Lost Ark was an incredible success about a year ago, with over 1.2 million players pushing for the release on the completely overloaded server at the same time. But the big rush is long gone, recently only around 300,000 players were online at the same time.
Now are the number of players dropped even further in one fell swoop, only around 100,000 players left are currently on the road in Arkesia. But there is good news for all players behind it.
60 percent of Lost Ark players weren’t even human
Behind the rapid drop in the number of players is a massive wave of bans in which hundreds of thousands of bot accounts were blocked. That two-thirds of active players are bots sounds enormous at first, but shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans of the action role-playing MMO.
Anyone who has ever set their virtual feet in the world of Lost Ark should have encountered heaps of bots: It’s teeming with strangely mechanically moving characters everywhere, who also have names that sound like someone’s head is over them keyboard rolled.
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Lost Ark shows how Geralt, Ciri & Co. from The Witcher 3 look in the MMO
Of course, these bots are a thorn in the side of the players – and the joy in the social media is correspondingly great that the pests will now disappear from sight, at least for a certain time.
According to developer Smilegate must large-scale bot ban waves continue to be carried out and new methods to identify and combat bots are widely introduced
so that the current wave of bans is not just a drop in the bucket.
However, it is questionable whether the bot problem can really be solved. New accounts can boost themselves to a maximum level and a high item level with the real-money purchase of a power pass and start farming again shortly.
The current wave of bans not only reveals that around 60 percent of active accounts were bots, but also that a large proportion of players apparently buy in-game gold via external websites instead of farming them themselves – if nobody buys from them, the bots would yes disappear by itself. A problem that is always present in World of Warcraft and other MMOs – especially in Free2Play titles like Lost Ark.
Lost Ark plant The Witcher-Crossover
In the MMORPG you can soon meet Geralt and Ciri
Incidentally, Lost Ark starts a big crossover with The Witcher 3 in January, in which you complete quests for and with well-known Witcher characters such as Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer or Delphinium in a new area. If you’re lucky, the annoying bots won’t be back by then.
