Well, first of all, both the starting areas and low-level skills have seen drastic changes in kOBT, so there’s really a ton of reasons for everyone to start over (which is great news as far as I’m concerned).
Second, there’s a few solutions other than wipe if they do feel inclined to keep our characters. A rollback or removing/banning every character that has an improper class combination come to mind.
Admittedly, both require more work than a wipe, unless the systems for that kind of thing are already in place.
Third, let’s face it. They were going to wipe it anyway.
Everyone wipes their closed beta servers, they are doing a wipe for kOBT, there was really no way in hell they were going to make an exception for iCBT2, especially not with the amount of game-breaking bugs that surfaced from time to time.
Finally, I understand that a wipe is not the most pleasant thing ever (I also wanted to keep my characters), but come on now, no reason to blame it on other players. While using such exploits is arguably a violation of the terms of service and could warrant bans if the developers feel like it, I don’t think you should be holding those people accountable for the wipe.
I mean, imagine if this exploit was reported “properly”, through non-public channels. They could fix the vulnerability, sure (or maybe not, the “fixes” so far look like quick and dirty temporary patches rather than long-term solutions), but we’d still have tons of broken characters left, people were doing this kind of thing for weeks before it became public knowledge.
Do you think it would be fine to bring those into the next beta? How many circle 20 Wizard-Swordsman-Cleric-Archers would you say is too many?
There is most certainly a dozen other exploits we don’t know of, a lot of which can be fixed if IMC takes a second look at the way the game’s interface works, and I sincerely hope they will use this opportunity to do just that, but before the game is patched, I don’t think it’s a good idea to retain characters.
Accept the wipe. Embrace the wipe. Become one with the wipe.