Lost Ark’s narrative today is a good news/bad news kind of story. Let’s start with the bad news first: As we noted on Monday, Amazon had apparently bungled the handout of bonus pheon currency as part of its skill tree transfer system overhaul; the studio accidentally gave out too much and shut down the servers to claw it back. Needless to say, people were very unhappy. Early this morning, Amazon put out a dev blog to address the complaints, and as the team tells it, the real problem was exploity in nature.
Amazon explains that it accidentally sent 10 pheons to every character in the original mail, but that wasn’t the only issue; the issue is that some players were claiming a lot more than that using some sort of undefined exploit. That was why Amazon shut it down and reclaimed the handout. Now it’s moving on to compensation, so everyone’s getting 30 now, unless you already spent more than 30, in which case you owe Amazon.
“Although we initially stated we would not take back any of the Pheons that were distributed, we feel that fairness means everyone receiving an equal amount of Pheons. To accomplish this, we will be removing the Pheons that players initially received from the mail and instead granting 30 total Pheons to all players. Please note that with this adjustment, players who previously collected and spent more than 30 Pheons from this incident will keep their purchased items but may see a negative Pheon balance. Most players will either gain additional Pheons or see no change to their total balance, as 94.2% of players claimed 30 Pheons or less. The remaining 5.8% of players averaged claiming approximately 70 Pheons per person, and will see an adjustment to their balance to maintain economic fairness among players. This adjustment already took place during the downtime for the November Update. Additionally, we want to reassure players that we know how valuable Pheons are in-game, and we will continue to distribute them as rewards wherever possible.”
There’s a compensation package en route to all players too, including three days of sub, hope amulets, and animal skins.
Now to the good news: Overnight, Amazon patched in the game’s November update, Feast with Friends. It adds the Reaper advanced class to the Assassin, the Punika Powerpass, the Hyper Express event, more anti-bot economy measures, Stronghold updates, and of course, the overhaul to tripod skill tree upgrades that’s been causing all the fuss.
