unfair advantage

recently I have been seeing advertisements of products touting good performance to gamers, in the form of less lag, less ping, increased accuracy, faster response time etc... with this tagline "gain an unfair advantage over your friends/opponents/enemies" - which led me wondering, why are these services/products unfair? you pay more for your internet connection to get better connections, you buy a better mouse/keyboard to help you aim better... it's not something that your friends/opponents cannot buy, nor is it against any specific rules or ethics of online gaming... It is advantageous to have better hardware to play with, but it is not like using a map-hack, a aimbot or a scriptbot.

in my era (I guess I am old...) when playing as a child, we would shout "Unfair!" if someone was cheating in a game... it usually (almost definitely) has a negative connotation to it. however, if I were to take the marketing tactics into context, youths (/gamers) of today do not think that being unfair or cheating is something bad. In fact, it is a secret desire of them to have an "unfair" advantage over their peers so that they can be superior over them? or how else should I interpret the marketing slogan?

playing games is all about fun and enjoyment. yes I had my share of exploiting exploits... but the fun came from figuring how to exploit the system and not about using cheats and exploits to be #1 in the server... which is why games which are easily exploitable quickly become obsolete from my playing collection... once I figure out the exploits and use the exploits a few times I quickly get bored of the game. On the other hand, skill based games or story based games held my attention much longer than games which just focuses on grinding and grinding and grinding... do the gamers of nowadays think that having the unfair advantage would enable them to derive more pleasure out of the game? I cannot answer for them but my answer would probably be no.

On a side note - I am still very amused by Leticia's insom-nom-nom-nom-nia.

Goodnight world.