Since the release, Lost Ark has had a major problem with bots. They literally flooded the servers and made life difficult for players. According to the developers, millions of bots have now been banned, and additional measures are being taken.
What is the problem with the bots?
- Bots have been flooding the starting area for months. They mainly farm gold and trade it.
- Players have repeatedly tried to fight against bots with some tricks, but the number is simply too large to change anything using such methods.
- In early March, Lost Ark already banned over 1 million accounts of bots.
Now there has been a new update regarding the situation, and the developers are presenting further measures that they want to use against the flood of bots.
Again “millions” of bots banned, chat measures, and changed quest rewards
What exactly has been done now? In a new blog post, the makers of Lost Ark released the latest status. They have banned “a few million” bots.
In addition, there are some new measures that should prevent bots from farming gold so easily:
- The area chat has been restricted to prevent brand new accounts from spamming gold sales advertisements.
- Active updates to the game’s automatic chat moderation with lines and phrases that we know are commonly used by gold sellers.
- The reward structures of quests and events have been changed to provide a stronger deterrent against using bots to farm gold.
- The detection functions of Easy Anti Cheat have been updated and improved to better identify bots and take action against them.
- Activation of a native detection system to quickly identify bad actors and take action against them.
- Improved reporting tools in the game so our players can report bots, and our support team can respond faster to reports.
- We have blocked IP addresses from regions where we do not have publishing rights and which have shown large amounts of bot activity.
- Blocked VPNs to prevent malicious actors from bypassing IP bans.
According to the developers, this is only part of the measures they intend to take to win the “war against the bots”.
There are still further steps that have been initiated, but they will not comment on them so that bot creators do not gain any details on how to circumvent these measures.
They are working on new methods and detection measures; the work is far from over.
Furthermore, the developers are addressing feedback and questions from the community. There were apparently questions about a captcha system or two-factor authentication.
They say: “These tools would require significant changes to the platform and architecture to implement them in Lost Ark.”
There are differences between the regions where Lost Ark runs. The western version has different systems than the Korean one. However, they are still examining these options.
What do you think about this? Do you agree with the measures and the statement, feeling optimistic? Or are you skeptical about whether the methods will be effective?
By the way: The mastermind behind Lost Ark is stepping down – apparently, the stress was too much.
