There is little point restarting all the flame wars over hacking. its all childish ego stuff.
Two things are certain.
ONLINE: The many many people that quit because mods came out will not return now if encryption came back. The entire makeup of the online community has changed with mods. A certain sort of player left, and another new type of player started to join because of the mods. There is no turning back time.
OFFLINE: No one really cares. Yes the online people that also play offline use mods offline ... and yes certain historical simmers have taken advantage of modes to make better historical offline campaigns. However overall most offline players, never use mods, never come onto forums, never download anything, often do not even use official patches and play vanilla 4.07.
It really does not matter whether mods and hacking were a good or bad thing for the game, its too late now and going back is pointless.
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