Lost Ark Continues To Battle Bots, Millions Banned Already

Developer Smilegate has posted a new update on Lost Ark and the continuing fight against bots that plague the game. The studio acknowledged that while there’s still plenty of work to be done, it has managed to successfully purge the free-to-play MMORPG of several million bots. Accounts that had participated in botting, hacking, or gold selling had been discovered and banned, and other improvements include a level-gated area chat to keep brand-new accounts from spamming gold-selling advertisements.

Additionally, Smilegate has updated the game’s automatic chat moderation to pick up on lines and phrases commonly used by gold sellers, changed the reward structures of quests and events to add a stronger deterrent against using bots to farm gold, and have blocked IPs from regions that have shown large amounts of bot activity.

“While each of these tactics has shown some measure of success in removing bots from the game, our work is far from over,” the studio wrote in a blog post. “We can’t share all the details, because we don’t want to help bot users more easily adapt to our tactics, but we’re working closely with Easy Anti Cheat to improve their support of Lost Ark and with Smilegate RPG to improve the native bot detection system, while tuning events and rewards to prevent or remove paths for bot abuse.”

Captcha or two-factor authentication tools have been suggested by the Lost Ark community, but Smilegate explained that implementing them would require sizeable platform and architectural changes to add to the game. Other options that will have less of an intrusive impact on players are currently being explored.

If you’re diving back into Lost Ark, the major Battle for the Throne of Chaos content update was added to the game last month and you can check out more of how it shakes up the game in our Ark Pass guide. Two new classes are also headed to Arkesia this month and Lost Ark could come to consoles in the future.