The temporary banwave in Amazon’s Lost Ark has become more of a lingering ban tsunami as the studio is actually extending bans for players who stand accused of exploiting Ignite chest rewards – i.e., opening lots and lots of them – back in October.
“As some 2-week bans from the Rewards Exploit begin to lift, we wanted to inform players of our next steps in actioning against players that abused the exploit,” the studio says. The two-week bans would’ve been for players who opened three to seven chests, mind you. But it sounds as if some of the punishments didn’t actually get carried through.
“Through continued investigation and verification of datasets around the exploit, we discovered some edge cases where items or chests remained in accounts. Because of this, we will be immediately adjusting the ban duration for some users, including actioning with additional permabans where exploit abuse was severe. Additionally, during this week’s maintenance period, we will be removing those remaining items from accounts that benefitted from this exploit. If Items were used or destroyed, the gold equivalent will be removed to ensure fairness. This includes the possibility of some players reaching negative gold values. This course of action will allow us to ensure exploiters are actioned against fairly, and that unfair advantages will not be earned through the abuse of this previous exploit.”
The game’s Redditors are openly scornful about the move, claiming that it took Amazon too long to address the oops with chests and that it wasn’t just “edge cases” who got to keep their ill-gotten games. Other folk are still tapping the “unbound gold exploit” sign, wondering when that’ll be fixed.
