I'm no game developer, but I am a data scientist. If they have data of player movements and auction house pricing, you can create an AI that will predict whether if the player is real or a bot. We use something similar when we try to predict fraudulent transactions for banks. This can be replicated for this if they have enough data. It can also be applied on a mass scale and its cheap.
The issue with this is there will be players trying to take advantage of the market and sell a low tier item at a high price that mimics a high tier item's stats. Then you'll have legit players making a hail mary attempt at selling shit items at a huge markup for the heck of it. The only way to combat bots is to have human admins in-game banning bots as they appear. There are many known spots where bots farm and if they're in chaos dungeons you can get them as they make congo lines in Vern for repairs. It's insane that such a profitable game has zero active admins on patrol.
Just randomly type player id like asdihqwklnas qoasdqweja aosijdamkw. And put the ban button , done. I'll bet AGS engineers are good at skill like this, since it's similar to what the leetcode trained them. The bots:players is like 90% vs 10%, you got 90% accuracy to ban bots randomly.
Experience as a new player that arrived later in the game, I found myself pushing T1 and T2 always alone. Nobody at Chaos Gates, nobody at Field Bosses, right up to Feiton where bots would always run Chaos Gates. I was so relieved and took advantage of them. I really wish that T1 and T2 events were all doable alone, with difficulty scaling down to accomodate the attendance.
I will argue to the death that the best solution to fight bots is to limit new accounts. This means no trading/mail or auction house until an account has reached a certain age and progression point in the game. There's enough free mats with events and buffs, and no real gold to be made on the AH, that the market should suffice all the way to T3. This gives AGS/SG **a lot** longer to catch and ban bots before they can sell gold. "OH BUT THE NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE!!!" - Which would you have as a new player? Queues and surrounded by bots, or having to actually play the game for a bit to progress?
Beautiful video, thank you for caring Stoopz, you, Neeko & and everyone else putting attention to this in this fashion might end up saving the game if AGS/SG decides to listen to this proper feedback.
Every single LA content creator needs to be talking about it, every single one of them. And if they don't you know they've cheated in someway, shape or form because there's no reason to not bring awareness to this. So far Saintone and Zeals have not made any videos regarding this and they're by far the biggest content creators on Twitch and Zeals is by far the largest on RUclips pulling 6 figure numbers every video. This game will not be fixed without these players making noise about it on a large scale.
@@TisBoiGoTSkiLLz Yea I mean Zeals doesn't care so much about it and considers it "bitching", I guess it doesn't affect them in KR that much lol. AGS/SG had 4 months to fix the problem, to do something/anything and they've shown time and time again they are unwilling. Meanwhile SG celebrating 800k players, so insulting. It's so depressing seeing such a good game being ruined by inaction.
@@igorjovanovic537 Honestly, that's pathetic if he really sees it that way. KR Lost Ark is every MMO players dream, if we got their version without RMTers and Bots, it would legit be the best MMO in the West with almost no contest once we hit KR content. Koreans are having the time of their lives on their version of the game and the West is just getting DESTROYED. I just tried asking Zeals about if he'll make a video or talk about the RMT/Bot situation in the West in his Twitch chat and my message literally didn't even appear in his chat, so I'll be unsubscribing him from since i didn't know that his stance was he didn't care. Really sad to hear. I hate greedy, and disingenuous people.
@@TisBoiGoTSkiLLz he did say that, and said I don't know how to deal with it and you guys don't too so we're basically just bitching about it, when someone in chat asked the other day. Idk if you watch RaizQT but he said something along these lines : I'm just gonna enjoy the game for what it is for a few months then bail out even if I love the game. He said AGS/SG isn't doing what they should've been doing and that it's too late now. ATK also seems concerned/scared about the state of the game, but Zeals not wanting to discuss it even while being one of the biggest content creators for the game is really discouraging.
The issues comes down to this: RMT is NOT being punished. More bots are a symptom of more people turning to gold purchasing. People are buying cheap gold and it is encouraging others to do the same. There have barely been enough mats for the average player to keep up with the content and gold inflation has gotten to the point where f2p isn't viable. Punish the cheaters and reward your player base or we are all going to be buying gold and botting our chaos dungeons real soon TM
It's the other way around. Wishing to punish the cheaters or the botters is basically like wishing a communist revolution and dekulakizaton. It's possible and it is effective, but the cost and the results are... problematic. Because at the end of the day what matters is that you have a person with disposable income. You can steal that income, tax, scam that person out of it - that's what businesses are for, but that is HIS income. In our society. And if THE GAME offers a a lot of VALUE for its INTERNAL currency - then that person just seeks a way to pay his way in. You can't fix humanity. Humans always seek to one up each other. What you can do - is fix the system. The game. It's complicated, because gold is an essential carrot, but it is technically possible. The problem is that it's not worth the hassle for most companies, because, again, the value of a carrot is too much, not to mention any byproduct, like key sales for WoW and player numbers for F2P games. However, it is a KOREAN game. And Koreans are... well, asians. And most asian game dev is sick, twisted and deplorable. At least when it comes to MMOs. Gachas, lootboxes, KoreanRNG, hour-long bossfights(and souls) and many more dark things of the gaming genre came from Asia. As stunning as the game is - at its core it's korean, VERY korean. Amazon can't do anything about it - their job is just deploying updates, they aren't the developers, they are merely a regional distributor.
Im on NA West with over 1000 hrs on my account. I'm very close to quitting this game because of the bots. It's insulting that I spend 4-8 hours a day on the game trying to farm every penny to keep up with the gold inflation. To make matters worse, I have to invest an additional couple of hours in a queue. The developers are going to lose players and have ZERO chance of getting new players if new players have to wait hours to experience the game.
@@Haz3Nation Yes making it harder for normal players to earn gold needed for everything in the game. Selling excess mats was a great way to earn lots of gold for people who milked alts. So having bots push cheaper mats is a double edged sword.
@@TwoNineSix296 k but legion raid is out. Game isnt like that later on. In kr u make gold by doing legion raids and abyss dungeons and everything on market is cheap af. We are getting to that. T1 and t2 stones like 1g now.
I appreciate you speaking for the EUW situation and not just focusing on NA even though that's where you are from.. and here's hoping there will someday be an option to server transfer or merge regions... because I have invested so much into EUW because I couldn't stand to be in 6 hour queues at launch on EUC. I havent enjoyed a game like this since vanilla WoW and really hope they will address the real issues you mentioned in this video.. there is something great here.
I am in the same boat. I won't start over, it'd take me likely 2 months just to get back to Valtan, and a ton of annoying af grinds that I've already done. No way I'm restarting. If they let EUW die without doing anything for us, I'll just stop playing. And I'll remember how they treated the customers which at least partially allowed them to solve the EUC queue problem at the launch of the game. Had no one switched, queues would've been longer and would have lasted longer than they did, making the game worse for everyone. Which, on release, is insanely bad for any video game nowadays. A bad launch kills most games.
idk euw feel pretty alive for me especially this month , feels like there's a lot of players back. but i guess the endgame content is pretty empty since there's more casual than nolife with thousands hours.
Unlucky for you even when they launched EUW there were servers in EUC without a significant queue. I personally switched to a less populated server in EUC and it worked for me. Unlucky for you though. Hope you get a transfer soon
I was about to post this same thing. Everyone that talks about this just talks about NA and pretends EU isnt in a completely shit state too in different ways.
Locking servers has one major flaw: you can server transfer gold via the cash shop: 1. On server 1, go into the cash shop and set a blue crystal purchase order (using gold) for some high amount that won't get purchased 2. On server 2, cancel your purchase listing, the gold can now be claimed on server 2 Until this is fixed (last I checked it has not - its been there since launch), bot owners can just transfer gold between servers at will.
Even tho I agree with you on the fact that RMT should be permabanned > we gotta acknowledge the full-throttle capitalism effect. By this, I mean that those people that spent ridiculous money to buy gold from 3rd party botting sites are probably spending a decent amount in the in-game shop to buy packages and so on. Many other MMOs that were published in EU NA (coming from Korea originally) had this issue and publishers never punished people like that cuz they are also providing good revenue for the publisher itself. Full throttle capitalism idea prevents companies from perma banning people like that cuz you know the annual income of the company that made the investment is more important than the health of the actual game. If AGS goes off the books to make the game stable for the long term, I'd be %100 supporting such a company making such decisions cuz it's rare to see stuff like that. If they go full capitalism mode then oh well, another Korean MMO that has high potential goes to waste in the EU NA market...
Good video, hope something changes for the long-term health of the game. The game economy being inflated with 3rd party RMT in mind and the bots running rampant takes the fun away more and more. I generally dislike dealing with making money in mmorpgs and won't use 3rd party RMT in LA because I care for my steam account. The royal crystals I converted so far felt like I was scammed with how little I could buy after and looking at the 3rd party RMT prices just makes me sad for buying royal crystals at all.
Stoopzz, 100% agree with everything you said. Could you please share this video on your Twitter and tag Lost Ark too, since they follow you on there? I'm sure many others would also retweet as well. I've never played a game as much as Lost Ark in a short amount of time (going on 1300 hrs). But if this RMT/bot issue doesn't get resolved soon, I will also be joining others in quitting this game. It will only get harder to detect them in the future if they don't take action now.
I saw 20 or more bots SYNC their movement at the same time, and it's clearly someone (a person) was playing them because they ran away then played the Song of Return as soon as I got closer and took a pic.
As someone that does not mind spending on the game I find it extremely frustrating to compete against RMTers bidding up the prices on everything. I've already spent a considerable amount on this game and am at the point where I would not consider spending anymore unless they seriously address this issue.
I learned my lesson on mmos man, i used to spend hundreds of dollars in BnS, shiet you wont get nowhere near the whales, always at some point there are always players can out gear you. i only spent 70$ so far in this game only for cosmetics including the launch pack, iand thats all about it. no more competing with gear lol
Appreciate you bringing more light to this. Ive spent so much time playing LA and i dont want to see it goo in NA. I enjoy logging in everyday with the friends ive made and the new friends soon to come. Heres to all issues being resolved and the focus once again being placed on the growth and expansion of the world that is, Lost Ark.
I play in NA West. I stopped playing for abt 2 weeks now coz of this issue. I am always on like 8000 or 9000 in Queue.. It is so frustrating and decided to stop playing till they fix the issue. Cheers for making a video about this.
