The popular Korean MMO Action RPG Lost Ark launched to an international market last month and posed an unfamiliar challenge to developer Smilegate; the record-breaking success it garnered was a surprise to both Smilegate and Amazon Games franchise leader Soomin Park alike. An official forum post from the team acknowledged botting is a “growing issue” and detailed the recent large-scale ban wave.
“Our team has been hard at work on crafting effective tools and methods to identify and remove bots from the game. As a result of this work, today (3/4) we will be permanently removing over a million illegitimate accounts from the game that have been determined to be running bots,” read the post.
Due to the size of the ban, the Lost Ark team also noted some innocent people might have been inadvertently caught in the deluge; if this is the case, submitting a ticket to their support site will solve the issue.
The team went on to reaffirm their zero tolerance attitude toward cheating. In an effort to assuage all fear, Smilegate has assured us of their continued commitment to making Lost Ark as fair and fun as possible. The game went from a positive rating to a mixed rating on Steam due to the longer queue line, but recent Twitter feedback directed at the official account would suggest this problem has improved a great deal.
“Looking ahead, we will continue our work on detecting and removing botting, cheating, and harmful behavior from Lost Ark at scale, which includes expanding our anti-cheat tools, improving bot identification methods, and rolling out more ban waves as frequently as is necessary.”
Lost Ark saw a historic high on Steam; it became the second-highest played game on the platform with a concurrent player record of 1.3 million.
