What F2P games need to do is not allow downloads of their games until their account has spent a certain amount of money on it and/or is X amount of time old. This means they can’t create steam accounts and have bots back and running, it would screw their scripts up, make it much more difficult and if anything make some of them disappear. Not a total fix but it will slow th em down immensely. This of course, would mean that when accounts are banned this associates with their STEAM ID too.
1 Like
Just an idea, make it so you are only allowed to use the chat system if your steam account has a mobile phone connected to it.
Not sure if this is even possible to do in Lost Ark, I just know that other games on steam like “Counter Strike” have a system in place that restricts people who don’t have a mobile phone connected to their account.
If Amazon was serious about this, they could easily hardware ban them, meaning no playing Lost Ark for them unless they get a new PC.
New PC is much harder to get than a new Steam account.
And I know this can be done due to my job (Non-Amazon related), and if tools for it do not exist, they can be implemented, Easy Anti Cheat has built in technology for this, which means the backend admin portals should have some access to this too.
Now it’s just a matter of how serious they are about this.
I am writing this for days. The reason most servers are full already at midday is not because of the high player base, but because the bots got out of control. The reason while servers instances bug out like this later the day on big servers is because of the bots and the frequent interactions and inputs and because they stay in the chaosdungeons to get vip entry to the next one. Otherwise you would not be able to sell gold in such amounts that cheap like they advertise. Also you still cannot report RMT in report options.
Server behavior is in every game like this where boting got out of control.
3 Likes
Theres far more pressing matters dont you all think?
I personally just dont read chat, which is an easy solution in every game.
So this has never been addressed in Kor/RU servers before either?
the problem is that we can only block 100 ppl that will be full in a few days
Step 1) Turn off Area chat because there’s nothing useful being said there anyway
Step 2) Profit
This is a good advice because Area chat makes the game stutter too xD Ancient bug present even in the closed alpha 8 months ago.
There just needs to be a better company than Amazon running the show to be honest.
Chat is overly censored and no option to undo it. We can’t even post links for guild members to join a Discord with out modifying with spaces. (FFXIV and WoW are prime examples chats worth using as a baseline). There is no way to make custom filters for us to just not see the spam.
When attempting to report these spammers ; it is possible people can falsely report other players and get them banned with no appeal on their end. It happened in New World and proven. It is happening in Lost Ark, we’ve all seen the emails floating Reddit.
1 Like
not possible or feasible. Because that would mean that it requires info from steam user account database, this is just not possible for external companies.
And account age is easily bypassed: Mass create account ahead of time and these (spam) botters will be back.
What they can do is make AI to detect variations of said “Strings” that gets spammed and auto-ban/mute it that way. If it was a mute on their account, they could just leave it “appear to self” but not visible in chat to others. This way they won’t know that they have been muted and must use “self set time” to restart new character to spam instead of detecting “ban popup msg”.
As for those who mentioned Hardware Ban, just fyi, it can be bypassed/spoofed.
Unfortunately the problem here is, you can spoof hardware ID’s quite easily with 5 m inutes of googling and downloading soft software. It’s not exactly a proven method. The people who are writing these bots would also be able to alter the registry with their own knowledge. It’s not effective. For 3head gamers, sure, it will deter 90% in terms of bans for cheating, but programmers, people who write scripts etc, it won’t do much at all. The best option is to keep up a continuous word filter for variations of said words etc and eventually they will give up. As I stated previously in my own comment, making them not allowed to download the game with a freemium account, a thing. It’s possible to do with steam and many companies do it. Oncew their account is banned, that’s it. They will have to spend money and wait X amount of time to download and play lost ark again.
You’re wrong. Steam user ID’s are allowed to be scraped by companies. It’s done in many logins for parsing authentication tokens off on to servers. As with account age, it wouldn’t matter, because that’s just a layer on top of disallowing freemium steam accounts from access to Lost Ark. Something many steam games have done in the past and it’s worked quite effectively.
Yes SteamId is public. Can be accessed through Steam API for lookup just like SteamDB did to get user profile. But getting information as to how much x user spent on the account is not possible. You can make a guess from the games purchased (discount or non discounted price range). I was pointing towards your msg about “What F2P games need to do is not allow downloads of their games until their account has spent a certain amount of money on it”. This part is just not possible. Especially if profile is set to Private.
Ok fair enough, well I do remember once upon a time 10-15 years ago steam did have this as a feature and disallowed people from accessing certain F2P games to some games so maybe it’s something Steam can do if it is requested, I don’t know. I havent had a game published on steam for almost 10 years and I was also never the person in charge of publishing it but definitely remember it being a thing back in the day. I hope they can, because it would create a huge disruption to botters across many f2p mmo’s listed on the steam platform.
Idk mate i got Area char disabled cuz of the many languages spam.
Not necessarily. Sometimes there are people asking questions or asking for help so shutting it off doesn’t help those individuals. Call me crazy or weird, but when someone asks a question like that, I normally try to help them and that is where the spammers cause problems.
1 Like
After 3 weeks, I’m afraid to announce the bots have finally arrived to the sea chat in the LA server.
Their method has slightly changed to use more cryptic messages to bypass the filter, such as vv instead of w, ç instead of c, and spacing between every letter.
That is all.