Respectfully mate, you're looking at this from the wrong lense.
You seem to be hyperfixation on the S20 ring...While I agree with a lot of things you're saying about the S20 ring, the honest truth in all of this...The S20 ring itself and the value of it or strongboxes do not matter. Things come into the game all the time that devalue other items, etc...etc....etc... That's part of the game.
The problem about this particular incident is MAs inability to simply say "Whoops our bad ''...Instead, they play it off as though it was intended. This here lies the issue. The fact that they are so willing to just straight lie to us and pretend like this "mistake" was intended is really frustrating. It's insulting the intelligence of every single player in this game. This is where my issue lies with it all. The other thing with this, lets be real... This slip up is small fry stuff, but if they are going to lie to use about things as small as accidentally adding strongboxes to the loot pool, what about more serious matters?
To be very clear, I am very happy about the Summer boxes, who ever fucked that one up, Thanks man, you saved migration a bit. The extra markup is amazing! I am grateful for their mistake. I also don't care about the value of S20 rings as every item in this game fluctuates.
The problem again with this whole situation is that it was completely unintended and instead of admitting fault, they try to pull the wool over our eyes.
If "Check your privilege" sentence didn't wake you up a few months back, when loot system completely went nuts, I don't understand how this did.
When someone asked official to check if looting 2 full armor sets to single person was intended, she said "Check with your mom."
Asking customer support to reset your code, you get reply that you should stop being racist?
Let's not mention support cases who doesn't get red at all, you just get a laugh from the agent and a copy paste answer that makes no sense, and completely unrelated to what you asked or reported.
Let's not mention how many times they promised that communication will improve and they are working on restructuring to make it work.
Still think I am looking at this trough the wrong lens? Let's continue...
This happening right now is very normal, it will always continue to happen because they overpay useless people, that are not capable of copy pasting proper sentence into the item description (many examples where they need to do 5 patches to fix 2 item descriptions, that means the one person who is being paid 80k euros a year is not capable of doing that "very complex thing", why is he still hired?). Management is completely out of touch with real world, and I strongly believe at this point they as a company are not capable of building a game from scratch (Unreal Engine 5 upgrade). The management is afraid to cut the bad employees from the company for reasons only known to them.
Let's talk about the loot system - People who created it and designed it from scratch are geniouses, who no longer works for MA. Nobody who currently works at MA in Software Engineering team does not know how the loot system works, do not understand it, and afraid to touch it.
ps. Considering the shitty financial report, and current share price (that dropped around 50% since release by the way), I predict new super exclusive "deeds" or "shares" by Christmass this year.
You are an old player who knows all this, and how are you surprised by this small thing they just did, considering what they did in past up to this point?
To summarize:
I really want to believe when they announce some optimistic things, but all in all:
What they decide to do with the game - it's their business, their company, their jobs - not mine to worry about. Slowly cashing out and scaling down the gameplay is the right thing to do here, as that's the only way to protest against incompetence - this company does not deserve players like this, who blindly invest their hard earned money.
We should all expect things like this, and be happy about the extra markup, as there is nothing you say here or anywhere else will make any difference, until whole management of the company is replaced.