It's interesting what they left out of the story. Item duping (done by exploiting bugs in the in game broker system that allows charters to sell items between each other for in game gold) really caught on weekend before last causing an emergency shut down of all servers on 8/7. Since then brokering has been either disabled or enabled for short amounts of time until someone noticed that the bug is still in the game. Also a ton of accounts were banned mainly because they were considered to have 'too much money for their level (lots of guilds lost their guild bank mules in this sweep)

Of course, you leave out the rather important fact that most of these accounts were reactivated by the end of the weekend. In fact, any account that had received "duped" money (even innocently, by a duper bying one of their items) was locked while they corrected the issues over the weekend. The speed that they were able to fix this problem, and the fact that they essentially were able to "roll back" the economy without rolling back the game-world is worth kudos in it's own right.

The interesting thing is that people noticed issues in the broker system months ago and mentioned it in the eq2 forums but nothing was done.

Galliente (Scott Hartsman, EQ2 Producer) already answered that one, and it was basically "mea culpa" - they plugged some holes, others they used to hone their tools. He points out they will not be doing that un the future, as the explosion of duping in such a short time proved that *any* amount of time a vulnerability is left "in the wild" can lead to extreme damage in a very short period of time.

software developers take note. :)

EQ2 is *not* the first game to feature voice acting Earth and Beyond had voice acting fro the major "Quest" characters and it was amazing, it was one of the things I liked the most about that game.

The problem was E&B started advancing the plot very fast and the voice acting and dev cycle got out of sync.. about 3 month or so into the game they dropped the voice acting, it was really sad because at the time it was one of the things that set E&B above and beyond the rest of the MMORPG's out there....

I really hope SOE can keep up the voice acting it will be very sad to go back to Sir Lucan D'Lere after a big patch to find out the voice was ripped out.