Lost Ark devs reveal massive changes to tackle bots as ban waves continues

Lost Ark devs have provided a much-needed update on bots in the MMOARPG, outlining the steps they are taking to ban accounts and reduce the frequency with which players are encountering them. 

Despite a 2019 release in South Korea, North American and European players had to wait until early 2022 to get their hands on Tripod Studio and Smilegate RPG’s title.

Many, though, would argue it has been worth the wait and are enjoying all the MMOARPG has to offer.

However, the game has encountered major issues with bots since its February launch outside of South Korea and players have been vocal in their calls for the devs to stamp them out as much as possible.

Thankfully, the devs and publishers have been fairly transparent with players throughout, a trend continued in a May 13 statement that outlined what is being done to combat the ongoing problems with bots.

After acknowledging the persistent issues and reiterating their thanks for the community’s patience, the devs explained the multifaceted approach they are taking, which involves banning accounts and monitoring game chat.

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“Since launched, we’ve been fighting a war against the bots infiltrating Arkesia,” they said. “Addressing bots can be especially challenging in free-to-play games because it’s so easy to create an account and enter the game, but we’re working on multiple fronts to fight them.” 

The measures being taken are detailed below:

• Permanently banned several million accounts that participated in botting, hacking, or gold selling.

• Level-gated area chat to keep brand-new accounts from spamming gold-selling advertisements.

• Actively updated the game’s automatic chat moderation with lines and phrases that we know are commonly used by gold sellers.

• Changed the reward structures of quests and events to add a stronger deterrent against using bots to farm gold.

• Updated and improved Easy Anti Cheat detection capabilities to better identify and act against bots.

• Enabled a native detection system to help quickly identify bad actors and take action against them.

• Improved reporting tools in-game to help our players report bots and our support staff act more quickly on reports.

• Blocked IP from regions where we do not have publishing rights that have shown large amounts of bot activity.

• Blocked VPNs to stop bad actors from working around IP bans.

They explained that each of the measures has shown some success in combatting bots and that the multi-pronged approach will continue.

Cold water was also poured on calls for two-factor authentication and captcha challenges, with the devs saying: “These tools would require sizeable platform and architectural changes to implement in . Real-world account owner identification is another method used in some regions, but the global scale of the Western version of the game and varying laws in the territories where we operate  make this a less realistic solution for us.” 

For now, players will have to remain patient and hope the situation continues to improve.