Dear VALOFE

Mar. 26 2017

Dear VALOFE [North America],

It has been requested that something is to be said about your performance, how your Customer Service functions, and just how plain lousy your employees are at handling the platform that is Atlantica Online. Rather than referring to experienced players about what works as far as content, they host events & updates that are ineffective or not as valuable as the ones that Nexon implemented. The goal is to sustain a player-base and not to discourage them from playing; I’m beginning to understand why you’re nicknamed Nexon’s Graveyard.


First Topic: The Website [valofe.com]

  1. Customer Service:
    • When the customer starts a ticket: seems fine; information it wants is fairly straight-forward. What could possibly go wrong?
    • Whoever manages the system takes forever to respond; anywhere from a week to a month or longer.
    • In order to respond to a previous ticket, the customer has to make a new one, and then refer to the old ticket. Also stupid or unnecessarily redundant and just creates more work for the person handling the tickets.
  2. Forum [when it existed]:
    • Was infested with phishing attempts from Gold Sellers and other anonymous players who want to steal other players’ accounts.
    • Didn’t have an approval system to block spam or phishing links.
    • Didn’t have a Forum Moderator system to manage the issues of phishing / spam / and anything similar.
  3. Item Mall / Billing System:
    • No content preview for many IM Boxes, which I have some of the information [here].
    • Many of the Credit and Prepaid options for the Billing System either don’t work, or are flawed in some way. The Cherry Credits option, for instance, is an outdated payment option that doesn’t even have Atlantica Online as an option on it’s own site; which probably explains the reason as to why it doesn’t work.
  4. Login Vulnerability [sign.valofe.com] -> [at.valofe.com]:
    • This is mostly speculation, but it is possible that the communication between [sign.valofe.com] / [at.valofe.com] and/or other locations may be vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle attacks or Session Hijacking.
      1. The moment someone tries to login (sign.valofe.com), they may receive a message regarding the login information being sent over an unsecured connection (at.valofe.com) if they click “Continue”.
        • Doesn’t mean someone’s session / login information will be hijacked for sure, but there’s a chance of it.
      2. The image further below shows a warning that accepting an unsecured connection (at.valofe.com) could cause login information to be possibly leaked.
      3. Clicking “Cancel” keeps your login closed to only [sign.valofe.com] but you won’t be able to interact with any account purposes on the [at.valofe.com] side.
      4. This basically means GCoins can be purchased without risk to your account, but you will have to click “Continue” in order to proceed into [at.valofe.com] to interact with the Item Mall or Customer Service section.
        • NOTE: this is only possible if you get the warning message; if you don’t receive this message upon logging into [sign.valofe.com], it is possible that your browser automatically sent your information over the unsecured connection without warning.


Second Topic: Gold Sellers / Dupers & Abusers [in-game] / etc.

Your employees seem to not realize the impact of crippling decisions they’ve made. For example, their approach of banning the Gold Sellers, Abusers, & other [presumably innocent] players; instant bans without a thorough investigation of both parties.

An example of how Gold Sellers / Abusers operate:

  1. They buy a certain item or obtain it through legit means.
  2. Then, they illicitly duplicate (dupe) the item(s) through any sort of method since the client has many flaws that they can exploit; whether it be Vulcanus, the Warehouse in Rome, or the ×50 box opening method. It doesn’t matter how they do it; it’s not supposed to be possible and it’s wrong to take advantage of it.
  3. If they duped the Atlantis Platinum / Gold Coins [or whichever], then they have the ability to create an infinite supply of gold, which they then keep repeating through their duping method.
  4. They then buy several rare items in the market, afterwards reselling on their personal marketing websites that you can’t take down since they’re not directly affiliated with Atlantica Online.
  5. The Gold Seller’s accounts that bought all those items get banned and the items they bought are thrown into a void, never to return to the market. Supply & Demand 101: that’s not good.
  6. Now, there is an enormous lack of supply within the market, as the Gold Sellers have bought it all and/or been banned; players will resort to trying to find others to trade with in game for the rare equipment they are searching for. They’d rather not buy from the Gold Sellers with real money, because that would mean a ban for sure.
  7. But, guess what; it’s not just Gold Sellers that dupe. Normal players like to break rules too! So, what they do is they dupe “A” item, and trade “A” item with the legit player’s “B” item, and then they continue the process, duping repeatedly so that they can exchange for legit ones or more gold.
  8. A few days/weeks later, both players get banned. It’s completely understandable to ban the player that duped an item or cheated in some manner, but why ban the player that wasn’t aware of the cheating issue? Yes, it is easier to ban both players and revoke the ban for the innocent player afterwards, but it shouldn’t be the solution.

Third Topic: Billing Abusers

I’m wondering what was going through the minds of the people who released this post [below], because it’s ridiculous. You would ban players that have no knowledge, whatsoever that the Item Mall was abused somehow because of a Billing / Credit exploit? Yes, ban the players that abused it, but to ban the players that had no knowledge or interest of exploiting this?

[IMPORTANT] Massive Banning for Abusers

  • ANNOUNCE
  • Mar. 23 2017

Attention Atlantians!

The operations team has initiated a massive suspension among players who violated our ToS by abusing the billing and gifting feature.

The team assessed these players into categories:

• A : Billing Abuser : IDs that charged GCOINS improperly and bought items from the item mall
• B : Players who traded these items with A
• C : Billing abuser : IDs which received items as gifts from A
• D : Item traded with C

If you have been affected by this incident, kindly contact us by filing a ticket at our customer support page.

VALOFE Customer Support

Thank you for your continued support and have a great day!

ATLANTICA VALOFE OPERATIONS TEAM


Fourth Topic: Banning of innocent / uninvolved Players

This is GM Enryu’s conversation with a player:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/222692586341531649/295006219553210369/unknown.png

This isn’t solving the problem; rather, avoiding it and hoping players will comply.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/222692586341531649/295008228897587200/unknown.png

The appropriate action to take here is to:

  1. Delete the item that the player had purchased from Abuser [insert name].
  2. Replace said item with whatever the player originally exchanged it for.

Courtesy of another player:

He was appealing them to revoke the ban of his account.

These words stuck out when I was in a conversation with him:

Banning players that are innocent in situations like these discourages the rest of the player-base. This is not something that should’ve occurred and adds to the negativity of the game’s community and/or view of your company.

The efforts of GM Enryu, Freyjah, & Regaleus are appreciated; it is noted that they are taking an initiative to handle in-game issues. However,  recent actions have upset players, and as usual, people will focus on the negative aspects.

Sincerely,

ArcanicVoid

2 thoughts

  1. Thank you, Arc, for saying the things I wish I had the words to say, on behalf of us all, Atlantica Online’s players.
    I stared playing AO about 2 months after the game was launched.
    After Nexon bought AO, I took a 2 year break from playing it.
    In the beginning, I quit the game for good but after I heard that AO was changing hands again, that VALOFE was buying it, I decided to check it out and see if it was fun to play again.
    All this mess, the gold sellers, the gms’carelessness about the tickets
    sent by many of us, players, and the unfair banning of players that did nothing wrong is making AO not so fun anymore.
    That’s sad because when VALOFE bought AO, the common thought was that AO was going to “shine” again…
    Maybe after your words, they will think it over and worry and take better care of us, players and our complaints.
    Once again, thank you for standing up for us all.
    Perla Lewis (OliviaMae – Macedon)

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