Bots Everywhere, Clips Provided. Amazon Respond please

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14

Reading this from the recent update is actually concerning to me. They make it sound as if the problem is pretty much taken care of and from now on they will be removing any remaining bots. Remaining bots? I don’t get it. How am I seeing more bots if they are acting as if they removed most? Here’s the quote I’m referring to:

“Thanks to the mass ban of bots around the timing of the Argos update and the removal of early-game gold that attracted them in the first place, we’ve seen a steep decline in bot activity and bot-farmed gold that was used to inflate the prices of honing materials. We will continue to take a hard stance against the remaining bots to make them inefficient, while ensuring active players can access gold, to create a better experience for all.”

Now, I will of course admit that I do not have their data and numbers and we of course can’t see what they see. But how is it so many of us are seeing this problem get worse, and this quote makes it sound like it’s definitely better? Have any of these people who work at this game actually logged into the game to see this for themselves? Have they not saw the countless screenshots and videos proving it? If they haven’t, they sure need to because I haven’t noticed a difference since their recent patch. I’m completely seeing more bots than players no matter where I go. I sure hope they don’t think they pretty much have this under control and now just need to clean up a few stragglers, because this game will fail if this continues on the path it’s on regarding bots.

4 Likes
15

That does look concerning.

I love making alts, and I’ve been playing multiple alts and the early game for the last couple of weeks, and I will say that I never really noticed the ban wave happen. Every day there are hordes of bots in Prideholme, and I continued to see them all the way through Luterra and beyond.

And, like you’ve mentioned, they are only becoming more and more prevalent in the world, and making more and more of an impact in the market; not less so.

Definitely has me worried about the future of the game.

16

This was exactly the point I made when discussing this issue with fellow guildmates.

Adjustments are being made throughout game progression that only hampers human players while trying to hamper the bots. However, unless you remove ALL gold rewards from quests, there will still be a legion of bots that will farm the crud out of anything that gives gold easily. And this isn’t the answer. It only gate-keeps the human player from being able to progress through the game as they should, given SO MANY things require actual GOLD to experience in the game.

Wanna make potions to sell? It costs gold to craft them and gold to list them on the market. By now, many mats have seen absolute rock-bottom prices.

Heck, I even made spreadsheets that factored the price of mats, the cost to craft, to the market price. Guess what, 90% of the crafted tradable recipes actually now make you LOSE gold. The raw mats? Worthless.

Fish used to be nearly 100g per stack of 100. The Natural Pearls used to be around 20-30 per 10. Redflesh Fish around the same. Oreha/Caldarr Solar Carp used to be 50-60 per 10. There used to be less than 10k stacks on the market.

Now look:

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I fully expected the price of honing mats to drop. More humans progressing, more mats become available, prices go down. Simple supply and demand.

I fell in love with this game playing it via RU servers, where botting is something rarely ever seen. Prices were stable. You could adjust your activities to support selling things you receive doing activities you enjoy. Now you can only farm specific things (or sell store items for gold) in order for it to be worth ANYTHING worthwhile. I would have to sell 110 Redflesh Fish to afford to craft a cheaper item on my stronghold.

I would have to sell 10,000 stacks to make 100k silver, because silver is NOT easy to come by after you’ve done every island’s quests and ALL the side-quests. Repeating content dungeons doesn’t even get you anything, which was the cornerstone of farming dungeons in other MMOs like, say, World of Warcraft. The treasure maps are an insanely spare drop-rate, compared to say, FFXIV, where you could farm for treasure maps, do them with a party, and make a decent amount of non-cash currency.

As someone who loves finding ways to make gold/currency in any game through legitimate means (market arbitrage, old-fashioned farming, etc.), this terrifies me.

Can we please, please, please just implement mobile 2FA already? Yes, it can be thwarted but it is literally the best option we have to put a stop to the bleeding now before it takes a more long-term toll on the in-game economy.

