Lost Ark’s July update, Spells in Spades, brought the Arcanist and began a new round of progression events, including the Punika Powerpass. This week’s update added a delay in being able to access gold rewards when purchasing or accepting Powerpasses. Soon after that update was announced, Powerpasses were completely disabled and no one is currently able to accept or use one. Today, gifting was also temporarily disabled.
There is currently no explanation on why both of these have been temporarily disabled other than there were “issues” with both features. Anyone who tries to use a Powerpass while they are temporarily disabled will receive an error message, and the same goes for anyone that tries to claim one. There's no timeline yet either on when we can expect a fix for these issues or for the features to become available again.
“Gifting in Lost Ark has temporarily been disabled as we address a problem related to the use of the feature.
Powerpasses also remain disabled, and we’ll provide an update on the state of these features as soon as possible.”
While the team isn’t clarifying yet just what’s going on with these features, it’s probably not a far-fetched guess to consider whether this has anything to do with potential exploits or the ever-ongoing fight against botting. The addition of a three-day waiting period in order to access gold that you get from using a Powerpass was similar to other efforts earlier in release when the team removed some early gold rewards from the main questline and pushed them to later stages in order to combat bots and alts made for RMT.
It’s not a stretch to see something similar in the three-day waiting period, but gifting now also being temporarily disabled seems to make a stronger case for action along these lines. If accounts are unable to send items, this should make potential investigations easier to do, by limiting the reach of any potentially affected items.
For more, head over to Lost Ark.