Phantasy Star Online
"Phantasy Star Online" suffered problems common with other online games, with players cheating and selling rare items online. Several weeks after launch, Japanese players began exploiting bugs to duplicate items, enhance their stats, and kill other players. Sonic Team announced they would ban players found cheating or disrupting other players, starting in May 2001. According to "IGN," cheating was prevalent because "Phantasy Star Online" used a peer-to-peer communication system; Blizzard Entertainment had had similar problems with "Diablo", but after moving to a client-server system for "Diablo II", cheating became more difficult.