If you’re going to source wikipedia, at least quote the entire relevant portion of the text. Glaucon does suppose that one ought not act immorally to avoid persecution. Socrates replies with an equally preposterous “evil men cannot be happy because their immorality enslaves them in the service of evil”. Which would equate to “evil isn’t fun, it’s self-abuse”.
In Republic, the tale of the ring of Gyges is described by the character of Glaucon who is the brother of Plato. Glaucon asks whether any man can be so virtuous that he could resist the temptation of being able to perform any act without being known or discovered. Glaucon suggests that morality is only a social construction, the source of which is the desire to maintain one’s reputation for virtue and justice. Hence, if that sanction were removed, one’s moral character would evaporate.
Glaucon posits:
Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.
Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.
For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.
— Plato, Republic, 360b–d (Jowett trans.)
Though his answer to Glaucon’s challenge is delayed, Socrates ultimately argues that justice does not derive from this social construct: the man who abused the power of the Ring of Gyges has in fact enslaved himself to his appetites, while the man who chose not to use it remains rationally in control of himself and is therefore happy. (Republic 10:612b)
The current alternative is to stake out sites, observe the player exiting and them inspect the site to check and see if they left it trashed and then move on to gank-punish them. Alternatively, the aggrieved could web and scan a target and then, observing the quality of loot, decide whether the player is likely to have been cherry-picking and finally make the decision of whether or not to execute them and either capture or more morally, since we’re talking about manners-police, destroy the loot.
So we’re left with three penultimate options it seems, four if you count ‘do nothing’ as an option:
First: deal evil unto evil and make the game less fun for (almost) everyone.
Second: provide a mechanic that makes trashing sites mildly risky when it would be otherwise nearly riskless for the effort required to intercept the behavior.
Third: despawn sites with no population quicker.
Which of these provides the greatest utility? Is this even a widespread problem that needs addressing? Do I care? No, I don’t really care, I just find the thought experiment useful to my own purposes.