Blue Archive players end up in “gacha debt,” with negative currency balances
Following a recent scheduled system maintenance, some Blue Archive players have been reporting that their balance of owned in-game currency has been reduced or even become negative, meaning they have essentially gone into “gacha debt.” The community is jokingly expecting the subsequent appearances of gacha interest rates and gacha repo men, but what has caused this gacha dystopia-like phenomenon?
Some gacha titles such as Genshin Impact and Fire Emblem Heroes have debt systems in place to prevent players from performing chargebacks on spent currency. These normally result in bans if the player is not quick to settle the difference. However, the Blue Archive debts this time around seem to be the result of the developers correcting their own mistake, while also punishing users who attempted to exploit a system error.
After completing a scheduled maintenance on April 30, Blue Archive shortly went into an additional maintenance, as it was discovered that a glitch was allowing users to keep receiving the same items from their in-box mailbox (including Pyroxene, the game’s paid currency) multiple times. This essentially meant that, for a short time, players had access to infinite amounts of Pyroxene. Although, it’s also worth noting that some players seem to have mistakenly received the same reward one or two times, not knowing it was a glitch.
Blue Archive management warned users not to exploit the glitch, as this goes against the game’s Terms of Service, and announced that they would be retrieving all irregularly acquired items. It seems that these corrective measures have resulted in some players ending up with gacha debts. Most likely, the only way to get rid of this debt is to buy or earn enough currency to settle the negative balance. For those who unknowingly received the doubled Pyroxene and used it, this will come as a nasty surprise. Hopefully they at least got pulls worth doing into debt for.
