On November 14th, the servers of Lost Ark unexpectedly went offline for several hours. The reason was to take back gifts from players. Although that ultimately did not happen, players are nonetheless quite angry. We from MeinMMO explain the situation.
What was given away? On the morning of November 14th, fans of Lost Ark were initially very happy. For after logging in, they were greeted by a message from Amazon in their inboxes. This again contained the warning that unsaved tripods will disappear on November 16th.
But not only that, this message was accompanied by a combat item chest, a card package, and above all, 10 Pheons. Pheons are a real-money currency needed in-game to purchase valuable items on the market.
Every character on every account received this message, which quickly led to excitement. If someone actually occupied all 24 available character slots, they received 240 Pheons as a gift. This corresponds to about 40 € worth.
What was the problem? However, some fans quickly wanted to take advantage of this and learned that this gift was also received for newly created characters. They therefore created characters, collected the Pheons, and deleted them again. Although some people on reddit say it wasn’t so easy to reproduce, that is the official statement from Amazon (via Lost Ark Forums).
Shortly thereafter, Lost Ark shut down the servers to prevent the exploit, but that was only the beginning of the debacle.
Not even in the difficult Legion Raids can you drop Pheons:
Lost Ark wants to take gifts away from players but then backtracks
How does Amazon react? While the servers are offline for almost 6 hours, Amazon stated in the forum that they want to delete all distributed gifts and Pheons. Once players log back in, nothing of that should remain.
At this point, the developers also promise an apology for all players for the long downtime. However, it is still unknown what exactly that will look like.
Quickly, feedback pours in from players, who think it is a shame that such a great gift is taken away just because a few people misbehaved.
The backtrack really angers fans: When the servers came back online in the evening, some people excitedly noticed that they still possessed their Pheons. Amazon announced on Twitter that they ultimately decided to leave the gifts on the accounts since they could quickly intervene before the exploit spread.
However, this sparked a whole new shitstorm. Because the mails with the gifts were no longer sent after the server shutdown. While all the people who were online before the shutdown of the servers get to keep their Pheons, everyone who did not manage to do so initially receives nothing.
Community is angry and disappointed with how Amazon is handling the situation
Why are people angry? Lost Ark has managed to step on everyone’s toes with the entire situation. People who were not logged in are upset about simply not receiving anything (via reddit).
Even those who were allowed to keep their gifts are disappointed that there was ultimately a lengthy server downtime where nothing happened at all. The mere fact that the servers were offline disturbs many.
Because since the update last week, the servers of Lost Ark have been suffering from severe performance problems. Lag spikes and connection drops have been an everyday occurrence for the entire week.
Some fans are disappointed that due to “a few euros worth of Pheons,” the servers are shut down immediately, but nothing was done about the massive problems for days. Currently, no one is really happy with the situation (via reddit).
Even the promised compensation is meeting resistance from some users. Because a compensation that all players are supposed to receive was promised. Many do not like that the early birds receive Pheons and compensation.
It remains to be seen whether Amazon wants to resolve the entire situation differently. They promised a statement within the next 24 hours that was on the evening of November 14th. We will update this article as soon as we know more.
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