I understand they don't want to wipe. - Many players will stop playing. - Many players will think they are scammers. - This MMO will be over. They should've just done an economy/item-rollback of 70 hours. Sure, people would lose stuff they payed for, etc. But at least the game is normal again + you didn't lose progress…
In the gateway people were bidding negative offers, so let's say you have charcoal, you could bid: "-100,000,000 gold." Once the auction got expired, the one who won the auction, would get 100,000,000 gold plus the item. The one who placed the auction would get -100,000,000 gold and no item. So it's like people were using…