificial difficulty. No rng there unless you count which racer is chosen to rubberband you.

RTS in higher difficulties is just giving them more resources and techs than you start out with, maybe even give them a higher speed i which they gather resources.

Playing higher difficulties in RTS will always be bullshit.

depends on why you play the game.
if you were trying to practice combos in a specific segment of a level, savescumming is the most efficient way to achieve that.

that would make it too easy for the most part imo.
dungeon crawlers are about surviving in an unpredictable environment, if you remove the adversity they wouldn't be very good.

Yes, and that often comes paired with other bullshit like not having fog of war, overly aggressive behavior, training units faster, having stronger units, etc. Sometimes it's impossible to win without AI abuse.

well the only RTS i ever got gud at was aoe2, and i noticed the ai would have more resources then i did when we started.

RNG is a thing of the past, a rudiment from technologically limited era, where you couldn't put a good combat system into an RPG.

I think it's fine when unpredictability is realized through enemies, environments, even loot, but when I physically fucking hit enemy into fucking face and game says, nah dude you fukken missed, said game can fuck right off.

This should only apply for when you aren't activelyy going and doing the action itself.
RPGs have a miss function because the player isn't the one fighting, the character is. The character is only as good as what their stats say they are- so of course a novice character would miss more often than a veteran one.
The bullshit levels will vary depending on the dev and how the percentages are calculated and how the perspectives are.

The fuck, what is going on in that game then? Did the devs put in some coding to change the values in the UI only or what?

Do you actually believe this user? RNG will never leave. And half the shit you listed has RNG elements in them no matter how slight.

Unless someone invents the perfect fucking AI, all rts will have to revolve on this.

What other way is there to make it happen? if you set the AI to a scripted path, players will eventually figure out how to exploit it.

There already things like Health, damage, defense, elemental damamge reduction value and so on.
Fucking levels for christ's sake. Those translate idea of inexperienced dude agains huge ass monster perfectly fine. Fucking chance based hit/miss situation shouldn't exist.

You know what I'm talking about. I'm fine with RNG droprates, enemies having random modifiers, shit that you couldn't predict is fine.

But hit/miss based on stats shit have to go away.

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There isn't, I wasn't saying there was. It's like you said, RTS AI is shit and can never compare to a half decent player, so they make up for it with brute force.

While not really an RTS game, the Civ franchise is horrible about this, especially Civ 5, on highest difficulty, the AI gets so many multipliers for free, basically 3 free cities, several free techs, and a free small army, and they don't have to worry about unit upkeep or unhappiness. They basically start out 10x better than you, and if you are smart and can survive you can easily surpass them in tech and other areas because the AI itself is shit.

All the whining about RNG always boils down to this, doesn't it?

If character is bad then he would hit for shit damage, because you mismanaged, you shouldn't have him go and hit shit that is way over his head.

Or if enemy's skill is far above your character's then let him just counter your dude and smack his fucking face into the ground and bam he's dead. Again not based on random chance, but based on the difference in level/particular skill/maybe even environment.

RNG is a lazy way to make shit look complex, without actually making it complex, without coding all those nuances.
As I said when tech was limited it was ok, now you can fucking code those calculations, you can make them into stats. But no, you're just lazy faggot who resolves everything through three decades old primitive mechanic instead of making new, complex one.

Saying it over and over again won't make it true user. I don't even know why you are playing those types of game when you are so against the basic game system of them.

It's risk management and having a backup plan. What happens if I miss this 90% attack? What is my backup plan for the failure. If you can't answer these questions you shouldn't be playing those types of games because they are clearly not for you.

Already exists, and if you do RNG properly then it won't disturb this skill however your butthurt over hit/miss chances instead of say attack patterns.
Dungeon Crawlers, RNG up the wazoo I thought you didn't mind that type of RNG anyways.
If you can't break down the probability and assume the worst case scenario in your plans then you suck at planning.
AI War: Fleet Command the AI was praised for how awesome it is but in reality it's steeped to the gills with a series of constant fluctuating RNG decisions.
Outside team cooperation mind games basically boils down to countering the pattern of the week, majority of players are boringly predictable while good AI bots are well known for doing crazy shit that a player would never do because it's not a human player.