2 Likes
17

I wanted to provide an example of how the market crashing is a big deal, even for items that could be crafted for silver.

1k gold = 100k silver.

Flares cost silver to craft. With 100k silver, you can craft flares exactly 84 times (with a minor amount of mats remaining), at stronghold lvl 26 with all research completed.

84 batches of flares would have a materials cost total (at present market value) of 3306 gold. This would yield 252 flares total. Present market price is 15g each, for a total sale value (before deposit/fee) would be 3780. Your net profit would be 474 gold, which isn’t even enough to earn the silver back you spent to make them.

At current market prices, and cost to craft on estate for sale, there are approximately SEVEN items that you can craft that will yield any profit for your time (assumes you buy the materials to accomplish this great crafting feat with endless estate energy). And only 4 of those items yield more than 20 gold profit per craft. This excluded the meals because they just don’t really sell.

These are for common consumables pretty much required in end-game content. As far as I can tell, the only reliable way to bring in gold in a repeatable way are limited and/or time-gated: Chaos Gate (share of gold from item auction), Abyss Dungeons/Raids (once per week), Una’s Tasks (a gamble on return based on chest RNG, tokens once per week.)

The current in-game economy and currency structure was designed for a world without bots. It’s why it is healthy on KR and RU, and why it ISN’T for NA/EU. It needs to be addressed and very urgently. As in, the absolute number one priority.

(Market prices are sourced from NA-West/Mari)

3 Likes
18

You summed it up very well, they definitely turn the in-game economy upside down. The efforts of real players are getting worthless day by day. That’s why it causes me to cool off from the game.

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19

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hehe 2 weeks old or so, its gotten much better since then

20

But im not sure about if its realy bots selling fish or just other players since there are now more materials on the market, even the t3 honing materials dropping in price hour per hour since more people sell them, supply and demand, maybe people just dont often buy fish but are fishing often. You get more materials from the lifeskills then u actually rly need in raids and dungeons, the market will be filled with materials in some days

21

Also AGS is worried about this issue and they working hard to discover efficient ways to get rid of the bots.

22

That much is certain. They want the RMT market dead as it’s direct competition.

23

yeah im wondering if they take legal action or stuff, i really want them disappear, cant someone hack their server or so :upside_down_face:

24

What’s even funnier, is the reduction of gold in earlier game only makes the bot script writers program more story quest progression in so they can get further into the game to get the quest gold. I’ve seen legions of bots over the past two days of leveling my wardancer from level 34 to 50 and bots were infesting the starting zone (level 10), all the way into Arthetine now. I can’ only imagine it’s a matter of days before Vern will be infested with them. What’s scarier is they weren’t just beserkers. There’s not sorceress bots everywhere that will sit there farming mobs for the adventurer’s tome items to sell, too.

The botting is a real issue and it’s hurting all aspects of the economy and the player experience. I saw maybe 6 total players over two days of playing when not in a city hub. It was really depressing and made me feel like I wasn’t playing an MMO. Hopefully something can be done, otherwise Lost Ark will lose tons of players to bot legions ruining the experience and economy.

Edit: Forgot to mention this is on US West - Mari, that this all occurred.

1 Like
25

They’ve been in Verne for ages. Just don’t see them much because they’re in the chaos dungeon 24/7.

26

Well they atleast implemented an speed hack detection, like they communicated to us, they are working on it, they basicly need to develop the tools to detect bots cause in RU KR they just didnt had these issues, this take some time no one can do anything about it immidiatly efficiently when there are more Bot accounts then actual players.

27

To be honest, I can actually believe that the EU server queues and whatever server queues are in NA being tied to a significantly larger number of bots than there are players actively on the server. Higher tier players just don’t see them as much because of the Chaos Dungeon bots or the 10-50 leveling zone bot legions because they just don’t go down to those zones anymore. I’m now legitimately curious to the percentage of bots vs players now that you’ve mentioned it.

