GamerzPlanet; Game Hacking Community?

I'm going to say something that may seem completely beyond belief... something that may change the way you think about GzP... or not.

GamerzPlanet is a game-hacking community, and has been for as long as I can remember. I'd say that's at least 2 years, to stay on the safe-side. In actuality, it probably has been a game hacking community for substantially longer, but that doesn't really matter.

In my time serving GzP, this argument has been brought up twice, so I figured I'd publicize our justification for certain decisions. Whether a "hack" (meant in the broadest sense possible) is detrimental to gameplay, the game itself, or other players' accounts is irrelevant -- the hack is permitted on GamerzPlanet. Although this has caused problems on two occassions now, with moderators taking it upon themselves to feel the desire to supercede ranking and then proceed to censor hacks, we've stood by our decision; GamerzPlanet does not, and will not, censor hacks.

It's absolute. We've argued to and fro about it, and came to that decision. I'll take an excerpt from Aaron's thread in the staff section of GamerzPlanet, which explains things (almost) concisely.

It's against the nature of our site to prohibit specific hacks from being posted even though that these hacks may cause significant damage to a game. At the same time, GamerzPlanet makes these hacks available for educational purposes and security reasons. You may ask, "Well, Aaron, what do you mean by security reasons?"

One could argue that game masters and developers for these vunerable games require the existence of sites like GamerzPlanet to detect specific problems and patch whatever faults are exposed in their programming. To show an example of this is rather simple. Go to Google.com and you can easily find security sites that actually provide working exploits. Why? This is meant to educate the developers while helping them detect and prevent the problem. Many anti-virus organizations provide "digital signatures" of viruses in order to help companies like McAfee and Symantec upgrade their databases in order to prevent possible damage. Additionally, several sites even provide malicious Javascript code which is similar to the megacount exploit-trojan that has infected the site recently. Many of these sites are, in fact, legal.

Moreover, we are not in an ethical position to choose which hacks to censor and which hacks we choose to keep. Many hacks, that are posted on this site, are inconveniences to people who play these games by the rules. By saying that, a dangerous slippery slope could occur. If one hack isn't suitable for this game, why should we allow this other hack for this other game? The whole management process will be diluted if the staff feels obligated to manage hacks and weigh their opinions on it.

We are not game masters. If you find yourself making decisions that game masters should be making, then what does that say about the game? If a particular game can be exploited with a very destructive ("extreme") hack, then why should people play that game? Let's take Dark Eden for example. Since this game lacks active game masters, wouldn't it be safe to say that maybe you shouldn't be playing this game? Another question to consider is: even if you could censor this hack... are you even really preventing the hack from being released on other sites? The obvious answer to this question is no. You can also ask yourself: would censoring this particular hack prevent the hack from actually being used? The answer to that is, of course, no.

While I sympathize with people who suffer from these hacks, the fault lies on the person who posts the hack and the lack of GM response, not GamerzPlanet. We do not and will not censor hacks. In actuality, the individuals [who posts these hacks] do not break any rules, however if game companies want to seek charges against the individual, we have the legal right to submit their IP address to authorities but this is more of an administrative matter than a general staff manner.

What we provide falls under "proof of concept". If you're deleting things, you're working against the very goal of GamerzPlanet, making you a liability to our site.

I'd just like to reiterate that the very reason GzP exists is because it is a game hacking community. You're more than welcome to argue away in comments.