After a massive wave of foreigners attempting to play the open beta test of LOST ARK in South Korea this weekend, Smilegate was deluged with complaints from their primary demographic of players regarding the inability to enjoy the game (20K login queues for example which on average, took about 2-3 hours to get through) and ended up taking steps to reduce that in-flow by issuing a re-verification against accounts that they felt weren’t actually from Korea.
This was big enough for it to hit the mainstream news media in South Korea.
https://sports.news.naver.com/gameetc/news/read.nhn?oid=356&aid=0000029914
Smilegate initially attempted to ease some of the strain by adding an 8th server but that really did little given the fact that an unofficial Chinese language patch was created (for basic menus and dialogs) over this weekend along with a supposed modified STOVE launcher with its own built-in VPN (sort of making this whole thing, a turn-key solution that initially made it easy for these players from China to simply hit “Play” and go).
What cannot be confirmed is whether or not there was an actual program that allowed bypassing the login queues (as noted in the article). The end result was this massive ban wave (since most of these won’t be able to be re-verified if the phone numbers came from rental units or from someone that allowed their info to be used to initially verify for a small payment) using a combination of login history pattern (there is a section in the STOVE account management where you could view your IP history) as well as Smilegate figuring out VPN node address ranges. The latter looks likely since some Korean players were hit with false positives (some VPN nodes utilize address ranges from Korea Telecom and other Korean telecom service providers) but they can easily re-verify their personal credentials.
As for myself, my account was also caught in this wave so that is it for me for the time being (I do get a partial refund though). I knew this possibility existed but didn’t have a problem with losing the account. If anything, I did get more than $10 worth of entertainment value from my play these last few days (nearly 3 days of in-game time to be exact out of the 4 days it has been in service).
