Heroes of Arkesia,
We know that bots have been causing frustration within the community, and we share in that frustration. Over the past few months we’ve made a number of changes to Lost Ark in order to combat bots. We know that there’s still work to do, and we want to share some detail on how we’re approaching this ongoing issue so we can give Lost Ark players a better experience.
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. Here are some of the measures we’ve taken so far:
- 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 each of these tactics has shown some measure of success in removing bots from the game, our work is far from over. 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. We’re also exploring new ways to help combat bots natively at scale.
We’ve heard some questions from the community about tools like Captcha or two-factor authentication. These tools would require sizeable platform and architectural changes to implement in Lost Ark. 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 Lost Ark make this a less realistic solution for us. We’re continuing to explore our options for additional tools that are scalable and could make a significant impact.
As we continue our quest to rid Arkesia of bots, we are also conscious of possible pain points some of these measures might cause for our players, and are working to balance this. We appreciate your patience as we continue working to bring the best possible Lost Ark experience to our players.