Krafton, which is preparing an initial public offering next year, suffered a hiccup in its newly released massively multiplayer online role-playing game Elyon.

Developed by Krafton and published by Kakao Games, Elyon exposed a bug that compromised its in-game economy, triggering a fierce backlash from users as the bug appeared just three days after the game’s release on Thursday.

When a user of an attacking squad hunted down a monster at a specific field and picked up an item the monster dropped, the item not only went to the user’s inventory but also to all other squad members’ inventories. As items are tradable in-game currency, the glitch delivered unearned proceeds to players that took advantage of it.

Kakao Games initiated an emergency update at 3 a.m. on Sunday and fixed the bug. It slapped suspensions of different durations on over 200 abusers. Some 30 users received permanent bans and all gold unduly generated by the bug was retrieved.

Krafton and Kakao Games on Monday apologized for the issue and promised better management of the game.

By Kim Byung-wook (kbw@heraldcorp.com)