Lost Ark Review Bombed by Frustrated Players After Sudden Bans
Lost Ark players – or rather, people who haven't played Lost Ark in a while – have started review bombing Amazon's free-to-play game in response to some bans that the community says are unexpected and unwarranted. The bans in question seem to have been applied to people who haven't even been playing the game lately which typically, but the permaban nature of these punishments mean that they can't come back even if they wanted to. Worse than that for some, these bands are also impacting their Steam accounts with negative marks.
Posts within the Lost Ark subreddit catalogued the instances of surprise ban players woke up to this weekend and did so frequently enough that a pinned post now sits at the top of the subreddit to address the situation. While playtimes differ depending on who's doing the posting, the core frustration remains the same: players who had only a couple of hours or so in the game and haven't played in months are getting permabanned from Lost Ark.
For those who did give up Lost Ark long ago, you may be wondering why they'd care at all about being banned from a game that they don't play anymore. But with the way Steam works, those who've been banned from games now have marks on their profiles signifying as much, and for those who've retained mostly perfect records throughout 10+ years of having a Steam profile, having a seemingly illegitimate strike against them like that is something they'd like to avoid.
Most people sharing their accounts of being banned said in the replies that they've submitted tickets and appealed the situation, but others have taken things one step further by letting their frustrations spill over into the game's Steam reviews. If you look at the most recent reviews, you'll see a wave of red thumbs downs with people saying they've been "randomly banned for no reason" while telling Amazon "thanks for the free red text on my profile." That's brought the game down to a "Mixed" status in terms of recent reviews, though the overall reviews remain "Mostly Positive."
What's most likely happened is the game's anti-cheat systems behaved a bit too aggressively and targeted people mistakenly, though we don't know for sure since Amazon hasn't said anything about the situation yet. That'll likely change over the weekend, however, so we'll see then how this situation will be resolved.