Crisis Into Opportunity (1)
While Thomas Motors was causing chaos in the United States, a Korean game company was in turmoil for a very different reason.
LD Studio had released a PC MMORPG called Fantasia Tales a few months earlier. The return of a major PC online game after so long sent players into a frenzy.
Fantasia Tales got off to a strong start and seemed to be cruising smoothly.
Then something happened.
A paladin-class player using the ID Moka bought a Shining Sword from a user named BronzeMan for 30 million won.
He had obtained one of the strongest weapons on the server, and he was practically jumping for joy.
But that joy did not last long.
Moka soon sensed that something was off.
BronzeMan was selling another Shining Sword somewhere else.
How the hell was that possible?
To craft a Shining Sword, you needed a variety of materials.
The hardest one to get was a Sand Pearl, which dropped only when you defeated a boss monster called Sandrock.
Competition was fierce among players trying to kill this boss, which respawned once every two weeks. It was such a powerful boss that a raid required twenty people.
And even if you went to all that trouble and took down Sandrock, the Sand Pearl still did not always drop.
So where on earth had he gotten enough Sand Pearls to make two Shining Swords?
Moka suspected that the item had been duplicated through hacking or a bug.
Hackers and bugs wrecked a game’s systems, so every game company dealt with them harshly.
If he handled this wrong, he could end up getting his own account permanently suspended or deleted for buying a duplicated item.
Moka organized everything and posted an inquiry on the official forum.
But the reply he got was that there was no problem, and the post he had written was immediately deleted. He submitted another inquiry, and that one was deleted too.
Sensing something was seriously wrong, Moka demanded a refund from BronzeMan. But BronzeMan refused, saying there was nothing wrong with the item.
The two of them started trading insults, and before long BronzeMan had not only mocked Moka, but even killed his character.
Furious, Moka decided to dig into BronzeMan’s background.
In the process, he discovered that BronzeMan’s account had only been created twenty days earlier, and that in that short time he had sold a large number of expensive items.
Moka began to suspect that BronzeMan was actually an employee of the company.
At that point, BronzeMan immediately deleted the account and vanished.
Convinced now, Moka reported the matter to the game company.
But the company’s response was unexpected.
If this got out, it would clearly pour cold water on the game’s success. At a time when word of mouth should have been carrying it further up the charts, a huge scandal had blown up instead.
Worried about the damage, the company contacted the user privately and tried to bury the incident with compensation.
That only made Moka even angrier.
“You think I’m doing this over some stupid item?”
He gathered everything that had happened so far and posted it to the official forum, the Fantasia Tales forum, the gallery, and the café.
Once the story broke, the users, as expected, went crazy.
Honestly, it was not unheard of for operators to cause trouble in other games too. But this was beyond common sense.
Not only had they duplicated items and sold them on their own, they had even PK’d the user who exposed them.
It was the first scandal of its kind.
The incident spread across the entire internet under names like the BronzeMan Gate and the Dongnam fiasco, and the user exodus began piling up along with news coverage.
Fantasia Tales: Operator duplicates items and pockets illicit profits
Trust in the game shaken by abuse of operator authority
LD Studio knew about the problem but kept quiet
Company belatedly moves to discipline the employee involved
The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family should be given sweeping authority to regulate the game industry...
Ministry of Gender Equality and Family: This incident is also tied to game addiction. The shutdown law should be expanded even further...
Minister Jin Mi-sun of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family insists that the only solution is to collect a special fund from game companies!
Once the scandal had grown too large to bury any longer, the company hurriedly posted an apology, disciplined the operator involved, and filed criminal charges.
But the boiling public anger did not cool so easily, so they rushed out compensation for the players: 200,000 gold and 300 enhancement stones.
That, however, created a whole new problem.
Two hundred thousand gold and 300 enhancement stones were resources that a beginner player would have to spend a month hunting to earn. When the company handed them out to everyone, the value of the currency crashed.
Even worse, the compensation could be transferred between players.
In other words, you could create a bunch of alternate characters and move the compensation onto your main account.
They belatedly tried to block transfers of the compensation items, but by then a large number of players had already done exactly that. The gap it created between them and new players widened dramatically, becoming a kind of barrier to entry.
When the company said it would roll back the transferred compensation, the users revolted all over again.
At that point, the operations team finally shoved the mess back onto the development team. In the end, it was the developers who had to stay up all night finding the problems and tearing the system apart to fix them.
Development Team 3 had to work on the system all day without even being able to leave work.
Kang Seon-woo let out a long sigh.
I’d gone around bragging everywhere that this game was going to be a hit.
He had a grand dream.
First, he would make Fantasia Tales a massive success and build a name for himself as a developer. Then he would secure investment and create a game company of his own.
