A series of Lost Ark maintenance checks scheduled for November 14 have ended in disaster, as Smilegate has had to extend the MMORPG‘s downtime in order to combat an issue with an in-game mailer and its associated rewards.
This may come as a disappointment to anyone who checked their mailbox this morning, as the rewards enclosed in the letter have been distributed accidentally. Yes friends, you have to give them back, unfortunate as it is.
Discussing the issue on the official Lost Ark forums, a community manager known as ‘Sandovall’ writes “today, Lost Ark characters received an in-game mail about the upcoming changes to the Skill Tree Transfer System titled ‘Notice: Skill Trees.’ This mail included rewards that weren’t intended to be sent along this message.
“Starting at 5am PST / 8am EST / 1pm GMT / 2pm CET we’ll perform an unscheduled maintenance and the Lost Ark servers will be unavailable for 120 minutes,” they continue. “During this maintenance unclaimed mails titled ‘Notice: Skill Trees’ will be removed from characters mailboxes, and unused items claimed from these emails will be also removed. Pheons claimed from these emails will be deducted as well.”
As you can imagine, players aren’t exactly pleased that rewards are being removed – especially because the enclosed goodies apparently don’t cost all that much.
“I’m just gonna say it. This is pathetic,” comments one angry fan. “Not for a minute did I think ‘hey this is strange, feels like too many free things.’ But no, it was too many. Players need to spend their real money to get that amount of pheons right?
“And it’s not only that!” they continue. “People with enough free time to claim these mails (or who already did), still have enough time to buy some accessories before having their pheons deducted. You won’t give negative pheons obviously. So on top of taking away a nice thing, you are also benefitting people who abuse early.”
A second response reads “golden opportunity to build good will and loyalty for a nominal freebie and capitalize from a mistake. Nope!” with a third player writing “it’s almost as if they want to be disliked…”
“Seriously? Taking away peons because it is too much?” reads another thread. “Let’s get to the point. This is trash.” And these two threads are just two of many.
As a player, receiving an accidental reward only to have it taken away is genuinely harrowing. It does little to reinforce that the devs actually care about their community, while making players feel like they’ve lost something for no reason. It feels punishing, and that’s not what players want in a game. Hopefully Smilegate will issue some form of compensation, but their reputation appears to have taken a hit as a result of this decision.
Despite this, there’s a lot of things to get excited about in Arkesia. You can scour the land for Lost Ark Mokoko Seeds, and line your pockets by reading up on how to get Lost Ark gold – maybe it’ll take the sting out a little.