Back in the long, long ago, most PC video games had a sort of physical copy protection, so in order to prove you had a legitimate copy of the game, you had to reference some external bit of kit and type in that the third word on page 14 of the manual was “rutabaga.” And sometimes you got the video game from a friend who had long since lost the physical bits, so you had a list of four copy protection answers and otherwise just had to keep exiting and reloading the game. We bring all of this up because Fawkes Games has identified the reason why people weren’t getting the rewards expected from Arkfalls in Defiance, and it turns out that it’s because the studio never got the code for rewarding extra stuff based on dynamic performance.

“After an in-depth technical review (and thanks to the incredibly helpful feedback from the community), we discovered that these post-Arkfall rewards were not managed by the game’s usual loot system,” the team says. “Instead, they were handled by an external system, referred to as the Paradise Karma System, which dynamically granted additional rewards based on player participation and performance. Unfortunately, this system was not part of the files or tools provided to us when we took over development. That means we didn’t receive the component responsible for handling those drops outside the normal game logic.”

This is at best a big oops on the part of the people who handed the code over (Gamigo, which seems to be, like, really cozy with Fawkes?), but the announcement confirms that Fawkes has identified the problem and is now going to rebuild that system correctly. Players are thanked for identifying the issue and consistently reporting on it. It’s not as simple as just turning the system back on since it was never included in the first place, but at least it is something that can be fixed now that the studio knows it was missing.