So, this is not true.
Let’s just be clear right now that there are duplication glitches in even our beloved Diablo 2 which have not been solved.
The problem with this explanation is not that it is impossible to occur but that it has to be in the right environment to occur. Take a game like Eve Online and this would absolutely crush the game to dust and make it completely pointless to play because that game has a very real, very meaningful economy that even goes so far as to have genuine analysts playing the game and constant real-time markets in game.
The number of people who are going to quit a game like Diablo where gear goes stale every 90 days no matter how you get it because of duplication glitches is nigh zero. A good proof of this is this season where players found Lost Altars in caves and literally bussed people into those caves via the forums to get people their last powers. That’s cheating! It did not matter. In fact it had a positive communal effect despite it being cheating.
There’s also this piece:
All the ladder spots would be taken by cheaters.
The ladder spots will always be taken by the best funded groups no matter how they get their gear and it’s an oligarchic problem. What’s strange about this kind of thing is that while it seems like it would reduce fairness it actually increases it alongside increasing build diversity and courage because (much like in the game now) the cost to respec, the cost to regear, and the cost to experiment would go to zero. But returning to the oligarchic problem the players who are at the top will always be the ones who are in the groups who do the farming in every game.
In games where there are zero cheats possible due to hypervigilance over certain systems for instance there’s “top guilds” and those guilds pretty much never get dethroned but also never take on “less than great” players so nothing new changes and the meta becomes the stale reality.
TL;DR 2nd part: If everyone had greater access to everything the game would actually flourish.