The MMORPG Lost Ark has had problems with bots and other tricks since its release in February. Real money trading is also a problem for the players, because the economy and the players are currently suffering badly, although it hardly looks like it on Steam. The number of players on Stream seems abnormally high for an MMORPG. We at MeinMMO summarize the situation around Lost Ark on Steam for you.
what is the situation About 4 months ago, the South Korean MMORPG Lost Ark started in the West on Steam and was very successful during this period. At the time of release, over 1.3 million people were online in the game at the same time and were celebrating the MMORPG.
In a large MMORPG there is a lot of trading, which quickly drew masses of bots into the game. They farmed gold and sold it for real money. This is known as RMT – short for Real Money Trading.
The developers have repeatedly tried to react and banned several million accounts, but it seems that the bot pandemic is not going to stop there. Rather the opposite, because if you look at the Steam numbers and the economy in the game at the moment, a creepy picture emerges.
The 5 reasons for the incredible success of Lost Ark
Steam numbers at peak – But fans aren’t satisfied
What do the player numbers say? Looking at Steamcharts.com you can see that Lost Ark currently has 799,000 concurrent active players. Since the first big wave of bans in April, this value has increased by almost 300,000 players and queues are currently waiting for you on some servers.
So you could assume that the game is doing particularly well right now. But the reality is a little different. Because bots are a huge problem in Lost Ark. They flood large parts of the maps and accordingly also the market in the game, which is bad for the economy.
Although there have been two major updates in Lost Ark in the meantime, it is unlikely that so many players will return because of new endgame content. A large proportion of the new players in Steam’s stats are likely to be bots.
Scenes like this are unfortunately the order of the day:
Bots love the sorceress
How does that show? If you take a look at the classes that are out and about in Lost Ark, you immediately notice something. The sorceress and the berserker are at the forefront with a large share. Coincidentally, these are also the classes most affected by bots.
Although the two classes are among the most popular in our votes, the sorceress in particular, who is far ahead, breaks every boundary of normal player distribution. According to a thread on reddit, 14.50% of all characters are currently sorceresses. This makes it more than 5% more popular than all other classes (via reddit).
Unfortunately, we have to assume that a large proportion of the currently active players on Steam are bots, but they make Lost Ark look very good. At least to the outside.
The economy is collapsing bit by bit
why is this bad Due to the mass of permanently farming bots and the enormous supply of gold in the game, the economy of Lost Ark is currently everything but no longer player-operated. A lot of the upgrade materials from Tier 1 are worth very little now because bots are throwing them out onto the market.
And if you take a look at the prices for gold in Lost Ark, it quickly becomes clear that many players are happy to get involved in RMT. Because large sums such as 20,000 gold are sometimes available for less than €15.
Although Lost Ark announced that it would not only ban the bots, but also the buyers of such transactions, this has unfortunately prevented few users from buying gold so far.
How bad is the impact? Looking around further, we come across an RMT page that we don’t want to name here. This is just one page of many, but we can currently buy up to 8 million gold here on the Asta server alone. The website states that they currently have this quantity in stock.
To put that into perspective: upgrading a weapon of item level 1,390 from +10 to +11 only costs 330 gold. And that’s a huge sum for some fans. The total of certainly far more than 8 million gold that are currently owned by bots is massively disrupting the economy.
The developers have recently announced that they are working on the problem, but there does not seem to be an effective solution so far. It is currently not known how long the bot plague will continue. What do you think of the current situation in the game? Are you still active in Lost Ark or have you stopped? How negatively did you notice bots? Write it to us in the comments here at MeinMMO.
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