I could be a bit 'holier than thou' here and say that I don't like playing games that "require" the player to cheat in order ro progress - however bad pacing in games is really a thing!

For me, if the game is so poorly designed that simply playing it the way it was intended is fingernails-down-a-blackboard-untenable, I'd rather play something that was fun. I don't need to complete the bad game, I have better uses for my time.

If it's really awful, I'll make a note of the developer, too, and seriously consider their other projects as suspect.

The best incremental games I've played have some vaguely fun minigames that add progression, but aren't broken.

Like, in cookie clicker, there's a golden cookie to find occasionally, and it (I think, been a while) doubled your multiplier for about a minute if you found it. If you stayed vigilant, you could keep that bonus going most of the time.

Other incremental games, I spent the currency, upgraded things, left. That can only work for so long.

Hope this helps, dunno if it will.

Well, there are several types of cheating.

Autoclicking, I like to do any time there is an 'active idle' section, or if playing the game would just be easier with hover to activate buttons or etc. I essentially use it almost constantly and I don't think it has ever ruined a game for me. There are enough games that do and don't allow it that you'd be missing out more to not use it? I am not sure I would feel much grief to have it taken away, but in lieu of more advanced automation it's allows just a step more consideration for how to idle, which is often being thought about anyway, so it makes sense being such a cornerstone. I don't think general automation would be nearly as successful at this point.

Tickspeeding up, this one again has some games intentionally using it so there must be something to it. Something that's difficult is games, especially represtiges, having lots of varying short waiting intervals. Maybe what happens is in games where you don't 'develop skills' to get faster you are expected to train recognition, and speeding up, of those parts. Extending this to speeding up the entire game doesn't necessarily ruin things, but if you are trying to make the game 'easier' spreading it out is actually advantageous vs 'I can't play it for that long so..' id say is a fallacy. So I would seldom use this hack though again it often basically is in the game. I plan to retry Kittens game which will test that opinion though (playing it normally may train me to less flailing around for any resource disruption and balancing games)..

General console value editing, apart from being less familiar with how to do this, I think it goes hand in hand with reading a games code as a different mode of playing. I am not sure you can exactly ruin a game by doing this, but it definitely creates demand for multiple playthroughs more than the previous two. Can group it with save editing, which I think is very justified and often used is your save is lost. I still am weary of roblox games just because you can't save edit, even without intending to 'cheat'. (if you can lmk, I want my generator incremental save back ><)

Is this all of them? I can't remember a game being painful to play, apart from when veering non-incremental, but people may have different win conditions. I hope this gives a clear vantage from my intuition of where to put the rails with this, but again it's clear to me as only one perspective to some extent, and I am not someone who collects other people's perspectives per se so have no info to say more.