I have a genuine CRITICISM as a long time viewer.... 1. Where is the Suit? 2. Where is the Slideshow? 3. Where is the Tier List with Issues? 4. Where is the Soloque complaints, wait what you guys have it already...? Sorry old habits die hard On a real note... you know how it went with your old game... you had to quit it before it had reasonable changes! I hope they can implement the changes before you have to quit! Smoge
The devs needs to come out and confirm with us that they're aware of all these things that you just talked about. It sucks sitting here not hearing anything from them
Ive made this comment multiple months back: 1. Just like Wow they need game GMs, but they really may not have the tools for it, and adjacent to that the culture internally. Game GM's a solid way to: A. Mitigate the rise of botting at macro and micro levels, B. Send a message about botting behaviours, C. Heavily disrupt botting warehouses. 2. There's been many comments how GM's do not matter, but actually we are now seeing exactly what happens when you have nothing to fight botting except incidental activities such as ban waves, incidental data matching etc. Fighting botting is basically something LA / SMG / AGS have to accept as a requirement to run the game... its not here and there depending on circumstances.. you need fulltime people dedicated. 3. With GM's who are active on each server you are able to accumulate and severely dent the ease of botting activities. And actually denting botting activity is what it is to stop it. Denting and disrupting IS stopping it. Because they will never go away so you have to fight constantly. Once again you can employ one GM on each NA West server for example and through simply one-click banning you can remove 200k bots in a week. 4. As time goes on and they thin you gradually begin to profile them (bots) better and better. As they thus break your profile you move your ban and monitoring activities accordingly. Bottom line, 2 months ago we had a yellow alert on bots and no GMs or real measures were put in place. If they continue to refuse to take practical steps such as GM's and accept the game must be fought with ongoing management of bots then we will always have what we have now.. and over the long term a red situation wont be accepted. I suspect the tools and culture are not in place to handle this or to employ GMs or accept their roles as valid - which of course is a mistake.
In Korea, social citizen numbers are required to make an account, which is harder for botters to make new accounts in mass, but even with that botters find a way around it later down the road. It would be harder to manage in NA or EU.
I need them to compensate me for Not using RMT, as a person who has spent over a grand. I feel STUPID for not just doing rmt from the beginning, and it should not be that way. I could’ve gotten 5x the gold for my money and they aren’t even perma banning ppl like wtf. At this point smilegate is in on it, they devs are behind the bots and are the ones making the money. I deserve some compensation for being loyal to the game.
Thanks for the video and bringing attention to this issue. Been in a 10K Q everyday for the last week. I love the game, but if this keeps up I don't know if I'll be playing much longer. I really hope this gets resolved somehow
EUC initial queue was majority players. I moved to EUW after a few days and it was really popular and new people coming consistently, recently though it has just been declining while bots are increasing. I cleaned my 50 friends which i had from day 2 of EUW and about 50%of them hadn't played in 1month+ lol
As a f2p player outside of ark pass and cheapest founder pack i felt like i was pretty competive up untill a moth ago or so, now 1200+ hours in a 1460 main, 1415 alt, 1385, 1370 and 2x 1340. Given i didn't know anything about the game at launch i made alot of new players mistakes and probably focused on alts a bit too much but i feel like i've missed the boat completely to get a nice 5x3 setup for the main since prices have gone abosulutely insane partially due to bots and rmt i realised the past few weeks. I love the valtan fight and always have a great time even if it's a struggle sometimes but hell i make around 50-70k a week (after some honings with bound mats) i'd say with all my characters seeing that my class engraving books alone would cost me 200k gold at this weeks prices (and they are going up still every day)... i've been on the edge of just giving up so many times the past couple of days it's kinda sad :/
Don’t be discouraged my dude. I did the same mistakes as you did on the alts and i just reached 1415 last nite and I’m still gonna hope for the best for the game. I played WoW beforehand but I can’t afford the new expansions and subscription every time so I’m way far back in any progress. So I dedicated time n effort as f2p (except the battle pass) and wishing that Lost Ark can fill the void of my mmorpg needs.
The sad thing is RMT hasn't had to change a damn thing in 20+ decades. At the turn of the millenium, the exact same discussion was being had. Unlike tech itself, no terms of strategy or tactics has had to be updated because no company has EVER innovated in this space to even the smallest degree. I said it at the first appearance of the first bots months ago in this one and I'm saying it now again; this will be no different. The amount of resources necessary to wage a literal virtual war with RMTers from foreign nations is substantial and not just in the financial, but also the sheer skill levels of your counter-agents. There is then the issue of any such entity literally being a very capable virtual militia and probably a ton of higher-level optics that come with being a virtual weapon squad.
I have like 1k hours. I have a decent understanding of the game. Yet, I have no idea how a 302 ilvl bot generates gold. Another thing, I'm too scared for my account to RMT, but, the value difference is insane. And not because the RMT gold is cheap, but because the ingame value of royal crystals is so ridiculously low. If I spend £100 on Lost Ark I'll get almost nothing in terms of gold, but if I spend £100 on any other game I'll get enough premium currency to last me a year.
Played on EU West since it launched and it seems to me that we have have nothing close to what you all are describing the other regions to have. The biggest issue is that its affecting the prices for sure, but they are not that visible ingame
They are, just go to the starter areas. If you start a new character and level all you see is bots, then you hut your first city and all you see is paladins. That's on the stoneheart server.
I tried to do some Una'a Tasks in the initial areas of the game. Crowds of speed hacking bots were making it quite hard. Also: have you not noticed the price of blue crystals almost tripling within one month?
Thank you so much for the video stoopz! I agree with what was said in the video and I hope amazon/smilegate looks into this issue and does something about it. The priority should be on the players that are playing the game currently and NOT potential new accounts. The high queue is pushing away the players that have spent time and money on this game. in my opinion, there are good points addressed in the video and amazon/smilegate has to consider locking servers as a very real possibility instead of saying that would deter newer players
One note about the royal crystal exchange: It does not cause inflation because royal crystals are being exchanged for gold that already exists within the economy. Through the exchange, gold changes hands rather than new gold being injected into the economy. Plus, there is a 5% tax on every transaction so not only does it not lead to inflation, it acts as another gold sink. Amazon and Smilegate should be doing everything in their power to get players to not want to risk going to 3rd-party websites and use the crystal exchange as it is far less damaging to the game's economy.
Thanks for video man! As someone who enjoys this game for what it is, its sad to see i being slowly devoured by rmt cheaters and bots. I have no doubts ags/sg is doing something, but it has to be strict from now on. Not sure if they are scared of backlash after locking servers, or what. And if they cant handle fixing economy, at least provide means for f2p/light and legit spenders to progress via events- a few leg. books here and there, its really discouraging when week of raiding and selling mats is barely enough to buy one book, cause of rmt scum
Great hearing your thoughts on the issues Stoopz! Really hope they can get this situation under control. Love the game but i´m actually worried about it in the long term.
Thanks for giving us EUW a voice. Our servers are dying and no one gives a f. Blue crystal exchange hit 1200 gold today. We lack players and our economy is ruined without a possibility to make gold. Nothing sells as we have a depression over here. Honing material prices are rising crazy. Redstones Hit 25 again from initial 10 gold like 2 weeks ago. I want to play the game after work and relaxe and not stress about if it is worth upgrading my alts with such prices. Alts which I play primarily to make up the lack of materials in the first place. Please fix the issues our servers are dying. The situation will go worse and will not solve itself if nothing happens from developer side
I think this issue impacts all the legitimate spenders as well. The issue for big spenders, at least currently, in Lost Ark is the image of 'whales = RMT'. In my current guild whenever we see a 1500+ character we jokingly say 'RMT detected'. Although it's meant as a joke, the negative image is only being reinforced by the rampant amount of bots and RMTers in the game.
I’m glad to see people are finally calling out Lost Ark for the increasing amount of bots populating the servers. I remember doing research on this a few months after launch. I expressed my concerns on Reddit and the comments section was filled with Lost Ark fanboys telling me I was wrong and that I was hating on a insanely popular game 😂
The bot situation effects me everytime i want to play, i only have 2 hours after i put my kids to bed, and sometimes its all spent in the queue. I have to queue up 2-3 hours before I want to play. i actively play other games sometimes because of the queue.
Silkroad Online had this problem happen back in 2009. Joymax, the Korean developer and publisher, capitalised of off the problem by selling premium access to the game, allowing you to skip the queue. Years after the game was in heavy decline they banned all the bots and then the queues where empty, however they were not selling any premium access. They stopped banning bots and began frantically merging servers to bring the queues back up. It became their business model. Nowadays they are rereleasing new servers every few months (all instantly filled by bots) and keep merging servers as the population goes down so there's always a massive queue up. They even made it so that you can't even access the queue and have to either try your luck to rng your way into a 7h+ queue or pay for instant access for 4hs or buy premium.
Great video Stoopz. Totally agreed that action needs to be taken. If I was running the show, it's time to start setting thresholds on number of trades, item buyouts, overall currency (gold), and most recently infinite chaos dungeons run. From the top, start working down and figure out a %-threshold that automatically flags an account for a manual review. From there, you will have the data to fine tune this. You will as well identify BUYERS and SELLERS, then can follow that papertrail from the bottom. Pincer attack from the top % and the buyers at the bottom. Example, dude in Call of Duty has 1000 kill minimum (threshold) and has a 99% headshot accuracy. Yeah, that is suspect and is caught in this %-threshold limit that is fluid and gets fine tuned over time. Anyone with over 250,000 gold (example), legit or not, gets a thoughtful/thorough manual review. DO SOMETHING....
That is only making the same mistake that Amazon keeps making. Every fix they implement makes the game worse for the people that play by the rules, as does your fix too. I got tired of them changing the game for the worse because of this and haven't logged on in a week and a half. The only thing they need to do is make the punishment not worth buying gold. A perma-ban would be ideal, but at least a 6 month to 1 year ban so the people that buy gold miss all the new content. If people are afraid to buy third party gold then there will be no demand for 400,000 bots. There is no need to change the game if there is no demand for third party gold
@@la7era1u54 this doesnt rly stop people tbh. theres RMT whales. they get banned? just make another acc or buy another account and buy a shittonne of gold. there needs to b another mechanism to flag/review or attack the supply. perma ban isnt enough of a deterrent tbh
@@la7era1u54 Got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. At least, above, I am offering an idea to identify these problems over "I don't play anymore" and "Punish buyers." Clearly not enough actions are being taken, and offering ideas at least gets a conversation started.
Thank you for this quality video. I appreciate you touching on #PermaBanRMTPlayers. In the way that you explained, that is the best solution moving forward for Lost Ark. It should have never been a temporary 3 day ban to begin with. Now it's just time we all sit and see if AGS / Smilegate actually change up their strategies.
Returning player here. Loaded up the game after 3 months or so of not playing to be greeted with a 15k queue on Valtan. After 45 minutes i was down to 9k. Quit the game then and didn’t bother. This issue makes it really hard for the people that have only a few hours to play after work and it bothers me that I can’t log on due to the bots. Amazon NEEDS to fix this issue, because if they want returning players like me to come back for their events, we won’t be willing to wait in a 3 hour queue.
Great video, but the only point i disagree with is to adjust the gold rates, because then the third party websites just go lower in price even more, also create even more bots and this battle amazon can't win.
