You have a bot problem. Bots have infiltrated and scripted every part of the game.
You have functional botters in South Vern. That means you have characters and accounts that have made it through Prideholm, Luterra, Tortoyk, Annika, Arthetine, North Vern… blah blah through Punika to South Vern. There is --NO-- gate that these scripted automatons haven’t crossed in your beautiful game. The bots have literally seen more content than I have at this point.
What ever action you are allegedly taking - it is not active enough. Your player community is here to help.
Smilegate / AGS / @Roxx - I invite you to share your challenges here. In this thread. We, the players, will help you solve it.
If you are too shy to communicate here, please feel free to DM me. I will happily (and anonymously) transpose your problems here to the playerbase who are COMMITTED to helping you solve the bot problem.
Yours truly,
Cauthey
(Not a bot)
(Will help you ban bots. For free.)
To some extent is has worked to a degree. I no longer run into login queues but, I do see hella bots when doing horizontal content when I revisit t1-t2 zones. Seemingly rampant, yet not bottlenecking login. For my server anyways. It’s annoying seeing them none the less.
There has been no shortage of feedback from players. There have been literally hundreds of threads with thousands of combined posts suggesting literally everything under the sun to fix the problem. AGS/SMG Will deal with it in their own time in their own way. I’ve given up suggesting fixes to them at this point.
Agreed. We need a streamer or a Youtuber with a popular following to just swing by the forum and do a visual inspection of all of the bot-related feedback threads. That would be pretty embarrassing I would think.
They “want” the bots… their own PR post gloating about their concurrent player count said everything you need to know.
“Top 3 popular charts on Steam and unrivaled No. 1 in RPG category”
"Thanks to this update, Lost Arc is solidifying its position as the global No.1 MMORPG by reclaiming the No. Although it has been three months since its release, it has maintained an average of 500,000 concurrent users per day, giving a green light to its long-term success. "
Ive Seen once 3 Bots Bug at Same Position in tortoyk stayin there doin nothing besides a melee Swing every some sec. I was pretty amused. But yes… Its hell of a Problem and U feel very trolled If Ur Putting shtloads of time into this Game cuz of it.
Absolutely crazy to me that they bragged about the 500k users. Latest maintenance showed we have around 200k players, IMO.
For several hours following last maintenance the player count hovered around 150k-200k and then rises back up to 500k eventually.
The theory is that bots have to update their stuff when a maintenance or patch comes in, which takes them much longer than normal players to get back up and running.
The steam charts for last 7 days show the numbers and supports the theory:
Also my anecdotal experience in game seeing hardly any bots the day of maintenance compared to now (THEY ARE EVERYWHERE) supports the theory.
Until the newest cash cow (infinite chaos) is fixed to not enable botters we likely won’t see any change because Amazon (appears) will not put GMs in game to manually remove T3 so we will not see changes until all content that allows botters to gain easy money is eliminated.
As a side note, the fact that T3 materials from unlimited chaos is tradable is just dumb design almost designed specifically to enable botting. I can understand it when the game was brand new and alts were limited, but now? Dumb design just begging to be exploited.
I’ve learned to play around bots and assume they will always be there. I just assume certain items will decrease significantly in value over time, which can be a good thing for pushing main/alts up.
Saturday was the worst its been. if you calculate, its about 50% of the playerbase were bots. We can safely say that half of lost ark’s player base were bots. hahaha
pfffff “as the global no 1”, just talk when diablo 4 release…but hmm they can still maintain 500k concurrent user per day even tho all player are quiting “just use 500k bot everyday” @OminousOnion
I think the problem with AGS’s strategy to combat bots is focusing too much on large ban waves vs regular enforcement. It gives the botters too much time in between the “waves” to make their money. Enforcement needs to be ongoing, not done in waves, with the areas the bots are typically found (chaos vendors, collectible farm spots) regularly monitored and cleaned out on a continuing basis.
i think they just don’t care about real player again… cuz they now this game will dead after wotlk classic release or diablo 4 release, so they try make profit as fast as possible @Roxx@OminousOnion
8pm here on the East coast of Australia, roughly 3am West coast US.
I have a 7.3K queue. I assume that in the previous years in the previous regions where Lost Ark was launch that there were bots, so I would assume that the developers would have some sort of measures to counter act the bots (I’m not expecting to get rid of them all).
It seems like the queues are worse now then they were at launch.
I’m with Cauthey (author) let me know what I can do to help you fix this issue.
11pm here in New Zealand. I logged in for the second time this evening (earlier attempt was about 5 hours ago) and the queue is still at 8k. This is the third day in a row now I’ve been unable to play at all.
A potential solution to the bot problem could be having volunteer in-game GM’s from the community. This has worked well in the past for games like Runescape and Habbo Hotel (both of which I had been a player mod for).
The volunteer GM’s generally only have 3 limited powers:
The ability to send alerts / official messages in-game to players
The ability to mute players (i.e. they cannot chat or PM etc.) for 24 hours
The ability to ban players for 24 hours
What would normally happen with bots is that a volunteer GM would be in-game, and if they saw/suspected any bots (or received support tickets related to bot sightings) they would be able to go and instantly ban the bot for 24 hours then in whatever backend-system create a ticket for the paid GM’s/CM’s/Customer Service to investigate the account further and determine whether it should be permanently banned or not.
This benefits both players and AGS:
AGS don’t need to pay the volunteer GM’s
The volunteer GM’s have no reason to exploit their limited abilities as they can’t use them to their advantage, and they can’t do anything beneficial like creating items etc.
As @Cauthey mentioned, there are PLENTY of players who would do anything to help with the bot problem, so there wouldn’t be any shortage of volunteers
Paid GM’s/CM’s/Customer Service (and probably even the devs) can work on the long-term solutions of the bot problem
I can totally understand why AGS don’t want in-game GM’s because obviously they’d have to hire and pay those people, so this is a great way to engage the community and get some free labour out of it!
