A wipe, leaving characters is the only solution.

Yeah, yeah... I know what the naysayers are droning on and on with. But here is the truth:

This has been going on since near the beginning of the gateway going live in open beta. This means these exploiters have been making massive amounts of AD, which leads to being able to buy anything they want on the AH and also, slowly, over time, buying Zen and zen shop items with AD.

The smart ones, and I am sure there are quite a few, would then create new accounts, log in a toon and then trade those items purchased from the AH and Zen shop to those toons. They have had a very long time to keep doing this and making new accounts and just keep trading items around from toon to toon. They would obviously know that the account they were using to exploit could (or would) eventually be banned. No big deal, it's a free to play game and now they have multiple accounts all with toons holding tons of loot worth millions of AD.

So here is the issue: Do you *REALLY* believe that Cryptic will go line by line, manually perusing the trade logs (character to character) to find these people? If you seriously believe that a F2P company has the will or resources to hire man power to go through all of that data you are deluding yourself. Do you have any idea how much data is in a log that tracks trade between toons? Assuming they even HAVE such a log (the data allocation space required for that kind of information over the long term would be tremendous.) No, I submit to you folks that they won't be doing any such thing if such logs exist. So these exploiters will have their main exploit account banned and then they will still be happily sitting on other accounts with toons loaded with items acquired through "cheating."

As time goes on, said exploiters will create another main account and slowly trickle items from those surviving accounts back to their main account toon(s) and sell them for AD. This won't be one or two people doing it, but MANY. Of course, if you know your basic economics, such a thing causes inflation (possibly hyperinflation) on the value of ADs. This, of course, benefits Cryptic/PWE since the free to play players will have to grind extra hard to make up for the higher value in the exchange (probably constantly hovering around the cap of 500AD per Zen.) Most players will be disgusted by this and end up spending real life money to exchange for AD at those rates. This means the value of items on the AH will be inflated as well.

We are not even delving into the issue of the smart cheaters "winning" in the long run if an item wipe with zen refund is not effected. Besides, the majority of these exploiters would just complain if they had one of those accounts banned, because they can just say: "Someone gave me these things for free!" Just imagine how many NON-exploiting accounts received free goods or very cheap goods without even knowing the items were from exploiters. You can't just start banning everyone who received free items and had nothing to do with it. Which means you can' just ban accounts created by the exploiters that received free items via person to person trading.

So sure. Go ahead and rollback 48 hours, it will make no difference. Those items are still out there and will be out there over multiple accounts and will come back into the economy as soon as this all blows over, thereby keeping it highly inflated. It's good for people like me who are willing to pay money for zen and exchange to AD, but you free to play peeps, you're screwed.

The only solution to not wrecking this economy (and fun of the game) over the long term is to wipe items and leave characters. Reset the economy and let the AD market float all over again from the beginning. You wipe all items over every account and the problem is fixed. Yes, some people will lose top tier items they acquired in a legit manner, but that small group (myself included) taking a hit compared to EVERYONE else is the only logical solution to this massive charlie foxtrot. Otherwise the in game economy will suffer severe inflation for a very long period of time (possibly a year or more.)

Say what you wish, do what you wish. I don't care. I am just telling you folks the reality of this problem and the least painful solution for it. Cryptic won't do anything, we all know that. Because this problem actually BENEFITS them in the long run by forcing more people to buy zen. NW will be a Zen sellers market for a very long time if an item wipe and zen/AD reset isn't done.

On a side note, they can also lower the cap of AD to 400 to help curb the inflation. But again, it doesn't benefit them to do so, so they won't.

Just my two cents... written in a wall of text.

10Char :P