Lost Ark Suffers Game Breaking Duplication Exploit

Finally, an MMO that Amazon can’t mess up, right? With the monumental mass of issues that New World has had from players abusing immortality bugs to win territory wars, to the 742 different duplication methods players utilized to destroy the economy – Amazon Game Studios have repeatedly shown their sheer incompetence when it comes to game development.
But this time is different.. right? They’re not developing Lost Ark, Smilegate are. They cannot possibly mess this up, can they? There’s absolutely no way.

Amazon have, somehow, done the absolute impossible and managed to implement a duplication exploit that have allowed well over 60,000 players to duplicate millions of dollars worth of founder’s packs rewards.

This exploit wasn’t something minor, something that rolled out relatively unnoticed and was patched immediately upon being reported. Rather, it plagued players over the course of the entirety of the 2nd day of the head start.
And with the exception of a few reddit posts and mentions on the forums, this has flown relatively under the radar.

TheAMSA and MercuryZX both clipped instances of this happening over on Twitch. AMSA went on to redeem his Founder’s Pack rewards. He then proceeded to log out and log back in, after which he realized he could redeem the Founder’s Pack for a second time.

This is a game-breaking exploit, and many – and I stress the word “many” here, players went on to abuse it. Although that isn’t even the worst of it. What’s worse, is the fact that even more players were unaware of this even happening, and went on to redeem their rewards a multitude of times.
Completely oblivious to the fact that this was a bug and that this means they were technically taking part in the abuse as well. Which makes it almost impossible to make the distinction between players that were abusing the exploit by choice with the intention of beneficial gain, and those who were unaware it was an exploit at all.

Amazon did address this at a point later in the day, with Roxx making an official forum thread titled “Regarding Multiple Item Claims.” The thread went on to read as follows:

“Yesterday, a database timeout led to multiple claims of Founder’s Packs and Twitch Drops for some players. This affected less than 4% of all accounts, with the majority of these players only redeeming 1-2 extra items, which did not include any additional Royal Crystals.
We worked quickly to deploy a fix that has prevented additional items from being created, and are currently working with Smilegate RPG to revoke the items that were created during the period that this occurred. We expect this fix to come later today, as it is a priority for the team to keep the in-game economy intact.

Thank you for your patience, and we will provide an update as soon as possible.”

I want to note here that sales for the game were made public on February 10th – yesterday. There were a grand total of 1.5 million total Founder’s Pack sales made within 72 hours of the head start going live.
Do you know what 4% of 1.5 million is? 60,000. 60 thousand accounts participated in duplication of items, minimum. That’s if Amazon are being genuine here and not downplaying the situation by reporting less counts of abuse than what they saw.
They state that there weren’t any additional “Royal Crystals” duplicated, and while I can’t verify if this is the case, the fact that the duplication happened, and is still attempting to be cleaned up is still a very damaging blow to the economy, the playerbase and even the game itself.
Amazon went on to confirm that they are working with Smilegate, the actual developers of Lost Ark in an attempt to revoke the items that were created during the period this exploit was occurring, but we all know how organized and effective their development team is, right?
I mean look at New World’s latest update. They introduce a skin into the game – the new Corrupted Love Pack, and immediately have to remove the skin because there was a bug that caused servers to crash.
That’s what we have to look forward to whenever Amazon introduce something into Lost Ark.

Amazon Game Studios are not the developers for Lost Ark. Smilegate are, and Smilegate didn’t – to my knowledge, at least, ever have issues with duplication exploits being present when their game launched in South Korea. Or Russia. Or Japan.
So how is it a company with the funding that Amazon has managed to be the only publisher to mess things up to this magnitude? There’s a reason New World, and more than that, Amazon have become a laughing stock – a meme amongst the MMO community.
Claiming incompetence is an insult to incompetent companies like Nexon or Gamigo.

Amazon is the publisher for Lost Ark, which means realistically they aren’t going to be – or at the very least shouldn’t be introducing new lines of code into the game.
So realistically there should be nothing to worry about with regards to bugs or exploits. But introducing Founder’s Packs into the game has left them with the responsibility of importing them directly into the game – and effective game development is clearly something their studio is just incapable of doing.
While the future of Lost Ark looks bright – the game has broken record after record both pertaining to its head start that was available exclusively to Founder’s, and its launch for both Founder’s and free players, it’s a little disconcerting to acknowledge the fact that if Amazon ever want to introduce anything into the game, this is what we can expect.
A skin that the Korean version doesn’t have? Potential duplication exploits, potential full server crashes. An event to celebrate a holiday that Korea doesn’t celebrate? Potential duplication exploits, potential full server crashes.

I love Lost Ark. I’ve been playing the Russian version of the game actively for years and have been covering this ever since it was announced back in 2016? 2017?
I’ve already put well over 20 hours into it since the head start launched and it’s such a surreal experience being able to play it in your native language with hundreds of other people you know. And having everyone actually enjoy their time within it.
But this bug, this exploit was abused repeatedly, and is incredibly damaging to the community, and to the economy. We saw what duplication did to New World, we saw what bug abusers did to New World. This is something that cannot be allowed to happen with Lost Ark, this game has far too much potential for that!
I’m actually a little taken aback by the fact that Amazon and Smilegate opted to comb through manually removing rewards on an account-level. This is both a time-consuming process and likely one that will result in many missed instances of removal.
I’m also shocked that no bans were issued to players – or even warnings, for that matter. I don’t believe everyone that received duplicate rewards should suffer consequences, but there’s a difference between some random guy that received rewards 3 times and some other guy that received it 30.
It should be very easy to discern the difference between abusers who abused the exploit for their own gain, with full knowledge of the situation and abusers that had no idea what they were doing.

Hopefully this is the only time we’ll have to discuss something like this, because realistically, I want everyone to enjoy this game in every way they can. It’s an incredibly fun game and there’s just so much to enjoy.
But I have my doubts, as Amazon have repeatedly proven their level of incompetence. I guess only time will tell.

Regardless, I hope you’re all having a lot of fun in Lost Ark. It’s been a lotta fun for both Mrs Stix and I over the last few days, and with the exception of the delayed launch for free players, we’ve encountered absolutely no issues thus far!