Prinz, I just posted about this over in the game op forum, which you can read if you have a password for it. Basically the reason is that because even though 90% or even 99% of all sysops are fine honest helpful people, the other 1% or 10% that play in their own game ruin it for the good ones who want to play in their own game.
The sysop has t-edit access, so he can change things in the game. A particularly evil type might even change all your front door settings so he can walk right in behind a photon and use a macro to land on all your planets and claim them.
The sysop is almost always believed over the player(from looking around the forums here it seems to me at any rate), so if you are doing something he can't beat honest, say a script he can't get around, he can always claim you are lagging his system - and lock you out of his board. All your hours of hard work gone, up in smoke.
If the sysop can't beat you in an even fight, if he's the cheating kind he can always drop carrier on you and do you in before you can even get logged back in. To make sure of it, he can even lock you out of the nodes so you CAN'T possibly get back in until he is done with his dastardly deeds. So even if the sysop doesn't drop carrier on the player to do something against them, if they get disconnected at that time there is always going to be that nagging suspicion on their end. If it happens often enough they will voice that suspicion, often in heated no uncertain terms to you on the fedcom.
And then there is the speed issue that everyone here has touched upon. He gets a large speed advantage over you because he is logged on to the machine. He gets messages faster than you, and in Tradewars (especially in a script battle) speed is everything. Nomad had a pretty good idea, but networks are 1/10 Mbps or 10/100 Mbps these days, so I am sure that the connection for the sysop would still be much faster - maybe as fast as playing on the actual game box itself.
As I said in the other post, this isn't a rant against all sysops, most of them are honest and fair as the day is long. But there's that 1% or 10% that isn't honest - human nature. That's why we have cops and people go to jail and prison. Thinking everyone that buys TWGS and Tradewars and puts a game up is automatically honest is a wonderful concept - but extremely out of touch with reality.
Guess it comes down to what a lot of people ask themselves about Sysops playing in their own game. With all the hundreds of games out there, why does a sysop feel he has to play in his own game, why is his NEED so great to play there instead of somewhere else? Not saying that there is anything dishonest about it in reality, just that it automatically raises warning flags in a lot of people's minds.
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And a quick comment on the paying for it thing, a lot of games these days are being run on cable modem, and the people would have the cable modem or DSL would have it anyway. Yes, they do pay for the TWGS and Tradewars software, I know I did. But, they aren't the only ones paying to play this game, if you don't use the JTWAT free helper most people pay for their SWATH, ATTAC, and/or TWX helper. So not meaning to get any kind of smack talk going on here (they have a forum for that here)