I play to have fun by trying to win. That's pretty much what gaming is. Any strategy is up for grabs if it is intended by the rules of the game, even if those rules are established by the players themselves beforehand. Cheating is wrong. Exploits are wrong, because even if its allowed by the game, it is clearly not intended. However, it should be noted that part of the appeal of video games is that anything you can do is within the realm of the rules, and that freedom of trying anything is important to games, so exploits are naturally, and understandably, difficult to stamp out without patches. Unbalanced strategies are a different issue. Most of the time, someone comes across an unbalanced strategy, complains that it is cheating, and just hasn't noticed that there's a counter-strategy because there too busy whineing. The most common argument I see is, "Quit camping the objective that we need to get to in order to win". No, the game is fun because it's competitive, you can't complain about the other player being good, and exploring the mental space of the game well. A game could, potentially, be unbalanced. But this is a problem with the game, not the players. You can't fault someone for wanting find best strategy. If a game truely is unbalanced, and not fun because of it, set up house rules. For example, I see tons of servers in CoD:W@W that ban Martyr. That's entirely legitimate.
Overly serious players are a major problem. Games are about learning (I don't mean in a cheesy, after school special kind of way, I mean there about thinking and experimenting and pattern recognition. Its the process of mental growth through exploration of a defined mental space). The overly serious player has ceased to learn. He has mastered pretty much all there is to learn, and hes just repeating the motions because they are comfortable, and an ego boost. Or, they have lost sight of a game as an experience for growth, and aren't able to see the fun of the experience anymore, just the meaningless mastery of one specific mental space. Even the most mindless shoot em up still gives you an experience of enlightenment and learning by playing with spacial learning and strategy. An overly serious player is no longer playing a game, but working out a meaningless problem, and that destruction of fun is infectious.
