Isotropic's FAQ does not have anything about disconnecting your opponent in order to win, or taking 5 seconds less than the disconnection threshold every move to get your opponent to quit, or snooping on their machine to see what they have in their hand. I think a reaction of "hmm, maybe we should have been more explicit about that" to any of those things is comical.
Force disconnecting an opponent isn't really winning the game of Dominion, it's simply destroying it. That seems like hacking rather than cheating. The meatworld analog would be pouring gasoline over all the cards and burning the entire game in between turn 8 and turn 9. The response isn't, "you cheated", it's "wtf". It's clearly unethical the same way it's unethical for me to steal your bank account number but it's not cheating in the sense of gaining an unfair, unallowed advantage in a game. No one won or lost, the game was destroyed. Whether that unfairly manipulates iso's ranking system isn't dominion cheating, it's elo manipulation cheating, which is not what this thread is about.
Taking 5 seconds less than the disconnection threshhold repeatedly isn't cheating, it's just being a dick. It doesn't give you an unfair advantage, if I took a bit too much Nyquil before I played my Isodom tournament game and took that same amount of time to think about every move naturally I would enjoy that same advantage.
Snooping on someone's machine to see their hand is viewing information that is defined by Dominion's rules to be private information, so it is explicitly cheating.
I think simulating is pretty gray. And I kinda think it's sad that Donald and everyone else responded the way they did. I'm most interested by games that can't be played well by a computer, and within those games, the aspects that can't be played well by a computer. And Gerominoo made the simulator himself.
It's kinda like when I was in high school. I had a TI-84 calculator, and I knew how to program it. I had a Statistics class that let me do whatever I wanted with it, and another math class that restricted me to a four function calculator when I had tests to take. In the statistics class I learned the concepts and programmed z-test process and t-test processes into my calculator and I knew what they did and when the test came it was actually mostly word problems, but I knew where the tools I had made were and how to use them and what they
meant and I made A's. Some of my classmates used the programs I had made (please note that I consider this complex ethical moral etc stuff and I'm not sure if letting my classmates was ethical in my metaphor) and most of the time they didn't understand how to interpret the results or what the program was doing so they made C's anyway. Which was rightful, the point of the class was to understand statistics, to potentially use it in the career field. I could clone that TI 84 and give it to a company but they wouldn't pay me 50,000$ a year to use it, because the formulas aren't the skill of value here, it's the understanding. If the point of that statistics class was to prepare me for potentially being a statistician, then I could very well bring that same TI 84 calculator to wherever I worked and use those same programs (yes I would forget how to use them. But you forget everything you learn in high school, that's just how life is) to do whatever application they had.
In the other math class we went over the concept and the proofs for the material and even heard the names of some of the jolly mathematicians and talked about how this or that formula is really good in a particular kind of physics problem. Then we got the test and it was a departmentwide thing that teacher hadn't written himself, and it had straightforward questions that just required you to remember tedious formulas.
In the first class the thing of value and interest was tested and the computation that didn't matter could be removed. In the second class there was effort and desire for me to learn things of value, but the test didn't reflect it, and even if it did I could have been inhibited by thingss that didn't matter so much.
It does depend on what you value in the game, it's beauty in the eye of the beholder. Almost everyone I hear from is more fascinated with engine games or interactive attack based games than when one guy won because he guessed that Vault BM would beat Envoy BM. So if both people are using simulators I think that just cuts some of the unfun stuff out of the game and leaves in stuff people like. I guess that's not really an ethical assessment, it's more of a, idealistic thing, about what the rules should be versus what they are. I don't really know whether Geronimoo should have instinctively know he was acting against the communities unspoken rules. I was just upset by Donald's post and the sentiment that using a simulator destroys the game or makes it uglier. Deep Blue can win at chess but computers have a much harder time winning at go, and many would contend go is a more beautiful game.