Coming from this answer, I felt that we need a tiny discussion. While cheats are typically on the way out in gaming, some games still use cheats and allow access to the developer console. Quite a few questions that get asked on this site ("How do I beat X?" or "How do I get X?") can be solved with a simple "open up the dev console" or "Press Up+Up+Down+Down+Left+Right+Left+Right+B+A".
The question is, should we accept cheats as valid answers?
As we determined pretty early on, a cheat is a valid answer if and only if the only person you're cheating is yourself.
If your question is how to be a better spy in TF2, an answer suggesting you run your own server and noclip through the map so you can easily sneak around and retreat to absolute safety is not for the purposes of our website a "valid" answer.
Cheats are valid answers, it's as simple as that. People come to Gaming.SE to find solutions to their problems and cheats invariably solve those problems. If we say to limit cheats to questions that specifically ask for cheats or "there is no other way", then we have a problem.
How do we know when "there is no other way"? Like our problem with lore, that implies that we need to paradoxically know the answer before we know there's an answer. If we simply allow cheats as answers, that doesn't affect our ability to answer questions definitively.
I think that OF COURSE a cheat should be allowed as an answer. But, unless the question is "How do I cheat on X?" a cheat should never be the accepted answer. Of course, we cannot control the community, but, we can make comments, votes, and suggestions to help people make the right decisions.
For example: "Is it possible to get Splinky to do the funky chicken?"
A quality answer could easily be:
No. This is not possible. Only Zippy has that power in-game. There is, however, a cheat that enables this:
Mash your face into computer keyboard until every key has been pressed twice
Hit Enter 37 times
I also think we should use comments to encourage people to post the sources of their cheats. There have been occasions where things have been presented as cheats which have deleterious effects on people's games, etc. I think this is especially true of mods, but that perhaps is a whole separate discussion.
Cheats: not a valid answer, because they obviate all other answers.
If you were to ask, how do I get Cloud in Final Fantasy Tactics, the most correct answer, if cheats are accepted, is to pop a gameshark into your Playstation and input the following:
3005xx74 0032 | 8005yy42 0032 | 3005xx7A 00A0 | 3005xx85 0020
Which is a crappy answer! Indeed you do get Cloud, but the whole game is trivialized. A cheat should be in its own question, like, "What is the gameshark code to get Cloud in Final Fantasy Tactics?"
Or better yet, lets have a CheatExchange forum where all the cheaters can exchange their cheatey cheats.
EDIT: Added "cheatey" to "cheatey cheats" just to be clear on where I stand
While cheats are technically a valid answer, they should not be used as answers on Gaming.SE unless the asker specifically asks for cheats or the problem is unsolvable through any other method (e.g. Asker wants an item that can only be given through the developer console).
The reasoning is that providing cheats as answers is typically low-quality, akin to a "Google X" or link-only answer. They're essentially catch-alls since you can accomplish almost anything you need just by opening up the developer console. I feel that, unless there are extenuating circumstances, cheats should not be valid answers.
