Gamers who have not logged into Lost Ark recently have been targeted by a slew of suspensions that are the result of bots.

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Since its launch in the West in February 2022, the Korean MMO Lost Ark has had difficulty with bots created for gold farming. A month after its release, Amazon Games banned over a million accounts for using bots and promised to continue doing so. It also made adjustments to the game’s economy as part of its effort to address one of the game’s main issues. Nearly a year later, the problem persists. In January, a huge number of accounts were banned, with Amazon Games announcing on the official forum that “many players have noticed a decrease in the number of concurrent users displayed in Lost Ark’s Steam stats.

This change is the result of the deployment of highly effective tactics to target and remove bots from the game.” Regrettably, these new tactics have also resulted in a lot of players being banned who have not logged in for a while, with the penalty appearing on their Steam accounts. This ban is not a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) ban, which is an automated system to detect cheats installed on users’ computers.

This particular ban is initiated by the developers, and visible to anyone who looks at the user’s profile. Understandably, those who were wrongly banned are not pleased about the tarnish on their Steam accounts, and the game’s overall user rating on Steam has dropped from Mostly Positive to Mostly Negative as former players express their outrage.

Amazon Games posted a statement on the forum, admitting that “we’ve seen an increase in ban appeals from players who were mistakenly affected by these bans.” The company went on to say that they have identified the error that caused these false bans and are actively working to undo them for all legitimate players, regardless of whether a support ticket has been filed. They also invited players to submit a Ban Appeal ticket to Customer Support to get their account restored and all penalties removed.