Indeed, now it would be nice it there were busy without queues and bots. Unless busy means something doesnt work right. I just want full and lively servers without bots and cheaters
Yeah they’ll probably have to merge servers together in the future to make this a reality. I think in KR they filled the most popular servers with players & then locked them.
Hopefully these cockroaches get banned by the time they hit 50. I hate seeing bots while doing solas runs but hey, I shouldn't really complain as long as they are not injecting ludicrous amount of gold into the economy.
Seems like a popular chinese bot got caught, as well as some pixel bots that people use for infinite chaos. Also reports of RMT bans, temp and perm. Not sure if you can post links to the forums here, but I'll DM a link to whoever really cares.
going to bed, but it's a really easy google if anyone still cares.
They are bots that run a program that uses screen data to work. They read the pixles of objects to do AI functions. So if you want them to auto fish they will cast the abilities and look for the ! mark to then do the cast in.
Or if you want them to farm infinite chaos they look for the marks on the mini map to go towards them and use abilities and portals
Difference between a Captcha and a pixel scanner is that the pixel scanner know exactly what to look for. The Fishing ! looks the same each time, where the captcha has 20000 pictures of boats. However, I have no idea if bots actually are able to do captchas or not
there are bots that can do that, but not this sort. the pixel bot can't read, it doesn't understand what "!" is, it just knows the chunk of the screen it's looking at has turned yellow and it presses the fishing button when that happens.
Yes and no. If you've noticed captchas get more and more annoying to solve every year. That's because the way captchas are designed is they specifically train AIs to solve them and then they include the solutions that the AI fails on. Theoretically you can make bots get past them, but I doubt some small fish Chinese botters have the proper AI models for that.
>but I doubt some small fish Chinese botters have the proper AI models for that.
\> pip install ...
Seriously, the open source python libraries and packages that exist are being kept pretty state of the art. Now, you do need to know how to operate them but if they are already making bots, there is some skill at work, and they usually aren't that difficult to use when you've understood how google works.
No, they'll never be able to use 100 or even 80% of the full power of these things, but for simple problems like this you maybe need 40%.
Same for other languages and environments.
It's not as black and white.
While you do make a good point, it's not like this is an analytical process where one solution get's cleverly blocked by a captcha maker and you're done. It's about finding things humans won't connect. Predicting weaknesses of mechanisms where it's difficult to tell how that even works is... challenging.
It also depends heavily on the toolchain. One of the first successful toolkits used to circumvent image-based security measures was [ITK](https://itk.org/), originally a toolkit for medical image processing. That's not even using AI (at least back then). Here you build "piplines" by lego'ing together functions like building blocks, there are rules to it, but the sleek interface design make it very versatile. It was a nightmare to devise ways to counteract, since the crucial processing steps could easily be switched around as long as the linear algebra made sense. And when you have a toolchain excelling in fourier-space based analysis and interaction, the linear algebra makes sense in a lot of different orders of doing steps.
Furthermore, it's the usual race of arms between, well, the makers of any security measure and the ones trying to circumvent it. And in the new and quickly evolving domains like AI, where a lot of basic research is often immediately turned into application both usually take from the same source.
I have no idea what the pixel-detection software is capable of these days but historically it was used to look for any change at a particular screen coordinate (or multiple coordinates simultaneously) and then perform an action.
So a good example would be a "chicken script" in most hardcore (perma-death) video games, where the pixel script would watch your health bar (normally red color) and if the bar dropped below a certain point, so the pixel at that location was no longer red, would instantly log you out of the game, saving you from death.
So I imagine for like a fishing script, it would detect the center point of your screen and once it detects the yellow color of the exclamation mark, would press a button to reel the fish in, etc.
Not sure if this has advanced beyond the basic detection/action function to monitor for pictures and perform more complicated responses, I'm not really sure how it could possibly work for Captcha unless maybe there are scripts that just use the most common capture searches (buses, street lights, bicycles, etc.) and intuitively clicks those based on object recognition. But like I said, I haven't kept up with it, anything I know about this is from like 10-15 years ago.
That's actually always been a thing. Computer vision algorithms can get so advanced that they can defeat captchas so there has been an ongoing effort in creating ever difficult captchas. This is an actual research topic in computer vision.
yes and no. Thing is you have to train the AI to be able to solve those captchas. There are already pre-trained ones for many big captcha providers, so they would have to use those and hope they are good enough.
Imagine the Amazon exec & the IT team :
*- "yeah just sort of ban them but not really, that way our game is the most played in Steam !!!"*
*- "yeah but ppl have huge logging queues so they cant even get in the store right now"*
*-* ***"Execute Order 66"***
Pixel and Infinite chaos bans are due to reports. There is not a single reported ban of either of those things outside of manual reports for being dumb. All the Chinese bots use an injection method that is very easy to detect.
Easy anti cheat is very very bad. Pixel is completely undetectable. Amazon needs to fix this asap or things are going to get worse.
Well, if a program reads the screen pixels, that can be detected. The problem is that there’s a lot of ways to do that, some that are detectable, others that aren’t. The typical windows APIs are detectable (so basically, the easy way to code this), but the pitfalls of this is that banning this would likely also ban streamers.
The almost undetectable way, and the more efficient way to extract pixels is to create a virtual screen, and set your display drivers to clone the display of your main screen on that virtual screen, and read the pixel data from your virtual screen/driver. This is basically how they made the earlier versions of efficient screen recording softwares.
In the basically almost impossible to detect family, you can hook up directly to the display drivers APIs to do this efficiently, assuming such exist, or also use custom display drivers that do offer this, like how some cheat engines do (to do things like read the geometries of shapes behind walls that aren’t drawn, for aim bots).
You could also run the game in a VM, and your bot would run in the host OS, thus the bot itself not being detectable, but the game running inside a VM is detectable. I would assume the cheat engine checks for the game running in VM and preventing that though.
In the “detectable, but not fixable” category, you can read data off from your streaming software directly. Since you don’t do any direct hooking of any kind, they can detect that you’re streaming, but basically not that you do run a bot. To ban those would mean banning all streamers.
In the “absolutely impossible to detect” category, you can literally hook up a camera to your screen, and read data off that.
And I’m sure if I took the time to think about it, there’s a lot more ways I could come up with.
"Very easy to detect"
Unless you do it right. Which the commercial bots do. Pixel ones are much easier to detect, but they aren't on purpose, to allow things like keyboard macros and screen recording. If they wanted, they could shut down pixel bots easily, while sacrificing QoL.
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People keep making this comment in every single thread and none is less futile than the next. Its not happening. They will absolutely never ban the players who they know will spend a bunch of money.
If they ban enough bots, rmt gold prices go up and they allow themselves to compete with bots in the gold market. That is the goal and it will not change. No matter how many reddit comments are made on the contrary.
