I'll admit I did something similar for a game called Dark Age of Camelot as a teenager. Very educative, learned about both network sniffing, hubs vs switches and Linux.
Was it worth it to give me an advantage in the game? No, I never played the game seriously enough to be able to use it, I think I used it for a week after spending two setting it up, but it was a great learning experience.
I also fell into my first programming experience with DAoC! I worked on fixing some very simple bugs/exploits on an emulated server (C#) back in 2005.
There's a ton of fascinating stories coming out in the last decade around hacking/exploits/etc of games of that era; DAoC, UO, Shadowbane (this one was real bad).
