Piztaker, I don't know why anyone would be such a consistent fawning apologist for WGT's shady business practices as you are on these forums, so I'm assuming that you're some kind of WGT employee or associate, whether in an official or unofficial capacity.
As if this company didn't make enough money from the massive amount of club and ball merchandise it sells, does it really have to take away the balls people have purchased due to a meter skip? I have no problem with being penalized the stroke penalty, it's the financial penalty that's just inexcusable. Why not let people retrieve balls in the dry land OOB areas?
I'm quite certain that WGT's legal team have all these things covered, but don't give me the BS about it being on "our" end. I have the fastest high speed internet money can buy and I'm a tour master with close to 90% driving accuracy. Granted I don't hit the ding every single time, but when I miss on drives, they sometimes go into the light rough. When I'm hitting the drive and it spastically skips to the extreme right hand side of the meter causing a ridiculous slice which takes the ball OOB, that's a software problem with the game. Actually I shouldn't necessarily say "problem", because that implies that's an inadvertent glitch, as opposed to the deliberate exploitation I suspect it really is.
But even if I give benefit of the doubt and accept that it is a glitch, it's still bad form to charge the player a ball they've already purchased. A VIRTUAL ball no less. There's no overheads or retail or manufacturing expense here; it's a video game. Every time this happens, WGT is taking an extra 83 cents (for a base level Callaway - $1.33 for a Nike) over and above the money that customers have already paid for VIRTUAL equipment and balls.
Like I said, the whole practice is just shady, and I've lost a lot of respect for this site over it.