Pretty much 0% and 100% are not 0% or 100% in either game never forget that.

I liked the way Hitman Blood Money did it, to be honest.

Nothing wrong with Save Scumming so long as you're not running an emulated save state or going outside of the games natural state or something to do it. You're essentially abusing a function the devs allowed you to have. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just bad design.

Easy way to fix?
Save points or start your character at the beginning of the level. 95% of the time it's a solid fix and if you can mod your game to have that implemented you should.

I don't use the word Artificial Difficulty to describe RNG. That's not what I even said. I said that certain RNG games rig their RNG system to consistently turn out negative or less than favorable responses that no honest RNG system would produce.

Example Xcom 2 will say you have an 80% chance to hit and after over 20 tries I learned you really didn't and the system was rigged. In Morheim the game relies on an RNG but it isn't rigged. Sometimes enemies get a nice decimation in on you, sometimes you get one on them, and sometimes you both languish the entire round. If not for the game having few maps, and the game posing almost no challenge without over leveling in regular missions and scripped bs in special missions it would be a fantastic experience.

Some games have fair RNGs but unreasonable variable inputs. Like Xenonauts which produce the same effect of a rigged RNG like the Xcom Reboot series has. If I have an assault rifle and I'm holding up next to the side of your head, my hit probability being anything under 100% is absurd. When soldiers have issues hitting things 15 feet away when even a novice could land those shots there is a level of artificial difficulty being incorporated to provide challenge as the AI would get smoked otherwise.

The greatest example of artificial difficult or in this case straight up cheating comes from Red Faction Gorilla. During race missions I'd keep running into cars and other vehicles. I knew I wasn't the best driver, but surely I shouldn't be performing this badly.

One course I ended up going way off road past a normal juncture and I had my camera turned back around. What I saw floored me. The damn vehicles stopped turned around and began to move in my direction to intercept my pathway.

It was the most satisfying vindication moment I've ever had in gaming. I still wasn't the best driver but at least I wasn't so bad I kept ramming into vehicles for no reason.

1. Stop caring what people think, if you cheapen the victory for yourself that is your problem.
2. The only time I save scum is when I'm buying something in-game that is so expensive I will be fucked if something goes wrong, eg. I always save before making a dam in Skylines.

No. You are mixiing in realism with game mechanics. It is a video game, it does not have to follow that logic, only the game logic.

If the rules of the game say your % to hit is aim+extra modifiers+range bonuses/penalties-cover and going point blank does not give you 100% chance to hit, then tough shit. That's the game rule.

You can only come to that statement by ignoring everything else I said in my post regarding artificial difficulty. That is artificial in nature if it's not realistic.

I'd also love to hear you explain how you can hold a gun to somethings head and not be able to hit it. All the while the game is telling you that you have the most elite of the elite at your disposal. Each with the aiming capacity that is exceeded by a common redneck or 10 year old.

A core element of what I said was this was rigging on the games part. You saying well tough shit doesn't exactly add anything to refute that.

There is no rigging with a hit formula. Learn the rules of it and play with it, they are not a secret. And I don't know why you keep using X-Com 2 as an example for this. It cheats in your favor giving you a HIGHER to hit % than it shows, and doesn't give aliens the same hit bonuses you get.

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Why?
You aren't 100% sure you can hit everything, no one is perfect. You might swing a sword at a tree, but then because of whatever reason- maybe your arm was tired from fapping last night- your arm gives out and you end up not hitting the tree.
Those chances are there because of shit like that.
What about the target's agility stat? Maybe they're quick enough to dodge, which in tern means you miss.

Maybe you're lucky enough to get that 5% miss?