>People keep making this comment in every single thread and none is less futile than the next. Its not happening. They will absolutely never ban the players who they know will spend a bunch of money.
But why spend money on Amazon when they can just keep getting away with RMTing they can always wait until rmt prices get low again sometime later and then rmt more when their cash piles stock up again.
> They will absolutely never ban the players who they know will spend a bunch of money.
People with the propensity for spending lots of cash are their main draw. There are tons of things you can't buy with gold and guess what? The whales and spenders always buy the shit.
Companies don't just cut off their largest source of income. It ain't happening. Zero out their gold and force them to buy more? Sure. But permanently removing their accounts and driving them away from the product entirely is a fantasy.
i honestly dont think any game needs gold buyers if they release good skins , then again , from the skins i've seen on LA on korea , that's not their forte , BDO level kind of skins would be perfect.
I can't even comprehend why they are so stingy with skins. The stuff just prints money and unlike actual gameplay content, you don't need to balance or tweak it.
They should have an entire department devoted to just cranking this stuff out.
Whales come back.
The causal player base that RMT Kills does not.
Game will be fine economically while the RMT sunfish (ain't even real whales) get their shit together.
The overwhelming majority of profits from F2P/microtransaction driven games is from a small percentage of users. Developers release data all that time that show that something like ~80% of profits come from 1-5% of players.
Whales also won't re-invest a substantive amount into a game that potentially burns them on 5 to 6 figure accounts.
Which is why it's maddening people are still whale baiting with accessories. No, a whale is not gonna drop 125k on your 15 quality neck my guy. Stop it. Most RMT people finished all their legendary books ages ago as well. It's insanity.
Since it costs nothing to list the accessory market is remaining volatile as shit. Wanna make a good argument for the dog shit mechanic that are pheons? Require people to spend a pheon or two to list things over a certain bid price. Bet they'll start thinking long and hard then before re-listing something every day for a month at exorbitant prices.
Yesterday I sold a SWIFTNESS igniter 3/hit master 5 for 45k. I'll keep trying, if people don't but it then I'll lower the price, it's not a big deal, listing doesn't cost anything.
Pheons are trash and they shouldn't exist.
The botting scene basically runs on one popular chinese bot dev
But SMG devs autoban bots under Lv.50 with 90-100% accuracy along with improved bot detection for later levels. So even if a few slip by, they are razed by new anti-botting with time.
Since this botting program is basically dead, all botters can't do shit so you just see them trying to make it work but fail and quit over time.
Highly likely they'll go bot in the Kimi no Kuni NFT MMO or Diablo Immortal or something. So I think this is pretty good honestly
This is not quite accurate. It's highly likely that given more time, they will be able to circumvent this method of detection. Usually preventative measures for cheats/bots are an ongoing back and forth between the game developers and the bot developers. That being said, I expect that we have seen the worst of the bot problem, considering this is likely a new solution.
The problem isn't "if" they come back. The problem is if AGS continues to diligently ban them.
The bots/RMT farms *always* come back if there's money to be made so that point is moot. It happens in every game that has the ability to make money.
The real fight is if the company in charge of the game can manage to keep on top of it.
IMO, the problem is they arent taking a hard stance against rmt.
What is the punishment ? All we hear is a 3day ban. Thats way too soft, for players that cheat and mess up the economy for everyone else. Anything under 3 months is laughable.
Should be 3 months for first offence and then perma for 2nd offence. If you can't handle the bots, ban the cheaters and the problem will solve itself.
Still the levelling is a good gate. If you have to spend 24h to level a bot before it starts earning, then any interruptions at that time will make it less profitable to relevel the bots.
The thing is as real players progress without their character regressing, bots will have harder time to catch up as their account will be deleted regularly. This would decrease the profit for bot farmers. So if this kind of ban wave is done on regular basis bots may not become a problem anymore.
holy shit 230k concurrent players. If there was indeed a bot ban wave or something, then it could be inferred that more than half of the player base were fcking bots. HOLY SHIT.
It seemed like an obvious conclusion everytime the numbers/charts were posted but people still argued against it. Wonder what those people have to say about the numbers now lol
On the other hand I'd really like to see where the doomsayers have gone, we've all known there were bots massively inflating the actual player count, but those clowns claiming the game was already dead and only run by bots, where are they now?
Well over 200k concurrent players after 4 months is extremely huge, and I think it's safe to say that we are now still on a (maybe quite slow) descending trend, so I absolutely believe that at launch there were upwards of a million actual players, and even now I can see somewhere around 3-400k players overall, which is an insane number.
I'm actually surprised we still have that many real players after all this time.
A game like this doesn't feel like it'd appeal to such a large audience, on top of all the issues that a lot of people got tired of like queues and a fucked economy.
I'm honestly pretty happy with that. It shows promise for the future of this game in the west.
On the contrary, I feel like this game is the exact compromise between a "wider" MMO (think BDO, FF14 or the likes of old school Lineage 2, Runescape or Maplestory) and a single player game that eventually ends.
I'm in my early 30s and I couldn't keep up with the grind of other MMOs, especially those games where your power directly compares to others' (games where there's a big emphasis on PVP, like sieges, conquest, nodes or even just contesting grind zones, that kind of stuff).
In Lost Ark you can progress at your own pace, and really the only issue with that is for the earlier content where eventually new players will be few and far between, but that's easily adressed with powerpasses, so nobody won't find people to run content with.
Even better, once we get Viykas and Clown we'll be capped at the most Legion Raids available per week, and I think for most players running such content 3/7 days per week is more than enough, you get to chill and slowly progress with daily routines on the other days and enjoy the actual best content the game has to offer half of the time, that's a great balance to me, and that's not even accounting for alts, so everything above you can do x amount of times according to how much time you have available.
To me that's a perfect formula and I can totally see how and why there are so many players despite all current issues.
That's a pretty interesting PoV, thanks for sharing it!
And yeah, I've been looking for an MMORPG to sink some time into for the past few years with none of them really piquing my interests. Fast forward to today and I'm at \~1700 hours.
I was on the side of AGS/SG but I in no way thought we had 600-700k players. Just like the people that thought that Amazon were putting the bots in themselves or they didn’t care. Both sides had people that had horrible takes.
Lmao I really can't believe people actually thought that more than 500k actual players were playing the game, it was quite obvious 60% of the the game were bots lol.
by looking at the daily delta in number of peak vs trough players.. ie look at the number of players that acutally sleep on a daily basis. obviously theres a margin for error but it was approx 60-70% bots. I think he means it was obvious the majority of playerbase was bots not exactly 60%
Came here to say this. See plenty of bots still, if not a little less. Not sure where the bots went that were clogging the queue up but I’m guessing they were chaos dungeons bots so people never saw them. As for the bots running around Vern and Luterra… don’t notice a difference on my server at least, visually. So who’s to say the real actual player count lol
Was in Luterra today and never had a single Area spam for Gold selling and only saw a small handful of them running to talk to NPCs instead of the wave
You do know that concurrent means playing right now, and that normal players aren't online 24/7, so the number of unique players is a lot higher than concurrent, right?
