LD Studio (7)
When Continue Capital first raised the suspicion that the odds had been manipulated, Baek Geumho hadn’t believed it.
There was no way LD Studio would scam its users or rig the game against them, or so he’d thought.
But once Empty Pool Research released its report, disbelief was no longer an option.
One in 3,333 trillion.
Only then did he understand.
Why the pulls had gone on for more than six minutes with nothing coming out, only to start spewing results one after another after that.
And who had taken the six Primordial Skills.
It had been Empty Pool Research, conducting its experiment on the Trogki server.
By then, the grand battle was already outside everyone’s concern.
What did the grand battle matter when the TK Guild, the Dark Guild, and the Dragon Guild had all become victims?
Still, he refused to let go of the thread of hope.
Baek Geumho turned on his stream and said, “People and companies can both make mistakes. Do you all go through life without ever making one? If they apologize sincerely and make restitution, isn’t that something we can forgive? LD Studio is probably putting countermeasures together as we speak. Right now, I think the right thing is to wait for LD Studio’s official statement instead of just hurling abuse and criticism.”
But the chat reaction was anything but good.
The Continue Capital private equity fund had recently become the hottest name on the market.
And if you were Korean, there was no way you hadn’t heard of it. It was the outfit that had brought down Hanjeong Group, one of the country’s ten largest conglomerates.
Empty Pool Research, meanwhile, was the activist hedge fund famous for getting every company it targeted delisted.
When those two funds joined hands and started beating on a target, LD Studio's stock price plunged day after day.
The company was flooded with protests from users and shareholders alike.
An emergency meeting was held at LD Studio.
“Public sentiment is far from normal.”
“There’s been a nonstop stream of inquiries on the boards about probability manipulation.”
“There are even petitions going to the Blue House.”
Normally, they would have just made a bit of noise and waited for the outrage to burn itself out.
A campfire dies on its own once it’s burned through the right amount of fuel. But this time it was a forest fire. One wrong move, and the blaze could swallow the house whole.
Jin Taekyeong clicked his tongue inwardly.
Why on earth are they targeting our company?
In financial markets, the power of private equity had grown too large to ignore.
But LD Studio wasn’t a chaebol group; it was just a game company. And because the founders still held such a solid block of shares, there had never been any danger of a takeover attempt.
So even while watching what had happened to Hanjeong Group, they had simply assumed it was someone else’s problem. They had never dreamed they’d be attacked over probability manipulation.
I never thought they’d prepare this thoroughly.
What kind of insane bastards would spend more than ten billion won just to prove probability manipulation?
What was more, they had timed the experiment to coincide with the first five minutes after launch, clearly aware that nothing would come out during that window.
In truth, similar incidents had happened several times before, so aiming for that timing wasn’t all that surprising.
But no one knew what other evidence they might have or what form the attack would take. Without knowing what cards the other side was holding, it was difficult to decide how hard to push back.
The same thought crossed everyone in the room.
We should have admitted to it from the start!
If they had brushed it off the moment the suspicion surfaced with some half-baked excuse like “there was an error in the posted figures” and then handed out compensation, they could have absorbed the damage and moved on.
But they had already gone on record saying there had absolutely been no manipulation. Because of that, the numbers they had casually posted had become the company’s officially acknowledged odds.
Jin Taekyeong asked, “What happens if we admit it?”
Hong Nak-hyeon, the director in charge of Brotherhood M, answered, “We’d have to roll back every server to before the Primordial Skill draws. And we’d need to refund every skill pack that was purchased.”
It stung to have to spit back money they had already swallowed, but that much could be endured.
The bigger problem was elsewhere.
“The same probability manipulation issue is now surfacing in every other random box too. Thousands of people are requesting users’ pull histories, and streamers are reuploading the live broadcasts of their gacha sessions.”
For years, LD Studio had supported streamers to promote its games.
The company had paid them anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of won in advertising fees for Brotherhood M gacha streams.
The streamers used that money to make gacha content, which in turn pushed their viewers to roll as well.
After all, once payment fees were deducted and the money flowed back to the company anyway, there had never been much burden on LD Studio.
Ironically, the very videos they had created that way were now being used as evidence of manipulation.
Jin Taekyeong looked at Executive Director Park Hyunjong and asked, “What do you think, Director Park?”
He was the one overseeing the Brotherhood series.
He had also ordered the initial media response.
“No matter what happens, we cannot admit to manipulation.”
What if users filed a class-action suit?
What if they demanded that every previous record be made public?
“Once we open the logs even once, they’ll demand that we release all the records before that too. In the worst case, we could end up having to repay everything tied to probability-based items we’ve sold up to now.”
If that actually happened, the company could go under.
Once they had denied it, there was no choice now except to hold the line to the end.
“The users don’t want the game to die either. They’ve invested too much money and time into it.”
The people most furious right now were, naturally, the ones who had spent the most money. If the game collapsed, they would suffer the biggest losses too.
“Public sentiment is going to cool off quickly anyway. The angrier people are, the faster they burn out. If we need to clean things up, we should do it later.”
