Amazon Games says it’s ‘fighting a war’ against the bots infesting Lost Ark
Actions include blocking VPNs and IP addresses from regions where the game isn’t sold.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Lost Arkhas had a problem with bots for a while now, and publisher Amazon Games has been commendably frank thus far about how it is and plans to deal with them. Back in Marchover a million accounts were bannedfor running bots—an unprecedented number—yet they remain a massive issue.
As well as banning accounts, Amazon has tweaked quest rewards, altered the queuing system (one of the biggest issues was that real players were being forced to wait long times to get onto bot-heavy servers), matchmaking changes and chat filters to target bot spam.
A new blogpost once again addresses the issue, beginning: “We know that bots have been causing frustration within the community, and we share in that frustration.”
Amazon says that “since Lost Ark launched, we’ve been fighting a war against the bots infiltrating Arkesia. Addressing bots can be especially challenging in free-to-play games because it’s so easy to create an account and enter the game, but we’re working on multiple fronts to fight them.”
It then lists some of the steps the publisher has taken:
While Amazon reckons that all of these measures have achieved some degree of success, “our work is far from over.” It says that it can’t be open about some of the stuff it’s currently working on lest it allow the bot users to more easily adapt, but is improving the game’s “native bot detection system” and will be making further changes to events and rewards to “remove paths for bot abuse.” It is further looking into how it can “combat bots natively at scale” and, if it cracks that nut, every MMO developer in the world will want to know how.
The publisher also addresses community requests for Captcha tools or two-factor authentication, which would in theory help with the bot problem. Amazon Games basically says nice idea, but the scale of the game and different laws across the regions it is operating in make this an unrealistic thing to implement.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
It’s pretty interesting seeing a publisher of this size face up to a perennial issue, and Amazon Games is clearly both serious about the problem and has all the resource in the world to throw at it. Whether bots is actually a solvable problem, of course, remains to be seen—doubtless Elon Musk would love to know how.
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
Genshin Impact’s missing English voice acting returns in its latest trailer, but players aren’t sure if they should celebrate yet
Vampire Survivors’ Castlevania DLC map is so big that I keep getting lost, but I’d do it all over again just to have Sonia Belmont’s sonic whip
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