I'm going to let you in on a secret user. The RNG is the recent XCOM games is seeded. Meaning, if you save, take a shot, miss, then reload the save, you will ALWAYS GET THE SAME RESULTS. To change the RNG seeding you have to do a different series of actions.

I only save scum in situations that if I lose, I lose the game and have to start over. I like challenge, but replaying the same content over again is just never fun to me. It turns gaming into a chore.

Maybe if the way you lost was better. Like instead of just getting kicked back 10 minutes you are switched out with a different character or something to do the section over again, which makes it different and playing it over again not so bad. It's a difficult problem.

Have a stamina meter.

I know it's fucking seeded. That post wasn't about reloading. I know you can't savescum in nuCom. I play fairly, and ten fucking times in the row I miss with 95%.
Yeah not rigged at all.

If you don't believe me you can look at the ini files themselves.

reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comments/45u81x/yes_xcom_2s_rng_cheats_in_your_favor_heres_how/

First, I doubt you actually missed 10 95%s in a row.
Second if you did, you are just unlucky user and should probably kill yourself.

I believe Ridge racer 7 doesn't have any rubber banding, not sure about the others though.

Ah but then your character gets distracted by shotabait side character twin (a) and misses the tree attack. What then?

singularity

welcome to whos game is it anyway

Midnight Club: LA doesn't. You get ahead of the AI in a race it will stay far behind where it fucking belongs.

When you like cocks in the pooper.

this. the game should be fun. I'm going to save and load because why should I be forced to do a bunch of shit all over again when I don't want to.

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Fire emblem.

I did it in stalker clear skies a ton because the enemies had homing grenades.

Any random loot drop so you avoid having to do shit like this

I disagree that RNG is all bad. However it is sensible to constrain it in a way that you cannot get stupidly good or bad luck in some games. Case in point, the Tetris TGM series is designed to not give specific pieces at the start, and also to make situations where the same piece shows up a bunch or a piece never does quite rare. Yet the games are for the master race only.

harddrop.com/wiki/TGM_randomizer

What's rewarding about saving every 5 seconds to evade anything the game might throw at you?
Though I could be reading you wrong, your sentence structure is a mess. I can hardly understand what you're trying to say.

What do you mean by save scumming? Using save states?
The game already provides you with save points before every boss

I always read "savescumming" as "saves cumming", as in "your save game are ejaculating".

Seeing shit like this really makes me think persona players are just plain horrible at games, after the first time you seen that roulette it should have been obvious the exploit that it always stops on the thing opposite to it but no, your casual as fuck ass seen none of that and just thought thought yeah I'll save scum through it.

Kill yourself.

When you are playing any Bethsda game that will crash and wipe an hours' worth of progress. It's the hardest part of Fallout 4 'Survival' difficulty.

I've only ever savescummed in LISA after so many of my allies died in the russian roulette part I couldn't even make a full team.

some mario world hacks are complete bullshit, and the game only allows 1 check point. sometimes ill give myself a check point. pic related

Who cares?

Games are supposed to be fun. They are not an achievement. Go walk the London marathon for that.

I save scumm in games that can either randomly crash or just fuck my shit up in a second.

Where the fuck do you think you are?

If you have to save scum on the highest difficulty why don't you just lower the difficulty?

Like in those teleport mazes. Fuck those. I just save state before going in one so i dont have to do the whole thing over again.

I save scummed in SMT IV because whenever I died it was faster to quit and restart the game than to wait for the unskippable bullshit to send me back to the main menu

Don't give a shit about what anyone thinks about shit like that, just have fun.
I always play on easy (very easy if it'll let me) and save scum to a ridiculous degree. I just want to have fun and be entertained, I don't want to bang my head against a wall for several hours. And even though a challenge can be fun in it's own right, (Hotline Miami and Dark Souls are some of my favorite games in recent years, although Dark Souls is more about technical knowledge and not that "hard" per se) I will always prefer having fun by MGRing every enemy than painstakingly slog my way through.
And you can't do a fucking thing about that.