28

I would like to believe that it’s human players doing that much farming, but the market supply has increased by 50x at least for most of the items in the matter of 2 weeks. You know what happeend over the last few weeks? A 1-million bot ban that led to the bots just being remade and reinvading the game.

I did expect prices to slowly decline and stabilize as players progress and then turn to developing additional alt characters. That’s just how games work at launch (and during expansions). Given that this game has incremental progression even within tiers, I thoroughly expected that as more people reached Tier 3 and gained access to Tier 3 materials through vendors, that the supply would see a sharp uptick and the prices would drop as the market saturates and stabilizes. Before the bots even hit Tier 2, the T2/T3 honing materials market followed a pretty predictable pattern… Thursdays meant cheapest materials (more people farming after weekly reset), the weekend usually held fairly stable as human players didn’t want to dramatically crash the price to earn as much gold as they could (especially those who don’t swipe), and then would see an increase across Tues/Wed for those trying to push to the next break-point before reset. Since the bot banwave, this hasn’t been the case. The prices have been dropping dramatically, especially as bots reach higher tier content.

I’m a veteran WoW, ESO, and FFXIV player. I’ve lived through countless content releases and expansions. The sharp increase in supply and dramatic drop in price is just too great given that, unlike the afforementioned games, we are time-gated in how much in materials we can gather without swiping for extra work energy potions or buying crystals → gold legitimately.

Just track the prices of the adventure tome collection items and the number available on the market. As the game has progressed over the last 5 weeks, you can tell when a wave of bots hits a new zone. The collection items go from 30-400+ (common/uncommon/rare/epic) to 2 gold each and hundreds of thousands available. At last look, it was the Rohendel adventure tome items that were next to crash. I stopped trying to pay attention to it, myself. Too time-consuming and not worth farming, even to save for (maybe) later if the in-game economy recovers. By then, everyone will have sucked up all the tome items needed for ignea tokens with all the botted collection items sold for 1-2g each.

29

They should punish the buyers so there’s less demand. This clearly worked out both in Warframe and Guild Wars 2.

Guilds Wars 2 also requires a game purchase to participate in economy in any significant way.

I think If they introduced a fee to participating in economy and botters lost cash with each ban, that might offset the profits.

For example: Market only unlocks on your first10-20$ purchase. There could be an alternate way of unlocking that privilledge, but it would have to be far in the game, so that amount of time it takes for bots to reach it (without paying) would be enough to have them detected and banned.

If the market could be auto-unlocked for everyone now, but became locked for new accounts, the next banwave would clean up the bots, making it free for existing players and paid (or challenging) for bots and new players.

1 Like
30

It really hasn’t improved. I was on my level 30 alt, I literally saw, dozens of bots just marching to their next location. This happened a couple dozens times, which means, it was actually hundreds of bots.

1 Like
31

I had the same experience on my level 30. The amount of bots were breathtaking.

32

Another serious problem is that these bots fill an entire map channels, so players are spread apart on different channels. This problem is most obvious in starting areas, where there are thousands of bots and you will barely met any player - because bots will create lots of channels and barely any player on these.

As a new player, this almost discouraged me from playing the game. Not a good first impression when you leave starting scripted sequence and you will see prideholm full of copy-paste bots with gibberish names all using some kind of teleport hacks.
I hope that devs will solve this bot plauge at least partially.

For example by impementing simple puzzles when changing map (drag a piece of picture to the right spot or something like that) which player will solve in a few seconds, but will screw the bot. :grin:

Best regards
and sorry for my crude english :grin:

1 Like
33

Would just wish we could get some clarification on what is being done to address this issue. Not exactly being transparent as they claim to be.

Even the update stated they got rid of a lot of bots which inflated markets on Honing mats etc. yet I still see no change what so ever in game in regards to number of bots running around. Now in Anikka arena there’s easily 20 bots doing the arena fights…

1 Like