In light of all that’s been said, I’m not actually convinced that you still require an official reply from a Crotch Zombie representative at this time. Nevertheless, we did discuss this in tonight’s meeting, so I can relay my version of the group’s message to you here.

First off, I don’t think the topic at hand is nearly as controversial as the recent drama would have you believe. I think it should be incredibly obvious to anyone that Kyoubai’s abuse protection feature is there for a good reason — to stop abuse. Sure, I’ll admit that perhaps we could’ve gone about it in a more subtle way (i.e., instituting some sort of reviewable flag), but to make the logical leap that we adopted this policy to forsake people’s “fun” is frankly ludicrous. This is why I was surprised to see the kind of tone that came out of the posts regarding this relative non-issue.

We understand and appreciate that there are players out there who have gone as far as they can in the game and are now just finding opportunities to fool around. Trust me, we love the fact that there are “die-hards” out there who are constantly finding new ways to have fun within the Forumwarz environment. A couple of posters even went as far to say that “fun is the unintended purpose” of Forumwarz at this stage. I’d prefer to shrug that off as typical Flamebatean hyperbole, but let’s say there’s some truth to it. In the end, we’re only talking about a handful of players who were involved in this one marble auction, driving the price to insane levels and causing our (brand freaking new!) system to flag it as probable abuse. Despite your lulzy intentions, according to our system, that kind of behavior is indistinguishable from abuse and we had no reason to believe otherwise.

Actually, as far as we’re concerned, with some teamwork and alt-trickery, that kind of thing could still lead to plenty of potential abuse. But I’m not saying that’s why you did it. We get it; it was for a laugh.

However, you’re not only saying we were supposed to predict that sort of behavior and have had ready-made conditions to deal with it…you’re saying we did, in fact, predict that behavior and purposefully blocked it because “we’re trying to kill your fun” or, absurdly enough, “we’re telling you what you can do with your Flezz.” Maybe we have been trolled here, but that’s just maddening. While we love our die-hard players, you have to admit that’s an incredibly selfish and petty attitude to take. The idea that we should toss out our rules for one lousy auction out of the 50,000 we’ve had in six weeks (okay, 40,000 if you ignore Johnny Mac’s) is pure insanity.

You’re saying we’re “lazy” because we’re not reviewing these cases. But that’s kinda exactly what Evil Trout did, isn’t it? Flag went up, people complained, it got fixed. We’re not afraid of “a little work,” as you put it, but what’s a better use of our time: building stable applications that can be enjoyed by thousands of users every month, or monitoring tens of thousands of auctions to distinguish between abuse and the occasional bit of goofing between a few (for lack of a better term) Moneyfabulous persons? I’m sure we’re going to have to review plenty of auctions in the future, so I don’t see why you’re making a federal case out of this one. I’m thinking it’s definitely trolling, but when it comes to General Discussion, we have to at least pay lip service to your earnestness.

So, like everything else, we’ll find a way to deal with this. And the best way to deal with this, in our opinion, is to allow and encourage auctions for extremely rare or expensive items where we can safely ignore the abuse flags. Not surprisingly, this is partly the motivation for the upcoming Itembuildr application.

We think bidding for these rare items will be much more — as you kids call it — “fun” than starting a price war over a stupid goddamn marble, but hey, it’s up to you. If it turns out that all anyone ever wants to bid on are marbles, we will have to change our focus accordingly. That’s how we do things.

In the meantime, please try not to be so indignant over every little annoyance that comes your way. Posters, you should know better than to encourage this kind of thing. It truly is unhelpful.

Thank you and goodnight.