Please stop arms racing the bots and instead do something that will remove their profitability at scale.
Proposal:
Remove ability to mail/trade gold and unbound mats except between roster. Only tradeable through marketplace and can only buy lowest price at any given time. Prevents bot farmers moving around gold or materials as a proxy for gold.
Add a heuristically based max price to the value of items on the auction house to prevent bots flipping trash items for gold. This wouldn’t be trivial to implement but it’s a far better usage of development time than arms racing bot developers as item values would be helpful for players too!
Result is that bot farmers can’t easily move gold and centralize it or sell it in a single transaction without trading items that are at least somewhat valuable, destroying the logistics of their operation.
Yes this hurts players somewhat too but it’s a far lesser evil than bots and RMT plaguing the game. If you announce the reasoning behind these changes most people will grumble and accept it, if it truly solves the problem.
No, AGS will perform another useless region block and double the bot’s numbers. Can’t you see that’s their only game plan? Their play book against bots is like:
VPN ban
IP and region ban
Geo restriction
Repeat steps 1 to 3
Last thing you know, Lost Ark NA/EU/SA becomes Lost Ark CA (AGS HQ exclusive game).
It’s all they can do without getting smilegate to change the game build, since AGS are in control of the infrastructure. The changes I propose requires cooperation from smilegate, AGS can’t do it themselves I suspect.
But it’s obviously not working, they need to do something more decisive.
It’s easy to say but hard to do compared to what I’ve suggested. It’s not as easy to detect these things as many people imagine. If something is easily detectible it’s also, by nature, easy to change it to avoid detection. That’s why it’s an arms race. Constant back and forth.
Scouring logs/data or hiring people to manually ban or any solution along those lines just isn’t scalable or resource efficient. An automated system will hit false positives that need manual intervention anyway.
They have limited resources to work with so they will never go this route. It’s not economical.
The only way to actually solve the problem is to make it undesirable or impossible to do in the first place.
But they earn gold from having hundrends accounts, where they just do weekly chaos dungeons una task on 3-4 characters per account xd Daily you can finish it on 70+ accounts. They dont earn money on mats which are worth 1 gold and can be dropped 12 times a day …
Again, i am tired of seeing posts complaining about the bots in this game when it is LITERALLY the RMT BUYERS causing this same issue OVER and OVER and OVER again.
This is what happens when a game does not fully enforce the TOS.