Based on reports prior to this from the publisher Buy Lost Ark Gold, anti-cheat updates have continuously cut down the number of bots in waves. However in the course of any cheater vs. anti-cheat battle, the user base is always rebounding following the bans as players have discovered a way around the anti-cheat and redeployed whatever sketchy software they had on the market.
This botting issue that has been recurring for a while has led to some people to speculate about the "real numbers" in Lost Ark, and while it's obviously impossible to know for sure exact figures changes in the overall player numbers, like the elimination of a gold mining method allegedly eliminated a whopping 200,000 players off of the highest level in March. This has occasionally come into the spotlight as solid evidence of just how many bots were lurking behind the scenes. In the end, we'll most likely not be able to determine any exact numbers, because websites like the aforementioned Steamcharts and SteamDB even though they are helpful, they aren't official tracking sites and therefore could be off by just a bit.
Fast forward to June 16 It appears that botters as well as real-money traders have been hit hard. One day prior this, it was revealed via Twitter and an official post on the Lost Ark forums that a "massive" ban will follow the scheduled update. They were not kidding! The patch is believed to have been packing extra juice under the hood, resulting in a sharper decrease in players in the days after the patch. The number of concurrent players was initially around 550,000, however, it decreased to about 200,000 during the weekend.
The result was two starkly diverse reactions from the two factions. On the most popular cheating forums as well as botting hubs are threads that have players performing fake damage checks are easy to find as posters report on the accounts that received bans, as well as the duration of the bans, and what services or in-game actions may have resulted in them being identified on Amazon's radar.On the other hand on the other hand, users on Reddit, Discord and other popular chat rooms for legitimate Lost Ark play hyped about the purge, in what is probably the most triumphant celebration of player decline you'll see anytime soon. The result was of genuine disbelief about the consequences, dumping on the players caught at the sharp end of the bans, and memes.
But if we all drop our popcorns for a while even as tempting as it is to break out the bubbly, is it too early to be excited. There is a consensus that generally the first time offenders get a three-day ban most likely as a way to warn people who are dodgy and not absolutely body regular players that are caught in the crossfire that means some accounts that were taken down over the last few days may return to service. While they're not likely to be hopping back into the fire however, those who earn money by developing and marketing botting software will likely be picking off the latest update in search of new ways to work around it.
But that doesn't mean it's in vain, however. The more it becomes frustrating to use automated trading in Lost Ark, while players who use large amounts of money into their accounts are permanently suspended for the acquisition of suspect amounts of currency in the game through real trades it is expected that criminals will be forced to move towards safer best place to buy Lost Ark Gold, more dangerous landscapes. With fewer and less buyers keep coming in, it's likely that we'll begin to get closer to the illustrious "real population" over time.
What does this mean for Lost Ark, all in all it's great news to those who play the game.