http://mulegend.webzen.com/en/News/Notice/patch-notes-21-11-2017-1430414
This closure is on top of the temporary disabling of player to player trading and sending of items via mail as part of their effort in trying to deal with cleaning up the bots/exploiters. It bears repeating again that taking action against those accounts are one thing. The bigger question is mitigating it after that. The ability to easily exploit the game via client side hacking is what needs to be addressed.
I again have to bring up the fact that it was never addressed on the Korean servers in the 8+ months the game has been live there speaks volumes. As I also noted before, it’s easy to hide behind the “open beta” moniker but the exploit is nothing new. In the mean time, players Gold or Platinum subscriptions are ticking down. Talking about compensation at this time also doesn’t make much sense until they come up with solutions that deal with the actual .
Disabling the auction house is unfortunately going to take a toll on the already waning patience of the player base. I wrote awhile back that “I didn’t get Webzen“; watching Webzen Dublin (and in some respects the Korean development team) struggling to deal with an issue (botting and exploits) that is common to most online games, reveals their inexperience in managing a game of this size. It’s in a completely different league from MU Online and the only other MMO’s they managed similar to this, were ASTA and ELOA which they ended up shutting both down. ASTA was something they tried to bring over to the west after it had already shutdown in Korea.
The wheels are really coming off this one fast and they literally killed cash flow for themselves by disabling the auction house.
