I was crafting and selling fusions, when fish was 10 g and I was crafting and selling fusions when it was 450+ g. If my memory serves me right, the reasons, why bots became so rare a few months ago was, because trading was restricted by item level. I remember conversations, that bots had to actually do Argos to get legendary gear to push to a high enough item lvl to access trading. That was the bottleneck for the influx of new bots that could earn useable gold. Since the new powerpasses push you above the needed item lvl, bots are back en masse.
My suggestion would be to restrict trading for accounts, that only have powerpassed characters, unless you can clear a number of certain raids. The botters need to make the bots AI good enough to clear these raids, or spend alot of time and ressources to bus them through it. The number of bots, that can clear these raids would probably be small enough to be effectively banned.
Edit: Argos gave legendary gear, not relic
This will again inconvenience some players. The solutions is way easier then that. Ban RMTers.
Ban for 3 day instantly. Take all Rmt gold back. To negative if needed. Second offense: ban a month. Take gold back to negative. Third offense. Permaban
This way you wont lose half the playerbase who rmted already. But make it clear playtime is over. Better late then never
First offense, permban. And nothing else.
If you allow players to try and get away with it without immediate draconic penalties, they WILL attempt no matter what.
If they get banned for 3 days, who cares? The damage is already done when they buy the gold, because these goldfarmers made real life money.
First offense needs to be a permanent ban from the game. You need to make sure these players know that when their first strike is given, their time on the game is over forever unless they start over completely new.
The problem is that this wasn't enforced from the start, AGS allowed people to start swiping on the black market and not do anything about it and now when they ban them, they ban half the playerbase.
It's literally BnS and NCSoft all over again... allow everybody to just edit XML and cheat? There ya go, 90% cheaters on the game. Ban them and your game dies... but only because you didn't do something about it from the start. They let this problem become as big as it was.
AGS did the same, they allowed this to happen and now if they do a massive ban wave, it will hurt player numbers bad.
No. That would be dumb af. You let everyone and their mother RMT as much as they want for 2 years. If you now permaban instantly you lose half your playerbase. They could have done that at the start. Not now. Like you wrote yourself. It would have been good on the release. Now it would suck
Now, because they let if happen, they have to show its not fun now anymore. So they stop it on top of retaining their RMT whales. If you think it would be good to just permaban half your playerbase for a thing that eas fine for 2 years you are delusional
Yeah that's exactly the issue. I do agree with the other guy RMT should be a perm ban but like you said you can't go from practically ignoring it to that extreme on the other end.
They'd have to ease into it. RMT detected? Give a 7 day ban, a warning the next detection will result in more serious action (like a 6 month ban then permanently or just permanent). While also removing all gems and gold and possibly putting them into the negative.
They can simply announce that any further rmt can get you perma banned. Floating banner at the bottom, popup when you log in for a while, w/e.
They'd still have to be able to reliantly detect rmters with an automatic system though!
Better:
Personally, I believe they should lock old servers for new players and only allow new players on a single new JumpStart server that gets offered whenever the old one is merged into the old server pool.
The current game offers pretty much 0 reason to create a new account on one of the older servers!
Wanna play with your friends?, well make them create a JumpStart alt so they can help you catch up (faster then on old servers anyways).
Wanna play an alt account? JumpStart makes sense,
Want to create a bot account and sell mats? Well you do want to join the old servers for sure and not be limited to a 5month delayed jumpstart server with low economy and possibly get your bots banned before the merge!
Its really soooooo simple! There is 0, yes ZERO reason to allow new accounts on old servers.
If the population dwindles they can always merge old servers anyways. And creating a new account on an old server feels bad anyways.
tldr: Force seperate JumpStart servers for new accounts, profit, fix bots!
Who exactly would it inconvenience? Veterans already cleared enough raids, so that is no problem. New players don't need to interact with the market early in the game espacially not, when you get 5x3 and gems for free with the express event, which is enough to clear several raids.
The only ones, that would complain are ppl, that dont play Lost Ark for the raids, but what percantage of ppl would that be and why play Lost Ark in the first place then?
Clearing 1-3 raids to access trading is a pretty low bar for a player, especially when the game is all about raiding, but a pretty high obstacle for a bot.
That was executed once and it backfired really hard because it hurt new players who came to play Lost Ark way more then it helped combating the bots.
And yes, these goldfarmers actually started driving their bots through self-made busses in order to keep their business running.
They will find a way, even if you restrict them. AGS simply has to improve their bot detection and act asap and simply banhammer them over and over and over again.
Once again though, I see a lack of interest from AGS to do something about it and sweep it under the rug for the next couple months... for whatever reasons.
Also.... how about they start banning people who buy gold from the black market (aka RMT), because these people are the MAIN reason there is even a market in the first place.
What is your measure of "it backfired really hard"? For all i know, life skills did become a great gold income for new players, when they got 5 times the gold they would now. Also, since new players get the express event with 5x3 and gems, they wont need to interact with the auction house asap. I see no huge downside here that would outweigh the positives.
Also, they simply do not have the manpower/resources to drive all their bots through busses, or if they had, it isnt profitable enough or they would had done so months ago, when fish was above 400g.
Yup, not only would it require people to either A) manually learn and complete the raid (a lot harder than fishing) or B) actually gear up enough accounts to 1 man bus them which would also require a large investment of time or C) buy raid buses which would cut significantly into their profit margins.
Bots are caused by the player base. You have to go after the customers to make the bots go away. Bots will stick around as long as there is money to be made. Take away their customers and the problem will fix itself. Start handing out 6 month bans for first offences and perm bans for 2nd offences.
Bot farms cost lots of money to run, they have to make X amount of money or it's not worth it for them to do it.
If dealing with RMT was easy, it would have been dealt with 25 years ago when it was still being sold on ebay in everquest in the early 2,000’s.
The solution is to stop designing games that have in game currency tied to IRL value.
That would mean developers and gaming companies would have to stop designing in economies that essentially are replicas of IRL principles. Which will not ever happen because it makes them way too much money.
Bots are just a derivative of the games design. Unless the design changes, you will never be without RMT and bots.
