An anonymous reader writes:
This guy puts the hate on his son for mucking up his peecee while installing a WoW patch/cheat. In additional to moralizing on what has become a part of the game itself, he's seems pretty heavy handed with the solution:
"It seems that many of the players on Battlenet install hacks, patches or cracks that enable them to cheat (spy on other players, see things they shouldn't, etc.) My son and his buddies were tired of losing to these cheaters, so he decided that he would just become one himself (that is a whole other character issue we have dealt with.)In his pursuit of a crack, he was apparently presented with one of those "You've got spyware installed! Download this program to fix it!" popup ads. I guess he knew he was treading on dangerous ground and thought that perhaps he had messed up and should try to fix it, when in fact there wasn't really anything wrong at all. He ended up installing Anti-Verminiser, one of the most notorious lieware programs out there. . . .
The result was I told my son that he was going to lose everything he had on the computer, all his maps, saved games, videos he had made, and more. Like we say at the office when someone brings in an infected computer, it was time to "format C:". And that is exactly what happened. He lost it all."
What do the Slashdotters think? What would you tell your offspring (*shudder*) about online cheats? Was this solution merited on a technical level, or just revengeful overkill?