Lost Ark has been in the spotlight recently for their radical bot ban wave that has seen more than two-thirds of the active players losing access to their accounts. Though it seemed like a good thing in the beginning, with most of the bots having been removed from the servers forever, the banning methods seem to have affected normal players as well.
It is normal for players to stop playing a game for a while and come back later. However, it seems that Amazon Games is accidentally identifying this as suspicious behavior. In the last two days, more than a thousand players have left negative reviews on Lost Ark’s Steam page, revealing that they have been banned for inactivity. Most of the players seem to have stopped playing around the release date.
Smilegate, Lost Ark’s developer team, has also released a statement on their forum, stating that they have figured out what caused this recent ban wave and that they are actively trying to reverse its effects. In their words:
“Following a recent wave of bot bans, we’ve seen an increase in ban appeals from players who have been incorrectly impacted by these bans. We have determined the error that triggered these false bans, and are actively working on reversing them for all affected legitimate players regardless of whether a support ticket (…) has been filed.”
What at first seemed to be a great way of fixing the bot issue has ended up being detrimental to the actual player base. When the active player count first went from 300k to 100k, fans were very excited that no more bots were ruining the game. Now, with thousands of players finding themselves banned from a game they are not even playing, nobody knows what to expect next. At the very least, Smilegate will be restoring all incorrectly banned accounts.
