Bots are a problem in almost every online game. Whether it’s used to cheat, sell gold, or level characters with a human actually putting in the time. These tactics can undermine real players or even actively harm another person’s experience with the game. Today, on the Lost Ark blog, the team outlines how it is cracking down on in-game bots.
Lost Ark Cracks Down On In-Game Botting
Here are the lists of steps taken to remove and identify bots actively. Of course, the team didn’t reveal all of its tactics and details. By revealing more information, this could be used against the developers by these bot makers to circumvent further the tools designed to remove them from the game.
- Permanently banned several million accounts that participated in botting, hacking, or gold selling.
- Level-gated area chat to keep brand-new accounts from spamming gold-selling advertisements.
- Actively updated the game’s automatic chat moderation with lines and phrases that we know are commonly used by gold sellers.
- Changed the reward structures of quests and events to add a stronger deterrent against using bots to farm gold.
- Updated and improved Easy Anti Cheat detection capabilities to better identify and act against bots.
- Enabled a native detection system to help quickly identify bad actors and take action against them.
- Improved reporting tools in-game to help our players report bots and our support staff act more quickly on reports.
- Blocked IP from regions where we do not have publishing rights that have shown large amounts of bot activity.
- Blocked VPNs to stop bad actors from working around IP bans.
It sounds like there is more to come from the team to keep Lost Ark a bot-free zone. However, these situations are constantly evolving and the war between cheaters and developers rages on. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s one every developer working on an online game is constantly working to improve.
