Black Desert Community in an Uproar Over Shadow Arena Hackers & False Bans - MMORPG.com

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Black Desert Community in an Uproar Over Shadow Arena Hackers & False Bans - MMORPG.com

Updated with comments from MMORPG.com users

Keep in mind that these comments are from the perspectives of writers currently playing BDO and who are invested in the game's community.

Just letting you know they tried to correct it by a second band wave hot on the heels of the first mess...and banned a whole bunch of new people who shouldn’t have been while leaving several of the incorrectly banned accounts still in the lurch.

The paid employees aren’t engaging with the community beyond the two “official” updates and instead volunteer moderators and ambassadors are starting to snipe at the player base in forum threads.

They also seem to be deliberately (or not) suggesting people don’t have the right to any follow up if they are banned because of the ToS. While the forums aren’t the place to debate consumer laws it seems to be a deliberate misdirection to tell players “too bad we can do what we want”

There are STILL innocent players banned, we have reached out to Kakao numerous times with tickets and they are not responding and when they do it's just copy paste trash and no one is actually reviewing the tickets. The small amount of players they "unbanned" and apologized for, isn't -everyone- reaching out to media outlets is all that we have left trying to get help. We have tried to find someone to go over the xigncode logs and they refuse. I sincerely, truly, appreciate that you've taken the time to write this article and try to get a comment from Kakao. But please know that they did not unabn all innocent players affected. It seems like xigncode is wrongfully flagging programs ( as it is very well known, and well documented to do ) and there are even people reporting on the forums this morning that their game closed and when they relaunched it, it's now saying they are banned. They have implemented some kind of automated process and it is failing the player base.

ORIGINAL STORY - Pearl Abyss and the Black Desert Online EU/NA team are under fire for issues in the recently-added Shadow Arena battle royale mode. According to players, there are a number of hacks present in Shadow Arena, a fact backed up by action taken by devs that led to a large number of accounts being banned. Players assert that well-known hackers are making trial accounts in order to cheat and are being paid for their effort by those looking for high win counts and in-game currency.

Read the full story here

Scot

Lets hope our anonymous tipsters don't get banned.

For me there is always going to be some fallout over tackling hacking, some people will get their accounts banned that were innocent. But they have to act, it is just a matter of how many mistakes they make.

We know that hackers always kick up a fuss about bans; it was never them, what they were doing was not really cheating, everybody does it.

So when you see "I Am Innocent" threads I always take them with a large pinch of salt...and the way they are often written means you are going to get that salt anyway.

So how do you know when the complaints are genuine? You don't there's the rub.

Haki88

Yea like first 2 months of hacking in Black Desert, first they said they will ban all hackers at once and i still remember some dev when he talked on someones stream that there are going to be false positive bans but people can contact support. Guess what? Me and 2 guys from my guild are banned for hacking, i contacted support and i get some auto email that i cant appeal to ban, after that i sended like 5-6 emails and finnaly REAL person answered saying they checked my account and i was using hacks which i wasnt! Of course they never banned all hackers at once, they banned them in waves so they cant do refund.

I was very happy about game and i thought everything bad people say about this game was lie but after i got ban i saw whole picture. They just lied and lied, for example if you can remember first 2 months of game where you couldnt get support ticket solved, my ticket was resolved in 31 day, but 1 guy from guild i remember he waited over 60 days. They market sniping, all sea content bugged, just disaster...

Life2v

Stay away from this shady company. If u wanna start to play BDO just now better go read some info on official forum or reddit.

hyllyh

a lot of salt and tear for : 899 accounts - 614 trial = 285 "paid" account (not sure all of them paid something).
285 is not so much and yes, maybe some are false positive but it's really not a big mess here compared to some others games...
childs crying in forum "it's not me, it's not me" but the reality is here: cheat and hack pollute parts of this game and action must be done!

flizzer

How about avoid this game?

alkemist

I currently play this game. And really enjoyed the change of pace that the Shadow Arena had without having to grind stupid hours to make money and enhancing mats.
But this game mode is so overrun with hackers. The rank one player in Shadow Arena right now currently ingame is a hacker that has been doing this for 48 hours. https://imgur.com/a/lyAZNC6
Any name with a barcode is a hacker FYI. Look at there rankings. These same hackers were here last week before the whole ban wave fiasco and now are back. They have been completely silent about this.
If you have never tried Black Desert do yourself a favor and stay away from this game and Pearl Abyss/Kakao. Also MMORPG these same cheats used in Shadow Arena are also the same for the regular game mode. Just people are alot more lowkey about using them around of people.

