Late last month, players of Nexon’s tactical schoolgirl gacha fest Blue Archive were horrified to discover that their universe had undergone Koyukification. For context, Kurosaki Koyuki is one of Blue Archive’s recruitable characters, a twin-tailed pinkhead known for her immense natural code-breaking skills, her passion for gambling, and her mischievous persona.
On August 31st, Blue Archivists logged onto discover that Koyuki had multiplied like a virus. Cafes and arcades teemed with duplicates of the character. Her snaggle-toothed rictus filled the game’s recruitment banners. The very information page – once a source of guidance and solace to so many – had been edited to read “nihahaha”, in mimicry of the character’s giggle.
It was kind of like this scene from Being John Malkovich, if John Malkovich had been a freakazoid 15-year-old piker armed with a light machinegun. And also, the closing scenes from Matrix Revolutions (Koyuki’s in-game nickname is “White Rabbit”), if Neo and Agent Smith had decided to lay off the kung fu and sample the local parfait.
How to explain these nightmarish events? It was a hack, obviously. As reported by Automaton West, publishers Nexon took Blue Archive offline for a few hours that Sunday to expunge the excess Koyukis and carry out an investigation. Seemingly, this was the good kind of hack, carried out for the glee of it rather than to filch anybody’s credit card details. Or at least, that’s what they’re saying publicly.
According to Nexon’s subsequent notice to players, somebody managed to break into the game’s content delivery network and mess with the environment settings, which are managed separately from the game itself, redirecting them to an IP address in the Netherlands.
The hacker’s changes only “affected the client-side content display”, it seems. Nexon say that “players’ accounts, game data, and payment information were not affected, as they are operated in a separate database and always revalidated by the game server.”
You may find the idea of your online gameworld being suddenly suffused by goblin cryptanalysts amusing. Rest assured that Nexon do not. Aside from introducing new restrictions and countermeasures, they’ve reported the whole ordeal to the Korea Internet & Security Agency. They’ve also prepared a player compensation package of in-game McGuffins to say sorry for the emergency maintenance period. Thoughts and prayers, etc.
Is Blue Archive worth playing post-Koyukification? I can tell you nothing save that this trailer thoroughly weirded me out with its bright and breezy scenes of school life in which everybody present is packing enough firepower to clear out a Terminid nest.