http://lostark.game.onstove.com/News/Notice/Views/126
Translation from the LOST ARK community Discord:
Essentially, Smilegate is taking this matter much more seriously now given the impact it is having on their infrastructure and servicing of the game (additional servers added that in reality, will need to be merged down dramatically in the future). Right now, they’re simply sending out re-verifications for suspected accounts (which they are working through systematically). What this means is that other accounts will be individually flagged as needed (not on the initial 5,974 that were hit in the first wave).
If the login queues continue to remain high, they will likely need to do another wave in order to pickup additional patterns where they enough documentation to begin performing temporary account suspensions which would need to be dealt with via “face to face” support (i.e. through a support ticket). All of this is pretty much standard operating procedure to have a document trail in the event of false positives where a legitimate account is flagged and circumstances prevent the account owner from resolving it quickly.
Ultimately, accounts that show a pattern of continued re-verification, will end up being banned requiring going through the appeals process with customer support. Thus none of the monthly subscription products that offer re-verification will be safe in the long run so long as Smilegate’s login servers for LOST ARK are being hit hard.
Prior to this announcement, I had already mentioned to several native Korean players who have been willing to create accounts for others, to hold off and rethink those plans. Normally, 5 accounts can be created per phone number in Korea. STOVE ‘s terms of service however is much stricter where they do not allow players to share that information with others. A Korean player could therefore put their own account at risk should the other accounts they created and shared, continually set off those red flags.
Before the OBT launched, the demand for verified accounts was manageable. Once the OBT launched, the demand went through the roof such that the amount of resellers from China exploded (resulting in a significant jump in KSSN’s being sold on the dark web) with a primary source creating accounts and reselling them. Basically before, they could pay some Korean’s to either help with doing the initial phone verification (true, there are some who also willingly sell that info for a price but that is fairly rare). None of this makes it right though (which is why I am done with using such services and also not going to put people who were willing to create an account for me on their number, at risk).
Their initial re-verification wave has managed to catch close to 6K accounts which is on the low end because I guestimate they had to add at least two servers (and none of this has alleviated the queues or ability to create characters since there are waves of players (mostly from China) that are trying to get in. Until they can get their login queues down to something manageable, their resources are being spent on having to perform this monitoring and investigation (which means it is only a matter of time before more draconian steps are taken which they sort of telegraphed in their initial notice).
I will say this however. Their queue system has worked remarkably well. And even with game servers at max capacity, the one that I was on at least, never collapsed under that weight (no actual server side lag, no network disconnects, no hard server crashes). Simply put, I am continued to be amazed by not just the player facing parts, but also how well they’ve managed the less glamorous backend design/infrastructure.
