Goddamnit. (Or, single player, table of one!)

So, I found a cool thing this morning, or at least, I'd thought I had.

Meet the PMOG, or Passively Multiplayer Online Game. It's a nice little browser-driven (firefox only, and that's with an installed extension) game with a steampunky flair. The basic concept is racking up XP/levels by browsing unique pages, leaving tools, traps, etc around for others with the extension to find. There's even the ability to create quests for other players.

At this point, I'm interested- a game our home system's guaranteed to run with no huge issues, and I can play it while simply browsing around and doing some of my nightly routine! Sounds like fun.

Fun, that is, until I made the mistake of checking the forums on PMOG's site out, just to see what players are saying about stuff. The Strategy section? Full of nothing but fucking point farmers- with working methods for generating themselves tons of points per day by bending the ToS (and a few scripts) as much as possible. And, since the system's point-driven, it means they can pretty much dominate most aspects of the game. For someone (like myself) who wants to just play it and actually play within the normal bounds of the game, that's pretty fucking daunting. And, it's nearly unsold me on downloading it tonight.

Does no-one actually play online games just to [play the fucking game itself any longer? Or am I just insane for immediately disliking going out of the way to find new and interesting ways to cheat the game itself?

I'll take another serving of single player, please, just so I don't have to sit next to those bastards.