The most of players in Inven(KR reddit) are saying that "This is BS. You are making things up". I've been telling them truths with all the proofs but.. they just shit on me or someone doing just like me. Also the problem is, there are many many translated asmongold's or stoopzz's videos in korean but none of them are showing bad sides of global servers. Literally NONE. All the translated videos are about them having fun in raids or honing just like that. I've been sending emails to SG customer service like 5 times, posting whats really going on in global servers in Inven but im kinda tired now. Im just an ordinary KR andy here, never played in NA/EU. I just didnt wanna see ppl leaving because of something that is not related to actual game system. This is just stupid
overall good video but in my opinion more ingame examples could have been given : ad rooms for RMT in create team sections, the constant mails a player gets from gold sellers , the huge dump of resources that impossible for a player to gather(fish, excavation, tree cutting etc..) bots standing around chaos dungeon entrence to farm it. Also i would have loved hearing about other solutions besides server transfer considering the bad timing of closing it right now & fking up the new incoming players. few suggestions that werent mentioned in the video : - throwing a person into a minus for buying RMT - changing all reward quests so that they wont give gold & binding all materials/books from quests to account. p.s i think if server transfers are going to be possible it should be of a limited quantity/ time gated so that the bots couldnt continue transfering into the closed servers.
The queues didn't make me quit. Seeing a shartload of bots running around everywhere was driving me nuts. So I decided to go fish. There were 30+ bots stacked on each other, casting nonstop. Awful, because I was enjoying this game.
I can see the logic behind locking servers to funnel bots to other servers but I feel like that would just be delaying the inevitable and piss off real players from said server. The only real solution to this issue is to go hard and perma ban the RMTr's, set an example to lower consumption, therefore deflating the demand which will cause there to be less and less bots. Idk who's making the decisions but they're clearly scared of losing players, at this point I'm pretty sure they're losing more money with the infestation of bots they have, since most people won't feel compelled to spend money ingame when they can just RMT.
I am on NA west and all of my friends who are still active in the game are all on NA east. While I like the timers matching my current timezone and not having to do everything 3 hours in advance, I regret making my roster there. I love the game, my friends are all willing to raid with me, but well, that isn't possible at the moment. Haven't been playing much either due to the queue times from the bots. The last we heard from them is they never really had server transfer services in the past and when attempting to implement that service in KR, it didn't end too well as they needed more time. I hope they at least give us updates on that again.
The low hanging stuff is what makes me angry about the bot situation. How much would it cost to pay someone to scout the auction house and ban those people or hang out in Vern and ban the chaos or fishing bots. It just looks like Amazon/Smile Gate doesn't give a damn. Or rather don't want to cut even half a percent into their profit to pay someone to act as a GM in game.
I don't know for sure if they have any way to trace the auction house sales but if they do I could see "innocent" people banned. I know a few people look at the gem auctions and if they find an identical one in their inventory list it for the same values and hope to hit it big by the "seller" (of gold, not the item) accidentally buying their item and it has worked and got them gold. The mail system is probably the easiest way to catch people since it leaves a direct player to player trail and I'd assume that's where they catch most of the people that they ban.
I had 4 bot mail messages this morning... I've never seen all the NA East servers marked as "busy" until this week. I've been so relieved I chose to play on an NA East server even though I live in CA bc they've been having such terrible experiences. But now our bot problem isworsening and they're not doing jack shit. I'm worried once we start getting queue times many many many people will be forced to quit the game altogether and it won't be able to recover.
Thank you Stoopzz for making a video and giving us a voice in these rough times for Lost Ark. I hope AGS and SmG collectively come up with a proper solution!
I made a post on the forums that I’m pretty sure no one saw. If they won’t authenticate, they can make it a paid game. $5 and give players $5 worth of royal crystals or crystalline. I’m pretty sure most players has spent at least that. If bots get banned, they have to pay to get back on and then it’ll be too expensive to keep pushing new bots in.
I've been on Enviska in NA West since launch (700+ hrs). Have been patiently waiting for a solution to the bots/queues for more than two months. It's a shame, because I created a warrior on day ONE to use for a Destroyer main, then patiently waited for release. Now guess what, I can't even log in to do my dailies due to the ridiculous queues. Haven't actually logged into the server for several days. If I had it to do over again, I would have never spent a dime on this one. Yes, I purchased the platinum founder's pack and some skins packs for Destroyer and Glaivier release. I'm sitting on 6+ months of crystalline aura benefits that I won't be using. What a colossal waste. I went from being head over heels for this title to being completely unhappy and disgusted with the developers and publishers.
yes, glad you made a video about it. feel like RUclipsrs are restraining only to address it on stream. More exposure, more incentive for them to prioritize it.
i agree a lot on.. on royal crystal/gold conversion MORE competative.. because if the value in game exchange is way more ok thatn RMT.. there will be no reason for players to use RMT to 3rd party. = no more bot farming gold
This is the reason that every time I try to come back, see a que, and alt F4 out. Not trying to waste my time sitting in a que when I could play something else that deals with these botting issues.
The sad part is AGS needs Smilegate to implement features to combat this - while Smilegate also needs to bring west version up to Korean one feature wise. Only other thing AGS can do is hire more people to police the place manually, however without proper tools that can only get so far. Personally bots were the main reason why I quit the game months ago - having to wait hours in queue then struggling to find players to do content because servers are filled with bots just kills the entire experience for me.
to anyone considering whether you should play lost ark anymore: 1. don't play the NA/EU release. Amazon has no fucking idea how to run a game, look at all their previous history. They're the kiss of death on any game they're attached to. Also remember how they made EU and then had the afterthought of making EU west but didn't want to give people packages based on region. honestly you should ALWAYS get that package on the first server you play on in a different region. Amazon translation of "we'll look into offering region transferring" : "we have no fucking idea what we are doing or what you're saying but can you give us $100? we bought the rights for this game from Korea after all and we need to recoup the cost" 2. buy a Korean Account. you'll prolly spend less and you'll directly support the game. 3. leave a valid steam review sharing your experience in the truest form possible. if 15k "players" were preventing you from playing due to 2-4 wait on your server, make sure you mention that. 4. if you don't want to do any of this, just play a different game. one that actually "respects your time." hopefully with this being done, Korea's servers will also start being hit with more western players and also more botting as a result. once this happens smile gate will have to do something or the game will die.
It's the main reason I quit. There's no way to play at the times I am able to play. And considering everything is time-gated, it makes it even worse. Once I finally can get in, I can't or do not want to play. US Mari gets an average of 16-18k queues.
One thing they could also do is make it to where when making a char you cant name its "asoifjosai" Ban generic name making would cut it down a lot, one they'd have to make a genuine name and the name would be easier to permaban.
The only thing regarding the competitive royal crystal/gold conversion is that the bots can just go even lower and lower. There definitely needs to be an update in ToS regarding RMT punishment like you said. There won't be bots if there are no one to sell gold to.
I see ur point but honestly at the rate that it’s at rightnow there’s no competition if your dollar and spending power are worth more in a new updated rate and can be seen as competitive then there’s less of an excuse to do rmt and might be even willing to sway certain ppl to maybe buy or switch from rmt
It should be both of these things. Less incentive to RMT and larger punishment if you are caught. Win-win and it helps the free to play through crystal prices.
They can go low but not infinitely low. Botting requires hardware and power, both of which are not negligible. The current rate like 4x better than in game rate but it can to a point where botters can no longer make profit and won’t find it worthwhile to bot.
@@alkaliaurange I still think they can go lower than amazon though. They are making USD in Asia and their cost of maintenance is much lower than the West. If there is just strict punishment for blatant RMTers I think the bots would naturally die out as well.
buddy forgot to mention that he has been stocking up and hoarding bot farmed fish lol. he wants to ban fishing so his millions of fish goes up in price 100x love to see it man keep up the grindset
I do agree that something has to be done about the bot situation. And i do agree that the ban waves are not a good (permanent) solution for this specific issue. BUT I do not agree that the F2P player should not get gold by doing "low hanging fruit"-tasks. As a "normal" player on EU-W I do not have the time to do dailies, dungeons and raids which would take me 2+ hours (accounting waiting times in queues with low population times after work): Unas tasks with 3 characters and some dungeon runs. I work about 12-14 hours daily including commuting times. So I am dependent on low hanging fruits because the gear grind is real and honing chances are a bad joke even with the daily chaos dungeon and guardian raid rewards. I have mainly 3 suggestions to tackle this problem: 1. CAP (income) Make a certain amount of gold (capped per character, not roster!) easy to obtain even for beginners. (Maybe unlocked with the stronghold?) -> Some minor grind (10-15 minutes each day) grants a small but steady income of gold. 2. CAP (spending) My 2nd suggestion would be a cap on how much gold something can be sold off at the auction house and a cap for how many honing fails a piece of armor/weapon can have. -> THIS would reduce the need for gold drastically and make people who bought gold for royal crystals less cheated because they got something for the real money they spent instead of gambling your hard earned funds away. 3. Restrict Gold trading An additional suggestion would be to make players unable to exchange gold among each other (via mail and other means). -> Now there would be no easy means for gold sellers to get their "goods" to the buyers. Together with the restrictions on the aucton house (mentioned in 2.) it would be really tedious to "buy gold" from a 3rd party compared to some easy grind in the game which would be capped. If someone would then like to have more 'easy' gold they could buy it legally in the ingame exchange. I do realize that this would cut into amazons profits if ppl get their gear for less gold spent and faster because less shards are required... ... and i will surely get a lot of backlash from the "pro-players" because they DID grind for their geara bunch... but this would - in an instant! - make gold much less attractive and put gold sellers out of business because no one would need these absurd amounts of gold... ... and we could get it with a managable amount of daily grind. Here are some extra: 4. realistic gold exchange As a bonus suggestion: Make the royal crystal to gold exchange rate dynamic so it reflects the actual value on the server. 238 gold per 100 RC is a joke if 95 blue crystals cost about 1k gold. :( What a (truly bad) joke. 5. Ideas are rolling in: (Fake-) Subscription Make ppl with Prime subscription be able to use silver instead of gold (4 honing and traders). Amazon would get (more) "subscribers" and ppl would need less gold if any. -> "Gold seller go home"! I got Prime!" Now let the comment bashing commence.
1. Authentication won't do anything. Bot makers will simply find ways to authenticate automatically, even if it's 2FA (trust me, you don't need a phone to generate those 6 numbers) 2. Ban wave - does nothing. Bot makers adjust their scripts to the changes and continue working as per usual. 3. Permabans will only cause those banned players to quit completely. In a game that's already on the brink of dying it's just adding to the speed of its demise. 4. Locked servers - all it will achieve is locking out new players trying to create accounts on those. Existing bots will still be able to log in. Also, where are players supposed to go if you e.g. lock NA East and West, or EU Central and West? 5. Agree with this point. The whole economy needs to be reviewed, it can no longer be based on SG's or Amazon's greed. The reason people buy gold is because there is never enough of it. You have to be an idiot to not see that. So make it easier, make it so that people don't have to constantly struggle and they'll stop buying gold from bots. Stop that and bots will stop running their operations because there will be no point in it. I don't see anything wrong with players being able to make thousands of gold each week. I'd rather be a rich mofo at 1540 at this point and spend real money on skins and Crystalline Aura than not play at all (which is what I've done). As it stands they've lost tens of thousands of players that they could've converted to paying customers and that will never come back. SG are complete idiots in my view. Greed clouted their logical thinking but I guess they deserve it. 6. This will never happen. SG were stupid enough to release their Korean game as is, without doing anything to prevent botting. In their version you need your national ID to register, i.e. there is literally ZERO protection against any botting worked into the game. All this Easy Anticheat is complete BS, it doesn't do anything in regards to bots. It just encrypts and monitors memory for value changes to make sure you don't give yourself millions of money. It's not built for analyzing character paths, accumulating data over multiple players, finding patterns, etc. 7. As for low hanging fruit - might as well remove the whole game then if we're forced to neuter the gameplay just because developers are not competent enough to fix other issues. It's really sad overall. I won't lie and pretend I'm some kind of a WoW veteran. MMOs aren't really my genre but I fell in love with Lost Ark and it was amazing at first. So many good things about it and I genuinely though it would be my go-to game for the next few years. Then I got to the endgame grind, slow progression and just stupidly high honing failure rates and had enough (bots didn't kill it for me as we don't have so many of them on EUC). I need to feel my time is being respected. I'm a grown up person and I'm not going to do the same thing in a f**king video game over and over again only to increase some virtual number by 1. I'm at the point in my life where time is money and I'd rather play a game that is fun and spend money on cosmetics than play a game that clearly disrespects and time-gates everything I do. Call me a casual or whatever, I don't care. Being a grinder or a video game "veteran" isn't really a life achievement to be proud of. I make good money, I have spare time to play something so I choose to play something that's fun, engaging and rewarding. Lost Ark can be the former two but definitely not the latter and that is what they need to change. Although I personally think it's too late. The train has left and those hundreds of thousands of players that quit will not come back no matter how much they keep talking about returning players.
