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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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
Also AGS is worried about this issue and they working hard to discover efficient ways to get rid of the bots.
That much is certain. They want the RMT market dead as it’s direct competition.
yeah im wondering if they take legal action or stuff, i really want them disappear, cant someone hack their server or so 
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.
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They’ve been in Verne for ages. Just don’t see them much because they’re in the chaos dungeon 24/7.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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I had the same experience on my level 30. The amount of bots were breathtaking.
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. 
Best regards
and sorry for my crude english
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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…
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Bump
Started seeing them in North Vern now too, doing the chaos dungeons. If you stand by the chaos statue you can see them looping from the chaos dungeon to the repairer, then potion vendor then back to chaos.
Neat! What’s the point in even farming anymore, just open up a good ol’ cheating software and have it do all the work for you, There’s clearly not any security around that nor actual GM’s that seem to care either.
bump