No one was banned for buying duped artifacts, unless they did so in mass quantities. We're ultimately responsible for the bug that allowed the dupe to occur in the first place, so it'd be pretty unfair to ban players who unwittingly bought a few artis or other high end items for personal use, etc.
However, item sellers who bought a LOT of duped items (as in you go to their house/backpack and see a bag with a 3 dozen covetous statues, 20 hats of the magi, 15 ornies, and some "unique" event items thrown into the mix) were given no quarter. While the dupers may have exploited this bug, it was the item sellers who truly did the damage to the game. Any one of them that tries to tell you, "But I only bought items from a supplier, I didn't realize where they came from," needs to be smacked upside the head, and then tarred and feathered.
UO is a GAME, not a freakin' business, and while we don't ban players for selling things for cash, we're not going to look very kindly on those who harm the game in doing so. And honestly, are any of these "trustworthy" brokers and item sellers with "years of UO experience" really going to tell us with a straight face that they didn't know those bags of 125 character transfer tokens and the bags full of extremely rare event items (i.e. bags with more of them than should even exist in all of UO) were duped?
Equine Puckey!
If those people bother to email me, they might as well call just call 976-WHAH, because that's pretty much going to be my reaction when I read their "so sad" emails.
To this date, I've unbanned ONE player, who had ONE account banned (out of 3), where a genuine mistake was made. I've been going through the players who have emailed me so far, one by one, to see if we made a mistake somewhere else. Tonight, I got an email from a "lady" who claimed she had never exploited, and was just a nice mother of 2 who loved UO. Pfft. How about that bag of 30 each valorite hammers, barbed kits and heartwood dovetail saws we found in her house? Or the fact that the account she was trying to keep hidden from us had a bag with 124 hat of the magis in it, along with lots of other artifacts?
To those people: DON'T BOTHER EMAILING ME! I wasn't born yesterday, I don't fall for the lame emo emails, and we're simply not going to release your account with 100's of duped items on it because you spun a really unconvincing story about how you just bought your account from your little brother/roommate/ex-girlfriend and didn't know your house was already being used to store those 500 artifacts. And yes, we DO know about your other "hidden" accounts. And no, changing your IP, using an internet cafe or using different payment methods won't help you either. We WILL find you, so you might as well just stop wasting your time and go find another game to exploit. Or, I have a better idea - how about if you go find something productive to do with your lives? That's the best idea of them all.
And honorable players - please, STOP BUYING from the item sellers who were "out of stock" last week. These parasites wouldn't be perpetuating this fraud if no one bought their stuff in the first place.
If any of this sounds harsh, well, I suppose it is. I love this game, and I really don't like people who try to do it harm.
From a UO Developer, great stuff: (In reference to a recent big ban operation on dupers, where they wisely went for the big time cheats and made the whole operation collapse in on itself)