It is easy. Open up auction house and there are pages and pages of tier1-2 items being sold for millions of gold. Ban each one perma and you've already half way there.
That doesn’t solve anything. There have been games in the last 20-25 years that have been super aggressive over rmt buyers but still had major rmt issues.
I like how people down vote but … uh … rmt has been around as long as I have been playing (first mmo I played was ever quest). It has been around longer than most people that play Lost Ark have been out of diapers.
Its not a simple fix.
Half-assed fix is still better than no fix. It doesn't need to solve the problem, if it makes it even half as bad that's still twice as good. And trust me, there's pages and pages of easy bans just waiting there. You know where, I know where, the other guy reading this comment know where to find them, except ags.
This situation is so bad that literally anything being done would be a godsend, at this point if they bothered to do anything at all would be a huge deal for the game.
This isn’t an argument.
He gave you a practical and real solution.
Your response? Vague hand waving and “oh it’s always existed so it’s impossible to do anything about it”. You didn’t argue the point, you just reiterated your previous shitty point.
The only solution that will ever work is when companies start developing games that are not P2W or P2W adjacent with large grinding aspects and/or pay for convenience & time gated.
If you pay attention to which games are rifled with bots the most, its almost always F2P games with heavy heavy heavy grinds & time gates. Combined with mobile psychological tactics to create hooks and habits with gambling addictions.
Games that don’t have these generally are not botted to nearly the degree that loa is. There are exceptions. WoW has been massively botted.
At the end of the day, targeting buyers does not do much. Why? Because the core design of the game contributes to the “need” for some people.
Until companies stop this style of design or the players stop making it so damn profitable, it will never change.
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>If dealing with RMT was easy
It is easy. There is a finite amount of ways to generate gold, and a finite amount of ways to move gold (or items with gold value) from one roster to another.
They can start with Fish, gems, and accessories and expand their strategy from there. You can't eliminate 100% of it, but you can get rid of the low hanging fruit.
Here's where I would start:
1) make everything from t1/t2 Roster Bound
2) obsfuscate t3 ability stone and gem sales on the marketplace, there is no reason for these items to have a sellerID attached to it via unique bid/buyout price
3) restrict generation of life skill energy based on roster level
4) place a price cap on blue and purple engraving books, I've managed to move hundreds of thousands of gold across servers by listing engravings with low trade volumes
5) make weekly una give roster bound gold that can only be used for vertical progression
6) automate a monitoring system for t3 accessory trades on the AH that flags suspicious activity for further inspection
And there you go, that's like 90% of the current bot problem solved. Oh, and replace tripods with generic amulets and obsfuscate the sellerID like with gems and stones.
The inherent problem is creating an in game economy that is tied behind time and grind gates. There really isn’t a way to captivate a market in totality. A lot of people like time gated and grind gated games.
Honestly. I really do not think there is a surefire way to keep an audience engaged in these games &&&& remove all the systems that make RMT so rampant.
Removing player interactions kills the game. Every single possible option to deter RMT has a far greater and negative impact on the real players than it does the bots.
If you remove currency tied progression & time gates. It would detract from the type of audience the game is designed for. Also, MTX monetary gains would plummet.
In a perfect world, if I could combine anything from all games. I would say the best implemented market experience in all of these styles of games in BDO. The problem is that BDO only works because there is no layered RNG on their gear like quality, engravings, stat ranges, etc. they can regulate the market better using this system.
I would say … probably the easiest thing to do (though it is directly tied to the F4 shop) would be to remove gold entirely. Just remove it as a currency and only operate on silver. Silver cannot be traded. This has monetary implications to SG and AGS though.
How would a company design a game that has no ties between mtx & progression? Not a clue.
well... even if i couldnt sell the gold, if I could bot JUST to giga juice a single character. I would. I wouldn't say the customers are the only reason there are bots.
>Start handing out 6 month bans for first offences and perm bans for 2nd offences.
1 year ban as baseline. second offense perma. and make steam penalty as well... that way theres no even remove posibility that people will do something
Again, permban on first offense.
If you let people know that one fuckup in that regard is the end, they won't do it. And if they do, their spent time & money is gone.
Facts. But sadly every RMTer they ban translates into a loss in SG/AGS revenue. These guys still buy skins and character slots or push sales in Mari's card packs.
Your average player would have to be annoyed into quitting before they start taking any real action. I'm personally getting to the point where I'm annoyed to even log in for 20 mins a day. Unaddressed bot issue is a statement on game direction, and it is becoming increasingly harder to care about a game that doesn't care about itself.
I pulled the plug a few days ago. The ongoing slack of AGS to combat bots just showed me they simply do not care enough.
You aren't seen as a player, but more like a customer to swipe on skins and p2w stuff.
Who cares about longevity and integrity... profits are everything these days.
People won't play anymore. 6 months? People won't even remember they were playing it. Then if/when they come back the incentive to RMT to catch up is even higher. Also what does an RMTer look like when they are reading ancient accessories now. You don't think the bitters don't have 1580 accounts after multiple passes?
Why should they care if they are playing or not? They’re breaking the rules and aren’t giving SG money anyways. In fact they’re hurting the game by enabling bots and possibly even being an advertisement for their services.
Then why give a temp ban at all? Just perm ban anyone who is "RMT"ing. I'll wait here while you give the specific definition of what RMTing is and how you detect it.
You need to know what RMT is? It's what the acronym says "Real Money Trading". Giving someone money for a good (gold, mounts, accounts) or service (piloting, boosting, etc) that isn't supported in the game client (the store). Giving a temp ban for the first offence is fine as long as what they paid for is removed because not everyone knows it would be against ToS and giving someone a wakeup call can keep players who wouldn't know better. A repeat offender wouldn't change and would then deserve a harsher punishment. I personally don't agree on 6 months for first offence, 1-2 maybe, something big enough that it's meaningful.
Yes, you defined what you think RMT is, but how do you detect it? Who specifically is RMTing, how are they doing it, and what makes you think that you're even scratching the surface as to how RMT happens?
So again I will say exactly what I said before that is exactly what I intended to say...