Dudeskio

As one of the people that has a loved one affected by this recent banwave, I cannot thank you enough for writing this article! Kakao has been trying to sweep this under the rug for days now, and it has hurt the community greatly. As other players on here have said, spend a little time on reddit and the official forums before deciding to take the significantly time consuming plunge that is BDO. This is coming from a long time player that absolutely loved this game, and was NOT banned, and I am recommending to avoid for now. There are still a large amount of players reporting being unfairly banned, enough so that it is becoming hard to ignore. Supposedly around 200 at last count. That might not sound like a lot, but they only banned around 899 people total in this specific wave, and 600 of those were merely trial accounts.

OhhPaigey

This game can never escape the drama I swear! 

Scot

DMKano said:

OhhPaigey said:

This game can never escape the drama I swear! 

It's because the game is heavily gear based - and to have the best gear takes hundreds of billions of silver. 

Best way to amass billions- hack.

This is why hackers have infested Shadow Arena - because of the huge payouts. SA is currently the fastest money in BDO.


99% of all hacking in BDO has the same purpose - getting as much money as possible so that one could afford those tet and pen accessories 

You do realise you are making a case for subscription only with no money sink items? Naturally I agree.

Lastlaughlol

Life2v said:

Stay away from this shady company.

If u wanna start to play BDO just now better go read some info on official forum or reddit.

This. Why bother with Eastern trash? Not that our Western trash is any better(WoW, yikes)

SpottyGekko

Scot said:

DMKano said:

OhhPaigey said:

This game can never escape the drama I swear! 

It's because the game is heavily gear based - and to have the best gear takes hundreds of billions of silver. 

Best way to amass billions- hack.

This is why hackers have infested Shadow Arena - because of the huge payouts. SA is currently the fastest money in BDO.


99% of all hacking in BDO has the same purpose - getting as much money as possible so that one could afford those tet and pen accessories 

You do realise you are making a case for subscription only with no money sink items? Naturally I agree.

The horse has bolted, don't worry about closing that stable door, lol

"Paying for advantage" has become the norm these days, nobody raises an eyebrow over that anymore.

If it was a pure sub game, there'd just be a very brisk RMT "black market", and all the hacking shenanigans would continue unabated...

MadCoderOne

I remember when I used to get upset over video games LOL

wateryphoenix

The bans are still happening. I was banned this morning while afk leveling horses. I haven't even stepped foot into shadow arena. =/ Others were banned while afk processing.

BDOIsAjoke

I am also a user banned from the game since maint. Never played shadow arena or made a test account either. I have sent the same ticket back to them dozens of times now and I get the same copy pasted BS. Still not unbanned, hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours spent on this game. They released an additional statement this morning and said they unbanned all the wrongful accounts but added another 376 players to the ban list, the forums are flooding with more innocent players banned today. You can't get support. IGN needs to pick this story up too.

They are beta testing some crap data pull they got out of xigncode and have zero idea what they are doing with it. One guy just had his second account unbanned, and his main got banned today instead.

Lost the banroulette. Anyone reading this, don't start playing BDO.

FlyByKnight

No different than Archeage and people abusing systems for currency advantage to get stuff that gives them the OWPVP advantage.

F2P and OWPVP in MMOs don't mix at all.

deusdea

Scot said:

Lets hope our anonymous tipsters don't get banned.



For me there is always going to be some fallout over tackling hacking, some people will get their accounts banned that were innocent. But they have to act, it is just a matter of how many mistakes they make.



We know that hackers always kick up a fuss about bans; it was never them, what they were doing was not really cheating, everybody does it.



So when you see "I Am Innocent" threads I always take them with a large pinch of salt...and the way they are often written means you are going to get that salt anyway.



So how do you know when the complaints are genuine? You don't there's the rub.

Yeah, that's the thing. You don't really know who is innocent or not. This is when their team needs to take a step back and reassess the situation and start back from square 1, but all they're doing right now is stacking issues on issues by continuing to use a "100% accurate tool" to ban players in the game. They are making the issue more complex and difficult to resolve, when they should just be undoing the banwave like it never happened, fixing their "tool" instead of manually reviewing each account (which they claimed they would have /s), and reapplying once they believe it's time.

