Lost Ark's Pheon Kerfluffle Continues: Now You'll Get To Keep SOME Of Them, But Some Players Could Owe Pheons

Lost Ark players got a bit of news this morning regarding the accidental Pheon distribution issue this morning. Whether that’s good or bad news is best left up to the player to decide, but it is news – and a resolution of sorts.

For those who may have missed the entire thing, news broke earlier this week that Amazon was taking back the currency known as Pheons that they’d distributed among players as part of an in-game email promoting some of the new system changes. The idea was to get the word out to players in every way possible. The problem was that apparently doing it via in-game mail requires an item to be attached.

For some reason, someone made the decision to attach 10 Pheons in the message. These messages were then distributed to every character, rather than every account. That resulted in players being able to obtain quite a few Pheons, particularly if they created new characters just to get the email and then deleted them.

Obviously, there are a few things wrong there from top to bottom. Why the company set the system up so that even THEY can’t send out a message via in-game email without attaching an item first comes into question. And even if that’s the case, why attach a game currency? Surely there’s some other, less-valuable item they could have attached? The biggest issue, however, is that Amazon decided to remove the Pheons, resulting in upsetting players.

Today, the company published a post on the forums explaining exactly what happened, how the whole thing was being exploited, and a somewhat less-extreme solution. Rather than taking back all the Pheons, they’ll be removing them and then distributing 30 total Pheons to each player. The intention is to ensure fairness while not punishing anyone. The downside is that if players already spent more than 30 Pheons received in these in-game mails, they’ll likely have a negative Pheon balance. They estimate that to account for about 5.8 percent of the player base. Everyone else should actually see an increase in their balance. So, expect to hear some people complaining for a bit.

In addition to adjusting the balance, Amazon has decided to provide players with a compensation pack. This will include 3 days of Crystalline Aura, two Character Bound Hope Amulets, and a new animal skin gift package.