Quote Originally Posted by avikk View Post
That being said I have nothing else to say than:

Please look at the economy before making horrendous decisions, if anything people posting about the exploit of opening 3 chars to collect cakes should be handed a forums ban for making situations like this public. Nott saying they should be but it is still a better decision than nerfing drop rates.
While this sounds good I think there are a couple issues.

1. How do you know that one person owns all the accounts? IP addresses only eliminate possible exploiters but it does not confirm them. You could have 4 members of the same family playing individual accounts farming and opening together but all the IP addresses will be the same. Or you could have college friends all playing together in their dorm, same problem.

2. Many players panicked when they saw what was happening with the economy and in a vain attempt to keep up tried using multiple accounts, probably less efficiently. I wouldn't blame those folks, things were going to hell all weekend and their survival instincts kicked in.

3. I suppose you could look at changes in gold accrued over the weekend and see who the top 5-10% earners were but where is the cut off? 300m? 100m? 50m? 10m?.

4. I really don't see how anyone can be punished for STS's lack of foresight. The only punishment I can see is if folks were Plat farming in some way so they could speed crafting. If Plat farming was involved that is a known bannable offense.

I played as much as I could over the weekend but I had kid shuttling duties and leaf raking duties that kept me from playing a ton. I did what I could but while my account says I am 1-2 million richer I feel like it is worth 75% less then what I had last Thursday Morning.

I feel your frustration I just don't think there is a good way to punish anyone other than what I suggested about plat farming and I am not even saying that happened, I have no idea. We are just going to have to deal with another messed up economy until things settle. It's too bad because the economy was just finding its level.

Players need to realize that if you have 1m gold and everyone else has 250k then your rich but if you have 10m gold and a ton of players have 250m gold you are poor. It isn't about the number of 0's in your bank account, it is about how that number compares relative to all the other players. This is simple economics, I suppose if you never took an Economics 101 class in college/university you might not get this but the same applies to real life economics as well. Unfortunately, these cakes tipped the scale unfairly to a few and made the rest of our accounts a lot less valuable in the process.