My personal opinion is the Serene Swan should be restricted to FO's and Female HU's / RA's as they needed a good weapon to compete against the ever powerful PR's that is out there which is male only. On the flip side there are many female only items which they are not as strong as some of the Male only items but their character requirements and where PR's have a higher requirement. Anyways the reason I have not really voiced these thoughts to now was because I was neutral about the gun since it was still in testing phase. With this being said the testing phase should not be a live release to the entire community, this should be amongst a few trusted users (BetA Testers) as we call them in many other communities. Let the Beta members test it out and voice their thoughts towards it or have a poll before the event to see what the community would like to see in this type of weapon and what class it should be for. This would be the ultimate "CYA" (COVER YOUR ASS) incase there are reprocutions similar to what happened here.
Dont get me wrong I am sure the Ultima "Dev" team and select staff probably discussed this and tested it out but this kinda stuff really needs a community input since we are the ones that will be hunting it and grinding it up once we discover its true potential. As @mudkipzjm said many members was mislead by the statement from a staff member thinking the serene swan was safe and note to be nerfed so they invested time, ingame currency, donation currency , and many other gestures just to ensure they had it maxed out, just to be let down when it was nerfed. I am still pretty neutral about this but there has to be some form of safe guard to prevent this kind of stuff from happening. Some of us put are heart and soul into this game and community. We just want to know that our voice matters in stuff like this.
Side note I think the staff busts their butts to try to give the community the best experience they can considering none of us are required to pay to play. There are many minor things that could be corrected and it would make this community great again and the population would probably return. I have some suggestions which I wont voice here as I am not trying to turn this into a bigger issue than what it already is, but if you would like to hear them I would be glad to shoot any of the staff a PM with my thoughts.
As for @rashan0121 dont quit the game over something as stupid as an item getting nerfed. I understand what happened wasnt right through your eyes and many others but its still no reason to leave. In the almost 5 years I have played in ultima I have seen many changes happen some for the good and some for the bad, this is just one of those things that was rushed and wasnt properly thought through. Blame it on the community for wanting the event sooner than was expected or whatever the case may be. One thing I learned in all of my tantrums on here over the silliest stuff , is that it gets you no where if anything it isolates you away from the rest of the community. I cant tell you how many times I flipped out because I couldnt seem to get a item to drop that I was hunting for and took it out on the community instead of embracing my frustrations and realizing in the end I screwed up. For this I paid the ultimate price or should I say Ultima price of being limited to who I can play with. The point I am trying to make is you worked to hard for what you achieved on this server just to throw it away because one item got screwed up.
Just because it was nerfed now doesnt mean they wont balance it later and release a better version
I didnt really play with you much but from one PSO player to another dont leave.