Now with that said, after playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (on easy of course, you cucks) I've been wanting to get into Metro, and I know that game changes drastically with the difficulty settings, so I might actually play that on hardest, like how I chose easy on New Vegas, but went for Hardcore mode and that was super fun.

Fuck off with that shit. If the game let's me do it there's nothing wrong with it.

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Fucking casual

it don't matter, do whatever you want

Pretty much every infinity engine game, reload or game over

Doesn't playing on easy mean that your bullets and the enemy bullets have the lowest % to hit?

I've never seen the point of playing a game with hardcore death modes. Why do you want all your progress erased in a second when you die, especially if its caused by a bug or glitch in the game

I truly understand the appeal but dont fully understand why its defended so much or peope are called casual shitters becasue they dont want to lose hundreds of hours of progress with one mistake

I have real life to do that for me anyway

Undertale :^)

Typically games with that mode are not very long, Or theyre diablo clones.

its just a matter of taste really. ill pretty much only play tbs like that.

Bullshit RNG and exponential difficulty games aside, if you haven't been able to git gud at a game by the 30 hour mark then you probably are a casual. Losing your progress up till then doesn't even matter, unless you are an IRL casual who has a job. Restarting from the beginning allows you to create new strategies in more intricate and creative ways by taking advantage of opportunities that decided against or missed previously, especially for class-based RPGs, and ultimately increases your knowledge and skill level pertained to the game.
Sure, it really does suck in cases like story-heavy and linear games where you have to go over the same content over again, but the more you do it, the better you become with video games overall, which allows you to avoid events like that in the future more often.

all the day bro

How about save scumming in roguelikes?

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I save scum when I'm at the casino in a Dragon Quest game, but I'm pretty sure you're suppose to.

arent you just the sweetest thing

Only in absolute trash like Fallout that have fundamental flaws like instant random unavoidable Game Overs that outright necessitate it. But then, why would you be wasting your time on them to begin with?

CnC 1 was even worse. AI was allowed to build multiple things at once at accelerated speeds and disregards build limits. Had a commando sit outside of a hand of nod I was trying to capture and it would just continuously spam flame soldiers the instant the first one died.

Yes, which can lead to situations where you don't have enough bullets to finish the game. That's why you play on the hardest difficulty.

Anything under normal is a waste of time, anything above normal is dangerous faggot territory.

How do we define save-scumming? I started playing DD: DA and I save any time I have made considerable progress and usually before I engage a particularly large monster. I do so, so I don't have to walk back and kill everything I have for 2 hours in case of death. Would this be an example of save-scumming? Or is it something else entirely?

I can't play anything where dice rolls reign supreme without savescumming. That makes playing them pointless, so I don't.

I get that the appeal and challenge is in trying to cope with and survive your shit rolls, but I can never enjoy those games once I realize what they are. It seems like it's always either taken too far, to the point that player choice is frequently rendered inconsequential due to a couple of bad rolls making survival genuinely impossible, or when the abundance of RNG is used to disguise a lazy, simple game.

My friend can't get enough of pure RNG games, especially roguelikes. It's like watching an addict at a slot machine.

Save-scumming is exploiting the save and load system of game in order to save time while progressing through the game in some fashion. You described a pretty good example of what save-scumming is.

I always play on the highest difficulty unless all it does is something artificial (like double enemy health while yours stays the same).

It's ok user you don't have to be good at video games.

I don't think you can be faulted for any degree of save scumming when the game doesn't have any non-save-based continue points whatsoever in the first place. If dying always just prompts you to reload your last save end of story, might as well save anywhere and everywhere. Even more so if the game's buggy and crash-prone too.

Dragon Quest games really need to find a better solution for the casino stuff, they way they normally do it is too easy if you save scum and too impossible if you don't. I'd like something more in the middle.

On a side note, I still remember back when I was a little kid and the idea of just reloading my save if I lost and saving whenever I won big first occurred. I felt like an absolute genius.

