How do people cheat in role-playing in the novel, The Deadliest Game?

The problem of cheating in on-line games probably began the instant there were online games. In role-playing games, cheating usually takes one of two forms. One is that players with well-developed characters seek out new players and kill them, thus boosting their combat experience (which boosts the points that elevate their characters' skills) with little risk to themselves. Everquest prevents player characters from killing other player characters except in one or two special areas in which those players who want to kill each other may do so without disturbing the fantasy experience of players who are more interested in exploration of a fantastic environment. In The Deadliest Game, Rodrigues does something similar for players who want to use firearms in Sarxos: he designates a couple of areas in which firearms are enabled but makes them unable to work in the rest of Sarxos.

The second common form of cheating is to rewrite the code for a player's character so that the character can never lose. In games with much combat, this means even the best-developed characters can be felled by a poorly developed character whose code does not allow it to be hurt or overcome. Some cheaters redo their code so that they have all the weapons and all the magical powers available in the game without having to explore and interact with other characters in order to find them. This would seem to spoil the fun of the game, but it happens often enough to be a source of frequent complaints in the chat areas (places outside of the playing area where players can "talk" to each other and to the people who run the game).