Over in Shadowbane, worlds are being closed. The official reason seems to be the fact that populations are too low, but the story becomes a bit more mysterious if you read the forums. Players seem convinced that someone figured out how to manufacture massive amonts of gold for themselves. That practice, known as 'duping,' is part of the meta-game to some players. At one level, these worlds are designed to allow you to easily manufacture gold pieces - you simply stand your character next to the right monster and kill it over and over. Each time it drops a few coins. Over time, you can get a mountain of coins. Dupes accelerate this process somehow - perhaps a certain monster, cornered in a certain way, appears and dies with incredible rapidity. Or there is some FedEx exploit, of the kind that we first saw in Habitat and recently reappeared in Ultima; your character can buy widgets for 1 gold piece here and sell it for two gold pieces there, in unlimited quantities, enabling a person with a few computers and an artful piece of code to become a billionaire in a few weeks.
Shadowbane players believe that much of the gold in their worlds is duped rather than earned. The specific server-closure policy seems to back that up. Imagine if the gubmit said you were going to be kicked out of your town. What would be your expectation regarding compensation? Surely you would expect not to be worse off materially. Things you couldn't take with you - your house (SB allows real estate ownership) - you would expect compensation for. When Camelot merged two servers recently, the character could move with all items and equipment. Yet 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.
At the same time, SB is opening a new server, with a new map. SB plans to introduce more of these. Players fear that, step by step, each old server will be wiped and the new servers will eventually become the only servers.
Patching together the comments of disgruntled players and the sequence of events, this feels like a fairly sophisticated attempt to clean the bad gold out of the economy. Come up with a new server with a new map (and presumably a dupe fix); wipe old servers whose economy had been affected by the dupe; gradually move the player base to the new, clean worlds. Of course it only works if you completely disenfranchise everyone along the way.
Desperate measures, it seems. I would have advised a very heavy progressive tax. Anyone who gets lots of gold for any reason - duping, macros, eBay, whatever - gets to contribute 90 percent of it to the public coffers. If implemented before launch, it is completely fair. And it lessens the likelihood that uncompensated seizure will become a matter of state policy...