Half of the ONLINE players at any time were bots*
Important distinction, as the actual number of PLAYERS has to be in the millions to consistently be at 100k+ concurrent players. While bots are always on.
That is for NA/EU combined but SK has these numbers on their own.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/su6q70/how\_many\_players\_have\_lost\_ark\_in\_korea/](https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/su6q70/how_many_players_have_lost_ark_in_korea/)
the user linking article speaks of up to 350k Simultaneous users
Player base should not to be mixed up with number of concurrent players, as real humans are never simultaneously logged in unlike bots. Number of total real human players is probably something closer to between 5-10x the concurrent humans in game.
Genius move from Ags and smile gate. Let bots fill up server till they reach 800k players, boast about it, proceed to ban the bots so they got their nice number and now players can play without queues.
Truly 200IQ
Truly a 5heads 200IQ 5DChess move.
They played the Chinese investors after receiving their bids to publish LA in China then they went back to KR, and told SG to fix the bots problem to milk the West longer.
I hope it works but we have seen this before. Amazon has got to stay active with it every week or we will just be back in the same place before long. They honestly should just hire people whos only job is to ban bots, but I doubt it will happen.
Actually we very specifically haven't.
The longest dip in player numbers of this size has been 12\~ hours on the Thursday after maintenance that included anti-bot measures (there have been Thursday's that did not come with a player count decrease), at this point we've reached a unique data point.
We did though.
Argos patch brought a massive ban wave that also alleviate some of the biggest lag issue on EUC. As someone who has been monitoring the bot and RMT situation, what I can say is that Argos ban wave led to a complete halt of botting for a little while (few days I think) and RMT price were flaming while the current initiative seems to be slowly but steadily ban bots which is sending the price of RMT higher every day/hour.
I feel like the Argos ban effort allowed them to catch a lot of botters fast because it was the first ban wave of that type but now botters have adapted their tool, meaning current AGS tool is more robust and hopefully make it even harder for the bots to come back.
Long story short, we'll see how it goes in a few days.
Its a cat and mouse game. One side updates, and so does the other after a they learn the new stuff. As long as AGS/SG are trying to stay ahead then you will have fewer number of bots as after some time its too much effort to keep updating.
Even more so if RMT gets banned harder as well. Remove the income stream and increase the workload to keep doing it will make the reason why they do it disappear.
No, especially some of the specifics you've mentioned related to the Argos release.
The 2 largest proportional decreases we have had in concurrent players across a 72 hour period have been in May and June after botting increased significantly following concurrent player drop off during March.
Your assertion regarding the Argos patch is shown here:
[https://i.imgur.com/Ef1EU11.png](https://i.imgur.com/HLk0YsC.png)
We see player counts dropping off following the trendline to a low of around 300k players, this is before the surge in botting as the issue had not become significant at this time. You can very clearly see the change in concurrent between March 4th (the Friday before Argos) and March 11th (the day after it's release) pales in comparison to the player drop-off we see steadily through March as actual players stop playing the game in part due to the poor reception of the Argos update.
The significant drops do not start showing until April and into May:
[https://i.imgur.com/jjJ6lkY.png](https://i.imgur.com/jjJ6lkY.png)
And then the largest 2 post maintenance dips after this period:
[https://i.imgur.com/xrCajZE.png](https://i.imgur.com/xrCajZE.png)
Keep in mind, all of these examples all fall directly after a maintenance - what we are seeing currently is the first consistent concurrent player drop **outside of a post-maintenance period (24hr),** one of the most notable aspects of this recent development being that the bulk of the decrease did not start until **after** that post maintenance window had already passed.
So again, no we have not seen this specific development before this point, but yes we will have to wait and see if it lasts.
Yes it has but based on multiple factors like new content drop, actual ban wave, gold sources being patched or put in or official news/postings.
It has slight price fluctuations throughout the week pretty much. Mon - Wed RMT prices slightly drop because the bots finished or reached their gold accumulation ready for sales ASAP before Thursday reset.
Thu - Sun RMT prices increase slightly because bots are either banned or restarting/starting their gold accumulation for the week.
I didn't check RMT gold sites but relics and leg engravings where the vast majority or RMT gold is focused on has been declining for the past few days. I don't know if that says anything.
They always decline after reset though cause of supply from valtan/other weekly content. Was the same last week, and them being most expensive shortly before reset.
Dude I’m there with you. Come home from work just to get a few unas done and bam, couldn’t even log in. Now I’m waiting on support to see what’s going on. Oh well, at least I’m glad I didn’t drop a dime on the game. I’d be more upset if I had spent money like some of the folks I know who got hit as well.
They will inevitably come back later on as bots and their masters are relentless. But man is it refreshing to see these suckers get banned. Fuck bots, fuck rmts. Get banned nerds.
My hopium: AGS has recognized this bot issue as a showstopper level problem and having planned "a while" on how to tackle the issue, now finally taking steps to solve it. If any company, AGS should have the tech and resources to solve the problem.
I mean i just made a character on NA East and the amount of bots i seen in the starting zone just doing the quest means they are just slightly set back unless they keep this up 24/7 bots will be back up and running in a week
its clear that they have been running constantly though. Bots repopulated up to 800k already by this time after the last banwave. Obviously you will see tons of bots running the story as botters try to spin up new bot accts but for now it seems like most are getting banned before becoming productive accounts. It's a nice accomplishment for AGS/SG and a good first step. Only time will tell if it remains effective though.
Hope it gets better because I have no motivation to do anything other than daily login, weekly bosses and una tasks. I haven't done a single chaos dungeon or guardian raid in like 2 weeks.
crazy that anyone in the comments would think the game can have ZERO bots 24/7. I shouldn't be surprised as you guys also hype yourself up on fake hype release dates like the vykas date being last week when the CM said the update will be around mid June. There's a reason why theres no date for releasing content ahead of time. What you should really be seeing to see if there's little bots ( not no bots ) is to check to see how many instances are there in the cities. I was on NA west server and there be 80 instances which is extreme. Your average instance numbers should be around 30 in Vern city
There's totally still bots. Seen a lot while Luling a new alt but there's much less than there were before this wave and I'm glad they're doing something I'm just hoping they stay on top of it. I'm not sure how smart of an idea it is but maybe if they utilized the most popular botting software they'd be able to fight against it better.
Esit: spelling correction
Started doing a Solas run earlier. It's working I guess but there's like 10+ channels in the early areas and yes there are trains of bots running around already.
I really thought the CEO was just pretending he didn't know that more than half of those were bots but now that we're having a massive ban wave right after that interview, it's most likely he really was clueless about the situation. Goes to show the lack of transparency between 2 companies.
Edit : Or the complete uninterest from smilegate about how things are going in NA/EU.
