I’ve been giving this some thoughts over the last few weeks
Whether you want to accept it or not, the roadmap announcement started the snow ball of negative sentiment for this game, you can see this with the steam reviews and this blew up last week with the insane server queues.
Buying gold is not “cheating”, this is the game’s business model. The minority whales will pay for the majority of F2P, but this does not make RMT ok.
1. How did we get here?
Why do people buy gold from third party RMT and not official store? the same reason people will buy from whoever sells the cheapest if there is no discernable difference in the product, in this case the product being gold is identical.
AGS is not setting an example in punishing RMT buyers, from whats going around at most they get 3 days ban which is a slap on the wrist while the industry standard would be permanent ban and reporting weekly/monthly ban counts. The industry standard creates fear in buying from third party RMT and for AGS this should drive the same buyers to the official store.
In Korea, this game sometimes have a Pay to Lose reputation, why? The whales are able to get ahead in ilvl, but not to the point where they will have a drastic advantage over F2P permanently, F2P will eventually catch up.
Savix React to KR Whales on Lost Ark P2W Aspect - YouTube
This is not happening in this region with the “business intelligence” to reduce resource generating contents, delaying honing buffs while accelerating raid content. Afterall, driving the “FOMO” mentality and makes the best bucks.
However this is where the AGS incompetency starts, they too are greedy in wanting their share of the RMT whale money. Instead of permanently banning those RMT buyers who also happens to spend a little on the official store, they try to use manual labor to kill automated bots in attempt to drive out the competition. - maybe they don’t have the tools? not being able to find any examples of server transfers in other regions suggests maybe the database architecture is a mess.
There is no “real” punishment for RMT buying. They let the bot problem manifest over the 4 months time, to use their word, its like cutting off the heads of a damn hydra.
They are basically telling RMT buyers to keep going, and this feeds into the high demand in gold which in turns increases the bots. Simple supply/demand economics 101.
2. Whats Smilegate doing about it?
Quick google search shows Smilegate is actually attempting IPO from 2019, whats the best way to drive up your price for IPO? good publicity.
Seeing Lost Ark having 800k concurrent “players” articles going out in Korea and China suggests they thought it was a good idea to use this to drive up investor hype. - I’m no expert on their laws around IPO, has anyone told them about the consequences of intentionally defrauding investor?
This recent news is a targeted campaign, the West is not their audience for these articles. Who knows if this was done intentionally knowing about our bot problem or incompentecy?
3. What happens now?
Smilegate has basically backed themselves in a corner now. They can’t pull the articles back because that would be PR disaster and will ruin the IPO.
Some suggestions I’ve seen thrown aroudn the forums:
-
Lock the servers
If our region starts locking the servers like what the other regions did, the number be around 200k or so steam concurrent users which again will be disasterous for the IPO. This is probably why AGS is reluctant to lock the servers. -
Change the game to Buy to play
This might be a quick deterrant to botting issues as each bot will have a box price cost to get started, but will still rely on a certain level of efficient bot banning to make the cost of running bots a net loss for the farms. But what effect will this have on the future of the game? this is just a Korean RPG to the new player who hasn’t really done any research, what are the odds of them paying box price money to try the game? what level of on-going development support will Smilegate need to provide as the player-power progression might be entirely different now with the change. -
Captcha codes
Unfortunately a decent bot will be able to image scan the captcha code rending this measure almost entirely ineffective and will only add inconvenience to players. -
One-time passwords, 2fa
Similar to Captcha code this will probably only add more inconvenience to us players rather than the bot farms. If you think about it the bots are on-going for 24/7 and only really needs to be logged in every week with the server restarts, this is just a once a week process for the bot farms, how easy is it to buy a new phone number in China? there are limitless number of people willing to use their annual USD telegraphic transfer quotas to fulfill the black market for overseas monetary transfers, I can’t see too much resistance in organizing a phone number for each bot.
4. My proposal
I think locking the server is the way to go, it will take time to manually vet out the RMT buyers and the bots but eventually we’ll be playing with legit players and official whales.
But wouldn’t this be disastrous for Smilegate’s IPO?
What this game needs is a new shiny spark to gather interest, capitalize on the recent PR nightmare in Diablo Immortals, hope for a V shaped recovery
The Roadmap needs a revamp, going back to the Steam review we can see this is the tipping point for player sentiment and here are the things I’d like to see:
- PR statement around the actions to take, own the mistake
- Delay Vykas for a month - this buys AGS time to clean up the server
- Win back players who left by releasing all classes including Artist, along with a 1370 or 1415 powerpass.
- Require linking Lost Ark, steam and Twitch for New accounts. This is will actually be a double win for AGS as its vertical integration into their own service, offload the botting problem to the parent company Amazon. Twitch already has tools to deal with bots from their daily battle against viewer botting, they are much better equipped in dealing with the problem than AGS and Smilegate will ever be.
5. EU West and the no-queue enjoyers
I’m sorry you’re playing on a small or yet deserted servers with no queues. You can keep pretending this is not a problem, but when the big boy servers eventually capitulate from player exodus, guess what Smilegates and AGS will look at? Their PNL and they will evaluate if its time to pull the plug or take a page from Diablo Immortals.
In the mean time you can keep
I hope you enjoyed my copium filled post, time for me to take another sip
TLDR: Player confidence is at all time low, the game is about to capitulate and simplying banning the RMT and bots won’t will mess with Smilegate’s IPO plans, there needs to be a rework on the roadmap to bring players back as well.
