Some of the most dedicated Lost Ark players have been caught in ban waves
Now resolved, the Lost Ark forums showed numerous players boasting over 500 hours of in-game time alleging unfair bans in recent days
Lost Ark, the hugely popular free to play MMORPG from Smilegate and Amazon Games, is still trucking on following its hugely popular launch earlier this year. However, for those out there who have gone above and beyond to explore all the vistas and challenges the game has to offer, an unexpected suspension may be lurking around the corner.
This all comes from a popular post on the Lost Ark forums, where user Aionion created a thread after seeing multiple players claiming they had received unfair 3 day suspensions unfairly. According to their own claims, as well as the anecdotal information posted by those in the thread, these temporary bans seem to be impacting those who have invested hundreds of hours into Lost Ark.
While the claims of banned players must always be taken with a grain of salt, the sheer number of players claiming the same sort of bans out of nowhere made relegating these complaints as nothing but post-ban salt a touch harder. Further down the thread, posts featuring screenshots ban appeals not going the player’s way and stating bans are warranted make this whole situation that much more of a head scratcher.
Okay, let's take a step back and assume that at least a portion of these players have actually been banned unfairly. What could have led to this situation? Well, it was only last week that an official post on the Lost Ark forums claimed that a ban wave had removed one million bot accounts from the game. It was also stated that this effort to combat botting “ was just one step in an ongoing battle".
Alternatively, there are reports of speed hacking in Lost Ark, which allow some nefarious folk to level through the game incredibly fast, and these bans could be hitting people unintentionally in an attempt to halt that issue.
It’s possible that, in an attempt to curb the botting issue, certain players who were spending extended periods of time in game were accidentally caught in the crossfire between Amazon Games and botters. If time in game, large transfers of gold, or other acts were marked as potentially suspicious, then these hardcore players could theoretically be marked.
Late yesterday, we reached out to Amazon Games for a statement on this issue and whether they had identified some of these bans as unwarranted, or if they are all just bans. Just this morning, an official response was posted to the thread that explains what had happened.
"There were a number of accounts suspended in this timeframe as a result of one of our speed hack detection programs. While almost all of these bans hit real speed hackers, it appears that the program did flag some lag/connection issues as speed hacks, which lead to a small number of player being banned as false positives.
Involved accounts should now be unsuspended, and if you were caught in this ban wave, we want you to know that there will be no strike against your account, and no repercussions. We apologize for any stress or confusion this may have caused, and we are working hard to shore up our cheating detection tools to both crack down on bots and prevent situations like this from happening in the future."
So while this may have caused some temporary concern among the affected parties, it seems to have been an unfortunate side affect of anti-hacking measures. While everyone can breath a sigh of relief, it's clear that future steps in battling those who desire to cheat their way to the top of Lost Ark may not go without additional casualities. However, if they continue to remedy any misfires as they have here, it hopefully won't be much of an issue.
For more Lost Ark content, check out our guide on how to farm pirate coins, as well as everything that has been added with the Lost Ark March update.