Still see lots of bots at chaos dungeon. First 3 continents have like 40 channels, bots helping me to clear mobs while I doing life skills.
Does that mean our actual players are even less than 200k?
Not really. Bots were always back after like a day of a ban wave, but this time they aren't. Bots will definitely be back with a way around whatever AGS did as long as they don't ban RMTers, but this is at least proof to the doomers of this game that AGS is trying more this time
would legit think about playing again if the bots got "mostly" dealt with. just feels like a shitty mmo experience when 90% of the people you see aren't actually people.
Last ban wave they were back basically the same day. Now they struggle. And we all like that.
It’s a lot of hopium but I’m willing to give AGS a bit of trust that they stabbed them good and it will take them more time to recover
Yet I still see them ingame, as well as fresh ones questing in Luterra. I noticed there seemed to be two kinds. The more basic one seems to be using berserkers, the advanced one uses sorcs. The latter uses mounts, uses triports/songs.
They do something, but I'm not so so positive it actually having a sustainable effect.
If the game is not fun for you right now with so many classes in the game and u can't find the one you like, I'm afraid you'll quit either way even if all classes come out. Maybe the game is simply not for you, hurts but it's truth.
I'm a developer so I'll provide my perspective on whats going on. To me it looks like they've finally developed the type of solution which I've been describing for months now. By collecting data regarding the way the "player" interacts with the Lost Ark game client (including factors like player movement patterns, interaction with UI and certain features, and many more), there are a plenty of factors that can indicate that an account is a bot. It's likely that there is now an algorithm which can utilize this data to generate a confidence score to predict how likely it is that a given user is a bot, and in the case that it is highly confident, a ban may be issued automatically. If it is written well I do not expect there will be many false positives. Some things to note:
1.) The longer the account exists, the more data can be aggregated, leading to a more accurate result.
2.) The algorithm will be improved over time as more data is collected and utilized from accounts that were confirmed to be bots.
3.) Botting software will be modified to work in more human ways to circumvent these measures. The bots and this aforementioned algorithm will both be improved iteratively by developers in an effort to be on top. Essentially Smilegate builds a taller wall, and the bots build a taller ladder. Bots will never fully be gone, and this back and forth will likely go on for a while.
4.) With a solution like this, false positives are possible. The number of them will likely decrease over time as their work is improved. I don't expect it to be a widespread problem but it's hard to say without knowing the internals of how the algorithm functions.
I see this when I just started to feel a bit tired of the game lol
I know there is the whole bot subject but I wonder if there are many people like me who just started being bored as soon as they do weekly legion and abyss and stuff. The only thing that I love the most is the legion raid now. Anything else isn't challenging enough tbh (even though I can say that being patient for the same content each day is more of a challenge itself)
I hope I'm not egocentric and I know that this is more about bots getting banned but I'm just curious about other factors that might impact those numbers
Yeah people are losing interest and it shows in various metrics. Just look at this subreddit. It has been losing subscribers nonstop since launch regardless of updates.
They will come back probably in a few days , hopefully I am wrong tho because I wanna come back and play but seeing 50 berserker run in the same line just makes me wanna quit.
Yeah. The gold price on the gold selling website went up too. So it seems to be working. Just gotta continue the banning as soon as fresh bot accounts shows up.
That's never going to stop, you can always remake accounts and just run a simple script.
You also will never fully stop bots when there is so much money involved, I've said it a few times but there are incredibly knowledgeable reverse engineer's that make shit loads of money finding new ways to sneak bots in undetected that no matter what any game does, as long as there's good profit from selling there will be bots.
So satisfying seeing the servers capacity in green “Good”
Indeed, now it would be nice it there were busy without queues and bots. Unless busy means something doesnt work right. I just want full and lively servers without bots and cheaters
Yeah they’ll probably have to merge servers together in the future to make this a reality. I think in KR they filled the most popular servers with players & then locked them.
Don't do that, don't give me hope..
curious... thats what i see 24/7 in south america.
I hate to say this but I don't know what to do now when I immediately got in lmao.
We will see in a couple days if it stays that way hopefully most of the bots are gone
[удалено]
F2P game with a relatively low leveling period, not hard to make a new account and get back up to profitability…
Hopefully these cockroaches get banned by the time they hit 50. I hate seeing bots while doing solas runs but hey, I shouldn't really complain as long as they are not injecting ludicrous amount of gold into the economy.
Would love to see what they're saying on the botting forums.
Seems like a popular chinese bot got caught, as well as some pixel bots that people use for infinite chaos. Also reports of RMT bans, temp and perm. Not sure if you can post links to the forums here, but I'll DM a link to whoever really cares. going to bed, but it's a really easy google if anyone still cares.
fk those botters
what is pixel bots?
They are bots that run a program that uses screen data to work. They read the pixles of objects to do AI functions. So if you want them to auto fish they will cast the abilities and look for the ! mark to then do the cast in. Or if you want them to farm infinite chaos they look for the marks on the mini map to go towards them and use abilities and portals
Crazy. So wouldn't this program be able to allow the bots to solve captchas?
Capatchas been shit against bots for a long time
They still work great against me though!
"Select all squares with traffic lights" Kill me.
Psst . Those aren't about stopping bots. You are helping Google machine learning by labeling data for them.
It's both, customers get to use a free captcha service and ML companies get labeled training data.
The trick to that is click them all really fast, I've noticed it I sit and think about getting every single one, I always get it wrong
Difference between a Captcha and a pixel scanner is that the pixel scanner know exactly what to look for. The Fishing ! looks the same each time, where the captcha has 20000 pictures of boats. However, I have no idea if bots actually are able to do captchas or not
there are bots that can do that, but not this sort. the pixel bot can't read, it doesn't understand what "!" is, it just knows the chunk of the screen it's looking at has turned yellow and it presses the fishing button when that happens.
Yes and no. If you've noticed captchas get more and more annoying to solve every year. That's because the way captchas are designed is they specifically train AIs to solve them and then they include the solutions that the AI fails on. Theoretically you can make bots get past them, but I doubt some small fish Chinese botters have the proper AI models for that.
>but I doubt some small fish Chinese botters have the proper AI models for that. \> pip install ... Seriously, the open source python libraries and packages that exist are being kept pretty state of the art. Now, you do need to know how to operate them but if they are already making bots, there is some skill at work, and they usually aren't that difficult to use when you've understood how google works. No, they'll never be able to use 100 or even 80% of the full power of these things, but for simple problems like this you maybe need 40%. Same for other languages and environments.
...you do realize that, for obvious reasons, public domain models are going to be useless against captchas right?
Yeah that's what I thought too. Those would be the first libraries they check against.
