MemberZone: The Future of Kakao Games and Archeage

MemberZone is a forum where our readers can submit articles talking about their opinions on the latest news in multiplayer gaming. The opinions of the author do not necessarily represent the opinions of MMOBomb.com or its staff. Viewer submissions are volunteer only and no compensation is given in either direction when a MemberZone is posted. MMOBomb.com staff edit submissions for spelling errors or grammatical corrections, and we try to leave most content in tact, but may remove items that specifically detail how to execute exploits, etc.

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Today's MemberZone comes from Matthew Valli and focuses on the latest event exploit and economic impact of that exploit to ArcheAge. Matthew is an MMO player since the late 90s where he started by playing EverQuest with his father. Since then he has played many MMOs and enjoys more niche games.

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By: Matthew Valli, MMOBomb.com Reader

On December 20th, 2021, a huge exploit came to light for the players of Archeage Unchained; which was newly acquired from gamigo by Kakao Games in early November. Transfers of accounts from gamigo to Kakao took place throughout November and the launch of the new Kakao Games servers, including a fresh start server, Kyrios, happened on December 3rd, 2021.

Players that logged in on December 20th would notice nation chat being spammed with information on an exploit. This exploit was made easy from the Land Rush that happened the Saturday prior. With Land Rush and having access to public chests; people were able to create multiple accounts and trade items through these public chests despite the lock for auction house use at level 55 and the access to send mail and open trade at Ancestral level 10.

When Kakao Games announced their acquisition of Archeage, they decided they would return to a subscription-based model but promised free game time for those starting a new account along with those who have previously bought the game. With having free game time to add to new accounts and having level one characters being able to trade items freely with no lock through public chests, things began to boil.

Throughout launch, Kakao Games had been streaming Archeage to the public as a form of marketing and were giving out codes that could be redeemed for items. One of these items was Manastorm Crystals which players ended up accumulating up to 100 through the code. Having 100 Manastorm Crystals, people were able to buy many items off the Marketplace such as Drills, Trees, and Worn Costumes. Another item of note that could be purchased on the Marketplace were undergarments, which can be leveled using the worn costumes.

The undergarments were made "Bind on Equip" verses most items being "Bind on Pickup." Normally, to max out your undergarments it would take months of grinding. However, in a matter of a day, people were creating account after account to level up their undergarments to Eternal (The max equipment level). These max-level undergarments give a huge boost to player stats which gives players an advantage over those who don’t have them. These stats are active throughout the entire world and primarily PvP.

All players needed to do to use the exploit was make a new Gmail account and begin to create account after account. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Matthew detailed the process for easy email account creation here in an effort to be complete in his explanation. We have chosen to edit out this explanation so as not to provide directions for others to use.)

Once you logged into your new account on the Kakao Games website you could redeem all the codes to gather up your 100 Manastorm Crystals, log into the game, purchase your items, pick your undergarments up out of a public chest, level them, and put them back into the chest and log into another account to repeat the process. This issue goes far beyond the undergarments though. With access to Drill and Trees in the Marketplace; inventories of these new level 1 characters flooded with resources that would also normally take days and months to harvest.

The resources in the game are used to create everything from houses to ships, all of which are a vital part of progress throughout the game. The drill mines up gems that are used to progress an end-game ring which would end up being turned into a big stat stick that would normally take months to grind as well. These resources were also placed in public chests for people’s main characters to collect.

This exploit flooded the market with resources, driving costs down due to supply and demand. With the number of resources unknown and almost infinite, there is no sure way to calculate how long it may be before the economy recovers.

As far as exploits, though, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Scripts are being published on GitHub involving API keys for Kakao Game’s inventory system. With these scripts, it is possible to spam your inventory with a code a massive amount of time within milliseconds. Normally these codes are one-time use per account, but with the scripts, it would gather for you with what seemed to be unlimited resources from just one-code. After the exploits began to come to light, players began to spam Kakao Games and Community Managers in their Public Discord.

It took Kakao Game roughly 24 hours to even acknowledge the ongoing exploit and many people believe by then the damage was already done. Kakao Games has also announced on their Public ArcheAge Discord that they are currently investigating the exploit but stated it would take approximately a week to deal with the issue.

Many players have been vocal about Kakao Game’s response to the exploits and many believe it is too late for the server and a "new" fresh start is needed, others just want compensation, and others have just up and left the game.

Currently, the Kyrios server is seeing a much lower player count than the initial first two weeks of the fresh start. Many players say they won’t be playing until the investigation is complete.

For now, the future is unknown for Archeage and Kakao Game. Has the exploit killed Kyrios? Will there be a new fresh start server? Will there be enough people for the game to survive? It may be too early to tell but we may find out once Kakao Games finishes their investigation of the exploit.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Matthew's article was submitted prior to Kakao Games announcing that they have already started a ban process resulting in over 10,000 permenant bans and counting. Drills, Trees ,and greenhouses have been removed from the manastorm marketplaceKakao has said this investigation is still continuing and, to Matthew's point, no word on what Kakao Games will do to recover the economy a bit has been provided yet.)

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We would like to thank Matthew for their submission and ask what YOU think about the whole ArcheAge exploitation issue! Let us (and Matthew!) know in the comments!