Last weekend, Black Desert devs disabled some unusual items in the game: shovels and empty bottles. While at the time, Kakao said it had merely discovered a bug, players across the community claimed that in actuality, exploiters had been using the items to take advantage of an infinite gathering bug that allowed them to rack up a possible 20 billion in coin apiece over the course of the last few months.
Today, Kakao has acknowledged that very exploit.
“As you probably learned recently, a bug was discovered in the game allowing players to shovel in the desert for no energy cost at all. Granting them the possibility to only lose energy when they were getting a Crystal Shard,” Community Manager Tytyes posted to the forums today. “This is indeed considered an exploit and a violation of our Terms of Use which is not permitted. The original way this feature was meant to work was it would require energy for every action no matter the rewards.”
Kakao says it is “actively pursuing” an investigation and has vowed exploiters will see “action taken against their accounts,” though it’s not yet clear what that action will be or how badly the economy was damaged in the meantime.
