MMORPG Unbans Players After ‘Underwear Scandal’ – Is It Due To Poor Player Counts?

In the MMORPG ArcheAge, after the change of publisher, there was an exploit with the underwear in the game. Anyone who took advantage of this was permanently banned. But now Kakao Games has decided to reverse these permanent bans after a few months. It is speculated that this is related to the weak player counts.

What was that exploit? With the exploit, which Kakao Games itself dubs “Panty Gate”, it was possible to quickly upgrade the character’s underwear to the maximum level using a bonus gift code.

Some players created additional accounts with which the code was also redeemed. There was an economic crash.

Kakao Games – the company that took over ArcheAge’s publishing at the end of 2021 – responded with a permanent ban on player accounts and their newly created accounts. But that ban has now been lifted.

It was a clear exploit, but you don’t see it that closely anymore

What exactly does Kakao Games say? In a statement, they said they found the permanent bans too hard, especially when you look at ArcheAge’s long history. Since all the gold and underwear that was generated has now been removed from the game, it was decided to lift the bans.

One of the first exploits during the reboot, known as “Panty Gate,” resulted in the permanent suspension of many accounts. While we were aware that this was mechanic exploitation and the steps involved in the process were obviously exploits, we reviewed the stance we took during this incident to determine if our actions were correct and were in the best interest of the ArcheAge community.

via ArcheAge

Obviously the actions were not in the interest of the community. Exactly what that means is not explained. However, some players have a guess.

Incidentally, there will be no compensation for the suspended players. The additional accounts created to take advantage of the exploit also remain blocked.

Are the weak player counts a reason for the unlock?

What is the interest of the community? In order for an MMORPG to be fun, it primarily needs good players. But exactly those are hard to find in ArcheAge. A lot of things currently look like the MMORPG is slowly dying out:

• On Steam, 101 players have been playing ArcheAge at the same time in the past 24 hours. The record is 6,509 players in 2014 (via SteamDB).
• ArcheAge Unchained even only played 798 players at the same time in the peak. The highest number here is 7,242 players in 2019 – the release year of the offshoot.
• In addition, there is almost no exchange about the MMORPGs. That reddit by ArcheAge only had 3 new threads in the last 7 days. There are several posts on the home page asking which servers still have players on or if ArcheAge 2022 is completely dead.
• There hasn’t been a forum since the switch to Kakao Games either, but there is a Discord server instead. There is at least a little exchange with the CMs from Kakao Games.

The mood is bad: Recently, Kakao Games and the developer XL Games have repeatedly upset the players because bugs and exploits sometimes persisted for weeks or months, there were unauthorized bans or the server mergers took too long.

The announcement of ArcheWorld, the ArcheAge NFT game, was not well received either. Many would like Trion Games and even Gamigo back as publishers.

That’s why some suspect Kakao Games is breaking the bans to win back a few hardcore players and strengthen the community. However, the future for ArcheAge seems difficult.

Many hope that at some point Classic servers will come that will bring the game back to the release state. However, there are currently no signs of this.

Another hope is ArcheAge 2, although there hasn’t been an update for a long time:

New MMORPG ArcheAge 2 relies on Unreal Engine 5 and new races