I would like to add one more thing.
Everyone here has blood on their hands in this community. Whether it be botting, rmting, buying hacked items, ripping off a returning player or even intentionally ripping off a fellow collector because they know how much they want it.
Anyone who tells you how pure and honest they are is full of shit.
I agree with everything you have said, especially what I have highlighted because it's the pure truth.
Fortunately I have met users in my short stay here who have helped me get items I wanted without trying to scam me and who have actually done me a favor out of real kindness (talking about selling me things for a few ectos, the real price those items always had, instead of acting as Heritage Auctions Emissaries trying to scam and sell a Chitin Fragment or Wood Plank for 999.999.999 armbraces), so there are still good people who know how to distinguish reality from fiction knowing that this is just a fucking game and that if one person helps another person get something they want, we all enjoy the experience. The Zaishen Chest was a good addition to the game because you could drop almost any golden item you wanted including inscriptions of all kinds, so it helped a lot that items with beautiful skin could be obtained for everyone or that a player can upgrade their equipment for many characters without having to return to 2005 farming Minotaurs 24/7/365 to obtain 150g each run after 10 minutes.
But I have also met unfortunate people who really are sons of bitches, in this forum there are some who can be easily distinguished by seeing the way they write and how they think, who are not only botters but also insult you when you can't buy something for sale here while playing normally. If you want to spend 500 USD every month buying armbraces on RMT websites that's your problem, but I'm not going to invest my salary in a dead game to collect virtual objects, that's for sure, so don't come at me as legal when everyone reading you knows that your 30.000 or 50.000 armbraces are pure bullshit impossible to obtain by playing normal. Please, one only has to stand in Kamadan to see when a random character approaches a level 2 or 3 character with basic armor, no secondary profession and random names to know that he has met an agent from one of these RMT websites that is selling them ectos or armbraces or some other shit. It's like doping, you know perfectly well when someone is doping even though they deny it.
I think over all these years if people would have helped eachother alittle more and been a little nicer to eachother it wouldnt have poisoned the well and we would have alot bigger, triving, kinder community.
It's never too late to start being nicer to people though, so thats what ill ask for christmas from all of you instead of an earth shield is just alittle more cooperation, kindess and compassion, irl and in GW.
Maybe in another time this would have been possible, but now there are four cats left playing this, and unfortunately in any game there are always people whose only entertainment is fucking the rest of the players until they are banned out of pure evil. In my case I have tried to help when I could and I have tried to pay for things the price that I believed was correct within a real margin (no, I'm not going to pay 10 ectos for a 15^50 inscription or 500e for a Drago's Flatbow like someone tried once in 2022, GFY).
For example I always wanted to have a set of Dragon Staves for my Elementalist because I like the skin, and in 2006 this was impossible for me for many reasons (age, experience, the districts separated, I didn't know English to communicate with foreign people, etc, etc) but thanks to a person here who kindly sold them all to me for a reasonable price of a few ectos, the last year I was able to get my collection despite not being q9, which doesn't matter to me because I always have the attributes at 20 and in the end the staff damage doesn't matter. This person who already knows who he is will have my eternal gratitude, and so on with some others that I still have on my friends list. Honestly I have never understood how it can be that there are people whose only purpose in a game is to fuck the rest of the players, try to scam, try tricks to take advantage of someone and in general be an imbecile, people like this must be scumbags both in virtual and real life.