But it looked like things were already falling apart from the start.
What was the point of killing myself to make a game if, at launch, they were just going to plaster it with every kind of monetization and run the operations like complete idiots?
An MMORPG with a huge number of simultaneous users was practically its own world.
But once people started tampering with that world however they pleased, the balance went to hell.
Because they had dumped massive amounts of currency into the game as so-called compensation, brutal inflation hit and the economy system was, for all practical purposes, destroyed.
For hours now, they had been making one system adjustment after another, and just then someone held out a cup of coffee beside him.
She had smooth, clean skin and long straight hair tied back. Dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, she looked simple and unpretentious.
“You’ll end up with a hunched neck if you keep that up. Take a break for a minute.”
“Yeah.”
At Cha Su-yeon’s words, Kang Seon-woo finally lifted the head he had been bowing so long and straightened his back.
Even though they were both on Development Team 3, she worked in design. She did not really have much to do, but she had stayed late with the others to help wherever she could.
“Oh! What happened to the accomplice? Was it really Geon-hwi?”
“That seems to be the case. It looks like he and Kim Dongnam from the operations team are trying to pin the blame on each other.”
At first they had thought the operator acted alone, but as the investigation continued, an accomplice had emerged.
That accomplice was management team manager Park Geon-hwi.
According to Kim Dongnam, Park Geon-hwi had proposed the scheme first and even kindly explained how to do it.
The profits the two of them made from selling the items came to a staggering 380 million won, which they had split evenly between them.
After hearing the story, Kang Seon-woo said in disbelief,
“I can kind of understand Kim Dongnam, but Park Geon-hwi is Executive Director Park Hyunjong’s son.”
“Right.”
“He comes from a rich family, so why in the world did he do something like this?”
“Apparently it was because of stocks. He invested that money back into the market too.”
Before coming to LD Studio, Park Geon-hwi had worked at Future Investment Securities.
He had been known for making quite a bit of money through stocks until he put everything he had into a rigged stock called KNC International and lost all of it.
He even grabbed me by the collar back then.
Well, he had apologized later.
Thinking back on it, Kang Seon-woo said,
“So did he make money this time?”
Cha Su-yeon shook her head.
“No. He put it into a company called Thomas Motors and lost everything.”
“Thomas Motors? What kind of company is that?”
“They say it’s a hydrogen car company in the U.S. It was actually doing pretty well, but a few days ago it suddenly crashed ninety percent.”
At that, Kang Seon-woo froze.
“...What?”
What kind of stock plunges ninety percent like that?
Even stranger than that was this one thing...
“No, seriously, how do you manage to touch nothing but stocks that collapse like this?”
Cha Su-yeon nodded as if she agreed completely.
“Seriously. It feels harder to pick a stock that will lose ninety percent than one that will go up.”
At this point, you almost had to call it talent.
“Was it a pump-and-dump?”
“Not exactly, but apparently all the technologies they had been publicizing were fake. Some private equity fund called Continue Capital exposed them, I heard. I guess stocks really aren’t something just anybody can do.”
“Hmm.”
As he listened, a friend who traded stocks far too intensely suddenly came to mind.
Come to think of it, was that bastard doing all right in America? He hadn’t blown everything and gotten stuck there, had he?
Heo Min-woong had returned to Korea.
The moment he landed at Incheon Airport, he headed straight for the Hwaan Group headquarters. Waiting there were Chairman Heo Seong-hun, along with the executives of Hwaan Energy and Hwaan Solutions, all gathered in one place.
Heo Min-woong barely had time to catch his breath before taking his seat.
As soon as the meeting began, the executives of Hwaan Solutions started voicing their complaints one after another. Why had he gone and broken the agreement and sold the shares without consulting anyone beforehand?
Heo Min-woong explained the situation calmly.
“As I already told you, that’s exactly what happened. I met with CEO Bread Button and listened to what he had to say, and something felt off. So I postponed the signing ceremony until after the event and looked into it on my own. In the middle of that, I saw the report on Continue Capital that WST had released, realized how serious the situation was, and immediately contacted President Bang Su-hwan to tell him it would be better to sell our stake.”
In truth, Han Miru handed me the materials. I barely investigated anything myself.
Hwaan Energy President Bang Su-hwan nodded as if to say Heo Min-woong’s account was correct.
Then Hwaan Solutions President Im Taek-ju spoke up.
“The hydrogen energy agreement involves not only Hwaan Energy but Hwaan Solutions as well. Shouldn’t we have discussed the decision together before moving ahead with the sale?”
Heo Min-woong shook his head.
“When I suggested the sale, we only had suspicions. There was nothing certain yet. But if we had waited until after the agreement was announced, selling the stake would have been impossible, so I moved quickly.”