Tromokrata

 mistakes yeah has happen but they did nothing to help ppl has still been faulty banned including my wife .They just removed all posts from forum.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/b7d4uo/new_banwave_today/
https://community.blackdesertonline.com/index.php?threads/banwave-update-on-follow-up-measures.428601/

Albatroes

MadCoderOne said:

I remember when I used to get upset over video games LOL

I'm honestly jealous that I haven't had a game for years to get upset over. It really comes down to the time investment vs anything else. People sink a lot of time into BDO. The last thing you want to think about when you invest a heavy degree of time into something is that the people you're trusting with said time only see you as wallets. Unfortunately, that's what it feels like more publishers/developers see their consumers as. Empathy on both ends used to be nice back in the day.

Tromokrata

DMKano said:

Scot said:

DMKano said:

OhhPaigey said:

This game can never escape the drama I swear! 

It's because the game is heavily gear based - and to have the best gear takes hundreds of billions of silver. 

Best way to amass billions- hack.

This is why hackers have infested Shadow Arena - because of the huge payouts. SA is currently the fastest money in BDO.


99% of all hacking in BDO has the same purpose - getting as much money as possible so that one could afford those tet and pen accessories 

You do realise you are making a case for subscription only with no money sink items? Naturally I agree.

Of course I would love this - but I would also love free bags of money and 2 day work weeks.

It's nice to dream about stuff that will never happen. 

Could BDO replace all the RNG with actual content - where players would earn the items by actually completing all content- yes - the devs simply have no reason nor desire to go that route when the current playerbase is spending 100s of dollars per month to keep the casino gear upgrade system going.

Stop changing subject I m glad when they banned hackers but they banned innocent ppl they do nothing about that just deleting posts and trying to cover it up .Today is new wave of bans and new ppl banned for nothing.

Bloodaxes

FlyByKnight said:

No different than Archeage and people abusing systems for currency advantage to get stuff that gives them the OWPVP advantage.

F2P and OWPVP in MMOs don't mix at all.

I did something like that in archeage. You buy the 30 month premium once (with ingame or real money) on your NA or EU character, switch to the other country server and create a new character.

Both get the premium benefits. You then use the other account's labor purely to get money to buy more premiums and your main account is free to use their money however you desire. 

Poebao

Im one of the anonymous tipster and im thankful for this article. Im not banned in this "issue" but i want help to innocent people. Its insane how kakao ignore everyone and close tickets automatically with copy paste messages. No proofs, no explanations, nothing.

deusdea

Albatroes said:

MadCoderOne said:

I remember when I used to get upset over video games LOL

I'm honestly jealous that I haven't had a game for years to get upset over. It really comes down to the time investment vs anything else. People sink a lot of time into BDO. The last thing you want to think about when you invest a heavy degree of time into something is that the people you're trusting with said time only see you as wallets. Unfortunately, that's what it feels like more publishers/developers see their consumers as. Empathy on both ends used to be nice back in the day.

Yeah. That is true. I wouldn't make a big deal if I spent little to no time on this issue, but I spent over $5k in this game and invested so many sleepless nights. Don't get me wrong, the game is fun, but when they do this to you after all that time and money invested into your account. It's very unethical and demoralizing to the point we are dehumanized and looked at as cash cattle.

Poebao

Innocent people waiting for unban meanwhile cheaters do their job and use cheats on shadow arena, one of them make around 20m silver per game, 150-200m per day. I can collect 2-5m silver in normal game, when i won i got 12.5m

Renoaku

Yes but the cheaters can't really do much to a game like if you make trial accounts and cheat the most you can do is send the gold to other  players or buy your own items off the market house I guess over time un-checked it could cause inflation but there is no real benefits to cheating because its obviously going to get banned.

Though I assume the way cheaters are doing this is basically just having a hack that imports skills which are not checked server side to verify if a user picked them up or not thus cheaters can do this.

Or memory hack to detect where Items are, these type of hacks especially memory hack could go unchecked, and be denifed of being a hack especially if not a public hack open so devs can make anti-cheat.

Also using Packet Sniffing hacks like we have seen in FortNite, and PUBG can go undetected for a very long time because its 100% Undetectable by software based anti-cheats unless it knows what to look for, for example re-routing your connectiong through a raspberry pi that sniffs packets, as well as your DNS.

I want them cheates gone still its annoying as a consumer to have to put up with cheaters they should risk Real Life fines, community service, even Hosue arrest for a month or something on a first offense to teach people not to do this crap, perhaps with future Real Life Augmented games.

Poebao

https://community.blackdesertonline.com/index.php?attachments/hacker1cens-jpg.154491/
https://community.blackdesertonline.com/index.php?attachments/hacker2cens-jpg.154493/