It's not a videogame, but SomethingAwful's solution to banning paying members is to let them re-register with a new-account fee, so they can in effect stay if t

It's not a videogame, but SomethingAwful's solution to banning paying members is to let them re-register with a new-account fee, so they can in effect stay if they pay a $10 fine. Particularly egregious or persistent troublemakers can get "permabanned", though. I think I'm more sympathetic to people trying out hacks out of curiosity, especially if they're not trying to cheat their way to tournament money or something like that; but I can see that it causes an overall problem if it becomes widespread. One question that sometimes comes up is whether it makes sense for game companies to be zero-tolerance about cheating tools, analogously to how possessing burglary tools is illegal in some jurisdictions. What if you really do use them in a "legit" fashion, such as only on servers where the server admin allows them? If it's explicitly a have-fun-with-hacks-here-all-you-want playground, or a server set up to allow bots to play against each other as part of AI research, then it's not really "cheating", is it? Yet people have gotten centrally banned for that sort of thing due to cheat-detection code inserted into the server by the game's creator. I've been reading this book lately, so the idea of how cheating is defined, and who gets to define it (e.g. game creator vs. server owner vs. community norms) is on my mind a bit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262513285/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=kmjn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0262513285 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262513285/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...