As we all know there is a lot of bots in Lost Ark and recently they’ve been causing more problems than usual, especially with the AH and market, making it pretty much unusable for average user. But wait, Lost Ark is the only game with economy that can be exploited by bots, right? Of course not. Every MMO faces the same issue.
Here’s how WoW is fighting bots, or at least them being able to advertise their services:
As you can see, without activating authenticator on your account you can’t make a party. You can’t still join a party, but you can’t make one and advertise your services.
So the question is, why can’t AGS/SG do something like that? I am not gonna pretend like I am a dev or anything close to that, but wouldn’t it just be couple lines of code to implement something like this? Steam already has an authenticator as well…
Of course some people would moan about their privacy and bla bla bla, but authenticators are so widely used nowadays. When it was implemented in WoW not many people were mad about it.
Just go one step above and restrict the use of the AH for accounts that don’t have Steam Authenticator enabled?
Of course it wouldn’t get rid of the bots, but it would slow them down severely…
They’d need to buff up their customer support as people are amazing at screwing up 2FA and locking themselves out of stuff which would increase support tickets by a large margin.
That’s the thing, they don’t need to have their own authenticator. Both of their games (New World and Lost Ark) are on steam. Steam has it’s own authenticator and it HAS to be attached to a phone number. This solution wouldn’t even require them to create anything from ground up
This was an idea I’ve posted in the forums before. It was before the trusted account status thing. A mod replied to my post and said they took note of it but nothing came after that
There is a service that allows you to bypass this but I cant remember who exactly hosts it. Maybe it is google actually. It allows you to borrow multiple phone numbers on which you can recieve text messages, etc. I guess it depends if you can change numbers on the fly as there is a limitation to this service.
This issue has nothing to do with bots. There hasn’t been any sort of significant uptick in players but all of a sudden AH is messed up since last reset. Its something in the code or DB servers.
There is one post in the forum showing the USW market having 70k pages of lvl 1 gems. So the change is probably not in the nuumber of bots but in the bot behavior. If there that many entries in the market and the DB was not designed to work with that scale it will naturally slow things.
DB’s work with connection pools. You need to get something from the DB, you get a DB connection, do the request and then return the connection to an idle state back to the connection pool. If each call to the DB suddenly takes longer due the DB size going up, each connection will be occupied for longer, meaning that in the same time window, you will be able to handle less DB lookups.
I have worked with a problem like this recently for one of my clients. The problem I worked on was not caused by DB size increase but latency. The result is ultimately the same, it takes longer for each DB qeury to return a result.
