It's really too much to ask to show some decency huh?
Care to elaborate about this... particular character? (Don't really care if it was some spoiler or whatnot)
She's NOL, a side character who tags along for a quest in Phantasy Star Online. PSO was the first online RPG for consoles, which unfortunately meant it had some growing pains. NOL herself is a fairly inconspicuous character, but where she comes in for this particular thread is that hackers found a way to turn players into NPCs in version 1 of PSO. NOL was the lowest level NPC who had the worst equipment that they could use, so she became a favorite of ill-meaning hackers to hurt other players.
Usually such people would turn another player's character into her after killing them and taking their items. So imagine if you're, say, level 80 and have some great equipment and suddenly some jerk kills you, takes your stuff, and then turns you into a level 5 NPC with absolute crap. Potentially erasing hundreds of hours of effort. There were things you could do, like removing your memory card before it saved, but no matter what you would lose any non-equipped items/weapons/armor, etc by doing this. Part of PSO's gameplay was rapidly switching between equipment to deal with different situations/groups of enemies, so you could be carrying very valuable items even if they're not equipped.