Are you serious?

[GodsRage]

yeah.

You can add, change and remove items to your heart's content on bin files. Not hard if you have the right tooling to do it. These guys have that tooling.

You can also replace existing items on accts with updated items with simple SQL updates. This is no more complicated to do than the SQL they are going to have to run to insert new items into the exchange market inventory of all the characters that had their items deleted. In fact it is much easier since they have to keep track of which character they originally deleted items from.

None of this is difficult. And it can be done during a single maintenance with no possibility of 'missing' anyone.

There really was no need to

1. remove all instances of this item from the game with no warning that it was going to happen.
2. Issue 'sorry about that' items to reduce tension and ragequitting.
3. wait 2 or more weeks until they finally schedule putting the new items back.
4. Have to run specialized SQLs for each character to place new items in the event inventory at a later time.

If these guys had a clue what they were doing they could have done all this without all the drama and resulting player confusion & anger.

I agree at the end of the day the result may be better for the server, but the way they went about it in really caused more tension than was necessary.