Rúna

So here's my attempt at adding something other than the general "omg decisions like this are killing the server wtf are you doing?!" I don't necessarily disagree with the changed stats on R13 gear at the current stage of the game, even though having sunk months into getting it, since it will provide a more genuine AQ experience, the R13 gear is on par with AQ FFS. The problem is that it's not quite so black and white. The gear was buffed on Old Nost by a different team but that was motivation enough for many players to push for the higher ranks and affected decisions made by players reaching many, many months back. Doing this on a realm where perhaps only 1 generation of rankers have gone through the trouble of getting it (possibly even only for the weapons) would be fine. But as it stands over 4 or 5 generations of Marshals/Warlords have gone through the grind with the specific goal to get the buffed version is a PR mistake. I'll make my peace with it, but had I known I would've done things a lot differently and as this topic shows the majority does not seem to take this as calmly.

Increasing severity of punishment has already been proven not to work as a deterrent for physical crimes and it works even less for virtual ones. Carpet banning the populous even with a measure of accounting for certain factors only helps in antagonizing your own player base towards you because the gold selling industry you're trying to combat with this will see this and have accounted for it as acceptable losses. While the actual players that end up getting caught in the crossfire will be devastated, often having sunk months into their characters. You might staunch the bleeding with mass bans for a bit but unless these are followed up with meticulous reviewing of numerous innocents caught in the drag net - again at the cost of time and effort - will hurt the server more than the industry. Particularly with the community at hand and the status that vanilla WoW has garnered, people will pay large sums of gold for BiS items, e.g. wands. And with AQ looming the amount of items with a sizable price tag is going to increase. Carpet banning transactions of over 500g (or some other arbitrary number) with no chance for appeal will do far more harm than good. And in light of recent bans, probably already has. I've seen false bans on Nost lifted after being reviewed, and I can only hope that this will be case here. But I've not done my research on how the staff handles things here and who from the Nost GM team is involved, since I've been very much just enjoying playing the characters I thought lost again.