Just a month after its release, Lost Ark is deploying its largest batch of bans to date, removing over a million accounts in a single day. Following the South Korean MMO’s release on Steam on February 11, it reached a staggering 1,324,761 most concurrent players, second only to PUBG in Steam’s all-time concurrent player charts.
Some of these players may be regular players, but now that over 1 million accounts have been removed, we may see a drop relative to the average concurrent players to date.
One player said on Twitter that they had seen the Lost Ark server queue drop from over 8,000 to 950, although it is uncertain if this was the result of the ban.
Robots are seen in all MMOs, and Amazon was plagued by robot issues when it launched another MMO, New World. New World banned 7,700 bot accounts at the time.
If this is the reason the queue on EU Thirain went from 8k+ at peak time to 950 then great job. Credit where its due
— Stephy (@IianaDRK) March 4, 2022
A statement from the developers today said: “Maintaining a fair and fun gaming experience for our players is a top priority for the team. While we intend to have a huge impact on this wave of bans, we know there is more work to be done. Do, and want players to know this is just one step in an active and ongoing process.
Going forward, we will continue our work to detect and eliminate bots, cheating and bad behavior in Lost Ark at scale, including expanding our anti-cheat tools, improved bot identification methods, and more waves of bans as frequently as needed.”
The Lost Ark team also acknowledged that “a small number of players may have been mistakenly identified as bots”. Anyone who thinks they’ve been swept up in a million bot ban, as long as they’re a legitimate player, can appeal their ban via an Amazon Gaming support ticket.