If you noticed a rather dramatic dip in Lost Ark’s active playerbase numbers this week and wondered what happened, first of all, nice catch. And second of all, you probably already suspected the answer: attack of the banhammer.
“This week, many players have noticed a drop off in the number of concurrent users displayed in Lost Ark’s Steam stats,” Amazon told players last night. “This change is the direct result of a roll out of a significant number of bot account bans, which utilized new and highly-effective tactics to target and remove bots from the game.”
“Players should expect these bot bans to have a positive impact on gameplay, including improved Market and Auction House experiences, decreased lag in heavily populated areas, and fewer bots present in the game. In the coming months, we will continue to deploy large scale bot ban waves, implementing new methods of identifying and actioning against bots en masse. We will keep players updated about the deployment and impacts of these ban waves as they occur.”
Even with this latest bot ban, the game is still clocking 90,000 concurrent humans – actual humans, now – over the last 24 hours, leading to social media threads full of gratitude.