I think the point that was missed is these things are done in combination. By doing a massive Ban Wave & locking the servers, you essentially squeeze the bots onto a single server. The auction house is shared but you severely hurt their ability to generate gold as that one server would reach capacity. This would cause their prices to increase and be met with a competitive cash shop.
Oceanic player on NA West, Valtan. I quit after I started getting queues far far after the game launched and all I ever saw was trains of teleporting bots in every zone.
I'm om EUW moonkeep and i'm happy where i am, Best server i will say. Fast Login, players to play all the events with, what more i need. Matchmaking is great too, a little bit of patience and the game will hook you in.
I've recently rerolled from EUW to EUC after i couldn't get on my server in EUC during launch. Hopefully at some point they will address the botting and make some meaningful progress in server merges / character transfers. Great video and the word definitely needs to get out there from creators like yourself. Hopefully if more creators make similar types of videos Amazon / Smilegate will take note and provide a road map for how they are working on fixes as well as content :)
I've stopped playing (I'm on NA West,) not entirely due to bots, but I can say 100% that bots pushed me over the edge. There was no way in hell I was wasting precious time waiting in queue to play a game that was feeling more and more like a pointless grind to begin with.
The best example on how garbage is the current handling of bots from AGS is the damn 1385 bot that has been sitting into Argos EUC party finder for MONTHS, undisturbed, in his lobby with RMT ad title...
Hey Stoopzz, I always enjoy watching you on Twitch and your RUclips videos. I do have one question about the idea of transferring accounts from West to East: Wouldn't transferring accounts make it easier for bots to really take control over the whole NA servers? As an NA East player I can tell you that all servers show "Busy" status already. For a very long time Vykas (server I play) was "Good" while the rest of the servers were busy, until recently. Now, for granted that I have not experienced any queue waiting time even with the Busy status. I think that I needs to be a combination of Bot management (maybe server locking) before allowing account transfer between servers. just my two cents!
While I don't doubt that the vast majority of market xfering is illegitimate, it's also done legitimately to xfer Gold between servers. I'm playing multiple servers and it's how I move gold to myself, since I can't just mail it. Each instance can't be an "instant ban" because not everyone doing it is breaking any rules.
I would honestly like to add another point at which this botting issue affects newer players. When I played going from lvl 0 to 50 I saw no bots or barely any. It wasn't noticeable. I had a friend join around this time and they had to do all those hours watching stacks of bots teleporting around the map. It lessens the player experience. And I think that the new player experience is important to retaining players.
Hey Bud. I believed that all LA content creator needed to talk about this. Do a segment in your pod cast. Invite all LA in one pod cast and talk about this issue. With you, voices will be heared and hope that AGS/SG listens and action on it. Thanks!
Great vid. The part about adjusting the rate so that it's more competitive is something that should happen sooner rather than later. Personally I actually want to swipe for gold in this game, but the rates are atrocious. At the same time, I refuse to buy from G2G because I love the game and don't want to risk losing my account of 700hrs+. I literally WANT to buy gold the right way, but it's just not worth it.
Nice vid stoopz it gives me hope there is a big name advocating for the east and west merge eventually. Coming from someone who came to west with a group of friends and they all quit but the friends who went east stayed I would love to see this system implemented at some point :(
The entire reason the RMT situation got so out of control was the royal crystal to gold conversion rate. It needed to be at least HALF what it is now at lauch, probably 1/3 of what it is now for them to stop RMT before it started. They were greedy. If you are building in a P2W system to the game, you need to make it such that a decent percentage of the player base can participate reasonably (ie, $100-$200 in gets you a significant boost over F2P). If you don't, a decent percentage of the player base will find an RMT source that gives currency at reasonable prices, and a VERY LARGE percentage of the player base will do it if you don't do anything about it....like ban waves at least every 2-3 weeks. They never did any reasonable ban wave. They never did any sort of reasonable job of simply sitting in freaking Vern and banning berzerker bots as they ran by (which is pretty damn easy to do). I never did RMT this game, but I though long and hard about it. Instead I just quit. It probably has the 2nd most predatory equipment system ever (they have D:Immortal to thank for knocking them out of #1 there) and as you get above 1400, its literally not possible to keep up without paying up. And don't tell my you are 1475 and "never paid a dime". You are just a liar. Or crazy lucky. Or you have no life....like literally no life (get a job).
You can't control royal crystal to gold conversion rate, it's player supply and demand. The most effective thing ags can do to adjust conversion rate is to incentivize f2p to use blue crystals and raise the demand that way, making it cost more gold. They can add more blue crystal skins as an example. Early on in the game this doesn't matter though, since there is no gold generated to even support conversion at a decent ratio. Like on release day, no one has even been able to make raw gold yet in large quantities other than bots, that's why blue crystal to gold ratio was almost 1:1. Just understand supply and demand controls this, not ags.
Gold has to be valuable though. If you get more for spending less dollars then there's gonna be more gold circulating in the game. I guess if you make gold so cheap that 10 dollars get you a million gold then there won't be any bots, but on the flip side of that is gold will be so worthless that an endurance spirit absorption 2 hit master 3 ring will sell for 500k. A BiS accessory will sell for tens of millions. That's NOT good for a f2p player whose income per week is 15k.
I really hope SGS does more than just blindly "celebrate 800k concurrent players" and actually does put forth the time and effort to make this game function properly in the west. all and all great points!
EUC was so busy you couldn’t even queue. You had to keep spam launching the game for a chance to make it to the queue or you got a “Server too busy” error and thrown out.
Just a note to those not familiar with the NA West bot problem, Mari has been consistently queued for the last month when logging in, and the entire last week it has been around 15-20k que which is around 2 hours.
IMO this has reached the point where the bots are effectively DOSing the playerbase and in any level headed company this would absolutely be top priority
I agree with all of your points EXCEPT the royal crystal to gold conversion rate. Bro. It’s not dictated by AGS, it’s dictated by the market, simple supply and demand. It rises and falls based on the supply and demand of blue crystals.
10k+ ques for 4weeks now sine valtan release, was so hyped to hit 1445 then 10k everyday afterwards, will come back when the ques disappear just can't play at the moment
Honestly bro its such a bummer. I have 400 hours so far and i work graveyards so i typically try to play at 7am-8am in NA/EU and for the past month now there has been a que of 15,000+. By the time i actually get into the servers i don't even want to play anymore because i worked. All i want to do is play my game after these 12-14 hour shifts and i can't even do that because people literally ruin everything somehow.
This is what i've been saying for so long, i know for fact that they can't catch every single RMTr in the game, but those whom they can catch they should make them an example, the punishment MUST be so bad that the ones who weren't caught think twice on rmting again. Why you should focus your efforts on gold buyers instead of bots, because it has been proven over and over again that fighting bots is a neverending war, so you should focus ALL your efforts on obliterating the people that fund their operations, the gold buyers. I agree with eveyrthing you've said Stoopzz, glad to see somebody with radical ideas, because they don't realize the bots and rmt issue is so bad that they just can't go easy against them.
I sat in Que started at 11AM and ended at 5.20PM I legit forgot the game was running around an HR and went to town to shop went home and was still in Que. Me and my Giuld/Discord have a 2to3HR long Que every single day were about to move onto another game and this is a group of about 50people and we did a pull and about 90% of us are fed up and want to leave.
Amazing video! The truth is that Amazon doesn't care. Even though they are losing money because of this. Not only potential cosmetic sales, but all of these RMTers could just buy gold from Amazon and avoid any negative consequences. It is clear that people don't care how p2w this can get because the game is pretty popular. It really is not an impossible problem to figure out.
I think the Companies should engage more with the real players and fight together against Bots. Involve us by giving us tools with which we can interact with other characters. For example a Hotkey Item that can block or interact a Bot and makes them not progress ontheir path. Or an easier Bot notification system as a in game item which makes it easier for Admins to pinpoint and Ban. And the players should receive some small Bonus Reward for every successful „Hunt“ so players will feel encouraged to do that. My examples are just examples but the overall alliance with players means the Devs dont need to hire more payed workers to do this endless task but they have all players as their ingame Anti Bot system and give them in game rewards for this help. Its a Win Win as we then will definitely have better Gold prices for all the stuff in the Auction House.
Queue numbers on Mari are getting up to 15, 000 - 20, 000 even at like 8am on a weekday due to all the bots. That means the average player has to wait around 2 hours just to log in.
Lock access to using the market/auction house behind stronghold level 25. It's not difficult for real players to spam nact counters every day and get there. But no bot company is gonna do that for 100k+ different accounts with no upfront/quick money being made.
I'm no game developer, but I am a data scientist. If they have data of player movements and auction house pricing, you can create an AI that will predict whether if the player is real or a bot. We use something similar when we try to predict fraudulent transactions for banks. This can be replicated for this if they have enough data. It can also be applied on a mass scale and its cheap.
Smh we have a lot of things to combat shit like this but company’s don’t because of money
i dont really know about the cheap part
The issue with this is there will be players trying to take advantage of the market and sell a low tier item at a high price that mimics a high tier item's stats. Then you'll have legit players making a hail mary attempt at selling shit items at a huge markup for the heck of it. The only way to combat bots is to have human admins in-game banning bots as they appear. There are many known spots where bots farm and if they're in chaos dungeons you can get them as they make congo lines in Vern for repairs. It's insane that such a profitable game has zero active admins on patrol.
Just randomly type player id like asdihqwklnas qoasdqweja aosijdamkw.
And put the ban button , done.
I'll bet AGS engineers are good at skill like this, since it's similar to what the leetcode trained them.
The bots:players is like 90% vs 10%, you got 90% accuracy to ban bots randomly.
no clue if paypal uses similar shit but god damn they will call any transaction a fraudulent transaction or put it on hold for no reason.
