Greetings, Adventurers.
As we previously touched upon in the announcement regarding the temporary suspension of the Central Market on Wednesday, June 2, we would like to share with you the latest information regarding our direction for the investigation and improvement of the Central Market to combat improper trades.
Before we go into the details, we want to let you know that you are again able to buy and sell Main/Awakening/Sub Weapons that are valued at 10 billion silver or higher on the Central Market after today’s maintenance. Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience caused by this temporary measure.
Furthermore, today’s maintenance brought with it improvements to the Central Market. The details regarding these improvements are as follows:
▣ Details Regarding the Central Market Update
● Changed the standard for how prices change for weapons of the same group in the Central Market as follows:
- We’ve updated the Central Market for prices to vary according to the average sale prices for transactions of similar weapon items. For example, the sale prices of PEN: Blackstar Longsword and PEN (V): Blackstar Longbow will now influence each other, and the prices will change accordingly.
● There will now be a 15-minute delay before an item that is above a certain price is purchasable when listed for sale on the Central Market.
- A notification message will be displayed to all Adventurers to alert everyone that an item of a certain price has been listed and is awaiting the delay before it can be purchased.
- If an item you have pre-ordered is listed and is awaiting the delay before it can be purchased, it will appear in a UI at the bottom-right of the game screen for you to be able to view the item name and listing time.
We believe this update will grant all Adventurers a fairer opportunity to be able to buy difficult-to-purchase items such as the PEN(V): Blackstar items. We also expect this update to help prevent cases where so-called, “empty silver accounts,” are used to manipulate pre-orders to facilitate a transaction to a specific person.
Please refer to the June 8 (Tue) Update Details for more detail about these improvements.
Additionally, we’re currently reviewing the transaction records of important items such as PEN (V): Blackstar items. As this isn’t simply an investigation into the sale/purchase records of items through the Central Market, but a comprehensive review of all the game data before and after the transaction, we ask for your understanding as these investigations are expected to take some time.
We will share with you the results once we complete our in-depth investigations, and we will make sure to take the appropriate actions against the accounts that are confirmed to been involved with improper transactions in accordance with our Operational Policy. We are also investigating other possible improper transactions using the Central Market, which includes the use of real money to trade in-game items.
Unfortunately, there is no denying the fact that it is not easy to verify the evidence of real money transactions through in-game data. Since the majority of real money transactions involve communities outside of our game, there is a real possibility of manipulation for any outside evidence that exists, and there is also difficultly in verifying the personal identity of those involved. All this resulting in circumstances that make it incredibly difficult for us to impose account penalties appropriately.
To try to get around these limitations, we always recommended our secondary security services such as OTP and PC Registration; unfortunately, only a few Adventurers are actively using these services. As such, we are actively considering other ways to prevent real money transactions as best as we can, and we are currently working to develop a new feature as quickly as possible that will require you to verify your identity whenever you try to sell an item above a certain price as.
In order to ensure a fair gameplay environment for all our Adventurers, we will do our best to investigate any abnormal/improper gameplay and continue to look into what can be improved beyond what was updated above.
Thank you for your support and understanding.