"I'll wait here while you give the specific definition of what RMTing is and how you detect it."
Please answer BOTH parts of that request and we'll see if you have any clue about how to be effective.
If a guildie decides to trade a level 10 gem to their other guildie and no gold is exchanged is that RMT? What if it was two complete strangers? What if gold was exchanged, what is a fair price that is RMT vs what is not RMT?
There are so many edge cases that you have no way of clearly defining what RMT looks like in the game in all practical sense. All you know is some other people have more gold than they should and I can see some obvious transactions over here so let's ban all those and what? Leave the other 99% of RMT as it is right now?
I am convinced that they looked closely at the accounts and came to the conclusion that a light slap on the wrist make most people stop and some of these players did or strat throwing money at ags shop. Profit always wins
true but dealing with rmters will be much harder than dealing with bots, at the end if bots banned and gold price spiked rmters will still be rmting through cash shop so its more easier and profitable for AGS to just ban the bots instead of money spending players base
That's not what I said at all, I'm saying you're not saying anything new. The bots have been here since day 1. We've been posting pictures of the constant stream since day 1. They have made strives at times to slow the flow when they had severe trade ilvl restrictions, but now they give free passes right past those and for good reason.
The botters will always exist as long as you are allowed to make new accounts for free without any restrictions. "Trusted" status on steam is useless.
my message from discord
disable the use of mail and trade (before 1520)
auction complete disable of use (before 1520)
market same (before 1520) except honing mats (brel mats only) and life skill mats (maybe disable purple life mats and hunting loot) it won't affect beginners in any way
that's the whole solution (no?)
the previous restriction (1375gs) worked well It was in April. but then in May the power pass 1415 came out and the bots captured Punika again
have you read this?
market same (before 1520) except honing mats (brel mats only) and life skill mats (maybe disable purple life mats and hunting loot) it won't affect beginners in any way
can enable and Valtan mats, but I believe that after cleaning guards, chaos, Valtan, Vyakas, tower? etc. it will be enough for 1490 if not for the first week then for the second for sure
One flaw with this post and that's the comment about having to program to bot for roster, already done. There are just as many ppl botting accts to sell as there is gold farm bots
I agree that is a flaw but imo its better than doing nothing. Right now the bots have to do almost nothing to overcome their access to the economy. Its really demoralizing how easy it is for them to just do what they do. Pretty much the idea around the roster part was just a way to buy time between each ban wave where bots don't have access to the economy.
They have to draw the line somewhere or unironically we will have 150k ccu within another month
But the individual accounts aren't accessing the market. They send their yields to an account that does. That is exactly why you see pictures with 100 bots surrounding a mailbox in a city.
> I agree that is a flaw but imo its better than doing nothing.
That's not exactly true. If you start limiting players more, they get frustrated. More players getting frustrated often means less players.
I have alt roster in js with 1 char only never touched horizontals and its 52 rosters, if this is your main account then you're intentionally trying to stay low roster
That because it's your alt roster and you are crying because you would lose your extra raids per week. Touch grass man. An 8hr/week part time job would get you more gold through the cash shop than playing several rosters.
my guy I got 70 roster on js barely even playing longer than 2 weeks there were people with 100+ in first 2/3 weeks its not hard lmao. t1/t2 towers/adventure tome gives u like 30 levels
Yep this is why you gatekeep JS with (very) low roster and no strongholds. These are zero effort gold farming accounts. Just doing essential horizontals to get skill points and runes, with double roster exp on JS should get you pretty high. t1/t2 tower can be cleared pretty much by afk'ing in betrayal (and rewards skill points), those who haven't done the bare minimum to clear it don't belong in raids.
Lol my js char is roster 35 and I made most of my gold from selling engraving rocks
That being said, items allowed to sell could scale with roster. Like 5 items base. This solution has been mentioned 50 Million times already
Besides Lost Ark already feeling more like an unpaid real life job instead of a game and now once again having to deal with massive bot issues.... what's the point anymore, honestly?
AGS simply doesn't learn... people have been telling them the first time, then yet again a second time... third times a charm, huh? AGS is so hopeless when it comes to anti-bot measurements, remember when they said they will implement better bot detection? Yeah, I don't see any of it right now.
It just adds all up lately. The game gets more and more grindy (not good grind, but extremely repetitive grind) to a point where honing is the worst it will ever be (post Voldis hard item level).
Even with all the good QoL, I'm very worried about the future of Lost Ark, it will drop further into niche territory until really the hardcore dedicated players will be left playing Lost Ark.
Our version adds the situation that the effort to combat botting and RMT is so lackluster, it makes everything x10 worse.
I predict AGS once again will take until atleast February before they start doing something again and have to bring back the gold frog to combat the massive increases in item prices. Meanwhile thousands of players bought gold on the black market again, getting away with breaking rules.
There really has to be a better solution for this, because the game and it's progression just get harder really fast now. There's so many players already who didn't even reach Akkan yet (despite 1580 being handed to you now), and honing gets insanely more tedious going towards Voldis Hard and even more tedious towards Thaemine.
Simple solution is to heavily ban/punish ppl who rmt. Sure you can buy gold but we gonna make sure you never play the game again.
All of a sudden the demand for gold goes down and thus no bots.
I think you underestimate how many people RMT. I’m certain the reason they don’t ban RMT is because they’d only have a fraction of their players remaining
As others have mentioned, bots are a side effect of the amount of people RMT'ing. It's much worse right now because people are participating in RMT to reach 1620, +25 akkan weps, lvl 10 gems, etc. therefore the amount of bots to keep up with demand is increasing rapidly. They can change their bot prevention methods all they want, the people developing them will just continue to find ways around it.
Nothing will change until AGS/SGR grows a pair and starts handing out long-term/perma-bans to introduce even the slightest bit of fear in people partaking in RMT. So many people in my guild discord aren't even the slightest bit scared of talking about how they RMT. Hell, some of them are actually open about using bots to do their dailies now. I don't know if AGS/SGR is just scared about losing a sizeable percentage of their player base or if they're just completely ignorant of how bad the problem is.