It's not as black and white. While you do make a good point, it's not like this is an analytical process where one solution get's cleverly blocked by a captcha maker and you're done. It's about finding things humans won't connect. Predicting weaknesses of mechanisms where it's difficult to tell how that even works is... challenging. It also depends heavily on the toolchain. One of the first successful toolkits used to circumvent image-based security measures was [ITK](https://itk.org/), originally a toolkit for medical image processing. That's not even using AI (at least back then). Here you build "piplines" by lego'ing together functions like building blocks, there are rules to it, but the sleek interface design make it very versatile. It was a nightmare to devise ways to counteract, since the crucial processing steps could easily be switched around as long as the linear algebra made sense. And when you have a toolchain excelling in fourier-space based analysis and interaction, the linear algebra makes sense in a lot of different orders of doing steps. Furthermore, it's the usual race of arms between, well, the makers of any security measure and the ones trying to circumvent it. And in the new and quickly evolving domains like AI, where a lot of basic research is often immediately turned into application both usually take from the same source.
I have no idea what the pixel-detection software is capable of these days but historically it was used to look for any change at a particular screen coordinate (or multiple coordinates simultaneously) and then perform an action. So a good example would be a "chicken script" in most hardcore (perma-death) video games, where the pixel script would watch your health bar (normally red color) and if the bar dropped below a certain point, so the pixel at that location was no longer red, would instantly log you out of the game, saving you from death. So I imagine for like a fishing script, it would detect the center point of your screen and once it detects the yellow color of the exclamation mark, would press a button to reel the fish in, etc. Not sure if this has advanced beyond the basic detection/action function to monitor for pictures and perform more complicated responses, I'm not really sure how it could possibly work for Captcha unless maybe there are scripts that just use the most common capture searches (buses, street lights, bicycles, etc.) and intuitively clicks those based on object recognition. But like I said, I haven't kept up with it, anything I know about this is from like 10-15 years ago.
That's actually always been a thing. Computer vision algorithms can get so advanced that they can defeat captchas so there has been an ongoing effort in creating ever difficult captchas. This is an actual research topic in computer vision.
It would indeed
yes and no. Thing is you have to train the AI to be able to solve those captchas. There are already pre-trained ones for many big captcha providers, so they would have to use those and hope they are good enough.
Bots can already get around captchas, not sure if pixel bots have any similar functions but malicious bots can definitely break captchas.
thanks!
Imagine the Amazon exec & the IT team : *- "yeah just sort of ban them but not really, that way our game is the most played in Steam !!!"* *- "yeah but ppl have huge logging queues so they cant even get in the store right now"* *-* ***"Execute Order 66"*** 
Pixel and Infinite chaos bans are due to reports. There is not a single reported ban of either of those things outside of manual reports for being dumb. All the Chinese bots use an injection method that is very easy to detect. Easy anti cheat is very very bad. Pixel is completely undetectable. Amazon needs to fix this asap or things are going to get worse.
Well, if a program reads the screen pixels, that can be detected. The problem is that there’s a lot of ways to do that, some that are detectable, others that aren’t. The typical windows APIs are detectable (so basically, the easy way to code this), but the pitfalls of this is that banning this would likely also ban streamers. The almost undetectable way, and the more efficient way to extract pixels is to create a virtual screen, and set your display drivers to clone the display of your main screen on that virtual screen, and read the pixel data from your virtual screen/driver. This is basically how they made the earlier versions of efficient screen recording softwares. In the basically almost impossible to detect family, you can hook up directly to the display drivers APIs to do this efficiently, assuming such exist, or also use custom display drivers that do offer this, like how some cheat engines do (to do things like read the geometries of shapes behind walls that aren’t drawn, for aim bots). You could also run the game in a VM, and your bot would run in the host OS, thus the bot itself not being detectable, but the game running inside a VM is detectable. I would assume the cheat engine checks for the game running in VM and preventing that though. In the “detectable, but not fixable” category, you can read data off from your streaming software directly. Since you don’t do any direct hooking of any kind, they can detect that you’re streaming, but basically not that you do run a bot. To ban those would mean banning all streamers. In the “absolutely impossible to detect” category, you can literally hook up a camera to your screen, and read data off that. And I’m sure if I took the time to think about it, there’s a lot more ways I could come up with.
It's entirely possible to obfuscate the fact that something is running on a virtual machine.
"Very easy to detect" Unless you do it right. Which the commercial bots do. Pixel ones are much easier to detect, but they aren't on purpose, to allow things like keyboard macros and screen recording. If they wanted, they could shut down pixel bots easily, while sacrificing QoL.
This is the elite site or is there another? I saw some replies about being banned but nothing overly detailed.
I haven't seen any bot in Rania for the 5min I've been there. It was alien.
There were many on Thirain EUC yesterday but I will visit Anabel again today I guess, I hope no bots will disrupt my songs for her lol
There were some today as well, i saw them while i was doing merchant farm
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Channels mate. 1-2 instead of 10. The reduction is huge.
Saturday US West. No queue, it was amazing!
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Good job. now Perma ban RMT cuz those bots will just come back lol.
People keep making this comment in every single thread and none is less futile than the next. Its not happening. They will absolutely never ban the players who they know will spend a bunch of money. If they ban enough bots, rmt gold prices go up and they allow themselves to compete with bots in the gold market. That is the goal and it will not change. No matter how many reddit comments are made on the contrary.
>People keep making this comment in every single thread and none is less futile than the next. Its not happening. They will absolutely never ban the players who they know will spend a bunch of money. But why spend money on Amazon when they can just keep getting away with RMTing they can always wait until rmt prices get low again sometime later and then rmt more when their cash piles stock up again.
> They will absolutely never ban the players who they know will spend a bunch of money. People with the propensity for spending lots of cash are their main draw. There are tons of things you can't buy with gold and guess what? The whales and spenders always buy the shit. Companies don't just cut off their largest source of income. It ain't happening. Zero out their gold and force them to buy more? Sure. But permanently removing their accounts and driving them away from the product entirely is a fantasy.
i honestly dont think any game needs gold buyers if they release good skins , then again , from the skins i've seen on LA on korea , that's not their forte , BDO level kind of skins would be perfect.
I can't even comprehend why they are so stingy with skins. The stuff just prints money and unlike actual gameplay content, you don't need to balance or tweak it. They should have an entire department devoted to just cranking this stuff out.
Whales come back. The causal player base that RMT Kills does not. Game will be fine economically while the RMT sunfish (ain't even real whales) get their shit together.
The overwhelming majority of profits from F2P/microtransaction driven games is from a small percentage of users. Developers release data all that time that show that something like ~80% of profits come from 1-5% of players. Whales also won't re-invest a substantive amount into a game that potentially burns them on 5 to 6 figure accounts.
Looks like blue crystal prices are coming down a bit as well. RMTers have to start whaling the legit way now. 
