15 trillion gold deleted

[WindupAtheist]

http://www.uo.com/

It's the main headline.  Yes, they've deleted 15,000,000,000,000 illegal gold.

EDIT:  All shards went down for a couple hours unexpectedly, and this message was up when they came back.  Apparently checks of over a million gold (supposed to be impossible to create) were a scripter's prime way of storing gold, and they just got ambushed.

[WindupAtheist]

Surprised this post didn't even get any "lol economy" responses....  Anyway...

Number of UO gold auctions up on eBay decreased by 50%.
Price of UO gold quadruples overnight.  (To about $4/million)
Devs openly jubilant, posting "PWNT!" and whatnot on Stratics.
They claim they have other supar seekrit anti-gold plans to spring as well.

[stray]

Devs openly jubilant, posting "PWNT!" and whatnot on Stratics.

After years of being "PWNT!" themselves. 

[Trippy]

Were people duping? And what are these "check" things?

[WindupAtheist]

I go up to the bank and say "check 45000" and inside my bank box 45000 in cash turns into "a check for 45,000 gold" or whatever.  I give that to you, you put it inside your bank box, double click it, and 45000 cash appears.  (For anyone who doesn't know, UO gold has actual inventory weight and drops to your corpse if you die, so you can't just carry your life savings around at all times.)  Normally the max value a check can be made for is a million, but you could exploit player vendors to make checks for any arbitrary amount.

Mind you, if you wanted to make a check for a hundred million gold, you needed to have a hundred million gold.  So it wasn't a dupe, it was just a duper's storage method.  And, well, now everything stored in that form is gone.