I’m tired so I’ll go with a short version.

While Eve-Online had some major problem patching and putting back the servers online (plus all the legitimate rants about the bad font. Something important in a game so heavy dependent on the UI) the patching for DAoC went smooth as the baby butt. With the exception of a change that wasn’t disclosed and that made the players rise a loud protest.

Basically there were the high level items called “artifacts” that you could put on your vendors. With this new patch the process to get these items was made easier and this made the prices descend, as a consequence. To counterbalance this loss of value Mythic decided (without announcing it beforehand) to let the players sell these items directly to NPCs vendors for rather high prices.

Now you would expect the players to be just happy since this change suddenly made many items worth a lot more than previously (thanks to the high vendor values), but the problem is that noone was aware of this change and many players, after discovering the possibility, started to clear the whole market to sell these items themselves, buying low from the player’s vendors and selling high to the NPCs. In Sanya’s words (CM stands for player’s vendors):

What is causing the excitement is that on some servers, early birds realized that artifacts could be sold at a profit compared to listed prices on the CM. Those early birds cleaned out the CMs whenever possible, and made big profits.

If you do a 1+1 you can understand why so many players are pissed off despite Mythic added this feature exclusively for their (of the players) benefit. The problem is that many of those players who had these items on their vendors at low prices suddenly discovered after logging in that they had been looted by other players who sold those items for an higher value. They feel robbed because the change wasn’t announced and it was transformed into a “first come, first serve” scenario at the expense of those players that weren’t aware that the rules of the market were going to change like this.

Imho, the players have all the rights to complain and feel robbed. I also believe that Mythic just didn’t expect all this and the feature just slipped in without the devs paying too much attention and anticipating the results. It happens when you work at a bunch of stuff at the same time and overlook something that seems minor. The idea was a good one but it got totally screwed in the implementation. As I wrote on the forums the solution could have been easy (from a logical point of view, I don’t know about the implementation):

Imho they should have freezed all the artifacts on the vendors as the patch was released and the changes announced.

So that the owners would have had the possibility to draw them back from the market or put them back in with new prices.

That would have prevented all the pain I’m hearing now (I care zero since I play on classic).

This is really a screwup and one of those that cannot be made up.

There should always be an extreme caution when toying with the value of the items in an economic system. Especially in one where the items that are going to be changed play a large role.