Shadowbane World Closure Due To Counterfeiting?

Thanks to Terra Nova for their posting discussing world deletions/consolidations in the PC MMORPG Shadowbane, analyzing rumors that the measures are "a fairly sophisticated attempt to clean the bad gold out of the economy." The piece informs: "The official reason [for closure] seems to be the fact that populations are too low", but it's pointed out that "...those being booted from SB's Scorn and Treachery servers are leaving with nothing but the clothes on their back: no bank items, no coins, no property", a drastic step which some say is down to the fact that "...much of the gold in [Shadowbane's] worlds is duped rather than earned." Is this a simple world consolidation, or desperate economy-balancing measures?

Comments

Re:Similarities

[Babbster]

Then what? Well, then you get to tell all your friends what you did and how you did it, taking perverse pleasure in the trouble it causes not only the players, but the companies themselves when they try to fix things.

I'm sure that in Diablo 2, the first person who duped Stones of Jordan (uber rings for the uninitiated) on the Realm servers was quite pleased that people started using them as basic currency ([x] item equals [y] number of incredibly rare rings which suddenly aren't as rare anymore).

In short, the cheating is a goal in and of itself. People who enjoy cheating in multiplayer environments (as opposed to people who enjoy finding and then reporting cheats without taking advantage of them) have little interest in the rest of the game, and thus don't care how it ruins the game for anyone else - except in the sense that they have a twisted notoriety in the community. Any attention is good attention.