The first major content update was launched today by Amazon Games for Lost Ark with the Tier 3 Abyss Raid (Argos), along with a new story line (Kadan Story Episode) and associated new islands, There is also a month long event (Arkesia Grand Prix) which is a fun Mario Cart style 7v7 mini-game that players can do once per day (roster wide). The event token rewarded can be exchanged for materials used for upgrading gear (additional avenue to get to tier 3).
Myself, I’m part way through tier 2 with my main at 930 item level and still playing through the Yorn main story quest; it’s going to take me awhile to get even remotely close to 1300 item level (let alone, 1370) since I’m not grinding for resources; “endless Chaos Dungeon” farming isn’t my idea of fun (I’m okay with one or two gold or red portals but I prefer spending my time exploring).
There’s so much stuff I haven’t really touched yet including life skills (which I really do need to start leveling up in order to access better nodes), rapport, adventure tome. I haven’t even gone back to the earlier zones yet to pickup mokoko seeds that I had skipped over (I’m still only at around 330 out of over 1200). I also finally used my 2nd Powerpass for my sorceress, and began leveling an artillerist.
The latter is when I noticed how much bots (hundreds in each channel instance) were in the low level zones (there are so many of them teleporting around that you can only report a few at a time); these are large gold selling operations running automated scripts (I described part of this with how botters worked in Diablo III). This comes after AGS banned over a million such accounts last week; this has led to these operations to begin leveling a large number of replacements (leading to long 5 figure queues especially during primetime hours in Asia). AGS is aware of this and are looking at ways to combat the problem.
No, the solution is not to hire more in-game GM’s to play whack-a-mole with them because there also needs to be a process in place to deal with accidental bans. Additionally, you’d also need to hire a person for each channel instance in each zone (no company is going to hire personnel to do that all day). While the free to play business model exasperates this, even buy to play and subscription based games have issues with bots and gold sellers when the game is successful (i.e. no company has yet found the secret sauce).
Some of this can be handled on the backend (movement speed calculations being one; some games do keep track of this but in Lost Ark’s case, it’s problematic since there are movement speed buffs and dashes that are obviously being abused by these bots, and it seems the game doesn’t validate any of this). I know Devilian did this (because if a character position was deemed to have to moved too far over a period of time, the game would disconnect you and the account would be flagged for review; that is how they banned teleport hackers early on in the game when they did deal with the problem). The other requires more robust tracking of actual movement; meaning server side resources (again, we’re talking a lot of data to parse when dealing with each character).
Basically, it seems like a simple fix, but if that were the case and/or there was some backend code that could deal with it, someone or some company would’ve designed such a system, and would be making a ton of money off of it. Again, Blizzard has long had their own proprietary security system (aka Warden) to deal with this, but they also have a full security process in place (including personnel to deal with it). But programmers also began to figure out how to evade Warden by better mimicking a player (that isn’t the case with these bots in Lost Ark but that is because there is not even a basic built-in security system to detect these patterns which again, would be whack-a-mole because if there were, the botters would design their scripts and programs to perform more random actions).
I’m also not an advocate of the other oft-mentioned solution; restricting player trading. This is an MMO, and that is the antithesis of the social aspects of the game. Secondly, part of the design would need to take that into account from the start (i.e. having restrictive/no trading as part of the core design sort of like how Genshin Impact is as a single player/limited co-op RPG). Lost Ark already has a designed system to manage progression including character bound, roster bound, and fully tradable items (unbound honing materials are part of that calculus).
In a nutshell, there is no simple solution to this common problem. Lost Ark having the player numbers it currently has (and will likely retain a six figures) makes it an easy target for these gold selling operations.
