Lost Ark loses over 300,000 players after wave of ‘massive’ bans – community celebrates

Lost Ark has lost around 300,000 players in the past week, according to Steamcharts and SteamDB. The wildly popular action MMORPG had a ludicrous success earlier this year, but the recent wave of bans seems to have wiped out quite a few players, leading to a dramatic drop.

For those unaware, the team at Amazon Game Studios has been battling an ongoing bot issue for some time. With multiple official blog posts appearing alongside the major update, the topic of botting has been around almost always, and the ongoing cat-and-mouse chase between developers and cheaters has been going on for months.

Also a big problem! Lost Ark, which had been around for a while in South Korea and Russia before the Western release, actually launched within a pre-existing bot ecosystem that had been honing the aforementioned version of the title. This bot issue has also led to some frustrating side effects, as a healthy real-money trading environment can thrive thanks to a large number of bots running, farming content, and generating in-game wealth.

For those who aren’t sure why this is a bad thing, bots farm resources and money 24/7 infuses the game with a ton of currency that players with a little bit of expertise can buy. This inflated amount of gold in the economy can lead to – you guessed it – inflation, which means that construction worker Ted comes home from a hard day’s work and finds useful materials increasingly out of his budget. This isn’t necessarily a problem for those who can invest the extra time or have no problem buying gold, but it’s a tough situation for casual players and those who are morally opposed to real money trading.

That’s not to say the folks at Amazon Game Studios have been embracing this. According to previous reports by the publisher, anti-cheat software updates keep reducing the number of bots. However, as is the nature of any anti-cheat vs cheat war, the player base has been bouncing back after these waves of bans, as users have found their way around anti-cheat and redeployed any sketchy software they had on hand.

This ongoing bot issue has led some to speculate on the “real population” of the Lost Ark, and while it’s obviously impossible to know the exact number, changes in overall player numbers, such as the removal of an easily exploitable gold farming method, appear to have decreased in March , with over 200,000 players leaving the top spot. These events occasionally come up as strong indicators of how many bots are behind the scenes. For the record, we’ll probably never find exact numbers, as sites like the aforementioned Steamcharts and SteamDB, while helpful, aren’t official tracking sites, so may be a bit off topic.

Fast forward to June 16 and it looks like both botters and real money traders have been hit hard. The day before, it was announced via Twitter as well as an official thread on the Lost Ark forum that a “massive” wave of bans would come with the scheduled update. They are not kidding! This otherwise regular patch seems to have added some extra juice under the hood, causing a sharper-than-usual drop in players in the days following the patch. The number of concurrent players did initially hit around 550,000 immediately afterwards, but began to plummet to around 200,000 over the weekend.

This resulted in two very different reactions from the two factions. On popular cheat forums and bot hubs, it’s easy to find threads where users perform pseudo-corruption checks, where publishers report which of their accounts have received bans, how long those bans last, and which services or in-game behavior could get them arrested on Amazon’s radar.

On the other hand, users of Reddit, Discord, and other popular legitimate games like Lost Ark are hyping the purge, which may be the most triumphant celebration of player churn you’ll see anytime soon. This comes in the form of genuine doubts about the impact, dunking on those caught at the sharp end of the ban and memes.

But if we all put down our party popcorn for a while, as tempting as it is to burst the bubble, is it too early to get excited? Maybe. It is widely believed that, generally speaking, first-time offenders will only receive a three-day ban. This may be a measure that both warns the crafty and is not an absolute physical regular. Players get caught in the crossfire, which means the past few days. Some accounts that were deleted may be very well restored. While they may not jump back on fire, those who make a living developing and selling robotics software may pick up recent updates in search of new workarounds.

But that doesn’t mean everything is in vain. As the use of bots in Lost Ark becomes even more frustrating and cash-heavy players are permanently banned from their main accounts for obtaining suspicious amounts of in-game currency through real-money transactions, hopefully the bad actors will continue to do more. Green, less harmful pastures. As fewer and fewer buyers hang out around the neighborhood, we may start to get closer to that prominent “real population” over time.

As for what this means for Lost Ark, it’s good news for those who play the game. Even with that number exhausted, Lost Ark is currently the top five most popular games on Steam, so anyone echoing the “dead game” mantra is still dead wrong. Having such a large number of concurrent players is sure to be an initial shock, but think of it as a full-body detox. It’s a rough but temporary process that washes away all the filth. Of course, it will slowly recover over time, but constantly trying to stop the junk will only lead to a healthier game, a happier player base, and a better Lost Ark.

For more Lost Ark content, we have a great set of guides on the site for players looking to join for the first time! If this sounds like you, check out our list of the best career levels in Lost Ark, as well as our Glaivier build guide!