Alteris you told us that "you had heard our cries" and that the "horrendous" abuse of the pk shields would be fixed with the next update (the Frostblade update over a month ago). I hope you understand that nobody is paying top dollar so they can make +30 gear to pve or kill a freaking raid boss. The vast majority of the $$$ this game pulls in for you is the e-pride pvp spenders.
Countless complaints have been made over this and Ive seen at least 10 large cashcows quit the game because of this pathetic system, it has destroyed open world pvp. I know the wheels turn slowly at Gravity but c'mon man, we've been complaining about this for months and months and you made it abundantly clear that youre aware of the problem and that youre going to fix it. I'm not saying that you should remove them (though I wish you would), I'm saying that you should do what you said you were going to do (restrict their time limit).
If you're running into problems doing that, I would like to suggest simply making the pk shields like the daily PD and TD quests for keys where youre allotted one pk shield and one shield removal per day. This seems like a better solution because even with a 60 second time frame in the bag, people can just camp the pk shield vendor in alban and spam pk shields just the same as before.
If you do decide to implement the 60 second time limit on the protections/removals, then I emplore you to move the pk shield NPCs to the outskirts of towns (especially trifri and alban) or it will make the 60 second time limit a mild inconvenience to the spammers rather than a solution to the problem.
Just do something...jesus
Do it.