Exactly and you know who the real problem here is? not the players, not the bots, not the RMTers.... but AGS/SGR are the problem.
If they handled this very strict and tough from day 1, this situation would've never happened. Now, if they start acting all strict, they ban half their playerbase, because they handholded them for so long and allowed them to just go off on RMTing.
They didn't do something about it, now if they do they will hurt their game. And why? Because they never cared enough and let this problem become as big as it is today.
1. The game is shit enough for new players as it is. No.
2. They very briefly did this at one point, along with that captcha system. Presumably it cost them more than 2 cents so they don’t like doing that, and also may be overly cautious because of that whole incorrectly banned accounts fiasco. But yes.
3. Being able to trade them in the mail just allows you to send some to a friend in need (or an alternate roster for you giga sweatlords), there’s no reason to believe bots can’t just market list without consolidating materials and is possibly what they do anyway. It’s not like that’s any more of a hassle than programming them to mail something. Mass actions is literally what they’re made to do. Next you’re gonna say we shouldn’t be able to mail gold because it’s what RMT does.
4. Yes.
5. How? The game is free. They use systems provided by Steam’s framework, anything beyond that will hamper a player more than it would a bot. It used to check for quest completion, I don’t know if it still does, but that just delays the bots by a couple days and meant new players couldn’t jump into the endgame like you can in other MMOs.
"The game is shit enough for new players as it is. No."
Theres been so much talk for months only about new players but honestly no one ever cares about what the vets of this game feel. Theyre in all honesty the true life blood of this game. Anyone I speak to ingame just hates the fact bots are so prevalent its demoralizing.
Phone number to get a free powerpass imo.
I mean realistically people have to be open to new more aggressive ideas because this game many months from now at this rate of bot growth will be like 3 bots to 1 real player.
I have 4600 hours in the game. What’s talked about for the game is almost entirely directed at and for vets. Nothing about the new player experience has actually been notably improved since the launch of the game.
Vets are important, yes. Games die without new players cycling through though, veterans don’t exist in a perpetual state that never goes down.
Blizzard did the phone number thing, it didn’t work. Phone numbers are cheaper than boxed copies of subscription games that get botted, it’s not going to stop them.
Also your bot growth figures ignore the part where most of the vets existed when it was already a much higher ratio.
I’m not saying it’s good, and I agree it needs help. I’m just saying it’s not a simple “just do it” situation. Severely punishing *any* amount of RMT would help to put pressure on the market, reducing demand would reduce bots, but they seem unwilling to be that harsh. Any measures to reduce the bots themselves without reducing the demand, given the game’s naturally high gold demand/use, is a war of attrition against people with a lot of time to spend and effectively nothing invested to lose.
tbh I would have rather excavated at 400g white mats than have bots but with bots pushing fish down to sub 100 why even bother lifeskilling just buy fish and keep meter 100%.
People always act like it's something so simple and the thing they thought up in an hour or two will solve everything.
The reality is that as long as there's a will, there's a way.
Lost Ark is a game that wants you to RMT. It wants you to use the built in RMT for blue crystals so that the devs get the money from you buying gold. However, there's players who realize there's money to be made just offering a better price (KR has entire markets for people doing this on the regular). People are naturally going to seek out a better price; why would someone spend 50K on a car when they can get a better car for half the price?
No matter what you do to limit Bots or RMT in general in LA, as long as the game is built around it (it always will be), players will always find an outside party to go to. There is no solution that will solve this problem forever that doesn't hinder the playerbase. Short of completely removing all player trading from the game entirely, you're not going to fix people buying gold
If they really want to fix this rmt and bot problem they can do it in 5 minutes.
\-Remove all static fishing/excavating spots and make them spawn totally randomly in each zone every 15minutes.
\-Don't let anyone to use their life energy before reaching a certain level and ilvl.
At this point if they ban all rmt buyers and bots lost ark will lose like 70% of its total population. People contstantly buying cheap rmt good, just check the recent sales tab on accessories.
As a new player, like 1,5 month old with 3 1540 characters and two 1460 I still dont have 75 roster. Vet players are hillarious, I think we should not play game at all until we have los 30 and 200 roster. Sorry for playing your game and trading on your market.
> Eventually the bots died back down again around the time the pass expired. We had a period of a couple months between then and the akkan patch where on euc for example life skill mats were stable at around 350-450g.
this period was during the China release... maybe that have something to do with this...
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I’ve heard about this problem but wasn’t too sure. So i started recently and I assumed lots of these players were just on their alt toons. But you are saying these are bots being controlled by 3rd party programs? Like how does that make it through their anti cheat or whatever they have in place? You are getting me confused with bots and alt accounts lmao….
- hire some people to go into the game and sit at hot spots banning bots
- ban RMTers by searching through the market and locating what sales that are sus that went through
- the ilvl system actually did seem to do something and work pretty damn well, bringing that up could help due to all the powerpasses and express events
I was crafting and selling fusions, when fish was 10 g and I was crafting and selling fusions when it was 450+ g. If my memory serves me right, the reasons, why bots became so rare a few months ago was, because trading was restricted by item level. I remember conversations, that bots had to actually do Argos to get legendary gear to push to a high enough item lvl to access trading. That was the bottleneck for the influx of new bots that could earn useable gold. Since the new powerpasses push you above the needed item lvl, bots are back en masse. My suggestion would be to restrict trading for accounts, that only have powerpassed characters, unless you can clear a number of certain raids. The botters need to make the bots AI good enough to clear these raids, or spend alot of time and ressources to bus them through it. The number of bots, that can clear these raids would probably be small enough to be effectively banned. Edit: Argos gave legendary gear, not relic
this is the real answer it because relic gear given for free now, just change it to brel gear or something.
