When creating an MMO, one must anticipate the inclusion of bots. From Final Fantasy XIV to World of Warcraft, these irritating pests infect every online game on the market. Though their influence is hardly noticeable in certain titles, the free-to-play title Lost Ark has been hit extra hard since its release in February. Sadly, it looks like the issue hasn’t yet been resolved in any meaningful way quite yet.
In a recent blog post, publisher Amazon Games admitted that the bot problem is very much ongoing.
“Since Lost Ark launched, we’ve been fighting a war against the bots infiltrating Arkesia. 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 post reads.
In March, Amazon Games announced a solution to the problem, implementing a fraud and bot prevention system. Users having spent under $5 on Steam would have their accounts restricted, unable to initiate trades with other players, send in-game gifts, exchange Royal Crystals for gold, or send in-game mail with any attachments.
The blog post lists the steps that have been taken so far to push back against the onslaught of bots. While the problem hasn’t been solved, it does look like Amazon Games is actually doing what it can. So far, they have:
- 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.
Lost Ark was fully released in its free-to-play format on February 11, 2022. On March 8, it was announced that the title had surpassed 20 million players worldwide.
