If you’ve been keeping an eye and ear on Black Desert’s battle arena mode Shadow Arena, you probably know that the game’s been plagued with hacking issues by the usual spate of cheaters who just couldn’t resist the lucrative rewards from the mode. One tipster pointed us to multiple clips of hackers using combat and teleport cheats to win, making legitimate play pointless. And Reddit, of course, was predictably enraged.
When we contacted Kakao earlier this week for a statement, the studio told us it was still working on a solution, and as of this morning, we now know what it is: a big ol’ banwave. The company says it’s banned 899 accounts, 215 from Shadow Arena alone; most of them were trial accounts, which has players cranky since the suspicion is that cheaters’ main accounts are left intact.
“We know that banwaves are not the final solution, especially in a competitive mode such as Shadow Arena, but they do have a significant impact and we’ll continue trying to roll these out as fast as possible to safeguard fair play within Black Desert Online,” Kakao writes.
“We wish to affirm our commitment to keeping Black Desert Online free from cheats and hacks, and recently many of you have lodged complaints and reports regarding the prevalence of this (especially in Shadow Arena) and demanding faster and more definitive action. We are committed to fighting the problem with the tools we have at our disposal, whilst working on new methods to sustain any progress we make. […] In order to do this, we ’ll refine the process to conduct faster manual reviews. We can’t promise to catch every hacker instantly, but we do hope to see an improvement in the turnaround time from report to ban and that you will notice the difference as a result. The consequence is, that it may increase the response time on other tickets, so please bear with us as we balance this. Although these are the only steps we can share details of at the moment, we are taking this extremely seriously and looking at several other options to improve the overall service.”
In happier news, the game’s latest patch has rolled out in the west, with another new event, this one dubbed True or False in keeping with the April Fools’ Day theme this next week will have across the genre. Shadow Arena rankings have also been reset.
https://twitter.com/BDO_News/status/1110887689203695616
Meanwhile, if you’re not content with Black Desert on PC and Xbox One, how about mobile? Pearl Abyss reminded everyone this week on Facebook that Black Desert Mobile’s global launch is still on for 2019.
We’ll be launching our new Black Desert column later today, so stay tuned!