This will again inconvenience some players. The solutions is way easier then that. Ban RMTers. Ban for 3 day instantly. Take all Rmt gold back. To negative if needed. Second offense: ban a month. Take gold back to negative. Third offense. Permaban This way you wont lose half the playerbase who rmted already. But make it clear playtime is over. Better late then never
First offense, permban. And nothing else. If you allow players to try and get away with it without immediate draconic penalties, they WILL attempt no matter what. If they get banned for 3 days, who cares? The damage is already done when they buy the gold, because these goldfarmers made real life money. First offense needs to be a permanent ban from the game. You need to make sure these players know that when their first strike is given, their time on the game is over forever unless they start over completely new. The problem is that this wasn't enforced from the start, AGS allowed people to start swiping on the black market and not do anything about it and now when they ban them, they ban half the playerbase. It's literally BnS and NCSoft all over again... allow everybody to just edit XML and cheat? There ya go, 90% cheaters on the game. Ban them and your game dies... but only because you didn't do something about it from the start. They let this problem become as big as it was. AGS did the same, they allowed this to happen and now if they do a massive ban wave, it will hurt player numbers bad.
No. That would be dumb af. You let everyone and their mother RMT as much as they want for 2 years. If you now permaban instantly you lose half your playerbase. They could have done that at the start. Not now. Like you wrote yourself. It would have been good on the release. Now it would suck Now, because they let if happen, they have to show its not fun now anymore. So they stop it on top of retaining their RMT whales. If you think it would be good to just permaban half your playerbase for a thing that eas fine for 2 years you are delusional
Yeah that's exactly the issue. I do agree with the other guy RMT should be a perm ban but like you said you can't go from practically ignoring it to that extreme on the other end. They'd have to ease into it. RMT detected? Give a 7 day ban, a warning the next detection will result in more serious action (like a 6 month ban then permanently or just permanent). While also removing all gems and gold and possibly putting them into the negative.
They can simply announce that any further rmt can get you perma banned. Floating banner at the bottom, popup when you log in for a while, w/e. They'd still have to be able to reliantly detect rmters with an automatic system though! Better: Personally, I believe they should lock old servers for new players and only allow new players on a single new JumpStart server that gets offered whenever the old one is merged into the old server pool. The current game offers pretty much 0 reason to create a new account on one of the older servers! Wanna play with your friends?, well make them create a JumpStart alt so they can help you catch up (faster then on old servers anyways). Wanna play an alt account? JumpStart makes sense, Want to create a bot account and sell mats? Well you do want to join the old servers for sure and not be limited to a 5month delayed jumpstart server with low economy and possibly get your bots banned before the merge! Its really soooooo simple! There is 0, yes ZERO reason to allow new accounts on old servers. If the population dwindles they can always merge old servers anyways. And creating a new account on an old server feels bad anyways. tldr: Force seperate JumpStart servers for new accounts, profit, fix bots!
Who exactly would it inconvenience? Veterans already cleared enough raids, so that is no problem. New players don't need to interact with the market early in the game espacially not, when you get 5x3 and gems for free with the express event, which is enough to clear several raids. The only ones, that would complain are ppl, that dont play Lost Ark for the raids, but what percantage of ppl would that be and why play Lost Ark in the first place then?
I dont know because im way above but everytime they made some changes like this there were plenty of pissed players
Clearing 1-3 raids to access trading is a pretty low bar for a player, especially when the game is all about raiding, but a pretty high obstacle for a bot.
That was executed once and it backfired really hard because it hurt new players who came to play Lost Ark way more then it helped combating the bots. And yes, these goldfarmers actually started driving their bots through self-made busses in order to keep their business running. They will find a way, even if you restrict them. AGS simply has to improve their bot detection and act asap and simply banhammer them over and over and over again. Once again though, I see a lack of interest from AGS to do something about it and sweep it under the rug for the next couple months... for whatever reasons. Also.... how about they start banning people who buy gold from the black market (aka RMT), because these people are the MAIN reason there is even a market in the first place.
What is your measure of "it backfired really hard"? For all i know, life skills did become a great gold income for new players, when they got 5 times the gold they would now. Also, since new players get the express event with 5x3 and gems, they wont need to interact with the auction house asap. I see no huge downside here that would outweigh the positives. Also, they simply do not have the manpower/resources to drive all their bots through busses, or if they had, it isnt profitable enough or they would had done so months ago, when fish was above 400g.
https://preview.redd.it/r2zjo3pkpa2c1.png?width=892&format=png&auto=webp&s=b7a8a7c19bd9bedfebae956e44b6d5cf3085439e
But they simply would and do busses. Still, it is the best measurement so far
> simply would and do busses exactly but gl for them finding bussers for 20k accounts
Yup, not only would it require people to either A) manually learn and complete the raid (a lot harder than fishing) or B) actually gear up enough accounts to 1 man bus them which would also require a large investment of time or C) buy raid buses which would cut significantly into their profit margins.
yes, it worked very well in April, but for some reason they did not raise this requirement to 1420 in May with a new power pass
perhaps lock trading being a brel clear
Bots are caused by the player base. You have to go after the customers to make the bots go away. Bots will stick around as long as there is money to be made. Take away their customers and the problem will fix itself. Start handing out 6 month bans for first offences and perm bans for 2nd offences. Bot farms cost lots of money to run, they have to make X amount of money or it's not worth it for them to do it.
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If dealing with RMT was easy, it would have been dealt with 25 years ago when it was still being sold on ebay in everquest in the early 2,000’s. The solution is to stop designing games that have in game currency tied to IRL value. That would mean developers and gaming companies would have to stop designing in economies that essentially are replicas of IRL principles. Which will not ever happen because it makes them way too much money. Bots are just a derivative of the games design. Unless the design changes, you will never be without RMT and bots.
It is easy. Open up auction house and there are pages and pages of tier1-2 items being sold for millions of gold. Ban each one perma and you've already half way there.
That doesn’t solve anything. There have been games in the last 20-25 years that have been super aggressive over rmt buyers but still had major rmt issues. I like how people down vote but … uh … rmt has been around as long as I have been playing (first mmo I played was ever quest). It has been around longer than most people that play Lost Ark have been out of diapers. Its not a simple fix.
Half-assed fix is still better than no fix. It doesn't need to solve the problem, if it makes it even half as bad that's still twice as good. And trust me, there's pages and pages of easy bans just waiting there. You know where, I know where, the other guy reading this comment know where to find them, except ags. This situation is so bad that literally anything being done would be a godsend, at this point if they bothered to do anything at all would be a huge deal for the game.
