This was a cancer and a virus.
The most affected players are the community leaders spending time to make this universe work, followed by the crafters, followed by the "regular player" who doesn't get what he did wrong, and last but not least: the perpetrators. They know what they did wrong, and they have probably moved away (I. hope) We are left in ignorance.
In Flourish I can see how this is harming us: our community leaders (macro experts) feel betray, our crafters are no longer playing: they spend their time trying to see how impacted their toons are, then whether their city or their malls is in the red...
I read one of our member writing he is not going to play until 1.0, because his 100millions hammer got flagged. Worst I was there the whole time when he was spending his time running janta mission to get the money. He joined FLO something like 1 year and a couple month ago. He spent every months between the end of last year and last month grinding money.
On the other hands our merchants are feeling bad for the people who bought something from their vendors (because they don't know how widespread the disease is, and what the disease is, they are all assuming that they unknowingly screwed someone by accidentally selling him a dupe item), I mean for them the vendor bug was bad enough. ......
our crafters are spending their time checking their factories, asking their contacts...
My opinion:
its not a good idea to tell people to expect anything in "14 days" everything will be removed. Because some of us understand that: for the next 14 days, there is nothing else to do but checking your ten toons, their inventories, what mail they received...
and if the community carries on minding about this after the deadline, then we are going down the same way than we did with the CU, the NGE. Meaning...
"The community dies first."
Then after the NGE, I heard that certain people carried on playing this game, for 8 years or something before SWTOR got released. However concerning me, leader in my community, I was also participating in the management of two cities, but the patch killed me. What happened then, I don't know. The community I cared died first.
We must put our energy in understanding a few things:
i) We all have different knowledge of what's going on, and because SWG is a social game,
ii) We all feel that we were lucky/ unlucky to meet certain players, although we don't know exactly how tainted they were. Nor do we know if we are in the clear when we want to compare ourselves to the most honest player we met.
iii) We are all starting to wait for a judgment that may never come.
SWG is a community game, and we should not do anything that can hurt the community in the first place. I understand that the dev got screwed by some community leaders they trusted... Well I hope that the devs (the gatekeeper) can get as much information as they can, but then we really need to move on.
But due to the nature of SWG, I don't even think that the "Eye of Sauron" principle can work... SWG is a community game and we cannot make a tool to tell us "who to trust" without killing the community life. Maybe we can trust one devs to have such a tool, but we can't know how long dishonest players will take to get around it.
Well I do hope this end well, but we must allow this to end well. Basilik is a community and this is about trust, building trust, managing trust, rebuilding trust while we keep playing Galaxies.
