I do not know for how many days you already deleted the Paladin, and what time period is “reasonable” to have the char restored. I think there are enough bugs and problems where people are often left waiting so that such special services really have to wait or simply are not performed at all. I took parts in WoW raids where loot was assigned to the wrong person, GMs were called to correct this.
Now you can guess what my stance would have been. This was a player mistake, no reason for GMs to interfere at all. In this particular case I also know that the guy who got the item by accident was playing the system, as he told the GM the name of a buddy who did not even participate in the raid.

I would like some more ingame presence of GMs, less item restoration and bureaucracy when it comes to banning people for instance. Banning has become almost like the police having to gather evidence to put someone to trial in MMOs. A legal act. Maybe this is the reason why silencing gold spammers, bannning bots and all that takes so much time.
I would like to see GMs materialize as some kind of god and remind people to be nice to each other. I guess this is necessary, too many MMOs let zone chat become something like the infamous barrens chat.

Support was really kind to you. I would have at least expected a bribe or an invitation to dinner if you wanteda support person to restore your char. But maybe you did that, who knows.

So I run around by myself, charming things and taking down encounters that shouldn’t be possible for someone to do solo because of the power of the mob I’ve got under my control. Of course, charm also breaks fairly easily, and that means I get eaten by BOTH mobs, and that hurts. I die, a lot. BUT the experience is still a lot of fun, and probably my favorite class in EQ2.

Cheating? I dont think so. They were still legitimately killing the mobs needed for the updates. Exploit – absolutely – I am sure then devs didnt mean for it to work that way, and indeed a patch was released within 2 days to fix this exploit. Did players who took part in that exploit get the same sense of achievement as I did for leveling 90 over the weekend? I dont think so either – but if all they wanted to do was race to 90 – then good luck to them.

My EQ2 time is my time of respite – to kick back and enjoy some time out and have a laugh with friends. Some people take it much more seriosly – but I already have one real life job. Diffeent people have a different emphasis and expectation of what they want from their MMO, and different people have a different style of play. I could have taken advantage of the exploit I described above just like everyone else, so I can hardly claim anyone had an unfair advantage just because they chose to take advantage of that particular exploit. This is a whole different proposition to someone utelising an exploit to steal from another player, or using a bug to avoid the legitmate script to defeat an encounter.