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Using Cheats makes Gamers Happy – Results of a Study Involving Anno 1800

  • from PLITCH
  • 13.04.2023

We conducted a study with leading neurotechnology group Brainamics to show the impact of game cheats on users playing Anno 1800. The results? Activating a trainer software like PLITCH during gameplay increases players’ fun and guarantees an almost complete elimination of boredom and negative emotional experiences. Read on to find out more specific details about the study.

As you probably already know, Anno 1800 is a popular real-time strategy city-building simulation that features lots of micro-management which leads to plenty of downtime. The reason to undertake the study carried out by Brainamics was to see if using the PLITCH Anno 1800 trainer would accelerate or completely remove said downtime and therefore the gameplay session would be more fun right from the start.

The study involved two groups playing Anno 1800, the PLITCH group used the game trainer and the control group played the game without any external software. To measure the effect of cheating during the gaming session, the participants were hooked up to EEG devices which extracted their emotions from their brain activity.

This is what playing Anno 1800 looks like in the brains of the control group that played without cheats. As you can see in this heatmap, the participants experienced a lot of boredom and unhappiness. Furthermore, the results indicate a tendency towards passive gameplay. Overall, strong negative emotions dominated the participants’ gaming sessions, especially the ones who prefer action games rather than RTS titles.

This is the heatmap portraying the results of the PLITCH group’s Anno 1800 gaming session. In comparison to the first image, it is clearly noticeable that the gamers had an overall positive and active experience with hardly any boredom or unhappiness. Moreover, the players’ brain waves indicated increased levels of excitement and satisfaction.

Overall, the results revealed, with 98.5% confidence, that cheating with PLITCH in Anno 1800 does indeed make the gameplay more enjoyable. Tedious sections of the game were reduced to a minimum and therefore all of the players, no matter their typical genre preferences had continuous fun during their gaming session.

There you have it. It is scientifically proven that cheating in RTS single-player games such as Anno 1800 can have a highly positive effect on players as it raises excitement, satisfaction and tremendously decreases boredom and unhappiness during gameplay session. One could even claim that PLITCHing makes gamers happy.

Anno 1800 was only the beginning. The effect of PLITCH on gaming experiences with titles from diverse genres are being tested as we speak. Are you curious what the results will be? So are we! But in the meantime:

Happy Gaming with PLITCH – Cheating Done Right!