Originally posted by stvlepore:

Years ago I put a super charger on a truck. I often wonder if I’m a cheater because the truck was no longer vanilla.

If you agreed to partake in a street race against other vanilla trucks then yes, you are a cheater. If you compare the performance of your truck with other truck owners without disclosing that you modified it and everyone assumes you did not, then yes you are a cheater. If you blow your transmission because of your modification and then start a warranty claim without saying you did what you did, then yeah well you get the idea.

What OP is saying here is not that anyone who modifies the game is a cheater or that anyone who plays the game differently is a cheater. What he wants is to engage in a theoretical discussion about what cheating may or may not be and in which context it could be. He practically offers an academic thought of what cheating might be defined as.

He also refers quite often to speedrunning. In the speedrunning community there are various different categories and many of those exist to define what cheating would be for a certain speedrun. They define the start point and end point and which tools - if any - may be used. That's partly where 100% and any% speedruns come from: Because depending on what you define as cheating an any% speedrun could be seen as cheating if you didn't define what cheating was beforehand.

If the Valheim community would come up with some kind of challenge like open PvP, best architectural achievements, any kind of speedrun or whatever, then what OP is talking about certainly would have to be looked at and be defined in someway so proper comparisons could be made.