A post to the EQ Forums (thanks Mike Martinez and Ars Technica) follows up on questions raised about the transfer of a guild from an EverQuest II test server to a live server in a move contrary to SOE's stated policies on the topic (story). EQ2 senior producer Bruce Ferguson admits to the move, said to be a "kindness" to valued testers for their service, and says they will be reverting it by deleting the characters in question. He also says these characters were stripped of key loot before the transfer, something refuted in the original allegations and again contradicted by an account of the whole affair on Massively. Word is:

There has been quite a bit of discussion recently about something we were doing to show kindness to some valued members of our testing community who have been working diligently to improve EverQuest II for the last three years.

What we did was take a group of characters from the test server, scrub them by hand of all test gear, and any 'privileged' equipment, titles, etc, and grant their wish to continue to play as a group of friends, on a live server.

Had we been aware that being a little extra kind to these folks would cause such an uproar, there is no doubt we would not have taken this step. However, due to the current situation, I find myself apologizing to you for allowing this situation to occur.

We are in the process now of removing the characters that we copied to the live servers. Obviously, we overstepped the bounds of kindness in attempting to thank these people for their efforts in testing, and we are working to rectify this situation before the end of the day today.