Lost Ark ban wave wipes out over 1 million bots with more to come

After an influx of bot and spam accounts taking over Lost Ark, Smilegate RPG has banned over 1 million illegitimate accounts – and they’ve still got more tricks up their sleeve.  

In the middle of February, Lost Ark finally got its long-awaited release to players in the west – and it didn’t take long for Smilegate RPG’s MMO to start breaking all sorts of records.

Despite a fair few issues with server queues, the game quickly took over Twitch’s viewership charts and even had a record 1.1 million concurrent players within the first few days. Though, plenty of those were bot accounts.

Players have already fumed at how these spam and bot accounts have been filling up the game’s chat with advertisements for gold and other items. Though, the developers have set about making changes.

At the start of March, Smilegate announced that they’d be going after around 1 million accounts that had been flagged as either a spam account or a bot, as they looked to clean things up.

• Read More: All Lost Ark characters & Advanced Classes

A week later, on March 11, they confirmed that they’d now laid the ban hammer down and hit those accounts hard. “Last Friday we began rolling out bot bans, targeting over a million illegitimate accounts. We know this will not fix the situation by itself and there are still bots present in the game, so we want to provide reassurance that this was just one step in an ongoing battle,” they said in an official blog post.

The devs also confirmed that these ban waves would become more frequent too, especially as they develop “methods and tools” to keep ahead of the headaches. “These updates will soon be on their way to the game,” they added.

Naturally, not everyone caught up in this ban wave will have been operating a spam account, and there are steps that can be taken to appeal a ban if you believe it is unfair.

Though, as the hack and slash MMO moves forward, the devs will most likely be able to easily identify who is a spammer and who is playing legitimately.