At that, everyone nodded in agreement.
In fact, whenever trouble had come up, LD Studio had always handled it that way, and the method had worked well enough.
Jin Taekyeong nodded. “That would probably be best. Make sure the internal controls are tight, and don’t let useless talk get out.”
When Continue Capital first brought up the suspicion of probability manipulation, LD Studio had pushed back hard, insisting it was nothing more than an unfounded rumor.
But the moment Empty Pool Research presented evidence, they went silent.
There was still no direct proof that the company had manipulated the odds. Even so, anyone who still believed there had been no rigging was a fool.
Once manipulation was effectively confirmed, LD Studio's stock began to fall straight off a cliff.
By then, the price had dropped to 600,000 won, nearly halved from its peak.
But the stock price wasn’t the only problem.
The image of Brotherhood M had sunk all the way to the bottom, and that showed up as a decline in active users.
Before this, when people talked about Brotherhood M players, the image had been “building owners,” “silver-spoon kids,” “rich people,” and “well-off freeloaders.” But after this scandal, the image had changed to “sucker,” “moron,” “idiot,” and “LD’s slave.”
It had reached the point where no one could even say, in public and without embarrassment, that they played Brotherhood M.
As a result, ordinary users and low-spending players left in a flood. Not only did the server queues disappear, but item values also crashed because the user base was shrinking.
The reason people were willing to spend huge amounts of money pulling items was that they believed the expense was worth it.
Brotherhood M was famous for preserving item value well.
An item pulled with 100 million won was still worth 20 to 30 million. A character built by spending 10 billion won was still worth 2 to 3 billion.
But the Dragon-Slaying Sword, which had cost as much as 100 million won just before, now couldn’t find a buyer even at 3 million.
With the expensive items they had pulled and the characters they had spent fortunes building suddenly reduced to trash prices, users were furious all over again.
Still, LD Studio remained silent.
It looked as if they were simply hoping the storm would pass on its own. But that was only what they wanted.
(Excerpt) LD Studio stated that “log records are a company trade secret. If they are disclosed, the company’s core interests will be harmed, leading to damage for customers and shareholders.”
In response, Lockhart countered as follows:
“The odds were already public, and LD Studio has repeatedly said there was nothing abnormal. I don’t see how proving that the publicly disclosed odds were accurate could possibly be a trade secret, or how it could somehow lead to harm for customers and shareholders.”
He also sent an open letter urging Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service and the stock exchange to take action.
“The Korean Financial Supervisory Service has repeatedly requested that we submit materials in order to uncover the illegal conduct of short sellers. The core issue of this illegal conduct is ultimately whether actual probability manipulation took place, and the easiest way to verify that is to release the log records. If LD Studio simply releases the logs proving that there was no manipulation, I will pay the company compensation equal to its market capitalization.”
Even after the stock had already crashed, LD Studio's market cap still stood at 18 trillion won.
Continue Capital was effectively betting 18 trillion won that its claim was right.
Just by releasing the log records proving there had been no probability manipulation, they could stop any further stock decline and collect 18 trillion won.
At that point, it was strange that they weren’t releasing the logs.
So why weren’t they?
There was no need to spell it out. Everyone already knew the answer.
The situation had snowballed far beyond control.
The stock, which had once been at 1.15 million won, kept plunging until it had reached 200,000 won. In just a few days, it had returned to the price it had been six years ago.
The Blue House petition had crossed 200,000 signatures, and now the government itself had to issue an official response.
As public anger boiled over, politicians began bringing up the issue too, and there were even murmurs that the National Assembly should hold a hearing.
In the end, LD Studio, just as it had when the odds were first disclosed, was forced to issue a statement under pressure.
We apologize to our users for any misunderstanding caused by errors in the way the odds were presented.
However, we would like to clearly state that the probability manipulation alleged by some parties is nothing more than speculation. The random boxes in Brotherhood M use variable probabilities rather than fixed probabilities.
For the premium skill pack currently under discussion, the chance of drawing a Primordial Skill is 1.25 percent.
However, depending on the various conditions within each server, the timing, and the progress of the game, the probability may temporarily fall or rise.
Because the system is structured so that the final average reaches 1.25 percent, the average probability is indeed 1.25 percent.
That said, as we failed to properly indicate this and caused confusion among our customers, we are currently discussing countermeasures and compensation.
We ask for your continued love and support for Brotherhood M.
When Brotherhood M users saw that notice, they had to think hard just to decode it.
What the hell is this supposed to mean?
Am I the only one who misunderstood what probability means?
So the probability isn’t fixed, but changes all the time?
So if the odds are 1 percent when I pull, and 9 percent when someone else pulls, then the final probability is 5 percent?
Ah, I see! Right after the Primordial Skills launched, they set the probability to 0 percent and then later bumped it up to 2.5 percent when nobody was pulling, and that made the average 1.25 percent. Wow, wow—how could I have cursed them without knowing that?
I almost made a huge mistake!
After reading LD Studio's statement several times over, Baek Geumho finally exploded.
“Hey, you motherfuckers! That’s just probability manipulation!!”