Naver Game used Nexon Maple Story, which fell into suspicion of manipulation of probability-type items, in Lost Arc advertisement.
On the 5th, Naver Game posted an advertisement for a know-how sharing event for beginners of Lost Arc, which the company distributes (publishes) with Smilegate. In this advertisement, a Maple Story user was referred to as a refugee, and an advertisement was posted on the Lost Arc Naver Game page, saying,’Maple refugees, don’t worry.
Refugees have been used among game users as a term referring to users who quit their flagship games and cannot find a game to play since the 2010s. However, Naver Game officially used this word in advertisements, aiming at Maple Story, which is suffering from controversy over probability-type items. Since the dictionary meaning of refugee refers to a person in trouble due to war or disaster, the advertisement was viewed as a meaning of mocking Nexon to netizens. Naver Game has urgently modified the expression to be a new adventurer, but the original text is circulating through the Internet community.
It seems that the reason Naver Game published these advertisements arbitrarily was because Lost Arc benefited from the problem of probability-type items in Maple Story. Lost Arc was selected as a substitute for Maple Story users after a suspicion of the probability of an additional option grant item was raised last month for Maple Story. According to Gametrix, a game research service, it beat MapleStory (currently 8th) and ranked 6th (last month 9th) on the 3rd, and the average connection queue of Lost Arc reached 10,000 people. The influx of new users surged.
A Smilegate official said, “The Lost Arc serviced by Naver Game is a page operated by Naver independently, and the event that is problematic was also conducted without any consultation with Smilegate and Smilegate RPG.” And we will try to prevent similar problems from occurring through prior consultation and various methods in the future.”
On the other hand, Smilegate thanked all users as much as 3,000 Mokoko (a kind of goods) through a special support event for new and returning users in the new spring. Are paying.
Reporter Kwon Chan-wook, Consumer Economic Daily