F2P is not needed imho. Knowing the current situation a quick solution can be the change from F2P to 5 usd/euro B2P and measure the results.
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Then all of entitled ppl will riot because they want everything free. Even if 5$ isn’t a lot, if you can afford to waste time playing games.
Just locked Area chat, to unlock it you need to have crystaline aura that is purchased from the shop, not the f2p one available in game with Amethyst crystals
If bots want to advertise they will be force to spend money to advertise, its a win for amazon also
They will start dm-ing all the people in chat. Thats not a solution. 5E/Usd is something doable since they wont be able to afford all this spammers.
subscription games also have bots. they manage to earn much more than the cost of a subscription before they get banned =/
first of all they need to ban players who buy gold so that other players are afraid to buy gold
do anyone even use mailing system to send gold to their friends other than bots? just remove that function and remove personal trading (i dont even know if you cantrade gold with that function) thats 2 temporary solution i can think of
If they want to make additional steps to getting rid of bots they just need to add 2fa using a phone number tied to account access
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Then everyone with dodgy signal at their house can’t play; my last place I had to walk up the road to get a signal; to authenticate on anything that forced 2fa I had to literally run up the road, then run back to get it in time before the code expired, break your phone? Well not only can you no longer use your phone, but you can’t play Lost Ark.
Also in some countries (Australia is one example) it takes very little time to get a new phone number from your provider for free, some even offer it as an automated service.
5$ is actually a good idea, these bots run 12 clients at a time so it would cost them 60$ per batch of accounts to bot. They’d never make their ROI based on the current volume of gold each batch outputs 
WoW and FF14 bots still exists with 60$ price tag + subscription. WoW bots even buy the level boost and they are still making profit.
If Lost Ark dev can only ban bots in waves every 2-3 weeks the bots are already making a profit by then.
ffxiv and wow bots aren’t primarily for gold farming, players use them to automate ingame tasks and stuff. They make a profit doing complex tasks. These LA bots are so simple in terms of logic and method of gold farming (literally only questing to 30) that this paywall would in fact get rid of them. simple math, each account bots 500 gold approx by the time it reaches level 30 and is disposed of. 1k gold today is 20-40 cents on these sites gold is being sold on. why would they spend 5$ to make 10-20 cents? if they increase the gold price to break even the value of buying crystals ingame would be cheaper than the value of buying gold from the bots which is perfect
Have you played both games? FF14 has a bot problem where huge waves of lalafell blackmage being spawned in to rush through MSQ + spamming dungeon and deposit their gold in the guild for RMT. Both retail and classic WoW has bots running dungeon, gathering, overworld mob farm 24/7 if they are not being used to farm gold then what are they doing?
And yes right now LA bots are extremely primitive of just doing quests, but again it’s week 3 bot script. In a few months they should be able to farm T1 chaos dungeon/gate/early guardian raid easily.
Step 1 is remove F2P.
Step 2 can be (No sub, no area chat) ? 2FA? Other
Its a start. We need to start from somewhere…
Yes. Map slot sellers and run carries do use both systems as well as AH.
Yes I have played both and am familiar with the bots they use as well. MMOMinion used in FFXIV is extremely sophisticated and I assure you the primary source of RMT in FFXIV is not generated from those story mode farming mages. FFXIV’s entire API is available that’s why such advanced bots and plugins have been able to have been made for that game. There is also a wide variety of methods the RMT’ers in that game generate their gold which is not applicable to LA. Even if these bots in LA reach the point where they can auto farm chaos dungeons and gates and what not a paywall will get rid of most of them and they wont be profitable to most botters. By that time im sure AGS can come up with a better detection method as well but for the short term a small pay wall of 5$ to play the game would get rid of most of the bots.
What in the world…?!?
Ngl I think bot situation could be much better if they just had employees keep buying $1 worth of gold and ban the account that sent the gold.
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