For the last week we’ve been covering the hacking wave in Black Desert, as cheaters swarmed the Shadow Arena battle royale mode with trial accounts and hacks and bots in an attempt to enrich themselves in the real game. In response to many threads and reports about the cheaters, Kakao brought down the banhammer on Wednesday, nuking nearly 900 accounts, only to admit Friday that it may have swung at the wrong ball and overturned bans on false positives swept up in its banwave, promising compensation.
At the time, we noted that many players were still agitated because they had not been unbanned and hackers continued roaming Shadow Arena freely. In fact, since Friday, we’ve been besieged with tips and tweets from Black Desert fans upset over the incident, including players who use cloud gaming services and therefore literally have no ability to hack the game as accused.
It gets worse. On Saturday, Kakao unbanned more people, but then it banned another 376 accounts.
“With our recent attempts to combat the prevalent use of third party software, we attempted to strengthen our criteria to provide a better environment for our adventurers. However, many accounts were incorrectly banned due to an error in the data. We unbanned the ones we initially verified on 28th March and have been reviewing the full data since then. […] We understand that our mistake has caused high amounts of stress and we sincerely apologise for the error. We promise to improve our internal procedures to prevent such issues. Compensation to all wrongly affected adventurers will be sent shortly, and again, we are deeply sorry for the confusion and inconvenience that we have caused.”
Should it go without saying that folks are still claiming they were banned in error, even as recently as today? I realize most gamers’ response is to assume anybody protesting his innocence on a forum is guilty, but in this particular case and given the circumstances, it seems prudent to just unban everyone and start again.
