Wolcen: Lords of Chaos has had a rough launch. Its first day was full of server errors and disconnects. For the next two days, the servers have been down for maintenance. The Wolcen team plans to bring them up today, but that's definitely not a certainty. In the meantime, players are forced to use Wolcen's offline mode to play. This looks to now be a blessing in disguise, as multiple loot-related bugs and exploits have since been discovered.
The biggest issue is what's been dubbed the Magic Find Exploit. This exploit is allowing players to earn near-endless in-game loot. Players are able to stack +100% Magic Find buffs by going in and out of an Expedition map. The result is that when a player kills a boss or opens a chest, loot absolutely pours out of it. If the player has stacked enough Magic Find, loot will drop constantly for minutes on end.
The Magic Find Exploit isn't the only economy-breaking bug ion Wolcen, though. Players have also discovered methods by which to earn endless amounts of gold. This exploit is due to a bug where splitting a stack of items keeps the value of the full stack. There's also full item duping, though that seems to be a bit more complicated than is readily describable.
For its part, Wolcen Studio says that it's aware of "issues impacting the game's economy" and that it's working to fix them. A timeline for when these fixes will be in place wasn't provided. Wolcen's community manager Calistaen did confirm on the game's official Discord channel that no character wipes are planned. Wolcen Studio likely wants to confirm that the exploits have been solved before committing to a full server wipe.
Obviously, this isn't the launch that the Wolcen development team was hoping for. Wolcen Studio is still certain to be pleased since Wolcen is a premium ARPG and so many players have clearly bought it. But success is measured both by sales and how much people love a game.
So far, Wolcen Studio has managed to be transparent and communicative about the state of the game and its Wolcen's server issues. And while those issues have prevented players from accessing its online mode, an important part of the game, its offline mode is still there and still fun. The bugs and exploits may even be seen as a positive to many of the players in offline mode. The original Diablo faced similar issues and turned out widely popular. Maybe Wolcen will come out of its rough launch the better for it, too.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is available now on PC.