Quote Originally Posted by Kiote View Post
I'm one of the very few people on these forums who actually work in this Industry. I'm sorry, but this is one subject you cannot give a community the benefit of the doubt on. Every MMO that has ever had Mods has had Cheat mods. That is just the way people work. They make things as easy as possible instead of playing the game as intended.

You cannot give the community the ability to Add features to a game and not expect them to Cheat.
Sure, you can expect people to use what you give them to the fullest extent that it is usable. The way to ensure people are not cheating is simple in concept, if more delicate in practice - you establish a concept of what you think is "acceptable play," and you design your addon API in light of this. If you find that API functions are being abused beyond this scope of acceptable practice, you patch the offending functions out. The game devs absolutely have control of what players can do with their addons in a well designed development environment.

Again, I'd say the guiding principle that WoW follows with respect to addon development is a fair one - that players actually have to make any decision, and each action has to come from a corresponding player action.

Every MMO ends up having some cheat or another pop up due to the complexity of the project. It's how long those cheats are allowed to last that makes the difference.