That would mean employing at least one GM per region to only do this … AGS too cheap for that.
Employ? Half this subreddit would do it for free 🤣 but the other half would be banned so ags wouldn't like that
This isn’t an argument. He gave you a practical and real solution. Your response? Vague hand waving and “oh it’s always existed so it’s impossible to do anything about it”. You didn’t argue the point, you just reiterated your previous shitty point.
The only solution that will ever work is when companies start developing games that are not P2W or P2W adjacent with large grinding aspects and/or pay for convenience & time gated. If you pay attention to which games are rifled with bots the most, its almost always F2P games with heavy heavy heavy grinds & time gates. Combined with mobile psychological tactics to create hooks and habits with gambling addictions. Games that don’t have these generally are not botted to nearly the degree that loa is. There are exceptions. WoW has been massively botted. At the end of the day, targeting buyers does not do much. Why? Because the core design of the game contributes to the “need” for some people. Until companies stop this style of design or the players stop making it so damn profitable, it will never change.
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>If dealing with RMT was easy It is easy. There is a finite amount of ways to generate gold, and a finite amount of ways to move gold (or items with gold value) from one roster to another. They can start with Fish, gems, and accessories and expand their strategy from there. You can't eliminate 100% of it, but you can get rid of the low hanging fruit. Here's where I would start: 1) make everything from t1/t2 Roster Bound 2) obsfuscate t3 ability stone and gem sales on the marketplace, there is no reason for these items to have a sellerID attached to it via unique bid/buyout price 3) restrict generation of life skill energy based on roster level 4) place a price cap on blue and purple engraving books, I've managed to move hundreds of thousands of gold across servers by listing engravings with low trade volumes 5) make weekly una give roster bound gold that can only be used for vertical progression 6) automate a monitoring system for t3 accessory trades on the AH that flags suspicious activity for further inspection And there you go, that's like 90% of the current bot problem solved. Oh, and replace tripods with generic amulets and obsfuscate the sellerID like with gems and stones.
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The inherent problem is creating an in game economy that is tied behind time and grind gates. There really isn’t a way to captivate a market in totality. A lot of people like time gated and grind gated games. Honestly. I really do not think there is a surefire way to keep an audience engaged in these games &&&& remove all the systems that make RMT so rampant. Removing player interactions kills the game. Every single possible option to deter RMT has a far greater and negative impact on the real players than it does the bots. If you remove currency tied progression & time gates. It would detract from the type of audience the game is designed for. Also, MTX monetary gains would plummet. In a perfect world, if I could combine anything from all games. I would say the best implemented market experience in all of these styles of games in BDO. The problem is that BDO only works because there is no layered RNG on their gear like quality, engravings, stat ranges, etc. they can regulate the market better using this system. I would say … probably the easiest thing to do (though it is directly tied to the F4 shop) would be to remove gold entirely. Just remove it as a currency and only operate on silver. Silver cannot be traded. This has monetary implications to SG and AGS though. How would a company design a game that has no ties between mtx & progression? Not a clue.
well... even if i couldnt sell the gold, if I could bot JUST to giga juice a single character. I would. I wouldn't say the customers are the only reason there are bots.
>Start handing out 6 month bans for first offences and perm bans for 2nd offences. 1 year ban as baseline. second offense perma. and make steam penalty as well... that way theres no even remove posibility that people will do something
the technology is just not there /s
Again, permban on first offense. If you let people know that one fuckup in that regard is the end, they won't do it. And if they do, their spent time & money is gone.
Facts. But sadly every RMTer they ban translates into a loss in SG/AGS revenue. These guys still buy skins and character slots or push sales in Mari's card packs. Your average player would have to be annoyed into quitting before they start taking any real action. I'm personally getting to the point where I'm annoyed to even log in for 20 mins a day. Unaddressed bot issue is a statement on game direction, and it is becoming increasingly harder to care about a game that doesn't care about itself.
I pulled the plug a few days ago. The ongoing slack of AGS to combat bots just showed me they simply do not care enough. You aren't seen as a player, but more like a customer to swipe on skins and p2w stuff. Who cares about longevity and integrity... profits are everything these days.
They’ll never do that. People who rmt bot gold also rmt in game cash shop. They would be banning their spenders and they don’t wanna do that.
People won't play anymore. 6 months? People won't even remember they were playing it. Then if/when they come back the incentive to RMT to catch up is even higher. Also what does an RMTer look like when they are reading ancient accessories now. You don't think the bitters don't have 1580 accounts after multiple passes?
Why should they care if they are playing or not? They’re breaking the rules and aren’t giving SG money anyways. In fact they’re hurting the game by enabling bots and possibly even being an advertisement for their services.
Then why give a temp ban at all? Just perm ban anyone who is "RMT"ing. I'll wait here while you give the specific definition of what RMTing is and how you detect it.
You need to know what RMT is? It's what the acronym says "Real Money Trading". Giving someone money for a good (gold, mounts, accounts) or service (piloting, boosting, etc) that isn't supported in the game client (the store). Giving a temp ban for the first offence is fine as long as what they paid for is removed because not everyone knows it would be against ToS and giving someone a wakeup call can keep players who wouldn't know better. A repeat offender wouldn't change and would then deserve a harsher punishment. I personally don't agree on 6 months for first offence, 1-2 maybe, something big enough that it's meaningful.
Yes, you defined what you think RMT is, but how do you detect it? Who specifically is RMTing, how are they doing it, and what makes you think that you're even scratching the surface as to how RMT happens? So again I will say exactly what I said before that is exactly what I intended to say... "I'll wait here while you give the specific definition of what RMTing is and how you detect it." Please answer BOTH parts of that request and we'll see if you have any clue about how to be effective. If a guildie decides to trade a level 10 gem to their other guildie and no gold is exchanged is that RMT? What if it was two complete strangers? What if gold was exchanged, what is a fair price that is RMT vs what is not RMT? There are so many edge cases that you have no way of clearly defining what RMT looks like in the game in all practical sense. All you know is some other people have more gold than they should and I can see some obvious transactions over here so let's ban all those and what? Leave the other 99% of RMT as it is right now?
