I used to be a "DCI certified level 1 judge" for Magic the Gathering. Which means I took an exam on the complex rules of that game, and judged a couple of smaller tournaments, before being allowed to judge side-events at the World Championship 2000. Besides rules knowledge the job of a judge in a Magic the Gathering tournament is to prevent cheating, and to decide whether cheating was really going on when one player accuses his opponent of it. As you might guess, the rules enforcement level at a World Championship is pretty strict. And if you apply such a strict definition of what cheating is to World of Warcraft, you quickly realize that nearly everybody is cheating in WoW.
Magic has some team events. Communication between members during the event is strictly forbidden in many cases. If I had found a team using electronic devices to talk to each other during a draft, I would have had to disqualify them. Meanwhile in World of Warcraft it is perfectly normal for some teams to use voice chat, while other teams don't have it. Voice chat not only makes beating a raid dungeon much easier, but also gives a nearly unbeatable advantage in small PvP battlegrounds. Use of electronic devices for communication outside of the communication channels the game offers you: Cheating!
In Magic there are limited and unlimited events. Limited means that you can't play with your whole collection of cards, but you are assigned a number of packs of cards as resources, and you have to build a deck with them. And everybody has to play with the cards he received, you can't give any of your cards to a friend who is also playing or sell them to him. In World of Warcraft the situation is far more bizarre: You are allowed to receive resources, like gold, from somebody else, as long as you didn't pay him. Imagine me as a Magic judge would have witnessed somebody passing cards to somebody else. Under the Magic rules both players would have been banned, but under WoW rules I would have to find out whether any cash changed hands as well, which is pretty much impossible. One of your characters receiving gold or items in World of Warcraft from another of your characters, or from a friend or guildmate, or from a gold farmer: Cheating!
A Magic player using a computer during a draft to calculate probabilities of certain cards coming his way would have gotten kicked out of the tournament pretty quickly. You can only use your head to calculate when playing cards, not software to make your life easier. In World of Warcraft nearly everybody uses mods and addons to make his life easier, and only "hacks" and "bots" are illegal. And some addons have a huge impact on your efficiency, otherwise people wouldn't be so angry about Decursive being disabled. Using third-party software to increase you efficiency in a game: Cheating!
So why are so few people playing World of Warcraft totally legit, and why does Blizzard allow all these activities which are cheating by any strict definition? Some of them are allowed because Blizzard simply couldn't control whether somebody is using these methods or not. Voice chat is a prime example. Even if the Blizzard Warden could detect the voice chat software running on the machine on which WoW is running, people could simply run the voice chat on a second computer. Something which I do anyway, to reduce workload on the game PC. Blizzard doesn't even know if that team beating up everybody else in Warsong Gulch isn't simply sitting all together in the same room. There is no possible way to disallow communication.
But the underlying reason why nobody cares about most forms of World of Warcraft cheating is that it isn't really a competitive game. The latest Magic the Gathering World Championship awarded a total prize money of $250,000, so you better make sure that everybody is playing on an equal level. Cheating in World of Warcraft earns you nothing, except in cases where gold farmers use bots to make gold and sell it, and these *are* banned.
World of Warcraft can't really be a competition, because it is not inherently fair. Your progress and standing in the game depends to a very large extent on the number of hours played. Imagine a race that goes on over many days (like the Tour de France), but where the contestants don't all start at the same time, not even on the same day, and don't all race for the same number of hours per day. Did the guy who crosses the finish line first win because he was fastest? Or did he just start earlier than the competition and race for more hours per day than they did?
As soon as you start considering World of Warcraft not as a game which you can win, but more like a toy, a sandbox in which you can play, it becomes evident why the very concept of "cheating" isn't really appropriate. Of course people disrupting the sandbox play of others should be evicted from it, just as they are in Kindergarten. But if somebody is building nicer sandcastles than the other people playing in the same sandbox, because he uses a bucket and a little star-shaped form, is not disrupting the game, however jealous the other kids in the sandbox might be. You can't cheat in a game which can't be won. That is why Blizzard allows people to use addons or transfer gold to other characters: It makes playing for them more pleasant, and doesn't really disrupt the game play of others.
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