I'm going to vilify myself here and now. I was one of the "water walking"
'exploiters', and
to this day I'm still infuriated that this is considered an exploit. We did not walk on water. We walked out, we died. A healer rezzed us. We walked further before we drowned again. It got us to the island (Lerena) for the cost of a few death points. There were "water walking" exploits around then - things you could do to avoid drowning, that had been around since beta. And I reported them. In Beta. We didn't use those obvious "the game is broken" methods. What we used seemed to make sense to me, and still does. For those who weren't around then, that's why you are auto-teleported back home when you drown. Didn't used to be that way.
I don't care whether the developers "meant" for us to build the dang bridge first (Which, by the way, one of the two punished guilds built the majority of after this incident), I still see it as using the game mechanics on hand, that, for all we know, were supposed to work that way. There were two ways to get to that island and we opted for the clever, quicker way. Hell, we even asked a developer before doing it whether we were allowed to use that mechanic. He said yes. Only when the game world was in uproar did the devs reverse their stance to "Well, you're not allowed to use it to do
that."
I guess I'm still very angry about the way the community and developers treated that one.
Not that the developers didn't have the right to, just their handling of it. I'll tell you who it affected. Those of us who were punished and had our world "readjusted". Flame away, I'm sure there are dissenters.
To tie it back to the thread, opinions will vary, and tempers can flare.