Personally, I've always believed that doing A, B, C, and D over, just to try again at E where you actually screwed up is pointless, be it in video games or anything else in life. So I don't see anything wrong with avoiding playing the last two identical hours of content just to do the one part where you did mess up. If you want to in order to get more practice that's cool, but if you got to point E in the first place, you already proved you can handle the challenges before that. What does doing them again prove? That you can do them successively? If so, what does that matter? Flip a coin enough times and it'll hit ten heads in a row eventually too, that doesn't prove it was any more skilled than it was before. There have been so many games where the final challenge was some sort of boss rush or something, and my eventual victory was more that eventually all my "good runs" happened in a row, not that I really was that much better the 50th try than the 40th. My skill level gave me a certain chance at winning each point is all, and eventually I flipped heads every time.

Beating a specific enemy is a meaningful test of skill, beating a whole bunch of enemies in a row is just a test of patience. If you can handle all the individual components, doing it consecutively is just a matter of trying enough times.

^this

I save scum in fps games when there are too many enemies. Feel really dirty, but can't handle anything else.

Expert Nethack players can get pretty good ascension (win) rates. It's true that bad luck can fuck you over but being careful can often save you.

disgusting

The only game I savescum is when rng bullshit me

There's random forced conversion in CK2? Is this insane/possessed only or for anyone?

When the game has RNG rewards, after awhile of doing it legit I lose patience and just savescum until RNG stops being a cunt and gives me what I want.

I savescum when I don't get dubs

There is a choice that you can make, and keep the titles but I was Rpg as a zealot and couldn't take that option. Otherwise is always war against your liege and his bitch

Last time I remember savescumming was in half life opposing force. I was eleven.

Holdover does this but it's not done uniquely or interestingly. It's just an excuse for the developer to turn every obstacle into an instant death trap.

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As of right now the only alternative is Gran Turismo AI, pick your poison.

Also
It's obviously not optimal play if it doesn't work now is it?

It'd work if the game didn't teach you its logic and then decide the rules it taught you don't matter and lets the AI violate the game's rules that you're forced to abide by.

Sure user

Only game I savescum a lot with is Civ IV. Every computer is out to fuck you six ways to Sunday and they cheat like a bitch.

Right.

You're the player they're the AI what made you assume you're bound by the same ruleset when this has never been the case in any video game ever?

We're not talking about Mario here. In most games the AI is either gimped or overpowered compared to you and this is fine. It's part of the challenge and is almost always immediately obvious. There's no confusion when a goomba turns out to be a weak piece of shit or when a boss in most other games has way more health and deals more damage than you.

Racing games are not like those games. They're a competition between similarly capable entities as you. What you're effectively arguing is that it's fine for a game to misrepresent its rules to the player because the ability to decipher those lies is part of the challenge in a racing game of all things.

The game never misrepresents anything you just assume the AI can do the same thing because it uses the same tool as the player in appearance but if you've ever played a videogame before you would know that the AI can do things you cannot hope to do while it cannot do things that you can do.

Did you even read what you wrote?

If I have to play around the fact that the AI is able to cheat, then I'm not playing a racing game, am I? I'm playing a racing/puzzle game where a crucial ability to perform well is to decipher what rules the developers of the game have blatantly misrepresented to the player. Instead of

Oh, I don't know

The ability to perform well in a race?

In a racing game?

If you're gonna go that way, in a real race the ability to control your rhythm and plan your race is far more important than just going as fast as possible.

Yeah cool. That's what I'd like. Having my skills at competing in a race being tested in a racing game.
Do you know what I don't want to be tested on in a racing game? My ability to manipulate an AI's propensity to cheat in a racing/puzzle game advertised as a racing game.

