Ever since Lost Ark launched in the West last month, the community has seen a number of botting attempts and other spam that the team has been working to limit and eliminate. Now they have announced that the growing issue of botting will be taking a big hit with the team gradually banning over a million suspected bot accounts, with the promise of more work to come.
This ban wave comes at a time when the game remains popular and, of course, had a huge Western launch. One of the measures already taken was limiting area chat to level 30 and above, as well as consistently working to try and identify botting accounts and other RMT spam accounts and cheats. CM Roxx announced that the team will be banning these accounts and corrected, when asked by the community if it had happened already, that it will be happening over time and is only the first step.
“While we intend to make a massive impact with this ban wave, we know that there is more work to be done and want players to know that this is only one step in what will be an active and ongoing process. Looking ahead, we will continue our work on detecting and removing botting, cheating, and harmful behavior from Lost Arkat scale, which includes expanding our anti-cheat tools, improving bot identification methods, and rolling out more ban waves as frequently as is necessary.”
Using the tools they've developed, they plan to work to identify botting accounts when they come up end also to work on additional tools to help prevent them in the first place. This will be an ongoing process, but this first ban wave of a million accounts should be a significant start. If any real players are caught up in the bans by mistake, they do offer an appeals process.
For more on the process, see the update over at Lost Ark
