Over 1 Million Lost Ark Bot Accounts Have Been Banned

Amazon Games has banned over 1 million "illegitimate accounts" involved with botting from its newly released MMORPG Lost Ark, the company has announced.

Lost Ark has been a huge hit on Steam, becoming one of the most-played games of all time on the platform. Unfortunately, that popularity (and the fact that it's free-to-play) means it has become a prime target for gold sellers and bot accounts to hawk their wares. Amazon has already outlined methods it's taking to combat bots (such as restricting the game's area-chat to only higher-level players and improving bot-detection tools), but this is the game's first mass ban wave. From the sound of things, it might not be the last.

"While we intend to make a massive impact with this ban wave, we know that there is more work to be done and way players to know that this is only one step in what will be an active and ongoing process," Amazon writes.

Due to the size of the ban wave, Amazon states that a small number of players may be identified as bot accounts by mistake. Players who were "earnestly playing Lost Ark, and not modifying their gameplay in any way" but have been impacted by the ban by mistake can appeal their ban here.

Due to the game's popularity, server login queues have been an ongoing problem for Lost Ark, particularly in the game's Europe Central region. Amazon has stated there is no way to currently expand capacity on crowded servers, and that the ability to transfer characters to less-crowded servers also isn't an option.

Lost Ark will receive its first major content update later this month, as Amazon and developer Smilegate RPG look to begin bringing over content from the Korean version of the game (which launched in 2019) to the West. An update earlier this month nerfed much of the game's initial endgame content, making early Guardian Raids and Abyss Dungeons easier.