Crackers Slam EQ2 Economy

Gamespot.com is reporting that third parties are manipulating the currency in EQ2, leading to massive inflation on the Station Exchange. From the article: "The players then began trying to sell the ill-gotten plat on Station Exchange, the official auction exchange for EQ2 weapons, armor, currency, and other virtual goods. 'The amount of money in the game increased by a fifth in about 24 hours,' Kramer said. 'We have a lot of alarms for this kind of thing, and they all went off on Saturday.'" Thanks to some exhaustive data tracking, most of the duped currency was removed from the economy by Sunday.

How did Sony

[rsilvergun]

deal with the problem of these auctions adding value to the 'vitual' items? i.e. if I buy $100 dollars worth of EQ gold and Sony causes it to devalue to $1 dollar, how do they avoid liablity?

some things they left out

[Harlockjds]

It's interesting what they left out of the story. Item duping (done by exploiting bugs in the in game broker system that allows charters to sell items between each other for in game gold) really caught on weekend before last causing an emergency shut down of all servers on 8/7. Since then brokering has been either disabled or enabled for short amounts of time until someone noticed that the bug is still in the game. Also a ton of accounts were banned mainly because they were considered to have 'too much money for their level (lots of guilds lost their guild bank mules in this sweep)

The interesting thing is that people noticed issues in the broker system months ago and mentioned it in the eq2 forums but nothing was done.