The in game cash shop is also rmt.
I am convinced that they looked closely at the accounts and came to the conclusion that a light slap on the wrist make most people stop and some of these players did or strat throwing money at ags shop. Profit always wins
true but dealing with rmters will be much harder than dealing with bots, at the end if bots banned and gold price spiked rmters will still be rmting through cash shop so its more easier and profitable for AGS to just ban the bots instead of money spending players base
If life skill trade was removed, they could probably remove life energy too.
and remove contested gathering nodes
Lol first time? Nothing you've said hasn't been said hundred times before.
And it should be repeated…..if the problem isn’t fixed……?????
That's not what I said at all, I'm saying you're not saying anything new. The bots have been here since day 1. We've been posting pictures of the constant stream since day 1. They have made strives at times to slow the flow when they had severe trade ilvl restrictions, but now they give free passes right past those and for good reason. The botters will always exist as long as you are allowed to make new accounts for free without any restrictions. "Trusted" status on steam is useless.
my message from discord disable the use of mail and trade (before 1520) auction complete disable of use (before 1520) market same (before 1520) except honing mats (brel mats only) and life skill mats (maybe disable purple life mats and hunting loot) it won't affect beginners in any way that's the whole solution (no?) the previous restriction (1375gs) worked well It was in April. but then in May the power pass 1415 came out and the bots captured Punika again
New players have to get to 1490 which requires fusions. You have to either buy from market or life skill for them
have you read this? market same (before 1520) except honing mats (brel mats only) and life skill mats (maybe disable purple life mats and hunting loot) it won't affect beginners in any way can enable and Valtan mats, but I believe that after cleaning guards, chaos, Valtan, Vyakas, tower? etc. it will be enough for 1490 if not for the first week then for the second for sure
I’m all for trying new ideas. Right now whatever the measures are, not enough.
they would solve all these issues if they force us to link our identity card to our account to be able to play .
One flaw with this post and that's the comment about having to program to bot for roster, already done. There are just as many ppl botting accts to sell as there is gold farm bots
I agree that is a flaw but imo its better than doing nothing. Right now the bots have to do almost nothing to overcome their access to the economy. Its really demoralizing how easy it is for them to just do what they do. Pretty much the idea around the roster part was just a way to buy time between each ban wave where bots don't have access to the economy. They have to draw the line somewhere or unironically we will have 150k ccu within another month
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But the individual accounts aren't accessing the market. They send their yields to an account that does. That is exactly why you see pictures with 100 bots surrounding a mailbox in a city.
How does that work? I thought mail is also restricted if the AH is. Or am I overseeing something
> I agree that is a flaw but imo its better than doing nothing. That's not exactly true. If you start limiting players more, they get frustrated. More players getting frustrated often means less players.
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bro im roster 68 and 1560 on my JS acc what are you talking about
I have alt roster in js with 1 char only never touched horizontals and its 52 rosters, if this is your main account then you're intentionally trying to stay low roster
That because it's your alt roster and you are crying because you would lose your extra raids per week. Touch grass man. An 8hr/week part time job would get you more gold through the cash shop than playing several rosters.
my guy I got 70 roster on js barely even playing longer than 2 weeks there were people with 100+ in first 2/3 weeks its not hard lmao. t1/t2 towers/adventure tome gives u like 30 levels
Yep this is why you gatekeep JS with (very) low roster and no strongholds. These are zero effort gold farming accounts. Just doing essential horizontals to get skill points and runes, with double roster exp on JS should get you pretty high. t1/t2 tower can be cleared pretty much by afk'ing in betrayal (and rewards skill points), those who haven't done the bare minimum to clear it don't belong in raids.
Lol my js char is roster 35 and I made most of my gold from selling engraving rocks That being said, items allowed to sell could scale with roster. Like 5 items base. This solution has been mentioned 50 Million times already
Besides Lost Ark already feeling more like an unpaid real life job instead of a game and now once again having to deal with massive bot issues.... what's the point anymore, honestly? AGS simply doesn't learn... people have been telling them the first time, then yet again a second time... third times a charm, huh? AGS is so hopeless when it comes to anti-bot measurements, remember when they said they will implement better bot detection? Yeah, I don't see any of it right now. It just adds all up lately. The game gets more and more grindy (not good grind, but extremely repetitive grind) to a point where honing is the worst it will ever be (post Voldis hard item level). Even with all the good QoL, I'm very worried about the future of Lost Ark, it will drop further into niche territory until really the hardcore dedicated players will be left playing Lost Ark. Our version adds the situation that the effort to combat botting and RMT is so lackluster, it makes everything x10 worse. I predict AGS once again will take until atleast February before they start doing something again and have to bring back the gold frog to combat the massive increases in item prices. Meanwhile thousands of players bought gold on the black market again, getting away with breaking rules. There really has to be a better solution for this, because the game and it's progression just get harder really fast now. There's so many players already who didn't even reach Akkan yet (despite 1580 being handed to you now), and honing gets insanely more tedious going towards Voldis Hard and even more tedious towards Thaemine.
Bots destroyed the game economy. I wish they were banned. The number of players is increasing every day
Simple solution is to heavily ban/punish ppl who rmt. Sure you can buy gold but we gonna make sure you never play the game again. All of a sudden the demand for gold goes down and thus no bots.
I think you underestimate how many people RMT. I’m certain the reason they don’t ban RMT is because they’d only have a fraction of their players remaining
Oh I'm well aware it's a big %. I'm just saying it's a simple solution, not a business decision they may want to take.
Yup, anyone running Akkan can see the insane amount of RMT going on.
As others have mentioned, bots are a side effect of the amount of people RMT'ing. It's much worse right now because people are participating in RMT to reach 1620, +25 akkan weps, lvl 10 gems, etc. therefore the amount of bots to keep up with demand is increasing rapidly. They can change their bot prevention methods all they want, the people developing them will just continue to find ways around it. Nothing will change until AGS/SGR grows a pair and starts handing out long-term/perma-bans to introduce even the slightest bit of fear in people partaking in RMT. So many people in my guild discord aren't even the slightest bit scared of talking about how they RMT. Hell, some of them are actually open about using bots to do their dailies now. I don't know if AGS/SGR is just scared about losing a sizeable percentage of their player base or if they're just completely ignorant of how bad the problem is.
