A Glimpse into PSU 360's Economy

I was browsing a PSU fansite's discussion forums this evening and came across this interesting post about the economy on XBox 360 PSU:

Everyone I know is aware of the S+10 glitch that was fixed awile back, but allowed good number of cheaters to stock up on stacks of 99 S+10 grinders for 1 meseta apeice.

A friend of a friend is one of these cheaters. He was banned for two weeks for producing illegit grinders. Then he emailed SEGA saying that he bought those grinders legally and they gave him back his account. He now has a full common box of S+10 stacks, and sells one stack at a time overnight for something like 33 mil profit everday.

Three thoughts come to mind.

First, all of the XBox 360 players who laugh (still!) at the PC/PS2 servers for having "haxeta" need to shut the fuck up, forever.

Second, why did Sega ban the producers of the illegitimate items, then allow them to come back to the game with those items left intact? We're all aware of players that made up stories like, the only reason I cheated was to show Sega how to do the glitch so they could fix it! Bullshit. Players that cheat should be banned permanently, regardless of why they chose to do it. I don't understand why Sega chooses to selectively enforce their Terms of Service like this, and there's a good chance that neither I nor anybody else will ever know for sure.

Finally, why couldn't Sega just remove all of the S+10 grinders from the servers? I can think of only one reason: Sega didn't want to incur the wrath of the players who had legitimate S+10 grinders. Fine, but this is just one more reason why PSU needs to implement some sort of item tracking system to make it easier to locate and remove illegitimate items without having to trace them through dozens of player transactions.

In any case, there's not much that can be done about the problem now. The damage has been dealt, and we're going to have to live with it.