Experience as a new player that arrived later in the game, I found myself pushing T1 and T2 always alone. Nobody at Chaos Gates, nobody at Field Bosses, right up to Feiton where bots would always run Chaos Gates. I was so relieved and took advantage of them. I really wish that T1 and T2 events were all doable alone, with difficulty scaling down to accomodate the attendance.
I will argue to the death that the best solution to fight bots is to limit new accounts.
This means no trading/mail or auction house until an account has reached a certain age and progression point in the game.
There's enough free mats with events and buffs, and no real gold to be made on the AH, that the market should suffice all the way to T3. This gives AGS/SG **a lot** longer to catch and ban bots before they can sell gold.
"OH BUT THE NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE!!!" - Which would you have as a new player? Queues and surrounded by bots, or having to actually play the game for a bit to progress?
Beautiful video, thank you for caring Stoopz, you, Neeko & and everyone else putting attention to this in this fashion might end up saving the game if AGS/SG decides to listen to this proper feedback.
Every single LA content creator needs to be talking about it, every single one of them. And if they don't you know they've cheated in someway, shape or form because there's no reason to not bring awareness to this. So far Saintone and Zeals have not made any videos regarding this and they're by far the biggest content creators on Twitch and Zeals is by far the largest on RUclips pulling 6 figure numbers every video. This game will not be fixed without these players making noise about it on a large scale.
@@TisBoiGoTSkiLLz Yea I mean Zeals doesn't care so much about it and considers it "bitching", I guess it doesn't affect them in KR that much lol. AGS/SG had 4 months to fix the problem, to do something/anything and they've shown time and time again they are unwilling. Meanwhile SG celebrating 800k players, so insulting. It's so depressing seeing such a good game being ruined by inaction.
@@igorjovanovic537 Honestly, that's pathetic if he really sees it that way. KR Lost Ark is every MMO players dream, if we got their version without RMTers and Bots, it would legit be the best MMO in the West with almost no contest once we hit KR content. Koreans are having the time of their lives on their version of the game and the West is just getting DESTROYED.
I just tried asking Zeals about if he'll make a video or talk about the RMT/Bot situation in the West in his Twitch chat and my message literally didn't even appear in his chat, so I'll be unsubscribing him from since i didn't know that his stance was he didn't care. Really sad to hear. I hate greedy, and disingenuous people.
@@TisBoiGoTSkiLLz he did say that, and said I don't know how to deal with it and you guys don't too so we're basically just bitching about it, when someone in chat asked the other day. Idk if you watch RaizQT but he said something along these lines : I'm just gonna enjoy the game for what it is for a few months then bail out even if I love the game. He said AGS/SG isn't doing what they should've been doing and that it's too late now. ATK also seems concerned/scared about the state of the game, but Zeals not wanting to discuss it even while being one of the biggest content creators for the game is really discouraging.
The issues comes down to this: RMT is NOT being punished. More bots are a symptom of more people turning to gold purchasing. People are buying cheap gold and it is encouraging others to do the same. There have barely been enough mats for the average player to keep up with the content and gold inflation has gotten to the point where f2p isn't viable. Punish the cheaters and reward your player base or we are all going to be buying gold and botting our chaos dungeons real soon TM
It's the other way around. Wishing to punish the cheaters or the botters is basically like wishing a communist revolution and dekulakizaton. It's possible and it is effective, but the cost and the results are... problematic.
Because at the end of the day what matters is that you have a person with disposable income. You can steal that income, tax, scam that person out of it - that's what businesses are for, but that is HIS income. In our society. And if THE GAME offers a a lot of VALUE for its INTERNAL currency - then that person just seeks a way to pay his way in.
You can't fix humanity. Humans always seek to one up each other.
What you can do - is fix the system. The game. It's complicated, because gold is an essential carrot, but it is technically possible. The problem is that it's not worth the hassle for most companies, because, again, the value of a carrot is too much, not to mention any byproduct, like key sales for WoW and player numbers for F2P games.
However, it is a KOREAN game. And Koreans are... well, asians. And most asian game dev is sick, twisted and deplorable. At least when it comes to MMOs. Gachas, lootboxes, KoreanRNG, hour-long bossfights(and souls) and many more dark things of the gaming genre came from Asia. As stunning as the game is - at its core it's korean, VERY korean.
Amazon can't do anything about it - their job is just deploying updates, they aren't the developers, they are merely a regional distributor.
Im on NA West with over 1000 hrs on my account. I'm very close to quitting this game because of the bots. It's insulting that I spend 4-8 hours a day on the game trying to farm every penny to keep up with the gold inflation. To make matters worse, I have to invest an additional couple of hours in a queue. The developers are going to lose players and have ZERO chance of getting new players if new players have to wait hours to experience the game.
If you think you’re farming every penny that’s because you’re literally farming ‘pennies’, yoho each run gives $0.1 value
you spend a whole lot more than 4hrs a day playing if you have 1k hour played. i have played every day since it came out and am at 530hrs only.
@@KazaiTV if theres more mats on market doesnt that make them cheaper?
@@Haz3Nation Yes making it harder for normal players to earn gold needed for everything in the game. Selling excess mats was a great way to earn lots of gold for people who milked alts. So having bots push cheaper mats is a double edged sword.
@@TwoNineSix296 k but legion raid is out. Game isnt like that later on. In kr u make gold by doing legion raids and abyss dungeons and everything on market is cheap af. We are getting to that. T1 and t2 stones like 1g now.
I appreciate you speaking for the EUW situation and not just focusing on NA even though that's where you are from.. and here's hoping there will someday be an option to server transfer or merge regions... because I have invested so much into EUW because I couldn't stand to be in 6 hour queues at launch on EUC. I havent enjoyed a game like this since vanilla WoW and really hope they will address the real issues you mentioned in this video.. there is something great here.
what sucks even more are the scumbag content creators that told players they were going EUW then left all of you to rot.
I am in the same boat. I won't start over, it'd take me likely 2 months just to get back to Valtan, and a ton of annoying af grinds that I've already done. No way I'm restarting. If they let EUW die without doing anything for us, I'll just stop playing. And I'll remember how they treated the customers which at least partially allowed them to solve the EUC queue problem at the launch of the game. Had no one switched, queues would've been longer and would have lasted longer than they did, making the game worse for everyone. Which, on release, is insanely bad for any video game nowadays. A bad launch kills most games.
idk euw feel pretty alive for me especially this month , feels like there's a lot of players back.
but i guess the endgame content is pretty empty since there's more casual than nolife with thousands hours.
Unlucky for you even when they launched EUW there were servers in EUC without a significant queue. I personally switched to a less populated server in EUC and it worked for me. Unlucky for you though. Hope you get a transfer soon
I was about to post this same thing. Everyone that talks about this just talks about NA and pretends EU isnt in a completely shit state too in different ways.
Locking servers has one major flaw: you can server transfer gold via the cash shop:
1. On server 1, go into the cash shop and set a blue crystal purchase order (using gold) for some high amount that won't get purchased
2. On server 2, cancel your purchase listing, the gold can now be claimed on server 2
Until this is fixed (last I checked it has not - its been there since launch), bot owners can just transfer gold between servers at will.
Even tho I agree with you on the fact that RMT should be permabanned > we gotta acknowledge the full-throttle capitalism effect. By this, I mean that those people that spent ridiculous money to buy gold from 3rd party botting sites are probably spending a decent amount in the in-game shop to buy packages and so on. Many other MMOs that were published in EU NA (coming from Korea originally) had this issue and publishers never punished people like that cuz they are also providing good revenue for the publisher itself. Full throttle capitalism idea prevents companies from perma banning people like that cuz you know the annual income of the company that made the investment is more important than the health of the actual game.
If AGS goes off the books to make the game stable for the long term, I'd be %100 supporting such a company making such decisions cuz it's rare to see stuff like that. If they go full capitalism mode then oh well, another Korean MMO that has high potential goes to waste in the EU NA market...
Good video, hope something changes for the long-term health of the game.
The game economy being inflated with 3rd party RMT in mind and the bots running rampant takes the fun away more and more.
I generally dislike dealing with making money in mmorpgs and won't use 3rd party RMT in LA because I care for my steam account.
The royal crystals I converted so far felt like I was scammed with how little I could buy after and looking at the 3rd party RMT
prices just makes me sad for buying royal crystals at all.
Stoopzz, 100% agree with everything you said. Could you please share this video on your Twitter and tag Lost Ark too, since they follow you on there? I'm sure many others would also retweet as well.
I've never played a game as much as Lost Ark in a short amount of time (going on 1300 hrs). But if this RMT/bot issue doesn't get resolved soon, I will also be joining others in quitting this game. It will only get harder to detect them in the future if they don't take action now.
I saw 20 or more bots SYNC their movement at the same time, and it's clearly someone (a person) was playing them because they ran away then played the Song of Return as soon as I got closer and took a pic.
As someone that does not mind spending on the game I find it extremely frustrating to compete against RMTers bidding up the prices on everything. I've already spent a considerable amount on this game and am at the point where I would not consider spending anymore unless they seriously address this issue.
Get rekt
@@nickv3085 The salt in this reply. lmao
I learned my lesson on mmos man, i used to spend hundreds of dollars in BnS, shiet you wont get nowhere near the whales, always at some point there are always players can out gear you. i only spent 70$ so far in this game only for cosmetics including the launch pack, iand thats all about it. no more competing with gear lol
When you say bidding up the prices what do you mean?
failed investment
Appreciate you bringing more light to this. Ive spent so much time playing LA and i dont want to see it goo in NA. I enjoy logging in everyday with the friends ive made and the new friends soon to come. Heres to all issues being resolved and the focus once again being placed on the growth and expansion of the world that is, Lost Ark.
I play in NA West. I stopped playing for abt 2 weeks now coz of this issue. I am always on like 8000 or 9000 in Queue.. It is so frustrating and decided to stop playing till they fix the issue. Cheers for making a video about this.
I have a genuine CRITICISM as a long time viewer....
1. Where is the Suit?
2. Where is the Slideshow?
3. Where is the Tier List with Issues?
4. Where is the Soloque complaints, wait what you guys have it already...? Sorry old habits die hard
On a real note... you know how it went with your old game... you had to quit it before it had reasonable changes! I hope they can implement the changes before you have to quit! Smoge
The devs needs to come out and confirm with us that they're aware of all these things that you just talked about. It sucks sitting here not hearing anything from them
They have they just give vague answers without actually getting anything done
Ive made this comment multiple months back:
1. Just like Wow they need game GMs, but they really may not have the tools for it, and adjacent to that the culture internally. Game GM's a solid way to: A. Mitigate the rise of botting at macro and micro levels, B. Send a message about botting behaviours, C. Heavily disrupt botting warehouses.
2. There's been many comments how GM's do not matter, but actually we are now seeing exactly what happens when you have nothing to fight botting except incidental activities such as ban waves, incidental data matching etc. Fighting botting is basically something LA / SMG / AGS have to accept as a requirement to run the game... its not here and there depending on circumstances.. you need fulltime people dedicated.
3. With GM's who are active on each server you are able to accumulate and severely dent the ease of botting activities. And actually denting botting activity is what it is to stop it. Denting and disrupting IS stopping it. Because they will never go away so you have to fight constantly. Once again you can employ one GM on each NA West server for example and through simply one-click banning you can remove 200k bots in a week.
