Absolutely disgusting behavior from both Hated and GM team, and I'm afraid that the GMs handled this even worse than Hated.
The people who benefited from this bug should know better, and should be the ones to protect the server from such low life activities so that it keeps on going without any "cracks". Not only that, but even if they were to think "greedily", it would still make sense to protect the server just to protect their gameplay as well. If you play for 16 hours per day for months on end, the last thing you want to do is to **** where you eat, basically. So, if you are a player of high caliber, it's more worth to report any bug/dupping mechanism etc to the staff team, than to abuse it (or have others do so) and risk everything. Not only this wasn't the case here, as I'm guessing the players got blindsided by the competition and chose to ruin the economy of the server just to get an edge, but also some Hated players tried to defend their position by bringing more toxicity in discord, instead of apologizing for everything or atleast staying silent. It really takes a nerve to have such an ego, but who am I to judge.
However, what is even more frightening is how the GMs handled this situation; Anyone who has played in any proper server no matter the game (every game with an in-game economy is bound to have the same problems) has seen similar things happening, but a staff team worth their salt would immedately perma-ban the abuser(s), and through logs, rollbacks etc try to reduce the "contamination" to the rest of the server. Also, chat/gameplay/trade logs that can indicate that other people benefited from this exploit should also be searched and so on. Basically, put the server in lockdown (even one dev suggested would be the case for a "worse" bug through discord, as if this is not bad enough) and try to clean up the mess. Instead, what we saw was an absolute teardown of any professionalism left in the staff team. Blatant covering of the guild in question, deleting messages of people complaining, trying to justify how "not all bugs are the same", devs saying "the bug only stopped the boss from attacking, it's not a big deal" - let me add it again, this is coming from a dev who should be furious that such things exist under his nose for months - and so on, as is already documented. The GMs go out of their way to perma-ban a fishbotter making 1% of the damage in economy, but here the rules are bent.
Funnily enough, WoM2 and that particular GM team has already had a lot of negative press, obviously documented on other forums. I had read that before coming here, but I gave the benefit of the doubt to this new project. I even found WoM2 registration emails from 2014 and 2015, but I was much younger and probably didn't understand much when the older servers were shutting down. This time around, seeing how things unfold I ask myself why I ignored all of these red flags and instead played so much every day for the past 2 months. I gotta give it to the GMs though, they know that people won't leave easily as they have already invested so much, and if the hesitation to quit is happening to me with "only" 2 months invested, I can see how it happens to people who are here from the start.
The only thing that can save the whole situation, is the GMs and devs coming forward to publicly apologize for their behavior on discord today, to name-and-shame the abusers and lastly to try to clean up the economy. Anything less than that - especially the attempts to justify/save Hated - is just toying with our IQ and is already well past offensive.
Which means they literally spit up to decent players mouths and except from them they still will be playing here. For me and few of my friends - this is the end so far. Hope others do the same, cause this sort of staff do not deserve any paycheck for it. Kind regards!