What kills this game is the failure to understand that, like every real world free market economy, our virtual one here depends largely on the health and well-being of small and medium enterprises. Not on large, highly visible multimillion corporations.

And in our case SMEs = new players (actual ones, not twinks) + all those more experienced players, who haven't got the time to hang in here 24/7 (mostly pink or part myth higher levels). This includes both non-plat and moderate plat users (people who pay 10-15-30 euro/dollars from time to time). This includes both low level farmers and low budget merchers. This even includes some of the high plat spenders who prefer to keep relatively quiet, don't whine for everything, avoid drama, and just enjoy the game. And so on and so forth. These are people who keep every MMO game alive. These are the people who keep every gaming company financially healthy. And finally, these are the people who bring awards to games and companies.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am entirely in favour of removing all kinds of cheating or otherwise improper behavior in MMO games. What is wrong here is that the effects of this action obviously were not analyzed in detail, and no accompanied measures were taken to - let's put in bluntly - ease the pain for all those aforementioned "SMEs". Let's not kid ourselves here - games like this die when the masses leave, not when 5-10-50 uber players do. And the masses, or okay - 99% of the masses - weren't aware that this plat farming issue even existed. But I can assure you that they ARE very much aware of the prices of locked crates, other easily lootable goodies, elixirs and whatnot. When you remove or limit the main source of income of so many people and do nothing to compensate for this, what exactly do you expect will happen?

Now, people say "just wait and the economy will go back to normal", "it takes time", and various stuff like this. It won't, as that's not how economy works. Because when Lehman Brothers dissapear from the market, others take their market share and the economy slowly recovers. If this can't happen and no other measures are taken - which is our case here - the economy shrinks and the ones who suffer the most are always the masses. Who just plain leave.

Thanks.