Since March, we’ve been covering a hacking wave and the ensuing fallout in Black Desert, as cheaters swarmed the now-defunct Shadow Arena battle royale mode with hacks and bots. Kakao nuked nearly 900 accounts in a first pass only to admit that it had been overzealous and overturned bans on false positives swept up in its banwave. Then it banned even more folks. We called it a clusterfudge, as the forums and Reddit saw piles of claims about unjust bans as the investigation continued.
Of course, since then, Kakao has literally canceled the mode; it went offline indefinitely Wednesday, and it’s unclear that it will ever return.
Anyhow, it looks as if the company has now concluded its investigation into false bans, as the studio says innocent folks have all been unbanned now and compensation is being duly dispatched.
“In order to combat the hacking problems, both in the Shadow Arena and the main world, we attempted to change our methods for identifying people that were using 3rd party software. However, we discovered a number of errors that led to false positives and the accuracy of the banwave was not up to our usual standards. Unfortunately, the full investigation took much longer than we expected but we wanted to be certain that this time we got it right and that nobody remained falsely banned. Today, we have corrected the errors and unbanned those that were affected. Compensation will be sent to everyone involved, along with our apologies for the rollercoaster of emotions we know they must have experienced over the past two weeks. We understand that nothing can compensate for the frustration that you have experienced, but we hope to regain your trust by creating a more reliable environment for our adventurers. We remain committed to stamping out cheats and hacks wherever we find them and will continue our efforts in this regard as we work to strengthen our methods.”
Surely that’s the end of it. Right?
