Put an end to DC hacking.

Is there a reason for them doing this? Ignorance or...? I'd think it wouldn't be much/any harder to write it to be handled by the server than by the client...

The question isn't how hard it is to code, but how big of a server they'd have to buy, and how much bandwidth they'd have to pay for.

It seems the initial design was to write a distributed game, or what people call "peer to peer", not a client-server model at all. Have the players' pc's talk to each other, and leave the server to do only the minimum necessary to allow them to do it (e.g., ip lookup) and to save the data when clients log off.

The result was what we have today, way too much of the game is on the players' computers, where it can easily be tampered with. So now they have to keep writing checks, and more checks, and second-guess the client... resulting in much more network traffic and much more server load.