We here at Kakao Games believe in providing a fair and enjoyable experience for everyone in our community. Since we have taken over the publishing rights of ArcheAge in December, we have taken on the challenge of doing so for a game with a long-existing history.
It is our strong belief that, even though certain behaviours have become deeply ingrained within the community, we can make a positive change on this aspect and work towards a better ArcheAge for all of us. In order to achieve this result, we will continue with our zero-tolerance policy towards exploiting and RMT (Real Money Trade).
We have permanently banned a total of 338 accounts today:
- RMT buyers: 9
- RMT sellers: 326
- Speedhacking: 3
To help us combat RMT in the game more efficiently, and to help us catch the abusers that have so far slipped through our net, we will be opening up a unique self-report ticket form for this week only. Players that have made an illegitimate RMT purchase in the past on an account that has not yet been banned, will have the opportunity to self-report this purchase to us. In exchange, the purchased gold will be removed from the account and a temporary 3-day suspension will be given instead of a permanent ban.
Q. What is the deadline for self-reporting?
A. The self-report ticket form will be open for 1 week, from Thursday, February 10th, until Thursday, February 17th 2022 at 09:00 UTC (the start of maintenance).
Q. What if the gold was already used up?
A. In that case, the items that were bought with this gold, or items of similar value will be removed instead. Please note that the player will not have the option to choose which items are removed. If there are also not enough items available to make up for the gold value, additional suspension days may be added to the account for the remaining gold value.
Q. What about already-banned accounts?
A. They will not be unbanned, nor changed to a temporary ban. As we’ve already identified the seller(s) and buyer(s) for those cases, there is no further merit to self-reporting.
Q. What if I report some RMT transactions but not all?
A. Any non-reported RMT transactions will still be actioned with a permanent ban.
Q. What about purchases done before December 3rd 2021?
A. With this action we are focusing on purchases done between December 3rd 2021 and February 10th 2022.
Q. Why are you giving permanent bans for RMT instead of temporary bans?
A. RMT is extremely damaging to the game, and is one of the leading reasons for in-game hyperinflation, causing an ever-increasing gap between old and new players, along with destroying any competitive aspects of the game. Furthermore, the methods that RMT sellers use include, but are not limited to:
- Having in-game bot farms, actively disrupting other player’s gameplay.
- Using stolen & fraudulent credit cards to steal real-life currency from unsuspecting victims. This is a real-life crime.
- Hacking real players’ accounts, selling all the items on it and using that gold to sell to their customers. (1)
Considering the large-scale damage these practices cause, we deem a permanent ban appropriate for any participation in this offense.
(1) These hackers actively track the web for big global breaches - such as Adobe, Yahoo, Facebook, etc - and try out all the email+password combinations on different services to see if there are any matches. You can avoid being hacked like this by using a unique password for each service, and by regularly changing your passwords. We’d like to clarify that we have not had any data breach on our side in the history of Kakao Games, but players do get hacked because they use the same email & password everywhere else.
Q. Why not just ban the sellers instead of both buyers and sellers?
A. Sellers are only here when buyers show enough interest in their services. It is not possible to tackle the RMT problem by only actioning on the seller side.
Q. Why not change the in-game systems that tempted players to buy gold, instead of punishing them?
A. Our goal is to do both. While the GM team hunts down abusers, the CM team works together with the developers to explore and implement in-game changes and events to re-stabilize the economy and provide opportunities for new players to catch up.
For those that missed it, we also posted a more extensive FAQ about our banwaves last week.
Remember, play fair and play safe!