Reading this article, Japanese Super Smash Bros. players mistakenly banned for using Peach online | Joystiq , brought back memories of when I used to play online back in the day. Back then there was main game online for console gamers, Phantasy Star Online. Part of the appeal of the game itself was to build your character and find new, more advanced items. Then there were also people who were able to take advantage of exploits, and do things like duplicating items. This had the potential effect of flooding the game world with items that were supposed to be rare. There were other cheats (more like bugs) that people could use and so things faster than normal.
For the most part in reality it didn’t end up bothering me that much. But I guess this was mostly due to the fact that after a while I stopped playing in open games, where anybody could join. However, I could see this type of thing affecting the experience in general. However, seeing how much playtime I get now, I know that a lot of people would not have the time to grind to get the more advanced items. Though now I see a lot of it is circumvented anyway by way of micro-transactions. So seeing people using exploits to get items wouldn’t bother me so much now? What about other gamers here?