It was an interesting one (slightly embarrassing from a coding standpoint, but the sort of issue that creeps into commercial software constantly, so I don’t mind sharing…)
On the server, there was a bunch of data used back in 1.0.6 (?) which tracked the final quest in a kingdom, for the purpose of figuring out Kingdom Levels (back in the days where completing quests & challenges contributed one level each).
That particular array of data was extended to ALSO contain some information about whether kingdom tributes were Glory, Souls, or Gold)
It contained all kingdoms up to and including Drifting Sands.
With the new Kingdom-Levelling & Tribute system however, we deprecated that data, but hadn’t got around to removing it yet. Tribute amounts were actually pulled from a new table.
It turns out that although the Blighted Lands tribute data was added to the NEW table, that the tribute system was querying the OLD table to get the list of kingdoms to check… so it was seeing every kingdom EXCEPT Blighted Lands. Our automated testing missed this because it could see the new data there!
Turned out to be a simple one-line fix on the server!