Just to clarify.. I do not know what happened, I was just taking a guess at the exploit thing.. makes sense to me.. and I've seen it a few times before. Perhaps this is a precursor to a "rust storm". In diablo2 they would periodically scan the server for dupes, glitches, bugs, etc and fix/delete them.
I'm still very confused as to how so much gold got into circulation.. I can understand there being lots but I know multiple people with billions and billions...and I doubt they are a minority. Do you guys this think is legit? Sorry to hi jack thread just curious.. sick of seeing things for 100s of millions when the 1.5 for a pendant of magi was barely reachable just a few years ago.. that's why I keep thinking there is a dupe or something going on. How can billions upon billions of gold be farmed in just a few years? I suppose it could be.. but seems unlikely to me.
Perhaps I was just never privy to the wealth of some individuals in UO.
There was some massive duping of gold and items when shard xfers were borked and people could crash shards effectively duplicating 800 items. Think 800 mil each attempt. At one point the dev's destroyed like 10 trillion in gold (thats 10,000 billion).
There have been dupes as far as I have played the game from time to time involving gold. At one point you could smelt ballot boxes made with wood and get ingots. You could make heater shields and sell them for gold. The first guild I was in had a woman doing it nearly 20 hours a day to make money to pay for a nicer guild house. I didn't find out about this until after they closed the loophole but again - a gold exploit.
Many of the high end rare collectors ran ingot scripts to get the money to buy rares. I mean how do you come up with 100's of mllions to bid up the value of items though any sort of 'normal' gameplay? Those millions selling ingots though came from legit players but still it was creating very wealthy through these means.
But lastly many of the idocs and people quitting has consolidated wealth. When you have 50-75% of your players leave and their accounts and stuff passed on or passed on through IDOCs - the remaining 20% of the population has 100% of the stuff or 4 to 5x richer. Its more gold and stuff floating around. I've always wished IDOC's would just decay instead of leaving the stuff behind. With a declining playerbase it has really hurt the economy. A declining population and an increasing money supply (M1 for your economists) is a recipe for inflation. If the population was increasing - an increasing money supply is fine as its got a larger and larger base to share it.
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be nice to do a full wipe and everyone start out with no items and no gold - just character skills again. That fixes all the ill gotten gains and you could *fix* armor to make it simplier. Its far too complex. I've been crafting for 12 years and at times I"m as confused as ever to all the options, mods, tweaks through runics, reforging, imbuing, enhancements etc. I wish at times I could just look at a shield and say oh' AC 8 must be better than my AC 6 shield' and move on.
There is a balance between complex to give options and complex to overwhelm. We are way past the overwhelm point.
I used to take time to explain things to new players - now I don't. I don't have a month to explain the basics. Its way too much.
Its really completely daunting for any truely new player. I really can't imagine a new player starting and staying with this game more than 3 months. Even returning vets are completely lost.