Over the past week, Lost Ark has lost roughly over 300,000 players according to Steamcharts and SteamDB. This hugely popular action MMORPG, which launched to ridiculous levels of success earlier this year, appears to have wiped out a significant number of players via a recent ban wave which resulted in the dramatic drop.
For those not in the know, the team at Amazon Game Studios have been battling an ongoing botting problem for some time now. Through multiple official blog posts coinciding with major updates, the topic of botting has been a near-constant presence, and the continuous cat and mouse chase between developers and cheaters has trucked along over several months.
It’s been a major issue too! Lost Ark, having already existed in Korea and Russia for some time prior to the western release, practically launched with a pre-existing botting ecosystem who had been sharpening their fangs on the aforementioned versions of the title. This botting problem has resulted in some frustrating side effects too, as a healthy real-money trading environment has been able to flourish thanks to the ample number of bots running around, farming content, and generating in-game wealth.