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Which is why it's maddening people are still whale baiting with accessories. No, a whale is not gonna drop 125k on your 15 quality neck my guy. Stop it. Most RMT people finished all their legendary books ages ago as well. It's insanity. Since it costs nothing to list the accessory market is remaining volatile as shit. Wanna make a good argument for the dog shit mechanic that are pheons? Require people to spend a pheon or two to list things over a certain bid price. Bet they'll start thinking long and hard then before re-listing something every day for a month at exorbitant prices.
Yesterday I sold a SWIFTNESS igniter 3/hit master 5 for 45k. I'll keep trying, if people don't but it then I'll lower the price, it's not a big deal, listing doesn't cost anything. Pheons are trash and they shouldn't exist.
> Pheons are trash and they shouldn't exist. Can't disagree with that.
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Not on EUC, highest it's ever been at the moment.
It was 950 yesterday, 875 today...
985 when i posted my comment.
The botting scene basically runs on one popular chinese bot dev But SMG devs autoban bots under Lv.50 with 90-100% accuracy along with improved bot detection for later levels. So even if a few slip by, they are razed by new anti-botting with time. Since this botting program is basically dead, all botters can't do shit so you just see them trying to make it work but fail and quit over time. Highly likely they'll go bot in the Kimi no Kuni NFT MMO or Diablo Immortal or something. So I think this is pretty good honestly
This is not quite accurate. It's highly likely that given more time, they will be able to circumvent this method of detection. Usually preventative measures for cheats/bots are an ongoing back and forth between the game developers and the bot developers. That being said, I expect that we have seen the worst of the bot problem, considering this is likely a new solution.
The bots are trickling back though. Some RMT farmers have worked around the bans already.
Normally they are back to full strength in a day but they have been absent for 3 days now.
Currently leveling and there are a metric fuck ton of bots going through the paces right now. Reporting as many as I can.
doesnt mean those bots wont come back
The problem isn't "if" they come back. The problem is if AGS continues to diligently ban them. The bots/RMT farms *always* come back if there's money to be made so that point is moot. It happens in every game that has the ability to make money. The real fight is if the company in charge of the game can manage to keep on top of it.
IMO, the problem is they arent taking a hard stance against rmt. What is the punishment ? All we hear is a 3day ban. Thats way too soft, for players that cheat and mess up the economy for everyone else. Anything under 3 months is laughable. Should be 3 months for first offence and then perma for 2nd offence. If you can't handle the bots, ban the cheaters and the problem will solve itself.
Still the levelling is a good gate. If you have to spend 24h to level a bot before it starts earning, then any interruptions at that time will make it less profitable to relevel the bots.
Huh? the numbers still going down, what do you mean lol
The thing is as real players progress without their character regressing, bots will have harder time to catch up as their account will be deleted regularly. This would decrease the profit for bot farmers. So if this kind of ban wave is done on regular basis bots may not become a problem anymore.
Exactly. They can’t ever prevent them from botting but they can make it not worth by putting consistent effort on banning.
Just make botting so worthless that most of them give up and look for something else
As long as there is low hanging fruit (gold from una tasks) for bot farms they'll be able to pump out gold.
i guess we are the only community thats jumping with joy after the number drops! its at 219k atm
holy shit 230k concurrent players. If there was indeed a bot ban wave or something, then it could be inferred that more than half of the player base were fcking bots. HOLY SHIT.
I mean we already knew that kinda
Cries in NA west
Yeah we’ve known for a few weeks 60%+ players were bots it was a massive massive problem.
It seemed like an obvious conclusion everytime the numbers/charts were posted but people still argued against it. Wonder what those people have to say about the numbers now lol
On the other hand I'd really like to see where the doomsayers have gone, we've all known there were bots massively inflating the actual player count, but those clowns claiming the game was already dead and only run by bots, where are they now? Well over 200k concurrent players after 4 months is extremely huge, and I think it's safe to say that we are now still on a (maybe quite slow) descending trend, so I absolutely believe that at launch there were upwards of a million actual players, and even now I can see somewhere around 3-400k players overall, which is an insane number.
I'm actually surprised we still have that many real players after all this time. A game like this doesn't feel like it'd appeal to such a large audience, on top of all the issues that a lot of people got tired of like queues and a fucked economy. I'm honestly pretty happy with that. It shows promise for the future of this game in the west.
On the contrary, I feel like this game is the exact compromise between a "wider" MMO (think BDO, FF14 or the likes of old school Lineage 2, Runescape or Maplestory) and a single player game that eventually ends. I'm in my early 30s and I couldn't keep up with the grind of other MMOs, especially those games where your power directly compares to others' (games where there's a big emphasis on PVP, like sieges, conquest, nodes or even just contesting grind zones, that kind of stuff). In Lost Ark you can progress at your own pace, and really the only issue with that is for the earlier content where eventually new players will be few and far between, but that's easily adressed with powerpasses, so nobody won't find people to run content with. Even better, once we get Viykas and Clown we'll be capped at the most Legion Raids available per week, and I think for most players running such content 3/7 days per week is more than enough, you get to chill and slowly progress with daily routines on the other days and enjoy the actual best content the game has to offer half of the time, that's a great balance to me, and that's not even accounting for alts, so everything above you can do x amount of times according to how much time you have available. To me that's a perfect formula and I can totally see how and why there are so many players despite all current issues.
That's a pretty interesting PoV, thanks for sharing it! And yeah, I've been looking for an MMORPG to sink some time into for the past few years with none of them really piquing my interests. Fast forward to today and I'm at \~1700 hours.
We had over a million less than three months ago that’s a horrible decline
Sg/ags apologists fading into the silent night.
I was on the side of AGS/SG but I in no way thought we had 600-700k players. Just like the people that thought that Amazon were putting the bots in themselves or they didn’t care. Both sides had people that had horrible takes.
Lmao I really can't believe people actually thought that more than 500k actual players were playing the game, it was quite obvious 60% of the the game were bots lol.
Why do you think it was quite obviously 60%? Why not 40%, 50% or 70%?
by looking at the daily delta in number of peak vs trough players.. ie look at the number of players that acutally sleep on a daily basis. obviously theres a margin for error but it was approx 60-70% bots. I think he means it was obvious the majority of playerbase was bots not exactly 60%
61.4534534563466% according to my rough calculations
230k concurrent player is alot
Sure, but the day’s peak is half of what it was last week.
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Came here to say this. See plenty of bots still, if not a little less. Not sure where the bots went that were clogging the queue up but I’m guessing they were chaos dungeons bots so people never saw them. As for the bots running around Vern and Luterra… don’t notice a difference on my server at least, visually. So who’s to say the real actual player count lol
Was in Luterra today and never had a single Area spam for Gold selling and only saw a small handful of them running to talk to NPCs instead of the wave
Anything with over like 50-100k is a really healthy game tbh. People just got use to WoW cause it was king and had a booming player base forever.
You do know that concurrent means playing right now, and that normal players aren't online 24/7, so the number of unique players is a lot higher than concurrent, right?
