You are unaware then. They discovered an exploit where they could raid their family gold via visiting the aunt and sending the gold away or into a guild/temple and drop it to incredibly low levels. The game then immediately began auto-replenishing the family gold to get in the neighborhood of a thousand gold. How many of them were multis is unclear, as the situation was and is quite tangled, but the system only worked because they had a /lot/ of new families starting with their family home in Thulsoma, so make of that what you will.
In other words, using brand new families they managed to scam several thousand gold out of the game and didn't even lose any honour because they went through the visit the aunt feature. The exploit was closed, but that got them a lot of gold to play with, and combined with various other schemes (starting a new character to get the starter troops, then pause/delete and start a new character to get starter troops as an example) got them an army several orders of magnitude larger than they could have had otherwise.
I was aware of the loop to take out more gold than normal, but not that this was game-generated gold. Honestly, I don't even see the point of poor families getting extra wealth: takes wealth to make wealth, it this was just abused by many over time. Thulsoma aren't the first to do this.
I generally dislike IC actions being taken to compensate OOC actions, though. Bolts would have been more appropriate than sending 5 extra armies.
