Kakao Games, the publisher of Black Desert, has responded to the latest exploit in the MMORPG. However, the penalties are significantly smaller than many players had hoped.
What happened? At the end of March, an exploit became known where experienced players exploited the free weekend of Black Desert.
They created numerous new accounts and received a lot of loot through a special item, which was then transferred to the main accounts.
The curious thing was that the same exploit had already occurred in Korea in 2018 and still came as a surprise to the western publisher.
How did Kakao Games react? On April 15, the penalties for this exploit were announced. Kakao Games permanently banned a total of 23 accounts and removed all the currency gained from the exploit from the game.
This amounted to a staggering sum of almost 4 trillion silver.
However, many players feel that this penalty for the exploiters is too lenient. After all, only a fraction of them lost their account.
Many users also laughed off the official statement that the publisher “had no sufficient evidence to assume that a large number of players would exploit the event.”
Anger spreads in the forum and reddit
What is the problem with the penalty? As Kakao Games itself wrote in the official statement, 405 accounts were involved in the exploit. However, only 23 were banned.
Although all 23 accounts are said to have been main accounts with longer play times, well-known guilds, streamers, and partners of Black Desert seem to have been spared, as noted in reddit.
All non-banned accounts also received no real penalty. They only lost the silver that they had unfairly obtained. So there were no real consequences for the exploiting.
What do the players say? Directly under the announcement, some criticize Kakao Games’ behavior regarding this exploit. User Rizzly is upset about the number of banned accounts:
- “23 accounts? Lol. Entire guilds cheated in the livestream. You should have added two more digits to that number.”
User Altey would have liked to see more penalties:
- “I think some temporary bans are missing here, even if it’s just 1 or 2 weeks. So they can think like children about whether they should do this again or not.”
However, user Odelschwank is most upset in his own thread on reddit. He also compares the situation with the exploit in Korea:
- “In Korea, every player involved with the exploit was banned for 7 to 30 days. Nothing remotely similar has happened to us.”
Indeed, in 2018 in Korea, 21 accounts were banned for 30 days and 219 accounts for 7 days (via Inven.co).
Lenient attitude of the publisher was expected
How did Kakao Games react to other incidents? As soon as the exploit became known, many users on reddit suspected that the penalties in the West could be more lenient than in Korea.
This was already the case with the Shadow Arena, where some bans were later lifted.
And although players already had low expectations, these were apparently surpassed this time. Odelschwank’s thread has been holding strong with 331 upvotes for hours despite the “Unconfirmed” label on reddit.
Despite the issues with Black Desert, it is a very popular game. It is currently among the best MMORPGs that you can buy once and play forever.
