It’s obviously not a good idea to cheat or spend money to advance your MMO character. These are platinum-clad rules for most people. Yet Lost Ark has had to contend with botters, cheaters, and RMT activities for a while now, leading Amazon Games to dish out bans to accounts and explain why.
At the face of it, the requirement to play fair in the MMO’s code of conduct is the primary reason for actions against accounts, specifically those who took part in RMT and used a utility to automate daily tasks. Amazon Games also simply warns players to just… not cheat, bot, or engage in RMT.
AGS also sought to clear the air about automated responses and what it termed as “false narratives being publicly shared” surrounding them, explaining that while reply templates do exist, appeals are all manually reviewed and “RMT investigations are thoroughly vetted and manually looked into” while also pointing out that those caught usually lie about their experience. As for those found to use third-party automation utilities, the studio did find that some first-time offenders were caught in the wave and so have had their permanent bans adjusted to 30-day ones.
It’s that latter point that has raised some hackles within the community, as many players raise the point that there should be zero tolerance for cheaters, argue that AGS’s decision just ends up harming regular players and encouraging the community to just keep cheating until they’re caught for the first time, and add it to a growing pile of perceived mismanagement regarding reining in unruly players and bot accounts.
