The Black Desert Online Banwave Drama In A Nutshell

Last week, Kakao Games brought the mighty banhammer down on cheaters and hackers infesting the new Black Desert Online Battle Royale game mode- Shadow Arena. Kakao perma-banned nearly 900 accounts last Wednesday as part of their commitment to keeping the game clean. Unfortunately, a number of innocent accounts were caught up in the banning spree. The devs quickly overturned false positive bans last Friday although a large number of supposedly innocent players still remain banned.

On Saturday, Kakao proceeded to unban more wrongfully flagged players only to ban more than 370 more accounts on the same day. The studio explains the reasons for the high number of false positives in a forum post over the weekend:

“With our recent attempts to combat the prevalent use of third party software, we attempted to strengthen our criteria to provide a better environment for our adventurers. However, many accounts were incorrectly banned due to an error in the data. We unbanned the ones we initially verified on 28th March and have been reviewing the full data since then. [. . .] We understand that our mistake has caused high amounts of stress and we sincerely apologise for the error. We promise to improve our internal procedures to prevent such issues. Compensation to all wrongly affected adventurers will be sent shortly, and again, we are deeply sorry for the confusion and inconvenience that we have caused.”

As of today, players are still claiming that they were wrongfully banned. Whether we see another round of unbanning and banning still remains to be seen. We’ll keep you posted as more of the banwave drama unfolds. Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below.