Heroes of Arkesia,

Aegir arrives in the second major October update. Downtime will begin on October 23 at 2am PT (9am UTC) and is expected to last 6 hours.

The new 2-gate Kazeros Raid will require you to face off against dangerous threats, both familiar and new. The rotting King of the Dead, Akkan, will unleash his horrifying attacks, even calling forth the tormented soul of the fallen Beast Legion Commander Valtan. Joining this unholy alliance, Aegir arrives, raining down a devastating barrage to crush any resistance to Akkan's plague.

If you're able to defeat Akkan, you'll need to challenge Aegir within the Giant's body — no easy feat. Entering Chapter 1: Earth-Shattering Hellfire will require Item Level 1660 for Normal Mode and 1680 for Hard Mode. With Hyper Awakenings, Hyper Awakening Skills, and Allied Forces Skills in the raimd you have the tools to be successful, but it’s up to you and your raid group to put the pieces together and achieve victory. The Kazeros Raid against Aegir is an 8-player raid.

Victorious players can will earn Hellfire Keystones, the material to craft T4 Ancient Gear, T4 Accessories (Relic from Normal Mode, Ancient from Hard Mode), Aegir's Abyssal Trail Effect Chest (Hard exclusive), Relic Engravings, T4 honing materials, Special Honing: Circulated Leapstone, and more!


Many more updates also arrive, with a large balance update, new cosmetics and much more. Find the full release notes on our Aegir's Arrival Release Notes page[www.playlostark.com].

Heroes of Arkesia,

A bug was identified with Ignite reward chests, which some players were able to repeatedly exploit. Our team has been investigating the extent of the issue, and wanted to communicate our decision on the penalty for those who abused the exploit. As a reminder, a key tenet of the Amazon Games Code of Conduct is to “Play Fair”. We reserve the right to determine what constitutes unfair play and to take corrective action we deem appropriate, and the abuse of this exploit will have corrective action taken, with suspensions and bans already sent out.

Slightly over 2,300 players received rewards chests from the Ignite Stronghold reward issue. Within this group, over 1,200 did not open any of the reward chests. The group that did not open any reward chests will not have any action taken against their accounts apart from removing the unopened chests from their inventory. For the remaining 1,000 players who opened the reward chests, the severity of the penalty will directly correspond to the level of bug exploitation. At a base level, all items will be removed and skill tree levels will be rolled back. For items that were used and cannot be removed, players may have gold (or the gold value of the used items) deducted from their balance, or be sent into the negatives corresponding to the severity of the abuse. This policy will apply to all materials, including processed chaos stones and combined honing materials. Along with the item withdrawals, players will be receiving suspensions and bans matching their level of exploit.

The first group are players who may have mistakenly encountered the issue and did not repeatedly abuse the bug. Players who opened 1 or 2 chests will have any items withdrawn and have not been suspended/banned at this time. Our team is investigating if we can remove the items for this group during maintenance. If the item removal process is gauged to take longer than the maintenance period, this group of players will receive a short suspension to give our team the time needed to remove the items. Spending these items in the meantime will result in further action, such as gold removal.

Players who continually exploited the issue and opened multiple reward chests will have more severe action taken, corresponding to their level of exploit.

• Players that opened 3 - 7 chests will receive a two-week suspension.
  
• Players that opened 8 - 14 chests will receive a 1-month suspension.
  
• Players that opened 15+ chests will receive a notice that they have received a 30-day suspension and are pending further review. This group will have various levels of action taken, up to permanent bans from the game.

To stop exploitation of the main reward issue and other bugs, access to strongholds was disabled. For players who have a character stuck in a stronghold, and need access to that character immediately, please submit a customer support ticket. Otherwise, the issue will be resolved during maintenance for the October 23 update. We will also re-enable the use of the Ignite reward chests at this time for players on Ignite Servers.



Based on our policies and investigation, we believe this is the best course of action. We know many players were concerned about the outcome, and we wanted to be clear with our approach. In the future, if you encounter an issue you believe is an exploit or unintended issue, do not engage with the issue (no matter how tempting it may seem) and report it to our teams. We appreciate those who reported the issue, along with your patience while members our team investigated and blocked access to certain in-game systems. While this issue gained high visibility in the community, we hope this policy is clear and allows us to move forward together. We are always open to community feedback, and welcome you to engage in the conversation on our official channels.

There are still key moments coming to Arkesia this week, with Aegir’s arrival and Ignite Server transfers arriving. Those aren’t the only things arriving in the update— stay tuned for the full release notes on Tuesday. In the meantime, we’ll see you in Arkesia.