MMORPG Lost Ark imposes harsh penalties on buyers of gold – a ban would be even better for some
The MMORPG Lost Ark has a problem with bots. This shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s been into the game for more than an hour. But not only the bots are a problem, but also the players who enrich themselves with them. There are now harsh penalties for them, as Amazon confirms.
what is the situation Looking at Lost Ark’s Steam player count, the game seems to be doing well at the moment. But appearances are deceptive, because many of the 800,000 simultaneous players are bots that are increasingly affecting the economy in the game.
Publisher Amazon has been fighting the automated characters for a long time and now wants to attack the problem from both sides. This is how Community Manager Roxx commented on the topic in the forum and said that not only the bots should be punished, but also those who buy the gold from these dubious providers.
Currently, tens of millions of golds are in the hands of bots on virtually every server and are up for sale for real money. This massively disrupts the economy in the game and many fans fall back on these offers. This is now punished so severely that a ban would even be better for some players.
You can find out why Lost Ark is so successful in the first place in our video:
Big debts for bad behavior
How are buyers penalized? In order to keep the economy alive in Lost Ark, not only bots but also buyers have to be punished properly. To what extent this happens, Roxx also explained in the forum.
Buyers or users of RMT (Real Money Trading – purchases of in-game items or gold with real money) can therefore expect two types of punishment:
- permanent ban
- Temporary ban
So far, so well known, but there is a special trick, especially with the temporary ban. In many MMORPGs, a long attempt is made to understand what happened to the purchased gold and then, as far as can be seen, reset everything piece by piece.
However, this also affects users who had nothing to do with RMT and only sold things that were then bought with RMT gold. Lost Ark takes a different approach and only penalizes the buyers. Because after a temporary ban, the developers remove the gold from your account. Even if you end up in the red.
You can see Roxx’s statement here:
Why is this worse than a ban? If you create a new account, you’ll be back to where you were before comparatively quickly and can then start accumulating gold. However, if your gold balance goes negative, you simply can no longer pay or buy anything with gold.
This means that not only can you no longer buy items, but you are also prevented from improving your equipment. You are thus trapped on your current Gearscore until you have worked off your debts again. Depending on how much gold was bought, this could be weeks or months.
Community thinks the penalties are too weak
What are the fans saying? At least in the forum and on reddit Lost Ark players largely agree that the penalties are still too weak. Many are calling for a physical ban on RMT users. Such a process blocks the user’s MAC and IP address. It also prevents creating a new account with the same device and the same router.
Others believe that the economy is already so broken that users of RMT shouldn’t be penalized at all. The prices of many items have already risen so much due to the massive inflation caused by bots that casual players have to resort to RMT to keep up.
What do you think of the penalties? Do you think a ban is worse than a pile of debt? Or do you even agree that RMT buyers shouldn’t be penalized at all? Which way do you personally think is appropriate? Write it to us in the comments here at MeinMMO.
We have summarized how you get gold in Lost Ark in the first place in a guide for beginners.
Reference-mein-mmo.de