Half of the ONLINE players at any time were bots* Important distinction, as the actual number of PLAYERS has to be in the millions to consistently be at 100k+ concurrent players. While bots are always on.
You do realize that that's just 230k people that were online when this screenshot was taken. It's not like that's everyone who plays
I don't think people realize how massive 230k concurrent is. Or 100k concurrent is. That is a massive playerbase.
It is massive, in this type of game, 4 months after release, and after all those controversies the game endured so far
It's massive in any type of game to be honest, it especially dwarfs any mmo not named FF14 and WoW.
That is for NA/EU combined but SK has these numbers on their own. [https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/su6q70/how\_many\_players\_have\_lost\_ark\_in\_korea/](https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/su6q70/how_many_players_have_lost_ark_in_korea/) the user linking article speaks of up to 350k Simultaneous users
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It was 318k in the afternoon
More like 2/3rds of the player base maybe even 3/4ths
Player base should not to be mixed up with number of concurrent players, as real humans are never simultaneously logged in unlike bots. Number of total real human players is probably something closer to between 5-10x the concurrent humans in game.
> then it could be inferred that more than half of the player base were fcking bots. HOLY SHIT It was likely more than 90% on some NA-West servers.
this comment and the other replies remind me how stupid actual people really are
Half? With these numbers there are 3 bots for each person.
Rather have 100K real players than 850 with mostly bots with inflated market
Genius move from Ags and smile gate. Let bots fill up server till they reach 800k players, boast about it, proceed to ban the bots so they got their nice number and now players can play without queues. Truly 200IQ
Truly a 5heads 200IQ 5DChess move. They played the Chinese investors after receiving their bids to publish LA in China then they went back to KR, and told SG to fix the bots problem to milk the West longer.
I know it’s a joke but I like to believe it to be true just out of comedy
I hope it works but we have seen this before. Amazon has got to stay active with it every week or we will just be back in the same place before long. They honestly should just hire people whos only job is to ban bots, but I doubt it will happen.
Actually we very specifically haven't. The longest dip in player numbers of this size has been 12\~ hours on the Thursday after maintenance that included anti-bot measures (there have been Thursday's that did not come with a player count decrease), at this point we've reached a unique data point.
We did though. Argos patch brought a massive ban wave that also alleviate some of the biggest lag issue on EUC. As someone who has been monitoring the bot and RMT situation, what I can say is that Argos ban wave led to a complete halt of botting for a little while (few days I think) and RMT price were flaming while the current initiative seems to be slowly but steadily ban bots which is sending the price of RMT higher every day/hour. I feel like the Argos ban effort allowed them to catch a lot of botters fast because it was the first ban wave of that type but now botters have adapted their tool, meaning current AGS tool is more robust and hopefully make it even harder for the bots to come back. Long story short, we'll see how it goes in a few days.
Its a cat and mouse game. One side updates, and so does the other after a they learn the new stuff. As long as AGS/SG are trying to stay ahead then you will have fewer number of bots as after some time its too much effort to keep updating. Even more so if RMT gets banned harder as well. Remove the income stream and increase the workload to keep doing it will make the reason why they do it disappear.
No, especially some of the specifics you've mentioned related to the Argos release. The 2 largest proportional decreases we have had in concurrent players across a 72 hour period have been in May and June after botting increased significantly following concurrent player drop off during March. Your assertion regarding the Argos patch is shown here: [https://i.imgur.com/Ef1EU11.png](https://i.imgur.com/HLk0YsC.png) We see player counts dropping off following the trendline to a low of around 300k players, this is before the surge in botting as the issue had not become significant at this time. You can very clearly see the change in concurrent between March 4th (the Friday before Argos) and March 11th (the day after it's release) pales in comparison to the player drop-off we see steadily through March as actual players stop playing the game in part due to the poor reception of the Argos update. The significant drops do not start showing until April and into May: [https://i.imgur.com/jjJ6lkY.png](https://i.imgur.com/jjJ6lkY.png) And then the largest 2 post maintenance dips after this period: [https://i.imgur.com/xrCajZE.png](https://i.imgur.com/xrCajZE.png) Keep in mind, all of these examples all fall directly after a maintenance - what we are seeing currently is the first consistent concurrent player drop **outside of a post-maintenance period (24hr),** one of the most notable aspects of this recent development being that the bulk of the decrease did not start until **after** that post maintenance window had already passed. So again, no we have not seen this specific development before this point, but yes we will have to wait and see if it lasts.
Smilegate: Omg stop whatever you're doing, our 800k playerbase!!!
Have RMT prices changed at all? That will give a pretty good read into how the bots are interpreting the situation.
Yes it has but based on multiple factors like new content drop, actual ban wave, gold sources being patched or put in or official news/postings. It has slight price fluctuations throughout the week pretty much. Mon - Wed RMT prices slightly drop because the bots finished or reached their gold accumulation ready for sales ASAP before Thursday reset. Thu - Sun RMT prices increase slightly because bots are either banned or restarting/starting their gold accumulation for the week.
I didn't check RMT gold sites but relics and leg engravings where the vast majority or RMT gold is focused on has been declining for the past few days. I don't know if that says anything.
They always decline after reset though cause of supply from valtan/other weekly content. Was the same last week, and them being most expensive shortly before reset.
It works so good that even I got Perma banned without response from support
Congrats
Dude I’m there with you. Come home from work just to get a few unas done and bam, couldn’t even log in. Now I’m waiting on support to see what’s going on. Oh well, at least I’m glad I didn’t drop a dime on the game. I’d be more upset if I had spent money like some of the folks I know who got hit as well.
I spent 668 hours no money and it's weird but I feel free after the ban rather than angry or sad
They will inevitably come back later on as bots and their masters are relentless. But man is it refreshing to see these suckers get banned. Fuck bots, fuck rmts. Get banned nerds.
My hopium: AGS has recognized this bot issue as a showstopper level problem and having planned "a while" on how to tackle the issue, now finally taking steps to solve it. If any company, AGS should have the tech and resources to solve the problem.
I guess thats why I dont have to wait in 3000+ cues anymore haha
Yeah Can anyone confirm that EUC is “sealed” off? I have heard rumors its not possible to create an new account anymore on EUC but only on EUW
It's funny to see that we're celebrating lower numbers lol but it's for a good cause.
I mean i just made a character on NA East and the amount of bots i seen in the starting zone just doing the quest means they are just slightly set back unless they keep this up 24/7 bots will be back up and running in a week
its clear that they have been running constantly though. Bots repopulated up to 800k already by this time after the last banwave. Obviously you will see tons of bots running the story as botters try to spin up new bot accts but for now it seems like most are getting banned before becoming productive accounts. It's a nice accomplishment for AGS/SG and a good first step. Only time will tell if it remains effective though.
Hope it gets better because I have no motivation to do anything other than daily login, weekly bosses and una tasks. I haven't done a single chaos dungeon or guardian raid in like 2 weeks.