4. As time goes on and they thin you gradually begin to profile them (bots) better and better. As they thus break your profile you move your ban and monitoring activities accordingly.
Bottom line, 2 months ago we had a yellow alert on bots and no GMs or real measures were put in place. If they continue to refuse to take practical steps such as GM's and accept the game must be fought with ongoing management of bots then we will always have what we have now.. and over the long term a red situation wont be accepted.
I suspect the tools and culture are not in place to handle this or to employ GMs or accept their roles as valid - which of course is a mistake.
In Korea, social citizen numbers are required to make an account, which is harder for botters to make new accounts in mass, but even with that botters find a way around it later down the road. It would be harder to manage in NA or EU.
I need them to compensate me for Not using RMT, as a person who has spent over a grand. I feel STUPID for not just doing rmt from the beginning, and it should not be that way. I could’ve gotten 5x the gold for my money and they aren’t even perma banning ppl like wtf. At this point smilegate is in on it, they devs are behind the bots and are the ones making the money. I deserve some compensation for being loyal to the game.
Thanks for the video and bringing attention to this issue. Been in a 10K Q everyday for the last week. I love the game, but if this keeps up I don't know if I'll be playing much longer. I really hope this gets resolved somehow
EUC initial queue was majority players.
I moved to EUW after a few days and it was really popular and new people coming consistently, recently though it has just been declining while bots are increasing.
I cleaned my 50 friends which i had from day 2 of EUW and about 50%of them hadn't played in 1month+ lol
As a f2p player outside of ark pass and cheapest founder pack i felt like i was pretty competive up untill a moth ago or so, now 1200+ hours in a 1460 main, 1415 alt, 1385, 1370 and 2x 1340.
Given i didn't know anything about the game at launch i made alot of new players mistakes and probably focused on alts a bit too much but i feel like i've missed the boat completely to get a nice 5x3 setup for the main since prices have gone abosulutely insane partially due to bots and rmt i realised the past few weeks.
I love the valtan fight and always have a great time even if it's a struggle sometimes but hell i make around 50-70k a week (after some honings with bound mats) i'd say with all my characters seeing that my class engraving books alone would cost me 200k gold at this weeks prices (and they are going up still every day)... i've been on the edge of just giving up so many times the past couple of days it's kinda sad :/
Don’t be discouraged my dude. I did the same mistakes as you did on the alts and i just reached 1415 last nite and I’m still gonna hope for the best for the game. I played WoW beforehand but I can’t afford the new expansions and subscription every time so I’m way far back in any progress. So I dedicated time n effort as f2p (except the battle pass) and wishing that Lost Ark can fill the void of my mmorpg needs.
The sad thing is RMT hasn't had to change a damn thing in 20+ decades. At the turn of the millenium, the exact same discussion was being had. Unlike tech itself, no terms of strategy or tactics has had to be updated because no company has EVER innovated in this space to even the smallest degree. I said it at the first appearance of the first bots months ago in this one and I'm saying it now again; this will be no different.
The amount of resources necessary to wage a literal virtual war with RMTers from foreign nations is substantial and not just in the financial, but also the sheer skill levels of your counter-agents. There is then the issue of any such entity literally being a very capable virtual militia and probably a ton of higher-level optics that come with being a virtual weapon squad.
I have like 1k hours. I have a decent understanding of the game. Yet, I have no idea how a 302 ilvl bot generates gold.
Another thing, I'm too scared for my account to RMT, but, the value difference is insane. And not because the RMT gold is cheap, but because the ingame value of royal crystals is so ridiculously low. If I spend £100 on Lost Ark I'll get almost nothing in terms of gold, but if I spend £100 on any other game I'll get enough premium currency to last me a year.
Played on EU West since it launched and it seems to me that we have have nothing close to what you all are describing the other regions to have. The biggest issue is that its affecting the prices for sure, but they are not that visible ingame
They are, just go to the starter areas. If you start a new character and level all you see is bots, then you hut your first city and all you see is paladins. That's on the stoneheart server.
I tried to do some Una'a Tasks in the initial areas of the game. Crowds of speed hacking bots were making it quite hard. Also: have you not noticed the price of blue crystals almost tripling within one month?
Cant wait for the bald man to react to this
U mean Krilin?
He wont. He moved back to ff14
Thank you so much for the video stoopz!
I agree with what was said in the video and I hope amazon/smilegate looks into this issue and does something about it.
The priority should be on the players that are playing the game currently and NOT potential new accounts. The high queue is pushing away the players that have spent time and money on this game.
in my opinion, there are good points addressed in the video and amazon/smilegate has to consider locking servers as a very real possibility instead of saying that would deter newer players
One note about the royal crystal exchange: It does not cause inflation because royal crystals are being exchanged for gold that already exists within the economy. Through the exchange, gold changes hands rather than new gold being injected into the economy. Plus, there is a 5% tax on every transaction so not only does it not lead to inflation, it acts as another gold sink.
Amazon and Smilegate should be doing everything in their power to get players to not want to risk going to 3rd-party websites and use the crystal exchange as it is far less damaging to the game's economy.
Thanks for video man! As someone who enjoys this game for what it is, its sad to see i being slowly devoured by rmt cheaters and bots. I have no doubts ags/sg is doing something, but it has to be strict from now on. Not sure if they are scared of backlash after locking servers, or what. And if they cant handle fixing economy, at least provide means for f2p/light and legit spenders to progress via events- a few leg. books here and there, its really discouraging when week of raiding and selling mats is barely enough to buy one book, cause of rmt scum
Ive noticed all the servers are now listed "busy" where they weren't a few weeks ago on NA east
Great hearing your thoughts on the issues Stoopz! Really hope they can get this situation under control. Love the game but i´m actually worried about it in the long term.
Thanks for giving us EUW a voice. Our servers are dying and no one gives a f. Blue crystal exchange hit 1200 gold today. We lack players and our economy is ruined without a possibility to make gold. Nothing sells as we have a depression over here. Honing material prices are rising crazy. Redstones Hit 25 again from initial 10 gold like 2 weeks ago. I want to play the game after work and relaxe and not stress about if it is worth upgrading my alts with such prices. Alts which I play primarily to make up the lack of materials in the first place. Please fix the issues our servers are dying. The situation will go worse and will not solve itself if nothing happens from developer side
Sounds rough man ngl
I think this issue impacts all the legitimate spenders as well. The issue for big spenders, at least currently, in Lost Ark is the image of 'whales = RMT'. In my current guild whenever we see a 1500+ character we jokingly say 'RMT detected'. Although it's meant as a joke, the negative image is only being reinforced by the rampant amount of bots and RMTers in the game.
I’m glad to see people are finally calling out Lost Ark for the increasing amount of bots populating the servers. I remember doing research on this a few months after launch. I expressed my concerns on Reddit and the comments section was filled with Lost Ark fanboys telling me I was wrong and that I was hating on a insanely popular game 😂
Turns out I was right and there are now over 600k bots to support the ~100k players
The bot situation effects me everytime i want to play, i only have 2 hours after i put my kids to bed, and sometimes its all spent in the queue. I have to queue up 2-3 hours before I want to play. i actively play other games sometimes because of the queue.
Silkroad Online had this problem happen back in 2009. Joymax, the Korean developer and publisher, capitalised of off the problem by selling premium access to the game, allowing you to skip the queue. Years after the game was in heavy decline they banned all the bots and then the queues where empty, however they were not selling any premium access. They stopped banning bots and began frantically merging servers to bring the queues back up. It became their business model. Nowadays they are rereleasing new servers every few months (all instantly filled by bots) and keep merging servers as the population goes down so there's always a massive queue up. They even made it so that you can't even access the queue and have to either try your luck to rng your way into a 7h+ queue or pay for instant access for 4hs or buy premium.
Great video Stoopz. Totally agreed that action needs to be taken. If I was running the show, it's time to start setting thresholds on number of trades, item buyouts, overall currency (gold), and most recently infinite chaos dungeons run. From the top, start working down and figure out a %-threshold that automatically flags an account for a manual review. From there, you will have the data to fine tune this. You will as well identify BUYERS and SELLERS, then can follow that papertrail from the bottom. Pincer attack from the top % and the buyers at the bottom.
Example, dude in Call of Duty has 1000 kill minimum (threshold) and has a 99% headshot accuracy. Yeah, that is suspect and is caught in this %-threshold limit that is fluid and gets fine tuned over time. Anyone with over 250,000 gold (example), legit or not, gets a thoughtful/thorough manual review. DO SOMETHING....
That is only making the same mistake that Amazon keeps making. Every fix they implement makes the game worse for the people that play by the rules, as does your fix too. I got tired of them changing the game for the worse because of this and haven't logged on in a week and a half. The only thing they need to do is make the punishment not worth buying gold. A perma-ban would be ideal, but at least a 6 month to 1 year ban so the people that buy gold miss all the new content. If people are afraid to buy third party gold then there will be no demand for 400,000 bots. There is no need to change the game if there is no demand for third party gold
@@la7era1u54 this doesnt rly stop people tbh. theres RMT whales. they get banned? just make another acc or buy another account and buy a shittonne of gold. there needs to b another mechanism to flag/review or attack the supply. perma ban isnt enough of a deterrent tbh
@@la7era1u54 Got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. At least, above, I am offering an idea to identify these problems over "I don't play anymore" and "Punish buyers." Clearly not enough actions are being taken, and offering ideas at least gets a conversation started.
Thank you for this quality video.
I appreciate you touching on
#PermaBanRMTPlayers. In the way that you explained, that is the best solution moving forward for Lost Ark. It should have never been a temporary 3 day ban to begin with.
Now it's just time we all sit and see if AGS / Smilegate actually change up their strategies.
Returning player here. Loaded up the game after 3 months or so of not playing to be greeted with a 15k queue on Valtan. After 45 minutes i was down to 9k. Quit the game then and didn’t bother. This issue makes it really hard for the people that have only a few hours to play after work and it bothers me that I can’t log on due to the bots. Amazon NEEDS to fix this issue, because if they want returning players like me to come back for their events, we won’t be willing to wait in a 3 hour queue.
Great video, but the only point i disagree with is to adjust the gold rates, because then the third party websites just go lower in price even more, also create even more bots and this battle amazon can't win.
The most of players in Inven(KR reddit) are saying that "This is BS. You are making things up". I've been telling them truths with all the proofs but.. they just shit on me or someone doing just like me. Also the problem is, there are many many translated asmongold's or stoopzz's videos in korean but none of them are showing bad sides of global servers. Literally NONE. All the translated videos are about them having fun in raids or honing just like that. I've been sending emails to SG customer service like 5 times, posting whats really going on in global servers in Inven but im kinda tired now. Im just an ordinary KR andy here, never played in NA/EU. I just didnt wanna see ppl leaving because of something that is not related to actual game system. This is just stupid
overall good video but in my opinion more ingame examples could have been given :
ad rooms for RMT in create team sections, the constant mails a player gets from gold sellers , the huge dump of resources that impossible for a player to gather(fish, excavation, tree cutting etc..) bots standing around chaos dungeon entrence to farm it.
