At this point in the game at least, this is not true. They inflate the value of gold so the price of mats actually goes up. If hypothetically the bots are somehow generating mats, then that would be different. But right now they generate gold, which inflates mat prices.
Also new players are not immediately swiping…they are leveling their first character and walking into zones with 30+ bots flying around.
if that were really happening wouldn’t t3 mats still be going up in price? they’ve been dropping steadily over the past couple weeks in na east
I would support something similar to Counterstrike Prime.
Keep the game F2P to access but to unlock social features such as chat and the ability to trade/mail and access the auction house behind a $5 paywall.
amazon has actually been taking decent actions for preventing botting, you can see this in the price of gold they are selling going up
rapport nerf hurt the amount of gold they got from leveling a lot
you can really correlate gold prices in game to gold prices of RMT, it really goes to show you how many people are RMT due to how heavily it effects the market
just remember when crystal cost was almost 900 gold
They’ve been dropping probably for a number of reasons like the influx of mats from the event and more and more players hitting T3. It’s possible that the number of bots has also decreased but who really knows. Someone mentioned the price of gold in RMT sites is going up so that could be the case
You go to low level zones and jsut see berserker after berserker warping around. Nod ecrease whatsoever.
This is definately new, they originally moved from area to area and npc to npc, now they just warp from area to area, they go straight through walls. It really can’t be that hard to detect them surely. What is easy cheat doing if it can’t see a bot program that allows players to run through walls.
Ok but you can’t use anecdotal evidence like that to judge whether there’s a decrease in bots lol. You have to look at widespread statistics across all servers, or like the price of gold on RMT sites which there is probably less confidence in.
believe botting or gold selling is a legal no no in kr as well hence why its not done. its taken more seriously then it is here in the NA
I’m assuming the assumption here is that the bot farms are based in china? Maybe it’s time to get steam to be stricter preventing access via VPN?
It’s because accounts in games are tied to your social security number in Korea. So yes it is legally pretty much impossible
But that is also why a lot of korean games fail at anti-botting/cheating measures because they rely so heavily on that system. So when they get published overseas, those measures are very underdeveloped
its literally as simple as adding a 2fa
Look at New World, B2P and there where/are bots! Yea was because of Family Sharing thing but bots seems to always have a way ;(
There are only two ways to combat bots:
Both come with pretty severe drawbacks. B2P means lots of people that want to play the game can’t, and lots of people that want to try the game can’t. Identity verification hits a level of privacy invasion that many (I’d argue most) westerners aren’t really comfortable with. Especially not from a company like Amazon who has a clear conflict of interest in collecting said information, regardless of their intent.
Pretty much anything else just helps to stymie the bleeding. They can ban a million bots a week and it means nothing if 2 million are created. It’s not an easy problem to solve. Personally I’d prefer if this was a B2P or subscription title, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who would never play the game if that was the case, and I don’t feel particularly justified in telling them to shove off.
Hands down for P2P
2FA would do literally nothing to prevent bots.
Need a text message/call? Use a website that provides temp. numbers for VoIP and text landing.
Need a code generator? There are desktop versions of every mobile code generator.
Need e-mail? Yeah, that ship sailed the moment free outfits like Hotmail became a thing.
2FA would be great from an account security standpoint, but from a creation and verification standpoint it would be worthless. Cutting off the bots’ chain of business is necessary: close player-to-player trading and the bots can’t function any longer.
Seems you all graduated clown college, are you even real with those suggestions? 
b2p wont get rid of the problem, but it will def make the bans way more impactful.
Thinking of it from a business prospective. if u had to pay 9$ to make an account every time it increases ur cost of operation. I think this might curve the current free for all thats going on. AGS proudly announced that they banned 1m bots, but i doubt thats the tip of the iceberg. F2P might have been a bad business model for Lost ark
It may lead to more charge backs for AGS i think, but something has to be done. there is so much spam in Vern that its unbearable. New players cant talk about the game or even communicate.
I like farming materials to sell too, but with bots is just an aspect of the game that is taken away.
When I look into just one known bot/hack trade market forum it are ordinary ppl and even whales botting on their main chars T3. After 18th March they discussed about ban wave, they wrote no prob, those who got caught got a 15 day ban and only a handful perma.
I don’t know if it’s true, but since they voiced how worried they were instead of boasting they didn’t get caught or perma banned I tend to belive it.
Today everyone can easily bot since the access to these programs is pretty easy. You still have those professional chinese farmers, but more and more “ordinary” ppl bot too nowadays. A VPN ban won’t help much in this matter.
The difference is: professional botters do it for RMT, while “ordinary” ppl do it for themself and to sell in ingame market.
At least for RMT buyers we should get the KR system: remove the gold and set the players amount to - the amount they bought. This is just like a ban if you bought 100k gold and now have to grind it back.
How to adress the whole bot problem - well, better systems to recognize botters and bot programs? Enough bot forums are open read, maybe devs should google and try it themself to get to know how botters do it to put up measures against it.