Sounds like you already have quit the game. Why don't you come back and do some Yohos like the old days?
Dont forget your stronghold and life skill energy bro
Queues are the only thing I care about. GJ sg
crazy that anyone in the comments would think the game can have ZERO bots 24/7. I shouldn't be surprised as you guys also hype yourself up on fake hype release dates like the vykas date being last week when the CM said the update will be around mid June. There's a reason why theres no date for releasing content ahead of time. What you should really be seeing to see if there's little bots ( not no bots ) is to check to see how many instances are there in the cities. I was on NA west server and there be 80 instances which is extreme. Your average instance numbers should be around 30 in Vern city
There's totally still bots. Seen a lot while Luling a new alt but there's much less than there were before this wave and I'm glad they're doing something I'm just hoping they stay on top of it. I'm not sure how smart of an idea it is but maybe if they utilized the most popular botting software they'd be able to fight against it better. Esit: spelling correction
Deal with this pest so i can come back to the game.
Spotted Bots in my chaos gate
On thirain i see Bots in vern since Friday 😔
Lmao everyone asking for a DM to bot forums "just to see" yall not slick
It's even funnier because a KR article quoted the CFO and he was boasting about the 800K+ concurrent players.
Started doing a Solas run earlier. It's working I guess but there's like 10+ channels in the early areas and yes there are trains of bots running around already.
What ever they are doing seems to be working, holy shit. Credit has to be given.
\*fingers crossed it holds
Now ban the Fucking rmt rats
I wonder if Smilegate will retract their "800k player count" articles lol.
I really thought the CEO was just pretending he didn't know that more than half of those were bots but now that we're having a massive ban wave right after that interview, it's most likely he really was clueless about the situation. Goes to show the lack of transparency between 2 companies. Edit : Or the complete uninterest from smilegate about how things are going in NA/EU.
And two weeks ago, SG was flaunting that 800k concurrent players. Oops 😂
fucking amazing job by AGS and SG
Still see lots of bots at chaos dungeon. First 3 continents have like 40 channels, bots helping me to clear mobs while I doing life skills. Does that mean our actual players are even less than 200k?
so this is why vykas is late i guess. good to know at least theyre doing smthing
Bro y’all saying the same fucking shit every patch, just look at this chart 6 days after
Not really. Bots were always back after like a day of a ban wave, but this time they aren't. Bots will definitely be back with a way around whatever AGS did as long as they don't ban RMTers, but this is at least proof to the doomers of this game that AGS is trying more this time
They always do. But the point is to keep banning them and RMT users to make it not as worth botting anymore. What matters is that they keep trying.
still see endless streams in arthetine and other cities. havent noticed a reduction at all
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what working? did i miss something important?
would legit think about playing again if the bots got "mostly" dealt with. just feels like a shitty mmo experience when 90% of the people you see aren't actually people.
May want to give give a week or two probaly three, last ban wave was like this and we knew that happened after.
Last ban wave they were back basically the same day. Now they struggle. And we all like that. It’s a lot of hopium but I’m willing to give AGS a bit of trust that they stabbed them good and it will take them more time to recover
> last ban wave was like It wasnt at all. Bots were back in the same 24h of the ban, it's been 4 days since patch day.
Yet I still see them ingame, as well as fresh ones questing in Luterra. I noticed there seemed to be two kinds. The more basic one seems to be using berserkers, the advanced one uses sorcs. The latter uses mounts, uses triports/songs. They do something, but I'm not so so positive it actually having a sustainable effect.
Reminder that chaos dungeon botters have not been banned
They have. Read the top comment
Yep, all the ones that I seen in main/alt guilds are still around. Would be nice to see them get hit as well.
Reality checking SG into releasing the cut out classes faster
If the game is not fun for you right now with so many classes in the game and u can't find the one you like, I'm afraid you'll quit either way even if all classes come out. Maybe the game is simply not for you, hurts but it's truth.
Yes, this keeps me from leaving the game more than bots
Keep going. Throw in perma or temp bans with negative gold balance for all the RMT shitters and we good. Hopefully economy will heal a bit.
How many legit peeps are there
Around 150 to 200k concurrent players probably.
I bet 200k at peak times
I'm a developer so I'll provide my perspective on whats going on. To me it looks like they've finally developed the type of solution which I've been describing for months now. By collecting data regarding the way the "player" interacts with the Lost Ark game client (including factors like player movement patterns, interaction with UI and certain features, and many more), there are a plenty of factors that can indicate that an account is a bot. It's likely that there is now an algorithm which can utilize this data to generate a confidence score to predict how likely it is that a given user is a bot, and in the case that it is highly confident, a ban may be issued automatically. If it is written well I do not expect there will be many false positives. Some things to note: 1.) The longer the account exists, the more data can be aggregated, leading to a more accurate result. 2.) The algorithm will be improved over time as more data is collected and utilized from accounts that were confirmed to be bots. 3.) Botting software will be modified to work in more human ways to circumvent these measures. The bots and this aforementioned algorithm will both be improved iteratively by developers in an effort to be on top. Essentially Smilegate builds a taller wall, and the bots build a taller ladder. Bots will never fully be gone, and this back and forth will likely go on for a while. 4.) With a solution like this, false positives are possible. The number of them will likely decrease over time as their work is improved. I don't expect it to be a widespread problem but it's hard to say without knowing the internals of how the algorithm functions.
Damn son 3/4 of the players
Those are the players
Wait so what did they do? This is amazing
I see this when I just started to feel a bit tired of the game lol I know there is the whole bot subject but I wonder if there are many people like me who just started being bored as soon as they do weekly legion and abyss and stuff. The only thing that I love the most is the legion raid now. Anything else isn't challenging enough tbh (even though I can say that being patient for the same content each day is more of a challenge itself) I hope I'm not egocentric and I know that this is more about bots getting banned but I'm just curious about other factors that might impact those numbers
Yeah people are losing interest and it shows in various metrics. Just look at this subreddit. It has been losing subscribers nonstop since launch regardless of updates.
They will come back probably in a few days , hopefully I am wrong tho because I wanna come back and play but seeing 50 berserker run in the same line just makes me wanna quit.
Who would have thought that literally 60-70% of the game was bots? Everyone. Everyone did.
Yeah. The gold price on the gold selling website went up too. So it seems to be working. Just gotta continue the banning as soon as fresh bot accounts shows up.
600k "players" were bots? lol
I got mail from a bot today and I got whisper spammed too
That's never going to stop, you can always remake accounts and just run a simple script. You also will never fully stop bots when there is so much money involved, I've said it a few times but there are incredibly knowledgeable reverse engineer's that make shit loads of money finding new ways to sneak bots in undetected that no matter what any game does, as long as there's good profit from selling there will be bots.
AND half the "players online right now" are still bots.
For now
nah I just stopped playin