Do you feel cheaty using reaction wheels?

[micha]

You didn't answer to the question. Why is that cheating? Is it because others have agreed to a certain set of rules? Or is it because the cheater pretends to agree to the rules, but chooses to break them instead? Both reasons can apply to cheating in non-competitive single-player games as well.

Perhaps you didn't phrase your question well enough or I misunderstood what you were asking. Sorry, but I'm still not sure what you're asking.

Cheating is breaking AGREED UPON rules.

In a single player game, you make (and change) the rules. Hence you can't break them. Hence you can't cheat. In a multiplayer game, ANY rule change MUST be agreed upon by ALL participants, OTHERWISE a rule change is cheating. A rule change can mean ANYTHING. Whether it's within the framework of a game, or outside it.

For example, an in-game rule-change might be turning on assisted targetting mode in a hypothetical multiplayer FPS. An external rule-change might be allowing a certain mod (eg, to give players unlimited ammo). Cheating would be doing either of those without first consulting and agreeing with the other players.

In the same FPS playing the single-player campaign, using either of those options is IMPLICITLY agreed upon by yourself (ie "all the players"), hence you're not cheating yourself. In the mod case you're playing the game differently to how the developer wanted it played, but it's still not cheating. You can "feel cheated" if the game is now too easy and you blast through in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours, but that's not the same thing.

[Jouni]

In the same FPS playing the single-player campaign, using either of those options is IMPLICITLY agreed upon by yourself (ie "all the players"), hence you're not cheating yourself.

This is where your argument fails. People don't always agree with themselves.

Maybe the player does a stupid mistake and uses cheat codes to rectify the situation, because they forgot to save the game often enough. Maybe one of the levels is hard and tedious, and the player decides so skip it, because they've already beaten it once. Maybe the player uses self-imposed rules to avoid some cheesy tricks, but then resorts to them "just a bit" to beat a particularly hard situation.

None of that is cheating as such. However, sometimes the player feels an urge to justify their actions, either to themself or to others. Some part of them may suspect that what they did was cheating, and another part tries to prove that that was not the case.

[moogoob]

I see no reason not to, but I also don't use copious quantities of them. Good luck controlling a probe's attitude without RCS otherwise, especially since the Apollo-sized nozzle quads are huge (and overpowered) compared to the smaller probes.

[Mister Dilsby]

Nope. Not at all. Why would I?

[Beowolf]

KSP has some issues that make certain tasks harder than real life, including rover wheels and wasteful RCS use. Generally, I think of the overpowered reaction wheels as compensation for those glitches.

But, yes, sometimes it feels like too much and I'll either disable the magic wheels or play Realism Overhaul for a while.