You appear to have a comprehension issue. Why not take a moment to differentiate between play style, which no one is questioning here, and blatant cheating that renders others at a disadvantage.
Blatant cheating is only disapproved of
here. DCS World for example HAS a cheat submenu where cheats can actually be mapped to keyboard or joystick buttons. The cheats for Doom and Skyrim are well known, extremely publicised, and officially accepted.
It seems cheating is a problem because the game is online-only, and - outside of solo - forces players to interact with each other.
I'm the sort of player who believes that if I buy a game, whatever I do in it short of reverse engineering or altering the executable itself, is entirely my business. I appreciate that in ED, things such as invulnerability cheats or unlimited ammo cheats would have an indisputably negative impact on other players, which is why they're not in the game.
So there is something I want - a way to skip the grind and tedium - that I can't have because I have instead something I don't want - having to share the galaxy with a bunch of people who not only do I not see eye to eye with, but don't even look in the general direction of.
With Doom, for example, I'd play the game until about two thirds of the way through, get sick of the frames-counting "remember its moves" boss fights, and just cheat my way through the end of the game. When the credits rolled, I'd think "Enjoyed the story and atmosphere... the grinding, not so much. Still, I've seen all there is to see now, so I can ditch Doom and go and play the next new thing".
When ED gets tedious, I can't. It's grind, or play something else. Why? Because if I tried to skip the grind, that would negatively affect other players. A valid and fair point, but I personally would rather have the option to skip the grind, than the option to interact with other players.
Hell, I would buy a third hard drive and give ED
several terabytes of hard disk space, if it meant that I had my own instance, running locally, on my computer, unaltered, unadjusted, untweaked, un-interfered with, with every single subsequent update.
But that's just me and I suspect in that, I'm strongly in the minority, so hey.
I'll continue playing of course. A few million credits here, a few million credits there, in the vain hope that I can get the next sparkly ship, and the game will suddenly - temporarily - become interesting again. Until the novelty wears off, then it's back to DCS World or Skyrim.
Ho Hum.
