Just looking for opinions here; how big of a problem do you think hacking is going to be in WoW? Traditionally, MMORPG's have been extremely strict on hacking; on the other hand, Blizzard has a really bad track record with either not banning hackers or banning the wrong people instead of hackers.

Opinions?

My opinion is that the hacking situation in Guild Wars is going to look much better than that in World of Warcraft (whether less hacking, or more taking care of the right people, or fixing newly discovered hacks quickly).

Hacking is not too common (well, not as common as other games) in MMORPGs, ESPECIALLY those that you have to pay for. Most hackers are losers who don't want to pay for anything, and most little kids can't convince their parents to let them use their credit cards.

That being said, duping is pretty common, but without using a program. Most of the time it is a glitch in the game and does not include a program.

MMORPGs are well monitored, any hacking shouldn't affect you too much. People caught hacking in MMORPGs are banned 99% of the time, and the money isn't returned. This results in the participant being angered for all those hours lost and not signing up to play the game anymore.

*sigh*

If I can refute your logic without getting into any bashing, I will try. I had never been around any game hacking until I became friends with Adron, and later, Skywing and others. This gave me opportunity to witness hundreds of anti-gamehacking opinions, most of which go something like
[quote]Hackers only hack because they suck at the game and cannot win without cheating.[/quote]
Now this excuse is known to be not only wrong, but unrelated. I believe it equally unrelated to say that MMORPG hackers are "losers who don't want to pay for anything" and "little kids" that "can't convince their parents to let them use their credit cards".

I'm sure you were trying to make a point, but it was lost by the fallacies of your first statement.

I wasn't talking about MMORPG's in general, I was talking about WoW in particular. Blizzard's policy on hacks has always been a joke; it seems like they don't want to lose customers by banning hackers, but at the same time they contantly declare their stance against hackers and make token movements once in awhile.

And about paying for it, that's like forcing people to get CDKeys. I doubt anybody who is planning to hack would use their own account ;-)

In short, we can probably all agree that there will be hacking or atleast some other form of cheating on WoW. People will try to cheat, try to hack, and once in a while, someone just may find or stumble upon a bug, glitch, or some sort of vulnerability not previously accounted for. What's gonna decide WoW's fate is whether or not customers will trust Blizzard to deal with these nuisances swiftly and prevent them from causing much damage. MMORPG fans probably are already aware of Blizzard's limited (or dare I say, poor) track record of preventing cheating from obstructing their games, so the company will have something to prove. If they succeed, WoW survives, if they fail, we can always hit the eject button. ;)

(+1 to the first person who identifies the popular RPG game whose commercial the last line of my post was sort of ripped off of)

Not only does Blizzard have a problem with not fixing hacks, they also tend to do a half-assed job patching with often leaves a gap still, and often creates extra problems when they do it.

i agree with iago... hackers dont mess with WoW just because they cant win... in fact most of the hackers are just bored and trying to find some way to mess things up. Personally i believe hackers are people who have beat the game so many times they get bored with it so they try to make new fun with the game by hacking. I'm not saying all hackers are trying to hack because they have won all the time im just saying maybe they are bored with the game so they are trying to spice it up that's all.

As For banning the wrong people... all it is, ... is that they are trying to show people that they are making a tiny fraction of an effort to distribute consequences on hackers but they dont realize all the innocent people are being banned cause blizzard cant pay attention to what they are doing... I was banned for apposedly hacking Warcraft III and i dont even know how to hack that game LOL.