Seoul (South Korea) - A Korean court has ordered NCSoft, the makers of the MMORPG Lineage and Lineage 2, to pay $500 per person to owners of hacked game accounts. Back in May 2004, 8,500 Lineage 2 accounts were hacked after NCSoft forgot to encrypt a database log file that contained usernames and passwords. The total payout is around $4,250,000.

Lineage was originally released in 1998, and in its prime, garnered four million monthly subscribers, mostly in Korea and other Asian countries. Lineage 2 was released in the United States in 2004, but has faced intense competition from World of Warcraft, which now has more than six million subscribers.