As far as I know the duping issue is caused by character transfers... So what would be the problem in leaving it down for an extra bit of time. And if this duping issue was oh so important to them... Why did they spend the time working on the publish, put it on TC, put it on Origin, THEN decide to spend their time working on a fix?
I HOPE its not because they just realized the duping was going on. The duping has been a serious problem for months. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed they didn't suddenly go "oh my gosh there's dupes!" and shut the system off the same day, that would be horrible. I would HOPE that they have a good handle on the trillions of gold worth of illegitimate items in the game, who has duped what, where it all is and how to get rid of it all, not just waking up to the concept that the whole economy of Ultima Online has been devastated to a point where there's no coming back.
Thats what I hope, but of course it appears with them - nearly coming out with this publish then delaying - that I'm wrong. The economy is permanently screwed AND EA just realized it a few days ago.
The duper bunch I'm assuming is the same bunch as last time. I'm assuming they're a whole lot better now at preserving their ill gotten gains. Someone loses $200,000 worth of stock, they scratch their heads and say "hmm how can I not lose $200,000 again?" A whole ton survived the last 400 account banning / trillions of gold and items deletion ... what you think the chances are they hid their items a little better this time around?
And worst of all, they SAID the last time around that they were tracking the dupers for SIX MONTHS! For half a year they knew about them but they didn't do a single damn thing about them for SIX MONTHS except keep their eyes on them to see where they hid stuff. I hope it doesn't take them that long this time around to get their act together.
EA needs to finally wake up and realize, they made this game into an item based game. Items matter. Dupers made the effort required to get any important item too much effort for the value, you can't obtain anything that they can do a million times easier and sell for as cheap as necessary to make it a worthless pursuit for anyone doing so legitimately.
EA needs to hire an employee. Simple job for this employee, "What? There's a vendor in Luna with 100 barbed runic kits on it? Hmm let me see whats going on here. Hmm this account doesn't even have a tailor on it. Let me quarantine all these kits until the owner can explain to me how they got em all." ... Run searches on the database, wow this house has a bod book of 500 valorite kits in it, that doesn't seem legit at all ... then ban the house and account. Set up a special email at EA for player-provided tips on where to find duped items. Add a feature to the game where players can report a vendor they believe are selling items that are not legitimate, for a quick glance-over by this employee once a day.
Do this 1 instance at a time, not all at the end of 6 months. After a month of that then the dupers will realize they can't sell anything massively in the game without being sniffed out and banned or items confiscated. What can dupers do with all their stuff if they can't sell it on a massive scale? Sell it on a small and barely noticeable scale? Isn't that a good thing?