Bots remain one of Lost Ark's top issues

(Image credit: Amazon Games)

Lost Ark has had a problem with bots for a while now, and publisher Amazon Games has already taken some steps to deal with it. On March 4, over a million accounts were banned for running bots—an unprecedented number. And yet, as mentioned in a recent update to its top issues, bots remain a problem.

"Following this initial massive ban wave," the update says, "we are continuing to regularly roll out additional bans to clear out more bots from the game. Beyond that, we are also working on internal methods and tools to make it much more difficult for bots to enter the game, especially at the current rate they are being created. These updates will soon be on their way to the game."

To combat the effect bots are having on Lost Ark's in-game marketplace, the rewards for some quests have been changed from gold, the currency needed for player-to-player trading, to silver, which is mainly used to pay for items and services provided by NPCs. Rapport quests and guide quests have been affected by this change.

One reason Lost Ark's bot problem matters is that players on the EU servers have often had to wait in lengthy queues to play—it must be galling to finally get online then see what are clearly clumps of bots blinking across the map in identical gear as they travel from quest giver to quest giver.

The update notes, "we are happy to share that queues in Europe are becoming more manageable. This is a result of a number of adjustments we've made in the background, including (but not limited to) improved game stability. We know it has been a long road for many players who stuck with their servers in the Europe Central region and we’ll continue to monitor the situation and make improvements wherever possible— like getting on top of bot bans, as we mentioned above."

Other issues mentioned are recent improvements to the matchmaking system, and the addition of a filter that lets players select which languages they'd like to see in chat. You can bring up the language filter by clicking the + symbol to create a new tab in the chat window.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.