Lots of games that have buy-ins have separate high score tables for buy-in scores, so I wouldn't go as far as to call it cheating. I do find it funny that though that some of the same people that would call it cheating, have their games set to award extra balls for replays, specials and at incremental point values. Somehow that's perfectly fine. For what it's worth, I keep all my games on factory settings. I like to play them how they were designed.

On location, if I am paying and I want to buy in cause I am having a killer game...I don't see a problem. Especially since I am probably using the credit I just won to buy in. In fact, the vast majority of times I ever buy in, it's because my original game took a long time and I don't want to play another full game with my won credit, so I just use it to burn it basically. At a show or at someone's house, I probably wouldn't because I would lose the opportunity to enter my high score.

That is interesting to me because if that is true, why do so many operators turn them off? Isn't revenue a good thing? For me personally, if I was an operator and someone wanted to give me full dollar value for a single ball, instead of a full 3 ball game...I'd give them that opportunity all day long.

I don't know the answer. If that's true though, then why bother? They don't hurt anything and they give someone who does have the knowledge of them and the desire to use them the opportunity. I honestly don't think ops are missing out on much by turning them off these days, but it just seems odd they would go out of the way to turn them off when it could be a potential revenue generator. Sure if they were off by default I can see them not enabling them. We are talking about a lot of the same ops here that can't be bothered to update code or fix their games, much less even clean a game so it seems odd they would do the extra work to disable them.