There’s a new update from the Lost Ark team regarding the ongoing battle against botting in the game. While the team has taken many steps to try and minimize and keep bots out, there are many challenges that come with having a free to play game. So the new update is a response to community feedback and acknowledges that some of the measures taken, and that will be taken, might cause some pain points in the process.
There's a list of the things that they have already implemented included, to show just how, even with extensive action, this issue can persist.
- 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.
While they do have data showing that these collective actions have had some impact to cut down on botting, gold sales, and overall spam, they know that there are still some slipping through. While the community has suggested things like Captcha or two-factor authentication, they would be overly burdensome with the amount of platform and network changes to implement. Real name verification systems have also been suggested, but these have some major flaws, and Because the Western Edition launched globally in so many countries, each with their own laws and policies, there wouldn't be a uniform way to do this.
While this update to the community doesn’t have any total solution to the bot problem, they are responding to feedback and acknowledging the ongoing problem as they plan more work and consider scalable systems to combat it.