The MMORPG Lost Ark has been struggling with bots and other tricks since its release in February. The real-money trading is also a problem for players, as the economy and players are currently suffering greatly, although it hardly looks that way on Steam. The player numbers on Steam seem abnormally high for an MMORPG. We at MeinMMO summarize the situation regarding Lost Ark on Steam for you.
What is the situation? About 4 months ago, the South Korean MMORPG Lost Ark launched in the West on Steam and achieved great success during this time. At release, over 1.3 million people were online in the game at the same time celebrating the MMORPG.
In a large MMORPG, there is a lot of trading, which quickly attracted masses of bots into the game. These farmed gold and sold it for real money. This is referred to as RMT – short for Real Money Trading.
The developers have repeatedly tried to respond and banned several million accounts, but apparently, the bot pandemic does not stop as a result. Quite the contrary, because when one looks at the Steam numbers and the economy in the game at present, a disturbing picture emerges.
Steam numbers at their peak – But fans are not satisfied
What do the player numbers indicate? A glance at Steamcharts.com shows that Lost Ark currently has 799,000 concurrently active players. Since the first large ban wave in April, this figure has increased by almost 300,000 players, and currently, you can even expect waiting times on some servers again.
One might assume that the game is doing particularly well right now. However, the reality is somewhat different. Bots are a huge problem in Lost Ark. They flood large areas of the maps and thus also the market in the game, which severely harms the economy.
While there have indeed been two major updates in Lost Ark in the meantime, it is rather unlikely that so many players are returning due to new endgame content. A significant portion of the new players in the Steam statistics are likely to be bots.
Scenes like this are unfortunately common:
Bots love the Sorceress
How does this show? If you take a look at which classes are active in Lost Ark, something immediately stands out. The Sorceress and the Berserker have a large share at the front. Coincidentally, these are also the classes most affected by bots.
While both classes also belong to our polls on the most popular, especially the Sorceress, which is far ahead, breaks every boundary of normal player distribution. According to a thread on reddit, currently 14.50% of all characters are Sorceresses. This puts her in popularity more than 5% ahead of all other classes (via reddit).
Unfortunately, we must assume that a large portion of the currently active players on Steam are bots, which make Lost Ark look very good. At least from the outside.
The economy is collapsing piece by piece
Why is this bad? Due to the mass of perpetually farming bots and the enormous supply of gold in the game, the economy of Lost Ark is currently anything but player-driven. Many of the upgrade materials from the first tier are hardly worth anything because they are literally thrown onto the market by bots.
And if you take a look at the prices for gold in Lost Ark, it quickly becomes clear that many players are eager to engage in RMT. Because large amounts like 20,000 gold can sometimes be obtained for less than 15 €.
While Lost Ark announced that it would ban not only the bots but also the buyers of such transactions, this has unfortunately not deterred many users from buying gold.
How severe is the influence? If you look further, we come across an RMT site that we do not wish to specify further here. It is just one of many sites, but on server Asta alone, we can currently buy up to 8 million gold. The website claims to have this amount in stock.
To give a relation: Enhancing a weapon of item level 1,390 from +10 to +11 costs only 330 gold. And that is already a significant amount for some fans. The overall certainly far more than 8 million gold currently held by bots is massively disrupting the economy.
Currently, the developers have announced that they are working on the problem, but unfortunately, there seems to be no effective solution yet. How long the bot plague will continue is currently unknown. What do you think of the current situation in the game? Are you still active in Lost Ark or have you stopped? How negatively have you noticed bots? Feel free to let us know in the comments here at MeinMMO.
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