Bet Won! Well ...
... actually nobody on the team bet against me :( I was willing to bet as high as a whole QUARTER that I was right.
Perhaps it really did take a whole week to investigate all those accounts. There's a hell of a lot of players on 77 servers, and to be fair, I'm sure every player who was online during the time the NPC was bugged had to be checked. Then they had to decide on levels of punishment, then they had to do the deed. All well and good (and if you're looking for a few laughs, check out both the Help and Technical forums for players crying about the outcome -- it's as funny as the red & black skulled players demanding resets earlier in the week!)
The punishments were fair, considering the only alternative that could have wiped out all abuse would have been to reset the servers back to the update launch (how long was that bug kept secret, after all?) Did some people get away with it to a certain extent? Probably. There's always that fringe element who skates away unpunished ... think of it like trying to catch every single person who runs a red light or drives through a tollbooth without paying ... it's almost impossible to catch them all!
All in all, justice was served. Just like the bet, though ... it was done at pretty much the end of the day on Friday, leaving players to rage in the forums all weekend. Monday will come, anger will be largely spent, and Cip will go on like nothing happened, neatly avoiding communicating with players -- again.
Nobody's asking for warm & fuzzy here, but a little more communication with players would be nice. Seriously.

















