The consequences of wiping characters

I've been a player of this game for a long, long time.

If anyone else remembered in 2010, there was a character wipe for somewhat minor game changes.

Fair enough, item duping is bad. But why not simply remove them, or try to counteract any market inflation/deflation like how the GMs mass dropped rubies in 2008(or 9?) which effectively dropped to grossly inflated 8 mil ruby price to 2 mil?

The market of the game should not be a reason to wipe out characters.

I would estimate about 80-90% of the game population gave up after the 2010 wipe. I won't straight up say it wiill destroy the game, but it will have drastic consequences.

Please be practical.

US YNK marketing department/ other teams ... really need to think of a better plan ...

Well i got the same thinking as you.Why not just deleting the duped items and hacked cegels instead of restarting the server?Are those so called GMs cant do that and prefer to do the simple way such as restarting the server?

So even the innocent players got the impact too.Is that could be called responsible?

I believe, it's because the cegel already distributed widely to the market and cant be roll back anymore without affecting all player. After the cheater sold a duped Fly Phoenix, he spend his cegel on rubies, gears, G Manual, etc...etc...then the seller that earn money from cheater buy another equipment or ruby...and so on..and so on...

There are WAY too many duped items.
If you delete them all, some people will be left with nothing to gear their characters with. How are they to progress any further? Unable to grind for their items due to their too high lvl but too weak gear (if any..). They'll be stuck on their char, unable to do anything with it.
Refund? Ok- give them their cegels.. but what with the people who traded items for items and what if part of those items turn out to be duped as well? Then you have to re-refund the person who got duped weapon in the first place and who knows did he buy it with another duped item or duped cegels.. which came from another other player and perhaps from even other other other players before.. it's practically impossible to track it all down and would take a crazy amount of time and resources to figure it all out and then figure out how to refund.

Problem is that the degree of duped items is WAY over the top that it would be impossible to actually refund everyone since there are less legit items to give in return than there are duped ones. Even so, you keep all characters at said level and refund their cegels/rps(or whatever the currency is) they will be still stuck ungeared and thus pretty useless to actually play with them. You could argue that you can buy new gear with said cegels/rps but fact of the matter is that there wouldn't be enough gear on the market to actually buy.

Therefore giving everyone a certain refund of x-amount of months history as a sort of 'head-start' on a new character is more beneficial to both players and the overall game. You cannot get your time back and it's solely up to you on whether or not you deem it worth to spend the extra amount of time on it- once again.
It's also as Dimode said, the kills on bosses and other achievements you have..well, achieved- only were possible due to the duped items. Which means that whatever you did, you shouldn't have been able to and you, thus, got a dishonest advantage on something you shouldn't have. Albeit unintentionally.

However, do not all despair as, apparently, YNK will be holding certain events to give people a boost in levels and/or keep your current character at its current level. Since not all players will do these events (or succeed them for that matter), there will be less people on said level but you will still be stuck with the gearing issue. Keep in mind that there's a possibility for you to keep your items that are found to be 100% legitimate, though.

So it's not like you'll be starting from scratch-scratch, see it as some sort of roll back. As to some other comments: updating gameguard is like installing anti-theft systems in your car, but leaving the motor running and doors open when you're away at the mall.