Amazon has taken action against the rampant spam from gold sellers in the MMORPG Lost Ark. Like in all Free2Play MMORPGs, Lost Ark was plagued by constant spam from people trying to conduct “Realtime-Money-Transactions”, real money trading. This was becoming very annoying for players. However, one of Amazon’s planned measures was considered too radical by players.
What is the worst plague of MMORPGs? It is the gold spammers:
- Normally, the public chat in MMORPGs is meant for players to talk, exchange, trade, and find guilds or groups.
- In reality, however, it is filled with monotonous, often particularly conspicuous sales messages full of exclamation marks and special characters, saying things like: “Give me money, and I’ll give you gold. I have the best gold ever, at the best prices.”
- In Smilegate’s new MMORPG Lost Ark, distributed by Amazon, the problem was particularly severe. New measures are supposed to curb spam now.
“Never experienced such a terrible gold spam in Lost Ark”
Why was it particularly bad in Lost Ark? Normally, MMORPGs have certain barriers in place to block gold spammers: You need to reach a certain level to use chats or similar.
However, there was none of that in Lost Ark. So gold sellers could simply create new heroes for a server and pollute the chats there.
If a gold spammer was actually banned, they simply made a new account: They hadn’t lost any time (for leveling) or money (for a new game key).
Therefore, in the past few weeks, posts on reddit increased, stating that gold sellers were particularly bad in Lost Ark:
- One person asks: “What’s going on with all the gold sellers – aren’t they supposed to get banned?” and received the reply: “Yes, but it’s Free2Play; they just make new accounts.”
- Another user said: He had never experienced anything as terrible as the gold spam in Lost Ark – he was advised to block and report them, a Sisyphean task.
- And a third person asked: “Why isn’t Amazon doing anything against gold sellers?” But Amazon was already on it.
What is Amazon doing against the gold sellers? In a post by Amazon on February 20, it stated that they had noticed an increase in gold sellers and already had scripts active to regularly ban them (via playlostark).
Additionally, they are working on “permanent solutions” to reduce chat spam. Players could also simply turn off the area chat for the time being.
One step against players in Lost Ark too far
What was retracted? Originally, Amazon planned to limit the area chat so that players would need to be level 35 to use it.
However, following protests from fans, this was hastily retracted on February 21. Fans complained: The restriction made it difficult for new players to cope with problems.
In response, Amazon acted quickly and withdrew the proposal, even deleting the passage from the blog post. They stated that nothing had been implemented in the game and that there was no longer any time frame for when the level restriction would be introduced. If that changes, they will let players know.
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