Hahaha, you seem to have a wrong impression. So let me enlighten you.
-All the countless hours of debate and deliberation and design planning, from what enemies are in what rooms to where we place upgrades and items, and how frequently they show up.
-All the balancing of what ability or item is acquired when, what it does, where it's useful and when, and how that affects progression and backtracking and balancing elsewhere in the game.
-All the work of data structuring for ability and item progression.
All of that and more, gone and for naught the instant a player decides to fuck with the save file and cheat their way through.
Call it elitism or whatever the fuck else you want, you're disgustingly wrong all the same.
I couldn't care less what players do if they've beaten the thing already. All's fair game after that. I'll cheat my ass off for fun and some good laughs--after I've finished the title fairly and can properly appreciate what it's like having maxed stats and all the gear from the start. I even have cheat and spoof modes in mind for Umbra that would break the game's curve otherwise--not that I expected you to know that, but it just goes to show why making half-baked assumptions about developer intent isn't a bright idea.
But unless a game is so poorly designed and balanced that cheating is basically mandated to succeed at it, players who openly admit to wanting to cheat because it's either too difficult for them (whether or not it's bullshit/fake difficulty or the player's own lack of skill is another matter altogether) or because they're just impatient are disregarding all the work we do because they want to beat it faster and not progress the intended way.
You acting like me, as a dev, being pissed off at wanton and open-admittance cheaters for flat-out stating "I don't want to play the game properly because I'm impatient", is somehow equating to "I'm pissy because you're not playing 'my' way" is unwarranted and rather crass.
Reality check, nothing's further from the truth. That you immediately went on the defensive and threw straw-grasping insults/assumptions says enough about your intentions. You cannot justify your wanting to cheat out of impatience, so you try to turn it around on the people who made the shit in the first place.
What a fucking joke. I've made heated arguments in the name of not forcing players to play a certain way, and you're welcome to check with Plot if you don't believe me.
You are too lazy or impatient (or both, I don't know) to properly learn a given title's mechanics and difficulty curves (once again, whether or not these things are fairly balanced or artificially-supplemented with fake difficulty elements is another matter), so you turn to cheating because you just want to see the ending without having earned it yourself.
Plenty of ways to do this without cheating. Watch an LP if you just want to see the ending.
But don't fucking sit there and make bullshit accusations like you're some oppressed minority against the big evil MLGers (which, spoiler alert, I'm not, but cute assumption nonetheless) who want to be evil bastards.
It's fucking Castlevania, not Dark Souls. The shit's structured to make players think before they act, and punishments aren't nearly as bad. You get a Game Over and lose the stuff you got without saving--it's not like Souls where you lose *everything* and run the risk of losing it for good if you don't get it back. Gold can be refarmed/reacquired, items can be refound, enemies can be slain again. Hardly the stuff of nightmares, and LC and LC2 kicked my ass more times than I care to admit (one such occasion back in LC1 instigated a screen punch, even, so don't sit there and talk to me like I don't know what gamer rage feels like). Don't see me cheating my way through it.
If you would rather cheat than actually improve at the game's mechanics, then just as you have every right to play however you want, I too have every right to tell you to git gud. And that means exactly what it says on the tin--"get good." Play, fuck up, think, learn, improve, repeat. This is how it was for years and years before easy editing and hacking became laymanized, and nobody called the devs evil or cruel for it (generally-speaking). And yes, I'm acutely aware of "git gud"'s meme status as a sign of Dark Souls elitism, but no, that's not its perpetual state of being. You wouldn't throw a fit if your boss told you to get good at parts of your job you weren't very good at, so I'm sure you can understand the difference in how the phrase can be used.
You want to cheat because you're impatient, lazy, incompetent, or something in-between. You've admitted this much already.
As someone who spends more hours and work and forethought into design that your mind can even fucking fathom (did you know that for every progress report post that goes into the Umbra thread, there are weeks and months of discussion, debate, argument, and concessions for the features you see? Or did you just assume it magically happened overnight and took no work at all?), this is more or less the equivalent of setting your own house on fire to collect the insurance and buy a new house because you didn't want to fix the plumbing in the old one. If I'm gonna devote years of my life to making something for people to enjoy, then I have every right to take countermeasures against those would would wantonly disregard all the work that went into it because they're too fucking impatient to actually experience the full product.
So go on, you self-righteous fuck. Call me whatever you please. Make your baseless insults and "arguments." All it does is solidify my reasons for protecting my work from people who don't even value it or the efforts that created it. And if something as small as save file protection bothers you, you're really gonna hate the other antihacking measures I have planned (though none are set in stone).
But while you're free to do whatever you please, if you can't understand why a creator would have a problem with people happily breaking into their shit because they want to play it the easy way and disregard all the work that creator put forth into making the thing, then there's nothing more to talk about.