The Topic of Today’s forums: Login Queues
The Problem: The huge number of bots causing the extremely long Login Queues causing frustration for legitimate/real players.
The Propose Solution that will be objectively extremely effective.
The first step AGS/SG could do is to lockdown all regions/servers to prevent the creation of new bots that further increases the login queue. There was a precedent for doing this already during the initial week or two of LA NA/EU. Then the second step would be to start removing all the current existing bots and there you go a progressively faster login queue with these two steps.
For those who argue this hurts new players who will try to play during this proposed lockdown/purge. I am sorry, but frankly AGS/SG can’t have the best of both worlds. They should objectively focus on the biggest issue at hand than worry about the close to non-existent new players that would attempt to play Lost Ark during this sceanario.
The Known Attempted Solutions from AGS/SG:
“Ban Waves” - Not Effective.
Using this analogy of you and a team are on a boat in the middle of the sea and the boat is sinking due to a hole. Scooping out water doesn’t address the fundamental issue that the boat will still sink until you completely block the hole to prevent further sinking. Once the hole is block, then you scoop out the water.
“Expanding servers capacity” - Not Realistic
I am sure I read a post during the release of NA/EU that there is some of logistic/realistic issue that prevents the expansion of servers due to how technically complex it is
“Continual reliance and expansion updates of EAC” - Not Effective
No need for further elaboration on this point lol.
Seriously, all existing and further suggestions/feedback in regards on how to tackle bots in one way or the other have “pain points” for the actual player base. Instead of the “objectively ineffective soft methods” that AGS/SG has been doing so far, how about just trying some objectively EFFECTIVE methods.
I think I’ve tried to propose enough solutions over the course of this month over how to fight against the bots that would have clear “pain points” against regular players, but if the CMs or the Devs wants to completely ignore those suggestions, then at least just directly pass this suggestion on to whoever has the authority over the direction of NA/EU and to the person who had the authority to lockdown regions/servers earlier on.
“But wait a minute, what happens after the lockdown/purge, wouldn’t all the bots come back?”
In my proposed scenario, they would lock all regions/servers down entirely for one month and arguably one month is quite a long time which is enough to achieve some sort of development process in terms of coding in flags/tools/what have you to prevent the comeback of bots. Meanwhile, previously bots/RMT would start to dwindle because I am assuming ban waves will continue to remove most if not all the bots.
One month later in a perfect world, there is barely any bots left, RMT is barely taking place due to fewer bots being able to make gold to accumulate to sell to RMTs, but the lockdown time is about to be over and bots are knocking on the front door again. In such a scenario, I would’ve hope that one month time frame given to AGS/SG would be good enough to prevent such a comeback surge of bots back into LA.
If they failed to do so, then just repeat the same process again and again with random lockdown for all regions/servers. Or they could just start up a registration process for new interested players to create an account/character to login to the game to filter it entirely while having the lockdown for all regions/servers indefinitely. If you had an account/character already, you would still be able to make new characters on the same server. If you wanted to switch regions/servers, then I would assume eventually one year from now they would have developed such a feature/function to do so.