they're not hackers, they're CHEATERS!!

You don't call someone using a Game Genie on an old Nintendo game a 'hacker' - you call them cheaters. Why do you give them the dignity of the title, 'hacker' just because it's in a online game? There's a huge difference.

Gawd, I hate how often I have to say this, over and over again, but here goes...

A hacker would muck about with the internals of the game, try to figure out why X item drops at a certain rate or how you could improve that rate, maybe even alter some code to see if in fact he was right.

A cheater would say, "Hey, I can use that knowledge to make sure I get tons of X item, and make sure that I'm the most powerful player in the game world!"

Now, using a Game Genie isn't a good or a bad thing - maybe you just want to really mess up the game, and it doesn't affect anyone else, so that's OK on your own time. But cheating in an online game is morally wrong; you're stating, "I don't care about rules. I don't care about the other people in the game. I'm going to do what I want to do, hell with the rest of you fuckers."

I play in a pretty small online game (I think the active community numbers something like maybe, MAYBE 2k players a day) and it can be said conclusively that cheaters helped to ruin the game, because nearly 3/4ths of players left in a single month's span when the cheating was impossible to get away from.

The effects were magnified because such a significant part of the population, as compared to say WoW, were cheating; I'd wager that there aren't more than a tiny fraction of one percent that have the ability to cheat on WoW, whereas at the height of PSU I'd wager 2-3% were cheating constantly, and another 30% at least were benefiting from those cheaters. If that many could cheat on WoW, then the game would be dead in short order.

Anyone who thinks that cheatin' is just fine needs to have another think. It's not a Single Player Online Role-Playing Game, after all (SPORPG?) It's a Massively MULTI-Player Online Role Playing Game, meaning that the game's about more than just you. I actually think that the EULAs which are so strictly enforced, and the programs that are slapped on to prevent cheating, aren't so much about the company's revenue stream (hey, if the cheater is paying for the game and you ban him, that means you won't get any more money!) but about protecting the OTHER players in the community.

And that's worth a little runtime on the CPU instead of killing the process out of hand.