There appears to be an upsetting problem that’s sweeping a select number of Once Human players. According to posts on Reddit, threads on Steam, and several Discord messages, players are being permanently banned from the game thanks to a bug that gives them a negative balance of crystgin premium currency.
The first Reddit thread provides a play-by-play account of the bug in question: According to an in-game email from Starry Studio, paid content from cross-character sharing that was engaged in last week’s update was double-counted, which in turn meant duplicated crystgins had to be removed. This was later followed with an image of a negative balance in that player’s premium currency account.
Exacerbating the problem is Starry’s seemingly ineffective customer support, as the same player tried five times to resolve the matter and received only a copy-pasted refusal to help due to a violation of policy each time. Ultimately the player had to call his bank to dispute all charges associated with the game, and the only character he is able to play with is the one who didn’t purchase anything.
As one might expect, this has caused many players to rage against NetEase and Starry with threats of legal action, calls to reviewbomb the game on Steam, suspicions cast on the portion of its terms of service about negative currencies (see section 5.3), and claims that it’s more widespread. Yet others are defending Starry, calling out how in some cases players actually spent the extra crystgins and are therefore worthy of being punished.
What’s likely making this worse is that, at the time of this writing, there is no official acknowledgment about the problem from Starry in its Discord, its Twitter account, or its official news feed. All we can suggest for the time being is to not spend a dime on this game just in case you’re caught in what appears to be an automated dragnet.
