7.7 billion gold from a number that would not fit: 22 years of duplication, and why the fix is never a rollback

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

Update 9/14: the 銀合金錠 reclaim this article treats as a 9/9 fact was never confirmed — neither the 9/9 maintenance notice (3540940) nor the update log (3541097) mentions a reclaim, and the log relists the same barter (阿爾米斯 特殊鋼錠 ×2 → 銀合金錠 ×1, once per account per day) as new content. Read the 9/9 case as “announced, then superseded”, not as a completed recall.

Across 22 years and five services, Mabinogi’s duplication incidents have all ended the same way: targeted item removal, never a server rollback. North American PC players have seen this doctrine first-hand — the 2018-08-06 Alexina and Ruairi gear removal was exactly it. The largest case on record is Korean PC, January 2025, when a bulk-purchase price overflowed an unsigned 32-bit integer and created 7.7 billion gold; 93.3% came back on the first pass and the servers were never rewound. Two dupes the community repeats endlessly — an enchant-scroll dupe and a bank/trade-window dupe — could not be found in any Korean or English source, and we say so rather than pad the list.

The doctrine, in one column

Eight incidents, five services, twenty-two years, and the rollback column never changes.

The big one: a price that wrapped around to almost nothing

On 2024-12-19 (KR PC), an NPC-shop rework added bulk purchase. Multiply a price by a large enough quantity and the product left the unsigned 32-bit range — 0 to 4,294,967,295 — and wrapped. The amount actually charged came out near zero, so high-value stock could be bought for essentially nothing and resold at full price.

Nobody triggered it for a month. Then, late on 2025-01-18, somebody did.

Emergency maintenance and the sanctions notice landed on 2025-01-19. A second notice on 2025-01-21 dealt with the downstream mess — the player-to-player trades made with money that had never existed. On 2025-01-22 Nexon ran an emergency developer livestream.

The numbers: 7.7 billion gold created, found in two sweeps (5.0bn, then another 2.7bn). 7.2 billion recovered on the first pass — 93.3%. Twenty-six accounts sanctioned, tiered at 15, 30, 90 and 180 days according to whether the currency could actually be clawed back. Permanent bans started at one account and were revised upward to seven after players said so, loudly.

Note what that revision means. The tier list was not a fixed policy applied mechanically. It moved under public pressure, in the direction of harsher.

The oldest one: the pet inventory that ate nothing

The record starts on 2008-08-02 (KR PC), with Chapter 3’s alchemy Synthesis — three items in, one item out. Fill the character inventory so the output has nowhere to land, park the input items in the pet inventory, and the game created the output without consuming the inputs.

Account blocks began 2008-08-04. Contemporary reporting noted the duplicated high-value items kept circulating afterwards anyway — which is the honest footnote on every recovery percentage in this article. Ninety-three percent recovered is also seven percent still out there, priced into a market that never gets rewound.

North America, 2018: the doctrine in English

On 2018-08-06 (NA PC), duplicated rare gear appeared on Alexina, with similar activity on Ruairi. This is the incident English-speaking players actually lived through, and it is the clearest statement of the doctrine anywhere in the record because Nexon America wrote it down in English.

There was no rollback. Nexon said it was tracking the affected items and “removing them from accounts” — Nexon America, official forum post. Players who had bought the illegitimate gear in good faith, with in-game gold or in trade, were told to file a support ticket.

Read that as a policy and it says three things. Innocent buyers are not made whole automatically; they have to ask. The item is treated as tainted regardless of who is holding it. And the rest of the server’s day is never undone to fix one server’s problem.

When the fix became the second incident

The strangest entry is 2021-07-29 (KR PC), and it is the one worth reading if you ever wonder why Nexon is so reluctant to run a restoration pass.

A bag-tidying update meant that reordering bags while holding sheet music deleted every item in that bag. Not duplicated — deleted. The restoration pass on 7/30 then issued items that should never have been granted, and an emergency maintenance on 8/2 had to flag 50,077 items for recovery. It got 41,364 back, or 83%.

Nexon refused a rollback, and stated its reasons: the phenomenon was not still happening on the live server, and no case of gain large enough to move market prices had been found. That is a threshold, not a shrug. The operator’s stated bar for rewinding a server is distortion of the market, and 50,077 wrongly issued items did not clear it.

Mobile ran the same playbook, faster

The Korean mobile service (launched 2025-03-27) compressed twenty years of PC history into fifteen months.

Day three, 2025-03-30. A main-story dungeon re-enterable without clearing; after the 06:00 reset, NPC shop purchase caps stopped applying. Emergency maintenance 06:40–09:00, extended. Accounts over three runs got 365 days under clause [4-4]. Compensation for everyone else: 50,000 gold, two small silver-coin boxes, three curse-removal potions, three undying powder, two holy water, two movement-speed elixirs, two damage-reduction elixirs.

2025-06-19. After that day’s update, putting an item into storage and taking it back out re-rolled its options — gem skill-tag cuts, rune stats, enhancement points, dye data. Emergency maintenance began at 14:50, was extended twice, and actually finished at 06:00 on 6/20: about fifteen hours and ten minutes. The server was back up for under three hours before a second emergency maintenance ran 08:40–12:00, because the rune bugs were still unfixed and a gem duplication had surfaced — sell to a vendor, rebuy, resell, and the cat merchant would offer it as two. Broken items were reclaimed, roughly 4,000 accounts were restricted for 3 to 30 days, and there was no rollback.

2025-12-18. After scheduled maintenance the appearance-codex support items reset, so the same handout could be claimed over and over. The recall ran in phases, with an advance warning that it could disconnect players mid-process; the first phase finished at 21:40 the same day. The extra compensation was unusually generous — ten gem skill carvers, ten rune reset prisms, two enhancement re-burn catalysts, and epic, elite, rare and advanced alchemy re-burn catalysts at two, five, eight and fifteen — claimable until 2025-12-25 23:59.

Taiwan’s closest equivalent, so far

The Taiwan mobile service (launched 2026-07-22) has not had a duplication incident. Its nearest relative is the 2026-08-26 Silver Alloy Ingot barter, a later-version material reachable through the Colhen smithy. The listings were pulled the same day and the ingots are to be reclaimed on 2026-09-09 from bag, storage box and mailbox, with the spent materials returned.

Nobody was punished. That is the Taiwan record across three separate early-content incidents in five weeks.

Two dupes that are not in the record

The community repeats two stories with great confidence: an enchant-scroll dupe and a bank/trade-window dupe. We went looking for both in Korean and English sources and could not find either. No notice, no press report, no dated forum thread.

That does not prove they never happened. It does mean nobody should repeat them as history, and this article will not list them just to make the table longer. An incident with no notice behind it is folklore.

What a North American PC reader should take from this

There is no Western mobile Mabinogi and no announced date for one. But the doctrine above is not per-service — it has held on Korean PC, North American PC, Korean mobile and Taiwan mobile, from 2008 to 2026. As inference: it would hold on a Western mobile service too.

Three practical rules fall out of it.

Buying a suspiciously cheap item is a loss, not a bargain. Every recovery pass in this record reclaims the item from whoever is holding it. On NA PC in 2018 the honest buyers had to open a ticket to get anything back.

Your compensation is paid on the downtime, not on your loss. Look at the 2025-06 Korean mobile packet: fifteen hours down, two emergency maintenances, thousands of items with re-rolled stats, and the payout was gold, coin boxes and potions.

Nothing gets rewound. The operator’s own stated bar for a rollback is market-scale distortion, and 50,077 wrongly issued items on Korean PC in 2021 did not reach it. Plan as though the clock only runs forwards, because on this game, for 22 years, it has.