Staff always believes what they are doing is in good faith but they never look at the impact of what they did.
What frustrates me is that i rarely come onto the server but when i did play non-stop i spent hours and hours of my time obtaining full vesta, statius, morgians, dragon full helm, dfs, the first vesta spear, and the money to buy a chaotic weapon. I spent a huge portion of my time into this server and what do i have to show for it? NOTHING. I feel that the reseting any server should be the very very very last measures you take.
Also seed, some anti-duping measures would be first off trying to fix the original issue. Bank checks on all online players (not time consuming at all for a small sever like this one) and increasing staff size for a limited amount of time so basically temp mods.