Did you actually witness the $nicks becoming ops?
The on OP and on DEOP events trigger when a user on a channel is opped or deopped.
Format: on <level>:OP:<#[,#]>:<commands>
Example: on 1:OP:#mirc,#irchelp:/msg $nick Please do not abuse your Op status
When you say you manually put one in your scripts folder, that's wrong at first, it doesn't go to scripts, it goes to the default $mircdir, not $mircdir\scripts.
It should look like this after made:
$mircdir\ops.ini
[#jimieo]
jimieo=1