There is a plague that infects the body of our community. It is a blight that darkens our souls, and saps the very lifeblood of our society. The community of which I speak is the gaming community. The society to which I refer is that of the online gamer. The plague and blight that I mention are hackers. These noxious little parasites define themselves by the rules they break. Like a cancer, they creep around the innards of some of our favourite games, and devour the very systems that make the games great. They have no honour, no mercy, no dignity. They lack any sense of fair play. They have a twisted concept of what constitutes fun. They are, for lack of a better word, losers.
Think of it. Why would any gamer possessed of even a moderate level of skill want to engage in hacking? Hacking is designed to give the loser the illusion of being a winner. It is a cheat. Not only a cheat of a game, but a cheat of life. The hacker accomplishes absolutely nothing. He or she simply learns how to manipulate a game program to alter the dynamics of their play, and then plays with others who have not done so. Why? To "achieve" something? Hardly. They have done nothing but waste time, and ruin what would otherwise be a fun pastime for others, including children. Well done hackers, you've made a child sad. Proud of yourselves?
They lurk in dark corners of a game and surprise you with some software trick. They kill you in the most unfair and utterly indefensible way. That accomplishes what? Again....nothing at all.
What do you do about hackers? Sadly, little else other than to expose them for who they are to others in the community. Identify them....weed them out...isolate them. Why? Because there is one thing all hackers need to survive. A host. Remember, they are parasites. Without a host, they die. If you see a hacker, identify them and refuse to play on the server they infect. When enough players do that, the parasites have no one to bother. What are hackers going to do then, play with each other? That defeats their whole purpose of cheating. How can you successfully cheat a server full of cheaters? Why then, you actually have a fair game. Now, who would want that?