Also i would have loved hearing about other solutions besides server transfer considering the bad timing of closing it right now & fking up the new incoming players.
few suggestions that werent mentioned in the video :
- throwing a person into a minus for buying RMT
- changing all reward quests so that they wont give gold & binding all materials/books from quests to account.
p.s i think if server transfers are going to be possible it should be of a limited quantity/ time gated so that the bots couldnt continue transfering into the closed servers.
The queues didn't make me quit. Seeing a shartload of bots running around everywhere was driving me nuts. So I decided to go fish.
There were 30+ bots stacked on each other, casting nonstop. Awful, because I was enjoying this game.
I can see the logic behind locking servers to funnel bots to other servers but I feel like that would just be delaying the inevitable and piss off real players from said server. The only real solution to this issue is to go hard and perma ban the RMTr's, set an example to lower consumption, therefore deflating the demand which will cause there to be less and less bots. Idk who's making the decisions but they're clearly scared of losing players, at this point I'm pretty sure they're losing more money with the infestation of bots they have, since most people won't feel compelled to spend money ingame when they can just RMT.
I am on NA west and all of my friends who are still active in the game are all on NA east. While I like the timers matching my current timezone and not having to do everything 3 hours in advance, I regret making my roster there. I love the game, my friends are all willing to raid with me, but well, that isn't possible at the moment. Haven't been playing much either due to the queue times from the bots.
The last we heard from them is they never really had server transfer services in the past and when attempting to implement that service in KR, it didn't end too well as they needed more time. I hope they at least give us updates on that again.
The low hanging stuff is what makes me angry about the bot situation. How much would it cost to pay someone to scout the auction house and ban those people or hang out in Vern and ban the chaos or fishing bots. It just looks like Amazon/Smile Gate doesn't give a damn. Or rather don't want to cut even half a percent into their profit to pay someone to act as a GM in game.
I don't know for sure if they have any way to trace the auction house sales but if they do I could see "innocent" people banned. I know a few people look at the gem auctions and if they find an identical one in their inventory list it for the same values and hope to hit it big by the "seller" (of gold, not the item) accidentally buying their item and it has worked and got them gold. The mail system is probably the easiest way to catch people since it leaves a direct player to player trail and I'd assume that's where they catch most of the people that they ban.
I had 4 bot mail messages this morning... I've never seen all the NA East servers marked as "busy" until this week. I've been so relieved I chose to play on an NA East server even though I live in CA bc they've been having such terrible experiences. But now our bot problem isworsening and they're not doing jack shit. I'm worried once we start getting queue times many many many people will be forced to quit the game altogether and it won't be able to recover.
Thank you Stoopzz for making a video and giving us a voice in these rough times for Lost Ark. I hope AGS and SmG collectively come up with a proper solution!
I made a post on the forums that I’m pretty sure no one saw. If they won’t authenticate, they can make it a paid game. $5 and give players $5 worth of royal crystals or crystalline. I’m pretty sure most players has spent at least that. If bots get banned, they have to pay to get back on and then it’ll be too expensive to keep pushing new bots in.
I've been on Enviska in NA West since launch (700+ hrs). Have been patiently waiting for a solution to the bots/queues for more than two months. It's a shame, because I created a warrior on day ONE to use for a Destroyer main, then patiently waited for release. Now guess what, I can't even log in to do my dailies due to the ridiculous queues. Haven't actually logged into the server for several days. If I had it to do over again, I would have never spent a dime on this one. Yes, I purchased the platinum founder's pack and some skins packs for Destroyer and Glaivier release. I'm sitting on 6+ months of crystalline aura benefits that I won't be using. What a colossal waste. I went from being head over heels for this title to being completely unhappy and disgusted with the developers and publishers.
yes, glad you made a video about it. feel like RUclipsrs are restraining only to address it on stream. More exposure, more incentive for them to prioritize it.
i agree a lot on.. on royal crystal/gold conversion MORE competative..
because if the value in game exchange is way more ok thatn RMT.. there will be no reason for players to use RMT to 3rd party. = no more bot farming gold
This is the reason that every time I try to come back, see a que, and alt F4 out. Not trying to waste my time sitting in a que when I could play something else that deals with these botting issues.
The sad part is AGS needs Smilegate to implement features to combat this - while Smilegate also needs to bring west version up to Korean one feature wise. Only other thing AGS can do is hire more people to police the place manually, however without proper tools that can only get so far. Personally bots were the main reason why I quit the game months ago - having to wait hours in queue then struggling to find players to do content because servers are filled with bots just kills the entire experience for me.
to anyone considering whether you should play lost ark anymore:
1. don't play the NA/EU release. Amazon has no fucking idea how to run a game, look at all their previous history. They're the kiss of death on any game they're attached to. Also remember how they made EU and then had the afterthought of making EU west but didn't want to give people packages based on region. honestly you should ALWAYS get that package on the first server you play on in a different region. Amazon translation of "we'll look into offering region transferring" : "we have no fucking idea what we are doing or what you're saying but can you give us $100? we bought the rights for this game from Korea after all and we need to recoup the cost"
2. buy a Korean Account. you'll prolly spend less and you'll directly support the game.
3. leave a valid steam review sharing your experience in the truest form possible. if 15k "players" were preventing you from playing due to 2-4 wait on your server, make sure you mention that.
4. if you don't want to do any of this, just play a different game. one that actually "respects your time."
hopefully with this being done, Korea's servers will also start being hit with more western players and also more botting as a result. once this happens smile gate will have to do something or the game will die.
It's the main reason I quit. There's no way to play at the times I am able to play. And considering everything is time-gated, it makes it even worse. Once I finally can get in, I can't or do not want to play. US Mari gets an average of 16-18k queues.
One thing they could also do is make it to where when making a char you cant name its "asoifjosai" Ban generic name making would cut it down a lot, one they'd have to make a genuine name and the name would be easier to permaban.
The only thing regarding the competitive royal crystal/gold conversion is that the bots can just go even lower and lower. There definitely needs to be an update in ToS regarding RMT punishment like you said. There won't be bots if there are no one to sell gold to.
I see ur point but honestly at the rate that it’s at rightnow there’s no competition if your dollar and spending power are worth more in a new updated rate and can be seen as competitive then there’s less of an excuse to do rmt and might be even willing to sway certain ppl to maybe buy or switch from rmt
It should be both of these things. Less incentive to RMT and larger punishment if you are caught. Win-win and it helps the free to play through crystal prices.
They can go low but not infinitely low. Botting requires hardware and power, both of which are not negligible. The current rate like 4x better than in game rate but it can to a point where botters can no longer make profit and won’t find it worthwhile to bot.
@@alkaliaurange I still think they can go lower than amazon though. They are making USD in Asia and their cost of maintenance is much lower than the West. If there is just strict punishment for blatant RMTers I think the bots would naturally die out as well.
buddy forgot to mention that he has been stocking up and hoarding bot farmed fish lol. he wants to ban fishing so his millions of fish goes up in price 100x love to see it man keep up the grindset
I do agree that something has to be done about the bot situation.
And i do agree that the ban waves are not a good (permanent) solution for this specific issue.
BUT I do not agree that the F2P player should not get gold by doing "low hanging fruit"-tasks.
As a "normal" player on EU-W I do not have the time to do dailies, dungeons and raids which would take me 2+ hours (accounting waiting times in queues with low population times after work):
Unas tasks with 3 characters and some dungeon runs.
I work about 12-14 hours daily including commuting times. So I am dependent on low hanging fruits because the gear grind is real and honing chances are a bad joke even with the daily chaos dungeon and guardian raid rewards.
I have mainly 3 suggestions to tackle this problem:
1. CAP (income)
Make a certain amount of gold (capped per character, not roster!) easy to obtain even for beginners. (Maybe unlocked with the stronghold?)
-> Some minor grind (10-15 minutes each day) grants a small but steady income of gold.
2. CAP (spending)
My 2nd suggestion would be a cap on how much gold something can be sold off at the auction house and a cap for how many honing fails a piece of armor/weapon can have.
-> THIS would reduce the need for gold drastically and make people who bought gold for royal crystals less cheated because they got something for the real money they spent instead of gambling your hard earned funds away.
3. Restrict Gold trading
An additional suggestion would be to make players unable to exchange gold among each other (via mail and other means).
-> Now there would be no easy means for gold sellers to get their "goods" to the buyers. Together with the restrictions on the aucton house (mentioned in 2.) it would be really tedious to "buy gold" from a 3rd party compared to some easy grind in the game which would be capped. If someone would then like to have more 'easy' gold they could buy it legally in the ingame exchange.
I do realize that this would cut into amazons profits if ppl get their gear for less gold spent and faster because less shards are required...
... and i will surely get a lot of backlash from the "pro-players" because they DID grind for their geara bunch...
but this would - in an instant! - make gold much less attractive and put gold sellers out of business because no one would need these absurd amounts of gold...
... and we could get it with a managable amount of daily grind.
Here are some extra:
4. realistic gold exchange
As a bonus suggestion: Make the royal crystal to gold exchange rate dynamic so it reflects the actual value on the server. 238 gold per 100 RC is a joke if 95 blue crystals cost about 1k gold. :(
What a (truly bad) joke.
5. Ideas are rolling in: (Fake-) Subscription
Make ppl with Prime subscription be able to use silver instead of gold (4 honing and traders).
Amazon would get (more) "subscribers" and ppl would need less gold if any.
-> "Gold seller go home"! I got Prime!"
Now let the comment bashing commence.
1. Authentication won't do anything. Bot makers will simply find ways to authenticate automatically, even if it's 2FA (trust me, you don't need a phone to generate those 6 numbers)
2. Ban wave - does nothing. Bot makers adjust their scripts to the changes and continue working as per usual.
3. Permabans will only cause those banned players to quit completely. In a game that's already on the brink of dying it's just adding to the speed of its demise.
4. Locked servers - all it will achieve is locking out new players trying to create accounts on those. Existing bots will still be able to log in. Also, where are players supposed to go if you e.g. lock NA East and West, or EU Central and West?
5. Agree with this point. The whole economy needs to be reviewed, it can no longer be based on SG's or Amazon's greed. The reason people buy gold is because there is never enough of it. You have to be an idiot to not see that. So make it easier, make it so that people don't have to constantly struggle and they'll stop buying gold from bots. Stop that and bots will stop running their operations because there will be no point in it. I don't see anything wrong with players being able to make thousands of gold each week. I'd rather be a rich mofo at 1540 at this point and spend real money on skins and Crystalline Aura than not play at all (which is what I've done). As it stands they've lost tens of thousands of players that they could've converted to paying customers and that will never come back. SG are complete idiots in my view. Greed clouted their logical thinking but I guess they deserve it.
6. This will never happen. SG were stupid enough to release their Korean game as is, without doing anything to prevent botting. In their version you need your national ID to register, i.e. there is literally ZERO protection against any botting worked into the game. All this Easy Anticheat is complete BS, it doesn't do anything in regards to bots. It just encrypts and monitors memory for value changes to make sure you don't give yourself millions of money. It's not built for analyzing character paths, accumulating data over multiple players, finding patterns, etc.
