Perhaps the biggest flaw in the design of games like Everquest and WoW is that you have to install the game on your computer, which is also responsible for keeping track of some of your stats, which get uploaded after every interval. This is understandable considering how much computing power is required to run these types of games so naturally you may want to spread out the cost more evenly to the players (who are now both paying with their cash and their processors mind you). Well, the downside of outsourcing your processing to the gamers-- who have a stake at the outcome, is pretty obvious.

If you make it my responsibility to keep track of my location (worth about 2 int values), my hit points (another int value), my mana (another int), along with several other nerdy stats (about 5 more int values) and do that a million times over, eventually some of these gamers will be hackers who will find where these int values are located. That probably explains how one can leap all the way across the board in less than a second or never die.

To make a sports analogy, thats like hosting a golf tournament where everybody has to keep their own score with no or little double checking from other players or the officials. Gee, I wonder what could go wrong.

As for "gold mining", thats probably the game makers fault too for making the game so boring that you don't do anything productive. Shame on the makers for not putting some quota on how many exp you can derive from a single source or how long you can be logged on per day.

Comparing cheating in online games verses super contra in this article was also lame because in contra, those "cheat codes" were put in the game on PURPOSE by the makers. This article also fails to point out that PC games tend to be more cheatable than consoles, where you would have to physically break into hardware. At least outsourcing the processing to consoles isn't as risky as doing so with a PC.

Actually, that's really not true.

The game server is responsible for storing your stats, and it's been that way since Ultima Online, who learned the hard lesson from Diablo 1, which was full of cheaters (I know this because I was one of the coders for a UO emulator). Your stats only touch your computer as an update from the server, and there is no traffic in the reverse direction that would allow you to correct your server's idea of what your stats are supposed to be. I also rather doubt they use ints, as most stats aren't ever going to get above 500, much less above the +/- ~33k a short is going to cover. Really, I would assume they're using a byte-specified struct/union.

At best, the only thing that you can cause is "speed hacks", which involved moving a little faster than normal by exploiting the outer boundaries of how fast the server allows you to move, bondaries that are necessary due to latency considerations... and even that is usually detectable. Anything else is pretty much just exploitations of bugs in the game, which they eventually fix if it's severe.

Gold farming has nothing to do with amount of xp per day or amount of time logged on. It has to do with acquiring massive sums of gold, then selling them offline to people who don't feel like acquiring their own gold. To an extent, yes, it's Blizzard's fault for making high-end items so expensive (epic flying mounts are 5,000 gold, which takes quite a while to come up with, it took me about 2 months to make that legitimately for my first flying mount), but limiting play time or experience made is not going to change anything. If playtime were limited, gold farmers would merely use more accounts, and the price would probably rise slightly to compensate. Experience is entirely inconsequential to gold farming, most gold farmers are 70 and can't make any experience anyway.