It ended up driving me away from the game ultimately.

Cheating is impossible to prevent. Someone will always piss in the village fountain if no one is watching. It is just the human nature of the weak and shallow.

All you can do is just deal with it. Ignore it. Do the best you can despite the cheaters. All you should be concerned with is proving to yourself what you can accomplish. Play this game for yourself and to hell with what anyone else thinks of you. You get ganked by a perma or OOC ring? Stand up, dust yourself off and soldier on having the satisfaction that you know that they needed three or whatever to take you down. Once you are satisfied with your performance, walk away with your head held high knowing that you did not compromise your integrity which is more important to me than any amount of success invalidated by cheating.

Personally, I sought out the cheaters (they are easy to spot) and handed their asses to them when they were alone. When they hunted together, I simply avoided them. The latter was easy enough.

Just chalk it up to the anonymity of the internet and simply do as I do and laugh at how pathetic some 150 pound computer geek can possibly be by having to resort to cheating in his feeble and desperate attempt to demonstrate any kind of dominance in anything (even a fantasy game) in order to compensate for his self-evident inadequacies in the real world. Kinda sad really. Oh well.

Drucyrus