I mean, you’ll find people using PEDs in any sport, despite the risk of bans and everything. Steroid use is also rampant among bodybuilders.
There is an “obvious market”, but why do such sport leagues or federations that openly allow those drugs exist?
I can imagine that such a thing existing would create an immediate and widespread health problem with lots of people, athletes or not, using those performance enhancers and accidentally fucking themselves. But what else could be a problem?
One reason could be that most of the audience doesn’t want to watch them if it feels like what they’re doing is artificial or inauthentic.
Might be a terrible analogy, but since people cheat on video games, why don’t they have an esports league where aimbots, wallhacks, speedhacks, etc are all allowed? It might be a novelty for 2 minutes, but most people wouldn’t want to watch that. It isn’t how the games were meant to be played. It’s not that it’s cheating anymore if the rules allow it. It’s that it isn’t a good showcase for talent because it becomes about who bought the best cheats.
This analogy doesn’t work for me. First of all, I’d absolutely watch coked esports. Secondly, glitched speedruns are absolutely a popular form of competitive cheating. Nobody would watch an aimbot competition because that specifically would be boring, it’d just be cameras jumping around and death screens. There’s no real competition happening. Wallhacks might be fun to watch - my favorite FPS Blacklight Retribution had that as a mechanic and it was great.
Glitches aren’t cheating. They’re using knowledge about the game’s internal workings. This is how the combo system that became the core of fighting games came about.
Maybe you could argue TAS (tool assisted speedrun), but I’ve always gathered thats more for proof of concept
And it’s probably worth mentioning that glitches still need to be fun. There have been speedrun scenes hurt because the most optimal method made the game less fun to play.
Armored Core on the PSX immediately comes to mind, the optimal route just skips all missions, so you’re effectively watching nothing going on for ~10 minutes. Wonder Boy 3 (Master System) has an optimal route that is grinding for money to unlock the final door, not fun. Many “game end glitch” runs also tend to fall in that category.
Well, the problem with the glitches I was thinking of was basically:
-You have to play a worse version of the game. This was a majora’s mask glitch. It relied on a bug that allowed you to “wrong warp” to the Japanese Debug Menu. The problem was basically it required you to increment a hidden index to over 8000. Which crashed the N64 version. The second issue is the debug menu requires the directional pad, which isn’t mapped correctly on the Wii version. Which basically meant playing on the Wii U version which has input lag among other issues that make it…not very fun to play when speed running. Basically it doesn’t play right.
-The other was an RNG glitch in Ocarina of Time. It worked on trying to get a bottle by the deku tree, which allowed you to do a very broken glitch that brought you right to Ganon to fight the final boss. The problem with that one is that it required you to trigger a pickup sequence in a specific way that allowed an enemy to knock you out of it. The only enemy drop that does this is the first deku seed of the game, and the enemies that were found using this method…had a low rate of dropping the deku seed. In theory it was the fastest run at the time, but on it’s first showcase it went over the allotted time because the seeds didn’t drop correctly until 30m into the run.
So in one case you had to use a version of the game that played awful to increment a hidden table 8000 times. And in another case you had to hope glitch went off without a hitch or you started over. And aside from the drop rate for the second glitch, it could also fail if the deku seed just dropped in the wrong place.
Cheaters battle each other all the time, deliberately, in private matches. The reason it’s not a sport with spectators is likely because if you’re a known cheater then you’re stuck with that label forever no matter what you do.
I highly doubt that’s the reason. There’s definitely an audience out there for people with chemical and surgical alterations to perform at superhuman levels.
The analogy with esports fails only because real people would still be limited by their own bodies, there’s only so many drugs anyone can take before the body starts failing, not to mention that they don’t make people godlike as some cheats do.
Depending on the speedhack allowed and the game, it could be entertaining to watch, it’d become a game of human reflexes.