Let them cheat their way through and then they don't feel like playing it again after the first roundORprevent them from cheating their way through and making them have hard fun while playing it and maybe thereby giving it good replay value (if the game was designed well) . . .. . . i choose the latter.@suliman: aren't the hackers the people that crack your game and give the cheats to the lazy, 'cheat-through' players?

OR they fail and fail and fail and since they can't do anything but start over or give up, they give up and call your game crap out of frustration.

Actually, 'fail and fail and fail' won't really be possible in my games, neither will checkpoints nor cancelling autosave be possible. You fail, you face the consequence, move on and . . . There'll be different things in my games and if isn't implemented before i start making my games, it'll be new things.
One more thing, shouldn't the player play within the developers programming? If not, i would have loved to keep going straight in the gtavc but unfortunately, you get magically turned around in the water.
Should you let them implement what you didn't program into a game? What if what they implement your idea for a sequel?
I'm just asking.

If they want to change the game that they bought from the original, I don't care (speaking of strictly single player games). They are increasing their fun. Sure, I put out a game and I intended it to be played a certain way, but if they change it to make it more enjoyable for themselves then who am I to deny them that? That would be like deriding anyone who ever writes any fan fiction. They are taking something you made and making it more enjoyable for themselves.

You are treating the player as an adversary instead of a partner.

As far as implementing my idea for a sequel, they are more than welcome to do that. However, their version of a sequel could be vastly different than my idea of a sequel, and if I the, the original creator of said universe, denounced it, then I doubt anyone would put any credence to it. It could even be spun off as a sort of split in the timeline. It would force me to do a better job. It would be like if someone made a Mass Effect 3 that doesn't have a balls ending that turns the entire series to poo soup. Also, see fan fiction example above.

No modding support will be in my games.

Isn't modding cheating? I read that users have no right to mod a game except the game devs add support for it.

You are correct that users have no right to mod a game, they also have no right to not mod a game. They can either do it or they cannot do it. They couldn't sell it or distribute it legally without permission from the copywright holders of the software that they based their mod on (as far as I understand). This does not stop them from doing it for themselves.

Modding could possibly be in the form of creating/performing a cheat. In the context of the discussion, it is cheating. What I am saying is that in a strictly single player game, where what one player does in their game has NO bearing whatsoever on a player playing their copy of the game, cheating is irrelevant and you are wasting your time trying to prevent it. The only one you are satisfying with your attempts to prevent cheating is yourself.

The idea of creating a game is to make something that someone will have fun with. I fail to see the problem of players altering a game so that they enjoy it more is a bad thing, and such alterations have zero affect on the other players of said game. I see it as a good thing. Are they altering the experience I planned for them? Yes. Is this bad? No.

You are trying to give a ball to a group of kids so they can play basketball, but get upset when they decide to kick it around and play soccer instead so you run out and say "No! You must play the game I want you to play, basketball!". I give them a ball with the intent for them to play basketball, and when they start playing soccer I would be estatic because they are having fun with something I gave them.

My point with all this is to save you time by having you not worry about something in your design I think you should not worry about and to help you create a game that will be more fun for people. I think you have placed your game/idea on a pedestal and think it a kind of personal insult to yourself and your creative idea for anyone to not interact with it in the way you want them to.

1. Make it so stupidly freaking complicated that people will look at it and say it's not worth the time.

2. Online database - save and load to/from it, and only to/from it - permitting that your server software doesn't get leaked or something and someone goes and makes their own server emulator...

You could like, encrypt the save data with a key - don't forget to generate 500 thousand keys at this point and maybe 500 different operations that looks like save-game encrypting, then maybe make it so that it loads the key from a bunch of randomly injected assembly code in the class that starts up the game, or the menu or whatever from the last time you saved, into an empty key object in memory somewhere, which is used to load the save...

hmm. I guess when you save, it could create like 5,000 "fake keys" along with it, where only a few of the injected commands actually build the real key...

I don't really know, this is just some crazy idea that would fall in the "stupidly complicated" category. I guess there's no way to really stop people from reloading old saves unless you ran the actual game from the server...