Hopefully it is something impactful like ID/phone verification.
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Sadly Easy Anti Cheat that they use for Western version is, from what im reading, rather basic and lack in functions.
While browsing for info and evidences for my topic on the similar/same issue i quite often saw that hackers are shocked how bad EAC version is that is used as well as laughing at it.
Whole Lost Ark game got reverse-engineered and you can find up to date Lost Ark SDKās on github with all memory call functions that you need to make working bot, or at least hack.
This is the root of the issue as well as the reason why whole game got so quickly reverse-engineered and is littered with leveling, farm, lifeskill bots and speed and attack speed hacks.
So maybe SmileGate have to strike this github repository ā¦
Iāve found github repository, Iāve reported hoster of this repo, heās not actually providing only LAO, but he provides some SDK for PUBG and SpellBreak.
Suggestions against bots:
1) Block restricted Steam accounts to play Lost Ark
- it costs only $5 to lift the restriction status on your Steam account but that would be a start against those guys botting 100+ accounts
2) Mobile/phone verification, supported countries numbers only.
- Players should have the option to not register a phone number but if they donāt, they cannot send party invites, cannot send messages in Area/whispers, cannot use AH, cannot send mails.
- Allow registering and verifying the same phone number on multiple account, this way if 1 account get banned, it bans ALL account linked to that number.
- Players who donāt register a number cannot have more than 5k gold ACCOUNT WIDE.
- If someone doesnāt register a phone number, implement in-game randomized captcha every 10 minutes on them and prevents them from moving until the captha is completed.
- People who registered a mobile number can use all features from level ##
3) Block VPNs as per your ToS
- People making a business from heavy botting are obviously using a VPN because not in supported countries.
- Yeah some people wonāt like this one and i donāt care, using a VPN is against the ToS anyway so Amazon can legitimately do it.
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in 5 minutes ive counted over 50 bots in lvl 20 area
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Its not the one that i found.
I found Github dedicated only to Lost Ark dumps and SDKs, split between regions - KR, JP, RU and Amazon (EU and NA). Ive also reported this one, but eh, it can be easily forked further or simply re-uloaded.
This is the worst botting I have ever seen in a game, F2P included. I did some basic statistics on Mari (NA-West) and ended up with botting rate of slightly over 35%. The key assumption being that the % class popularity among founders is the same as among f2p.
The economy is already ruined, and EU servers are literally unplayable due to the 20k queues from 24/7 botting.
At this point, what can even be done? I have stopped playing because this bothers me so much. Wiping gold or servers screws over players, but the gold inflation is through the roof.
Good game ruined by AGS, which is what I was hoping would not happen.
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1 week later and still no one adressed this issue. also i just made a new char for the fun of it. and all i see in lower lvl are bots with speed hacksā¦guys that runn faster that me on a mount while they are on footā¦ no wonder we are Qing all day long. @Roxx any update on the matter? will you do something? or your going to leave that be like with the Qs we had on launch and all of the other problems? i also cant report them fast enought since that they dont just run but like tping from one spot to on other and i cant target them. we are waiting for an answer. im sure u are watching all this but i dont know if u r doing anything about it.
thanks for reading this. IF you read it.
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While Roxx is relaying something is being done 7 days ago in another thread and a day ago in this one, the economy has already been irreversibly damaged beyond repair.
Your gold rewards from doing anything in the game now, quests, una chests etc? A tiny, useless drop in the bucket. You wonāt be able to have a meaningful amount of gold through rewards now because of the hyperinflation thatās already occurring. That means trade gems for gold or buy it are your only options.
Founderās items from a few k to 20k to 50k 70k and 100k in one weekās time, is just one glaring example. Not to mention how much of this gold is going to people who duped founderās packs because they werenāt banned nor was their gold removed. That doesnāt help the problem.
glhf
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I agree with @NoTearsDropped, this issue is getting worse every day and nothing is done so far. When I tried to play my new created character today there was an army of bots and they seem to be developed further. By now, they are super fast (some kind of speedhack), zooming between enemy packs (teleport?) and clear ākill 10 ofā quests within only a few seconds (attack strength modified?). Some quests were really annoying to do because I am not fast enough to get kills and bots rush through those maps like crazy.
I can understand that we do not get much insight into the solution the dev-team is working on to prevent bot developers to have insight but come on, this is getting ridiculous. Why there is no official commitment that they will do something soon? Why are there no temporary solutions to at least slow the bot issue down?
Potential temporary solutions to slow down bots could be but are not limited to:
- Relocation of important quest npcs or make them walk around. This should be easy and players can still find them by the quest marker. Not so sure bots do if they are not at the exact same spot the script is looking for them.
- Remove or at least massively reduce gold rewards from quests before level 50.
- Introduction of CAPTCHA before dialogue for a couple of important main quest NPC dialogues in the first couple of maps. Directly after hitting G, small quiz to solve. This could even be done in an immersive way āhey I got this letter which I cant really read, want to help? oh you cant well come back laterā¦ā
As of now I do not see efforts to stop this issue even though the gameplay experience is suffering substantially. No official commitment to do something, no temporary solutions to slow down bots, nothing. All we got are some posts here from Roxx (which I am sure does the best he can) but sadly that is not enough anymore. The game experience is suffering massively and this will have big impacts on this games futureā¦
Other problemā¦ founderās items were never meant to be tradeable. Those who banked on it not getting fixed now have items worth hundreds of thousands of gold (plat skin / cerb chest). Personally I wouldnāt trade my plat skins or mount, but it feels stupid having an untradeable copy of both now.
Werenāt the original ones suppose to be tradable? I donāt actually remember, but all my original ones are, it was the second ones that I got that were untradeable.
They were on KR, but they said on NA/EU founders items would not be tradeable.
This CM says itās a bug, never got fixed I guess.
you can see they are mailing their gold lol after reach lv 30 and gift rappot to king luttera ā¦ wtf is this game dude have ridiculous amount of bot prob 35% player on this game was bot @Roxx @Wyvernn
Hmm good to know, thank you. I considered selling the pally helmet, but now I wont just in case.
This is really getting to be a serious problem. The other night, in only about 10 minutes in Prideholme, I had already reported almost two dozen bots from various bot āgroupsā. I also routinely find myself reporting gold sellers and bots in various places in the game - Iād say at least a dozen every half hour (depending on where exactly I am).
Not only the gold/economy issues, the queue times are getting horrendous. Tonight, I sat in a queue for 30+ minutes on Mari (which yes, I know, is not the worst ever compared to others), finally got into the server, and then suddenly got an error saying ācouldnāt connect to serverā and booted from the game. I am now, currently, sitting in queue (#3500+) AGAIN. Who knows if Iāll even get on tonight to play. And Iām sure most of it is bots. For the record, I donāt mind a wait to get in if the server is just that busy with real people, but itās another thing entirely when a vast majority is just bots.
I really hope something is being done to rectify these problems, because I donāt fully understand how this was even allowed to become a problem in the first place. Bots are not a new problem, so Iām not really understanding how the anticheat wasnāt setup to deal with this in the first place. Or why there arenāt GMs in game to ban these people instantly (or bothā¦). 
Please, please, please do something about this soon.