A thread i hope stefan reads

[protagonist]

Hackers are way overestimated, and erroneously the target of a lot of hate.

I don't know about you guys, but when there was a hacker loose on a server, it was never to the point where the hacker was actually destroying the server or anything. It was more along the lines of it disrupting the gameplay, which sometimes was pretty fun. Speedhacking and that kind of thing was kind of lame, but whenever someone dropped like, 20 bombs on the screen, it was kind of fun.

It made Graal interesting, gave people something to think about, gave the GPs something to do, and gave the community of non-hackers something to unite against. I think that, while we may stereotypically consider hackers to be bad, they do add a certain black aspect to the game. An underground, if you will. I think we're so used to thinking of them in terms of the typical MMORPG hacker: duping items for profit and so forth. The thing is, Classic doesn't have an economy, so they can't really do anything that is so destructive to the constant gameplay. This makes the whole "hackers" argument for keeping the NPC server void.

Just my $0.02.