Lost Ark Details Plan to Continue Fighting Bots

The popular free-to-play video game Lost Ark has not been out for terribly long in North America, but despite only releasing earlier this year, it continues to have trouble with bots time and time again. Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG have continued to make efforts to resolve the issue and combat bots, and have now provided an update on how it intends to continue fighting the ongoing issue with them.

"Since Lost Ark launched, we've been fighting a war against the bots infiltrating Arkesia," the official update reads in part. "Addressing bots can be especially challenging in free-to-play games because it's so easy to create an account and enter the game, but we're working on multiple fronts to fight them."

Over the past months we’ve made a number of changes to Lost Ark in order to combat bots.

We know that there’s still work to do, and we want to share some detail on how we’re approaching this ongoing issue.

Details below!https://t.co/QmP7YUjwZ3

— Lost Ark (@playlostark) May 13, 2022

The update goes on to note that it has taken a number of different steps so far and will continue taking more, but that it cannot share full details because it would make subverting the new measures easier. That said, the folks working on Lost Ark are "working closely with Easy Anti Cheat to improve their support of Lost Ark and with Smilegate RPG to improve the native bot detection system, while tuning events and rewards to prevent or remove paths for bot abuse. We're also exploring new ways to help combat bots natively at scale."

Notably, however, the update also notes that while something like Captcha or two-factor authentication could likely help, it would necessitate "sizeable platform and architectural changes" in order to work with Lost Ark. Similarly, real-world account owner verification is "a less realistic solution," according to Amazon Games. The update does not that it is continuing to explore options for more tools to combat bot abuse, however.

As noted above, Lost Ark is officially available for PC via Steam as a free-to-play title. You can check out all of our previous coverage of Lost Ark right here.

Have you had a chance to play Lost Ark as of yet? What do you think of Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG's efforts to fight bots so far? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to reach out and hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop in order to talk about all things gaming!