It’s not often that Dungeon Fighter Online makes it to our headlines but that’s mostly because the game just keeps on keepin’ on with updates. However, a letter from Neople’s new live director, Jong Min Park, offers up a surprising story from the usually quieter game: a story of how one of DFO’s devs was caught abusing access privileges to make trillions of in-game gold.
This dragnet was kicked off in 2020, shortly after the game’s Korean live service team found similar in-house malfeasance. According to Park, between 2020 and November 2022, a former member of the DFO team had misappropriated an operations account that’s normally used for processing customer service requests to create items with high gold value. This dev then sold the items through NPC shops on an alternate personal game account and used the earned gold for real-money-trading. The value of the created items amounted to nearly 7 trillion in gold.
Park then outlines how this former dev managed to evade detection and work around security measures for an extended period of time before finally being caught and admitting to his crimes in a Korean court, while DFO’s former live director took responsibility for the duping and was replaced by Park.
It’s because of the sensitive nature of the matter and for legal reasons that Neople says it was unable to inform players of this story before now. “I am deeply sorry for this sudden announcement that understandably comes as a shock to our community,” Park writes. “I am fully committed to managing our systems and work processes to prevent similar problems going forth. I am determined to do everything in my power to provide a better game service, and to rebuild the trust our community has in us.”
As part of this contrition, all players are able to claim a bundle of items that include rare avatar and weapon boxes, a platinum emblem selection box, and a pair of cosmetic boxes. The items can be claimed from Seria’s Special Shop, with no specified restriction on when the items can be gathered up.
Meanwhile (and in happier DFO news), the MMO released its Season 7 Act 7 update last week featuring the new Archer class, item updates, and dungeon improvements. The update also has events that let players power up their Archers and use the class to legally dupe items from an Archer to a preferred character. Finally, DFO announced on Twitter that the MMO is headed for the Epic Games Store.
