Problem - F2P game with trade is bot heaven
- Ban waves just have botters creating new accounts immediately, causing no problem for the botters.
- Players buy gold and these cheaters will never stop buying 3rd party RMT.
- Bots are overwhelming servers and taking up queue space due to sheer numbers.
- As long as the game has trade and a healthy population, bots WILL always exist.
Solution - Restrict and Create a Separate Queue for new accounts
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Prevent any mailing, trading or single market/AH purchases higher than 100g (daily roster limit 500g sent/received) of items on accounts younger than 35 days.
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OR Link an Amazon account that has had any orders before March 2022 and this can bypass the new account limit.
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OR Link a Steam account that has at least 1 year of service badge, it doesn’t even need a purchase. This creates a very limited pool of purchased accounts that’ll get wiped out in the first or second monthly ban wave and creates a very restrictive policy against botters while very lightly affecting players.
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Reminder that Lost Ark accounts older than 35 days are unaffected by any of this.
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Restrict power pass and Knowledge Transfer use on New Accounts.
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Ban bot accounts in waves on two random days PER MONTH. This weeds out and kills any sleeper bot accounts, active bot accounts and any botters that purchased accounts or hijacked accounts. Also creates minimal effort for ban waves as 2 times a month is way easier than infinite times a day.
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Instead of an infinite ban/recreation cycle, new accounts need to wait 35 days and will get banned before they are relevant.
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Create two different queues per server, one for regular players and one for new accounts. So if bots flood the server, they all need to wait to get in while regular players won’t even know there’s a queue.
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Imagine a server that has a regular player account limit of 5,000 (with an average max 3,000 concurrent players) and a new account limit of 100 before queues are created for the new accounts. The regular player queue would likely never hit their limit meanwhile the new account server would not only have terrible queues, it would be impossible to have more than 100 bots per server across all channels and all areas no matter how many bot accounts try to get in…the server cannot get DOS’d this way also.
What does this do?
- There are more than 10 million legitimate accounts created in the first weeks of this game and many more that have more than 30 days activity. A single bot ban wave would solidify every 30+ day account where 99.999% of players would be completely unaffected
- There are very few new accounts being created each day that aren’t bots. The concept of linking an amazon account or steam account that existed for awhile is something almost naturally done when creating an account in the first place and would be impossible for bots spamming new accounts without them having to buy up an account farm to do it.
- Any accounts that cannot do this can still farm, level up, make small purchases and still transfer and spend/receive up to 500 gold on the market/ah per day per roster. They would need to wait out a brutal queue that would be horrible in the short term but would be much better over time.
Potential Problems
There is a VERY VERY SMALL minority of players that are…
- Legitimate Players
- New Accounts
- Adult Players that don’t have an amazon account before March 2022
- Adult Players that don’t have a steam account at least 1 year old.
- Players that never had a lost ark account 35+ days old
These players have to deal with terrible queues and minor trade restrictions for 35 days. The worst that can happen is a congaline of players making forum complaints about how everyone are now magically new players that never made a steam or amazon account that also never played lost ark. 
To put this in perspective, this would affect less than 1/10th of 1% of players affected by the VPN ban or Steam Trusted Status in its worst case scenario.
- Any botters that purchased old accounts, hijacked their RMT buyers or waited out the 35 day restriction would get swept up in each ban wave that would only need to happen twice a month, drastically reducing the effort needed from AGS while vastly increasing the effectiveness of the ban waves themselves.
TLDR
- Severely restrict newly created accounts that can’t link aged steam or amazon accounts.
- Create a separate server queue for new accounts. This puts a cap on bots per server and prevents them from overloading a server too.
- Regular players need a lost ark account 35+ days old or aged Steam Account or aged Amazon Account to play without restriction.
- These strategies wipe out new accounts from affecting queues or affecting the economy while creating minimal disruption among players and minimal anti-bot effort from AGS.