The whole concept of having "open" and "closed" Battle.net was genius. If you want to hack, be our guest! (But you can only play with other hackers.)

That experience of trying to mod my character was – I'm fairly certain – what eventually got me into programming! (Unfortunately I was on a Mac, so I couldn't use 90% of the so-called "trainers", much to my disappointment at the time.)

I recall meeting one specific player on Open Battle.net (their username was "iceblizz", I think) whose hacked sorceress was unbelievably OP. They also had a super-cool personal website -- and both of those things really kindled my curiosity ( ... "How on Earth did they build that website?" ... "How are they so strong with negative 2 billion HP??")