Welcome to the club, doesn't change a damn thing you're not getting what you want from an AI, at-least not for a long time

The only reason I savescum at all is to rollback accidental clicks that fuck me over.

imo you take your game way too seriously, if you cant enjoy the game having unpredictable circumstances

in competitive games I can see the point of having no RNG though

Save the Date
A free visual novel built around savescumming. You get new options from previous failures to save your date in a world that's killing her in increasingly unlikely circumstances.
paperdino.com/save-the-date/

You know absolutely nothing about how computers work and I want you to kill yourself

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can we agree that saving after every encouter like in a game like GOD HAND or duke nukem 3d is a nooby way to play?
so where do we draw the line then?

Back in my day every enemy one hit killed you and there wasnt any saves during the whole game

You are all a bunch of fruits

You live in Libya too?

back in my day turning on the game killed you

I do it in stealth games when I'm playing if I get seen it counts as a death. Replaying the exact same parts over and over again in an identical way just to try something new on where I'm stuck seems fucking pointless to me.

Back in my day, we called saves "quarters" and put them in the machine when we died.

Back in my day our machines didn't allow for continues.

If you don't want to play a game that has abstractions like hit percentages, just play another game instead. Savescumming completely breaks the mechanics.

back in my day you could get a cup of coffee and a hamburger for a quarter

Save scumming is just abusing the save system, but to what extent is up to the individual to decide. I think a pretty concrete example is saving right before a random event and reloading until you get a desired result. Or your playing fallout and you save before picking a lock and reloading if you break a lockpick. What you described isn't save scumming at all. I think saving before a big battle is pretty standard for people and usually games will auto-save anyway. But if you're saving after every enemy you kill so that if you die you lose no progress at all, well that's pretty save scummy.

I agree. Not sure where to draw the line but I usually save when a bit of action has happened and then the tension goes down a bit. During "rest phases" if I where to call it something.

And to build on this, if you derive fun through things other than how the game was intended to be played then by all means savescum. I play Dorf Fort just to build sick autism caves and I'd rather not have to deal with a sudden disaster fucking everything up.

I don't think you could say the same thing about abusing saves in a game like XCOM or Fire Emblem which are all about victory in battle. Without the fear of permanent loss, there is no tension or challenge. "Fairness" is just a buzzword used by people too angry to admit they fucked up or got themselves into an unwinnable position. There is a need to protect your progress against actual bugs fucking your shit up, and I like features like Long War's Bronzeman mode that is like Ironman (hardcore mode, no manual saving) but you can restart from the beginning of the mission. With this you can't just save your favorite soldier from a lucky crit unless you're willing to start all over again but you can revert progress in case there's a game-breaking bug.

Pretty sure what you're describing is the de-facto example people use when they say people who save-scum are shit.

The problem with the fire emblem series now is that some missions will just have reinforcements show up with absolutely no warning. There is no way to counter or plan for them and can result in losing people.

A game is unfair if there is no logical and predictable connection between the player's actions and the results, especially if they have a large impact on the game.
A great example of unfair gameplay was in a turn-based strategy game, in which there was a mission to defend a town from 3 directions, namely the center and two flanks, but you only have two unsplittable armies. The center was always under attack, and in the second turn one of the flanks was targeted. If it's the one you didn't defend, they marched through before you could move your troops, game over. Even if you did everything perfectly, this mission had a failure chance of 50% due to mission scripting and gameplay choices.
A supposed game of skill loses it's appeal when it is revealed as one of chance, where your actions are far less important than sheer luck.

The problem with the Fire Emblem series has always been a fundamental contradiction between two of its game mechanics. The game places very heavy emphasis on the value of individual units but then at the same time allows you to very easily lose them forever with no way to revive. Thus the strategies of sacrificial play are removed from consideration and most people play the games very conservatively.

Since when did the games allow you to save and reload in the middle of levels though?

no, fairness literally means: you'll win by making the right decision every time, thus many traditional board games are actually unfair for the other player, because you can mathematically prove, that the other always wins, if only perfect moves are made

It's worse in some of the games in lunatic, where the reinforcements can immediately move on the same turn they arrive with no warning. On lunatic, most enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits, so it's really hard to avoid dying when a large group of paladins and dracoknights with 10 movement points suddenly spawn from all 4 corners of the map.