7. As for low hanging fruit - might as well remove the whole game then if we're forced to neuter the gameplay just because developers are not competent enough to fix other issues.
It's really sad overall. I won't lie and pretend I'm some kind of a WoW veteran. MMOs aren't really my genre but I fell in love with Lost Ark and it was amazing at first. So many good things about it and I genuinely though it would be my go-to game for the next few years. Then I got to the endgame grind, slow progression and just stupidly high honing failure rates and had enough (bots didn't kill it for me as we don't have so many of them on EUC). I need to feel my time is being respected. I'm a grown up person and I'm not going to do the same thing in a f**king video game over and over again only to increase some virtual number by 1. I'm at the point in my life where time is money and I'd rather play a game that is fun and spend money on cosmetics than play a game that clearly disrespects and time-gates everything I do.
Call me a casual or whatever, I don't care. Being a grinder or a video game "veteran" isn't really a life achievement to be proud of. I make good money, I have spare time to play something so I choose to play something that's fun, engaging and rewarding. Lost Ark can be the former two but definitely not the latter and that is what they need to change. Although I personally think it's too late. The train has left and those hundreds of thousands of players that quit will not come back no matter how much they keep talking about returning players.
I think the point that was missed is these things are done in combination. By doing a massive Ban Wave & locking the servers, you essentially squeeze the bots onto a single server. The auction house is shared but you severely hurt their ability to generate gold as that one server would reach capacity. This would cause their prices to increase and be met with a competitive cash shop.
Oceanic player on NA West, Valtan. I quit after I started getting queues far far after the game launched and all I ever saw was trains of teleporting bots in every zone.
I'm om EUW moonkeep and i'm happy where i am, Best server i will say. Fast Login, players to play all the events with, what more i need. Matchmaking is great too, a little bit of patience and the game will hook you in.
I've recently rerolled from EUW to EUC after i couldn't get on my server in EUC during launch. Hopefully at some point they will address the botting and make some meaningful progress in server merges / character transfers. Great video and the word definitely needs to get out there from creators like yourself. Hopefully if more creators make similar types of videos Amazon / Smilegate will take note and provide a road map for how they are working on fixes as well as content :)
I've stopped playing (I'm on NA West,) not entirely due to bots, but I can say 100% that bots pushed me over the edge. There was no way in hell I was wasting precious time waiting in queue to play a game that was feeling more and more like a pointless grind to begin with.
The best example on how garbage is the current handling of bots from AGS is the damn 1385 bot that has been sitting into Argos EUC party finder for MONTHS, undisturbed, in his lobby with RMT ad title...
Hey Stoopzz, I always enjoy watching you on Twitch and your RUclips videos. I do have one question about the idea of transferring accounts from West to East: Wouldn't transferring accounts make it easier for bots to really take control over the whole NA servers? As an NA East player I can tell you that all servers show "Busy" status already. For a very long time Vykas (server I play) was "Good" while the rest of the servers were busy, until recently. Now, for granted that I have not experienced any queue waiting time even with the Busy status.
I think that I needs to be a combination of Bot management (maybe server locking) before allowing account transfer between servers.
just my two cents!
Great video man! Glad you use your reach to try and get attention on this issue!
While I don't doubt that the vast majority of market xfering is illegitimate, it's also done legitimately to xfer Gold between servers. I'm playing multiple servers and it's how I move gold to myself, since I can't just mail it.
Each instance can't be an "instant ban" because not everyone doing it is breaking any rules.
I hope they do something. Once I saw how many bots there were, I stopped playing. The game is going to be 95% bots at this rate.
I would honestly like to add another point at which this botting issue affects newer players. When I played going from lvl 0 to 50 I saw no bots or barely any. It wasn't noticeable. I had a friend join around this time and they had to do all those hours watching stacks of bots teleporting around the map. It lessens the player experience. And I think that the new player experience is important to retaining players.
Making the in game gold buying more competitive with the 3rd party sites would eliminate it almost entirely.
Hey Bud. I believed that all LA content creator needed to talk about this. Do a segment in your pod cast. Invite all LA in one pod cast and talk about this issue. With you, voices will be heared and hope that AGS/SG listens and action on it.
Thanks!
Great vid. The part about adjusting the rate so that it's more competitive is something that should happen sooner rather than later. Personally I actually want to swipe for gold in this game, but the rates are atrocious. At the same time, I refuse to buy from G2G because I love the game and don't want to risk losing my account of 700hrs+. I literally WANT to buy gold the right way, but it's just not worth it.
They really need to implement these suggestions ASAP
Nice vid stoopz it gives me hope there is a big name advocating for the east and west merge eventually. Coming from someone who came to west with a group of friends and they all quit but the friends who went east stayed I would love to see this system implemented at some point :(
Thanks a ton for making this instead of being silent. Good game is literally dying, and no official statement about that :(
The entire reason the RMT situation got so out of control was the royal crystal to gold conversion rate. It needed to be at least HALF what it is now at lauch, probably 1/3 of what it is now for them to stop RMT before it started.
They were greedy.
If you are building in a P2W system to the game, you need to make it such that a decent percentage of the player base can participate reasonably (ie, $100-$200 in gets you a significant boost over F2P). If you don't, a decent percentage of the player base will find an RMT source that gives currency at reasonable prices, and a VERY LARGE percentage of the player base will do it if you don't do anything about it....like ban waves at least every 2-3 weeks.
They never did any reasonable ban wave. They never did any sort of reasonable job of simply sitting in freaking Vern and banning berzerker bots as they ran by (which is pretty damn easy to do).
I never did RMT this game, but I though long and hard about it. Instead I just quit. It probably has the 2nd most predatory equipment system ever (they have D:Immortal to thank for knocking them out of #1 there) and as you get above 1400, its literally not possible to keep up without paying up. And don't tell my you are 1475 and "never paid a dime". You are just a liar. Or crazy lucky. Or you have no life....like literally no life (get a job).
You can't control royal crystal to gold conversion rate, it's player supply and demand. The most effective thing ags can do to adjust conversion rate is to incentivize f2p to use blue crystals and raise the demand that way, making it cost more gold. They can add more blue crystal skins as an example.
Early on in the game this doesn't matter though, since there is no gold generated to even support conversion at a decent ratio. Like on release day, no one has even been able to make raw gold yet in large quantities other than bots, that's why blue crystal to gold ratio was almost 1:1. Just understand supply and demand controls this, not ags.
Gold has to be valuable though. If you get more for spending less dollars then there's gonna be more gold circulating in the game. I guess if you make gold so cheap that 10 dollars get you a million gold then there won't be any bots, but on the flip side of that is gold will be so worthless that an endurance spirit absorption 2 hit master 3 ring will sell for 500k. A BiS accessory will sell for tens of millions. That's NOT good for a f2p player whose income per week is 15k.
I mean with 6 alts in tier 3 you’ll be swimming in gold and hit high ivl easy but it’ll just be a lot of resources that’s all because of how honing is
I really hope SGS does more than just blindly "celebrate 800k concurrent players" and actually does put forth the time and effort to make this game function properly in the west. all and all great points!
Always interesting to log on and see the server go green after being ‘busy’ for weeks.
EUC was so busy you couldn’t even queue. You had to keep spam launching the game for a chance to make it to the queue or you got a “Server too busy” error and thrown out.
Just a note to those not familiar with the NA West bot problem, Mari has been consistently queued for the last month when logging in, and the entire last week it has been around 15-20k que which is around 2 hours.
IMO this has reached the point where the bots are effectively DOSing the playerbase and in any level headed company this would absolutely be top priority
I agree with all of your points EXCEPT the royal crystal to gold conversion rate. Bro. It’s not dictated by AGS, it’s dictated by the market, simple supply and demand. It rises and falls based on the supply and demand of blue crystals.
10k+ ques for 4weeks now sine valtan release, was so hyped to hit 1445 then 10k everyday afterwards, will come back when the ques disappear just can't play at the moment
In my server the botting situation is waaaaaaaaaaaaay out of control. Gold to Crystals is at 980 and going up by the minute...
Not sure on what region you are, but here on EUC, price is about that much. Getting close to 1k Gold.
On top of that, logging at reset time on NA-West, i've had a minimum 10,000 queue number. This is getting out of hand.
Honestly bro its such a bummer. I have 400 hours so far and i work graveyards so i typically try to play at 7am-8am in NA/EU and for the past month now there has been a que of 15,000+. By the time i actually get into the servers i don't even want to play anymore because i worked. All i want to do is play my game after these 12-14 hour shifts and i can't even do that because people literally ruin everything somehow.
This is what i've been saying for so long, i know for fact that they can't catch every single RMTr in the game, but those whom they can catch they should make them an example, the punishment MUST be so bad that the ones who weren't caught think twice on rmting again.
Why you should focus your efforts on gold buyers instead of bots, because it has been proven over and over again that fighting bots is a neverending war, so you should focus ALL your efforts on obliterating the people that fund their operations, the gold buyers.
I agree with eveyrthing you've said Stoopzz, glad to see somebody with radical ideas, because they don't realize the bots and rmt issue is so bad that they just can't go easy against them.
I sat in Que started at 11AM and ended at 5.20PM I legit forgot the game was running around an HR and went to town to shop went home and was still in Que.
Me and my Giuld/Discord have a 2to3HR long Que every single day were about to move onto another game and this is a group of about 50people and we did a pull and about 90% of us are fed up and want to leave.
Amazing video! The truth is that Amazon doesn't care. Even though they are losing money because of this. Not only potential cosmetic sales, but all of these RMTers could just buy gold from Amazon and avoid any negative consequences. It is clear that people don't care how p2w this can get because the game is pretty popular. It really is not an impossible problem to figure out.
Inflation definitely the bigger issue. Escalation causes inflation to the degree that normal players can't genuinely interact with the marketplace.
I think the Companies should engage more with the real players and fight together against Bots. Involve us by giving us tools with which we can interact with other characters. For example a Hotkey Item that can block or interact a Bot and makes them not progress ontheir path. Or an easier Bot notification system as a in game item which makes it easier for Admins to pinpoint and Ban. And the players should receive some small Bonus Reward for every successful „Hunt“ so players will feel encouraged to do that.
My examples are just examples but the overall alliance with players means the Devs dont need to hire more payed workers to do this endless task but they have all players as their ingame Anti Bot system and give them in game rewards for this help.
Its a Win Win as we then will definitely have better Gold prices for all the stuff in the Auction House.
Good job on acknowledging this issue 3 months later, meanwhile people getting banned on forums and discord for pointing this shit out.
Queue numbers on Mari are getting up to 15, 000 - 20, 000 even at like 8am on a weekday due to all the bots.
That means the average player has to wait around 2 hours just to log in.
Been saying they need to lock servers for 2 months now. Its the only way to keep bots out of where the active playerbase is and reduce queues.
Why wouldn't they just give server priority to people who have their prime accounts linked?
Lock access to using the market/auction house behind stronghold level 25. It's not difficult for real players to spam nact counters every day and get there. But no bot company is gonna do that for 100k+ different accounts with no upfront/quick money being made.