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Let's not be vasteful and drink vhat ve vere served first! I'll go first. Bottoms up!

Maybe you all should have shared more vith me instead of that behemoth of a bear and ve vouldn't be in this situation!

We are seriously never giving out free beer again.

Because they are sitting in vaults and inventories as well, we can't really buy those.

And - for most of the times that we've added things to do with them (achievement related) they've been less than 4k in user shops. This isn't breaking anyones bank, but it's helping us remove tens of thousands of items from the site that we shouldn't have given out in the first place. We learned from our mistake, and now this is the way we have to clean it up.

That means no more are going out.

That was requested by users, along with some other achievements we released during the Anniversary. :)

Like Keith said, we learned from our mistake about how long an item stays out (free at that) etc. When we have 5 million of an item on site, we aren't going to release more. We are using free beer for things so that they have some use rather than rotting away in peoples vaults because we really don't need 5 million of one item having no use other than feed to a pet. Just searching free beer right now shows a shop selling 10,803 of them for 4,000 sP. It's not exactly free but it's pretty darn close!

I'm sure the price will drop again (it does that) once the excitement of the genetech combo passes and once Alegarten is over (and you can't feed Gunter drinks anymore).

We bought up elixirs from user shops when they were revalued ;) Nothing was deleted. We've never actually deleted items from user accounts except for the time godlies went out from the free shop.

I don't think altering how they work or deleting them is really a great solution either. Yes, we're in this less-than-ideal situation. But when it comes to it, autorefreshers are not against the rules, and that was a feature that we (stupidly) had available and was not a glitch. It was an oversight, but by our rules, all of those refreshed ones are still legitimate. Never again omg.

Deleting them is a bad idea, I'm sure I was not the only one who ended up buying thousands because I missed the majority of the refresh window. I bought around 30k of them from shops shortly after, when they were like 500sp each, because I knew one day I'd get to turn them into the recycle beast.

People still use them for treasure, as gifts, as food, and some people just want to have a ton of them--which isn't against any rules either. We're never going to be able to wipe them off site as much as we'd dream of, and I really doubt they'll ever be worth much. The prices will surge (is it really a surge when it goes from 1k to 4k?) during events like this, but we still have barely even made a dent. I just don't think limiting how they can be used is really a great solution either, especially since some people have spent money on them.

At least once! About a year ago?

Yeah, I don't really agree with that argument. Older users of any game are always going to have advantages from playing longer than newer users. This will sometimes mean having to pay for items that were free (whether it be from events like this, free gifts, newsletters, or plot prizes) that aren't available anymore. This isn't new. It doesn't really matter that it was free to start with.

Locking at request of the OP.