The MMORPG Lost Ark has a problem with bots. This should be no surprise to anyone who has spent more than an hour in the game. But it’s not just the bots that are a problem, but also the players who profit from them. For them, there are now severe penalties, as confirmed by Amazon.
What is the situation? When looking at the Steam player counts for Lost Ark, the game seems to be doing well right now. However, appearances can be deceiving, as many of the 800,000 concurrent players are bots that are increasingly disrupting the in-game economy.
For some time now, publisher Amazon has been combating automated characters and wants to tackle the problem from both sides. Community manager Roxx commented on the issue in the forum, stating that not only the bots need to be punished, but also those who buy the gold from these dubious sellers.
Currently, several million gold are in the hands of bots on practically every server and are being offered for real money. This massively disrupts the in-game economy, and many fans are taking advantage of these offers. This will now be punished so harshly that a ban might even be better for some players.
Why Lost Ark is so successful at all is revealed in our video:
High debts for wrongdoing
How are the buyers punished? In order to keep the economy in Lost Ark alive, not only bots, but also buyers must be punished severely. The extent of this was also explained by Roxx in the forum.
Buyers or users of RMT (Real Money Trading – purchases of in-game items or gold with real money) can expect two types of punishments:
- Permanent ban
- Temporary ban
So far, so familiar, but especially with the temporary ban, there is a special twist. In many MMORPGs, there is a long attempt to trace what happened to the purchased gold, and then everything noticeable is reset piece by piece.
However, this also affects users who had nothing to do with RMT and only sold items that were then purchased with RMT gold. Lost Ark approaches this differently and punishes only the buyers. After a temporary ban, the developers remove the gold from your account, even if it puts you in the negative.
You can see Roxx’s statement here:
Why is this worse than a ban? If you create a new account, you can relatively quickly get back to where you were before and start accumulating gold. However, if your gold balance goes negative, you can basically no longer pay or buy anything with gold.
This means you can’t buy items anymore, and you also cannot improve your equipment. You are stuck at your current gear score until you have paid off your debts. Depending on how much gold was purchased, this could take weeks or months.
Community thinks the penalties are too weak
What do the fans say? At least in the forum and on reddit, the players of Lost Ark largely agree that the penalties are still too weak. Many are calling for a physical ban for users of RMT. In such a process, the MAC and the IP address of the user are blocked. This also prevents creating a new account with the same device and router.
Others believe that the economy is already so broken that RMT users shouldn’t be punished at all. The prices for many items have already risen so much due to massive inflation caused by bots that casual players have to resort to RMT to keep up.
What do you think of the penalties? Do you consider a ban worse than a pile of debts? Or do you think that RMT buyers shouldn’t be punished at all? What path do you personally consider appropriate? Feel free to tell us in the comments here at MeinMMO.
How you can gather gold in Lost Ark, we have summarized in a beginner’s guide for you.