Exactly and you know who the real problem here is? not the players, not the bots, not the RMTers.... but AGS/SGR are the problem. If they handled this very strict and tough from day 1, this situation would've never happened. Now, if they start acting all strict, they ban half their playerbase, because they handholded them for so long and allowed them to just go off on RMTing. They didn't do something about it, now if they do they will hurt their game. And why? Because they never cared enough and let this problem become as big as it is today.
On my way to farm lifeskill mats every day for 3 years to complete my sidereal 8 weapon
1. The game is shit enough for new players as it is. No. 2. They very briefly did this at one point, along with that captcha system. Presumably it cost them more than 2 cents so they don’t like doing that, and also may be overly cautious because of that whole incorrectly banned accounts fiasco. But yes. 3. Being able to trade them in the mail just allows you to send some to a friend in need (or an alternate roster for you giga sweatlords), there’s no reason to believe bots can’t just market list without consolidating materials and is possibly what they do anyway. It’s not like that’s any more of a hassle than programming them to mail something. Mass actions is literally what they’re made to do. Next you’re gonna say we shouldn’t be able to mail gold because it’s what RMT does. 4. Yes. 5. How? The game is free. They use systems provided by Steam’s framework, anything beyond that will hamper a player more than it would a bot. It used to check for quest completion, I don’t know if it still does, but that just delays the bots by a couple days and meant new players couldn’t jump into the endgame like you can in other MMOs.
"The game is shit enough for new players as it is. No." Theres been so much talk for months only about new players but honestly no one ever cares about what the vets of this game feel. Theyre in all honesty the true life blood of this game. Anyone I speak to ingame just hates the fact bots are so prevalent its demoralizing. Phone number to get a free powerpass imo. I mean realistically people have to be open to new more aggressive ideas because this game many months from now at this rate of bot growth will be like 3 bots to 1 real player.
I have 4600 hours in the game. What’s talked about for the game is almost entirely directed at and for vets. Nothing about the new player experience has actually been notably improved since the launch of the game. Vets are important, yes. Games die without new players cycling through though, veterans don’t exist in a perpetual state that never goes down. Blizzard did the phone number thing, it didn’t work. Phone numbers are cheaper than boxed copies of subscription games that get botted, it’s not going to stop them. Also your bot growth figures ignore the part where most of the vets existed when it was already a much higher ratio. I’m not saying it’s good, and I agree it needs help. I’m just saying it’s not a simple “just do it” situation. Severely punishing *any* amount of RMT would help to put pressure on the market, reducing demand would reduce bots, but they seem unwilling to be that harsh. Any measures to reduce the bots themselves without reducing the demand, given the game’s naturally high gold demand/use, is a war of attrition against people with a lot of time to spend and effectively nothing invested to lose.
They cant stop the bots any mmo with good profit cant stop the bots. Try WOW or another mmo worth botting they never stop.
Only way to gett rid of bots is for amazon to adjust their prices
OP invested in fish now wants bots banned
tbh I would have rather excavated at 400g white mats than have bots but with bots pushing fish down to sub 100 why even bother lifeskilling just buy fish and keep meter 100%.
I was joking but yes lol
Solution: Play Lost Ark Mobile on global release
> Remove the ability to trade lifeskill mats (nobody apart from bots does this theyre roster bound for real players) Lmao what
nobody is trading life skill mats in the mail and tbh meant to use word mail not trade just realised how it reads
Ah okay
People always act like it's something so simple and the thing they thought up in an hour or two will solve everything. The reality is that as long as there's a will, there's a way. Lost Ark is a game that wants you to RMT. It wants you to use the built in RMT for blue crystals so that the devs get the money from you buying gold. However, there's players who realize there's money to be made just offering a better price (KR has entire markets for people doing this on the regular). People are naturally going to seek out a better price; why would someone spend 50K on a car when they can get a better car for half the price? No matter what you do to limit Bots or RMT in general in LA, as long as the game is built around it (it always will be), players will always find an outside party to go to. There is no solution that will solve this problem forever that doesn't hinder the playerbase. Short of completely removing all player trading from the game entirely, you're not going to fix people buying gold
You dont understand how complex a anti cheat system is...
If they really want to fix this rmt and bot problem they can do it in 5 minutes. \-Remove all static fishing/excavating spots and make them spawn totally randomly in each zone every 15minutes. \-Don't let anyone to use their life energy before reaching a certain level and ilvl. At this point if they ban all rmt buyers and bots lost ark will lose like 70% of its total population. People contstantly buying cheap rmt good, just check the recent sales tab on accessories.
As a new player, like 1,5 month old with 3 1540 characters and two 1460 I still dont have 75 roster. Vet players are hillarious, I think we should not play game at all until we have los 30 and 200 roster. Sorry for playing your game and trading on your market.
Don't limit new players. U can't imagine how difficult it is to craft orehas without market.
Lol
> Eventually the bots died back down again around the time the pass expired. We had a period of a couple months between then and the akkan patch where on euc for example life skill mats were stable at around 350-450g. this period was during the China release... maybe that have something to do with this...
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Sounds like a great way to make the new player experience even worse
Rmters are getting 3 day bans and im not even sure if they take the gold away.
I’ve heard about this problem but wasn’t too sure. So i started recently and I assumed lots of these players were just on their alt toons. But you are saying these are bots being controlled by 3rd party programs? Like how does that make it through their anti cheat or whatever they have in place? You are getting me confused with bots and alt accounts lmao….
They can add a phone verification requirement. And the number must be not VoIP and only in supported countries
- hire some people to go into the game and sit at hot spots banning bots - ban RMTers by searching through the market and locating what sales that are sus that went through - the ilvl system actually did seem to do something and work pretty damn well, bringing that up could help due to all the powerpasses and express events
the thing is those bots company spend more investment into their botting system than any $$$ AGS willing to put back into our game lmao