Giga-successful MMOARPG Lost Ark is not without its issues. As we noted yesterday, its player numbers are still pretty ludicrous. However, one reason for those numbers? Bots.
First, here’s a vid that outlines it all.
Short version: in a five minute span, our man here sees 37 bots, 36 of which are the exact same class, with the same gear. They’re all easily identifiable by their nonsense names, lack of titles, and completely identical walking pattern. That’s a bot every 8 seconds.
Botting is a problem for any online game – as the video says, even something like League of Legends has people botting accounts to give them playtime and passive gains in currency. It’s a sliding scale as a game becomes easier to automate, with PvE-focused MMOs being at the top of the list.
Lost Ark is a prime target for many reasons. It has RMT elements and is free-to-play, so making accounts and giving them value is easy. It has, or at least had, a massive playerbase, so lots of potential purchasers of whatever the bots manage to gather, and lots of unscrupulous individuals willing to use them. It is ludicrously massive and grindy, so plenty of bits and pieces to sell off, including just entire accounts.
It also has some unique problems. It’s relatively easy to play and thus automate – which, fair enough, the same is true of games like Diablo 2 & 3. But it was also developed, originally, for a gaming ecosystem where to create an account you had to present your government-issued id number. This is how online gaming is regulated in South Korea, the game’s country of origin.
The western version of Lost Ark isn’t completely lacking anti-cheat (indeed, one of the most common smaller complaints is the game’s glacial load time due to Easy Anti-Cheat). However, clearly it’s vulnerable, and even the most basic steps to counter-act it aren’t being taken. You could ban thousands of bots a day just using the method outlined in this video, nevermind if you actually had back-end access, analytics tools, and so on.
Anecdotally, I saw plenty of gold selling ads while playing Lost Ark, as well as a few packs of bots. Nothing on this sort of scale though, and as outlined above, this is proving damaging to the game economy. It’s also skewing player numbers and perception, with things like class pick rates, busy areas, and so on.
And, of course, those Lost Ark player numbers. Do I think a significant number of those 500k concurrents are bots? No, probably not, but it’s really not a good look. And the second someone finds themselves in a human-deserted area or unable to find players to do content with, it’s going to increase annoyance. Plus, these bots are taking up server and queue space, meaning legitimate players maybe can’t get online, or play with their friends. It’s been called a “top priority” by the devs – but that could mean a fix tomorrow, or in 6 months.
It’s also remarkably easy to get your hands on a boting tool. As usual, they’re hosted on the most scammy looking sites on the internet, but they’re not exactly hard to find. I could have installed two in the time it took to write this post, and they’re effective in some of the very highest levels of content. No doubt if and when Amazon and SmileGate come down on this, those same forums will be packed with people saying they were doing nothing wrong – it’s always the way. Hopefully it happens sooner rather than later.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.