Even if the subject has been nicely covered already I'll still enlight you with my wonderfull opinion.
When you try to destroy something in Providence, you either cannot even try because the houses are considered as non-destructible objects, or you are warned that this object belongs to Providence. Which means that, like every other town in the game, you should need a trial by fire to destroy anything in it. The average player then thinks something like "haha, that'd be funny to put Providence under a Trial". And just forgets about structures being destructible because we all know where are the limits of the town claim.
Now, some devs have decided to change the town a little bit. Making it more attractive, which I am fond of. Doing this happened to change the shape of the town claim, and left some places vulnerable. Since it is still a town claim I could assume that some people may be ko'd from numerous things, because, well, that's how every other town claims work. But the fact that some objects are destructible and others not, is not either logical, instinctive, or even intended in the general shape of the game. I dare expecting devs to disagree with the hypothetical destruction of some of my town objects if there is no trial by fire or partying (but I doubt JC partied Darwoth to allow him to destroy things) or any other hypothetical new conditions to destroy objects in a town claim. I think it is fair to think that something happening this way is "unintended".
That said. John Carver has admitted that he perfectly knew about this fact and didn't pay attention to it because... reasons. Then when the fact became a problem, he called it an "intended" problem; yet he logged in 10 minutes after said problem while he was freaking busy with finishing and deploying a new patch, to fix said "intended" problem so it couldn't happen again. Hurm.
Now I wouldn't give a **** if that wouldn't imply that you may lose your shop items due to, not your negligence, but the developpers' negligence. Losing a character means you lost your time. Losing your in game random items means you lost your time. Losing your shop items means you lost your RL money. If it is your own fault, like leaving your gates opened when you are summonable, well, ***** you you deserved it. If you got roared by a bear because you were around said bear, well ***** you it's your fault aswell. But if you were in a situation where you shouldn't have been vulnerable, like... Let's say, in a house that shouldn't be destructible without a trial by fire, then it is not normal, fair, or even an INTENDED mechanic that you lose your RL money. The idea that some players knew and reported that fact without any dev action doesn't make it more normal, fair or intended to happen.
Finally, I would just say that if John Carver called it "intended", it was, in my humble opinion, to prevent any attempt of being sued for scam. There have been former cases where people sued developpers for selling in game items that were lost due to bugs, or simply not working as intended due to bugs. Calling the game "beta" or "alpha" having no incindence on the fact that the shop being released, the game is legaly considered as released, devs obviously have to cover their back in this kind of cases. A normal game would have just recovered lost shop items because that is customer service and the customer is the king. For reasons that I suspect to be "if we do that once or again, we will be over busy with customer service and we don't have or want to take the time for that", Salem does not work that way.
And this is why, sir, I will not spend a single cent in Salemthegame's item shop. If careless developpers need money they'd better call for donations. The warning on the shop does not clearly imply that developpers themselves may be directly responsible for your shop item loss by leaving unintended "intended" mechanics in game.
Just so you know on what I base my judgement on "customer service" :
![¦]](./images/smilies/troll.gif "Trollface")
