The MMORPG Throne and Liberty just launched in the West a few days ago, and already hordes of bots are flooding the game world of Solisium. Are you expecting a second Lost Ark?
Why does Throne and Liberty have a bot problem? There are two reasons it was clear that bot farms would have a strong interest in taking a closer look at Throne and Liberty:
- Thanks to the Free2Play payment model, the barrier to creating new accounts is extremely low.
- The real money currency Luzent is closely linked to character progression and the auction house. Therefore, there is a market for players who want to buy Luzent as cheaply as possible.
A similar situation exists with Lost Ark, which is managed by Amazon Games in the West – like Throne and Liberty – and has been struggling with an ongoing flood of bots for years – despite millions of banned accounts and improved methods to track down or make life harder for the cheaters.
We highlighted that bots could be a potential problem for Throne and Liberty in our talk about the new MMORPG with GameStar:
Fighting Windmills
How is the problem manifesting? More and more reports are surfacing online from players who encounter groups of bot characters in Throne and Liberty farming items in the open world that can be sold in the auction house for Luzent – such as here on Reddit:
Or in this video on YouTube from NexxPK, where he follows a group of bots during their farming rounds at two in the morning.
How is the community responding? Many players are reacting to the footage with dark humor or sarcasm.
- KurtySuit writes on Reddit: “I’m glad we have Easy Anti Cheat, the DLSS update and frame generation with DLSS->FSR3 for AMD and 20xx/30xx GPUs is blocked, but at least we don’t have bots /s.”
- fymp takes it humorously (via Reddit): “As I see you’ve met fhdysidnw83 and fyeueidnriw, they are really nice people.”
- Publicity-reigns suspects the worst (via Reddit): “This is how it starts… it was a nightmare on the KR server.”
- Justostius calls for draconian measures (via Reddit): “Now it begins, say goodbye to your item value :D. On the Korean servers, there are now more bots than real players. People who bot should be hung by their *”§”$.”
- VZzzz is depressed (via YouTube): “NCSoft has done nothing about bots in Aion, and that has ruined the economy in the game. Basically, everything that is not time-limited and player-bound will become completely meaningless for everyone to strive for.”
How is Amazon Games combating the bots? In an interview with MeinMMO, Head of Third Party Publishing Merv Lee Kwai explained that they constantly adapt and improve their detection methods. However, it’s not just about removing bots; it’s also about adjusting the core systems of the game to make them tougher and less vulnerable to botting activities.
Daniel Lafuente, Globalization Design Manager at Amazon Games, stated elsewhere that they have learned numerous lessons from New World and Lost Ark, which they can now profitably apply to Throne and Liberty.
Among the proven measures is the introduction of a trust system for players. Only those who have this trust status can trade in the auction house with other players. They do not want to disclose other protective systems to avoid giving bots a chance to counter.
Whether all these measures can ultimately be effective remains to be seen. Lost Ark shows that the developers are facing the proverbial battle against windmills. You can read more about it here: Throne and Liberty has “one of the fairest payment models” of all Free2Play MMORPGs according to Amazon Games
