Lost Ark is losing over 60% of its player count on Steam and everyone is celebrating

In the MMORPG Lost Ark, a bitter fight against the bots has been going on since the release. This now seems won for the time being, but the players are skeptical whether it will remain so in the long term. Despite the generally good mood, a new problem has emerged. We at MeinMMO summarize.

What did Lost Ark do with bots? Over the past few months, bots have always been an explosive topic in the MMORPG. Some servers have long been overrun with these automated characters, and players have accused publisher Amazon of just watching.

In June, however, Amazon launched a major crackdown on the bots, banning over 600,000 accounts in just one week. This wasn’t enough for some fans, however, as they feared that this measure would only solve the problem temporarily and that the bots would soon be back in the game.

With the big update on June 30th, the publisher has upped the ante again and implemented some mechanics into the game that are supposed to keep bots away. Now and then you have to solve a CAPTCHA if you want to enter a new area.

But gameplay changes also annoyed bots, such as the fact that valuable items now have to be kept for three days before they can be traded in any way. This restricts the bots from trading with real money and appears to be bearing fruit. The fans are really celebrating Amazon for these measures in the forums and the mood is rising to a high of the last few weeks.

Also, Demoness Vykas came into play with the June update – see her in our trailer:

The number of players drops massively: As a result of the harsh sanctions against bots and real money traders, the number of daily active accounts in Lost Ark is plummeting. While more than 870,000 accounts were logged in at the same time at the beginning of June, the MMORPG now only has 250,000 simultaneous players (via steamcharts.com).

And although the active fans of Lost Ark see no problem in this and are generally very happy that there are now more players than bots in the MMORPG, a new discussion suddenly opens up.

“We just have too many servers”

What are the fans complaining about? While the discussion itself isn’t new, it was rekindled with the departure of all the bots. For the western release of the game, Lost Ark was heavily overcrowded, which meant that Amazon quickly installed and launched many new servers for the MMORPG.

The entire Europe West region, for example, only came into the game weeks after launch and is largely deserted today. The problem isn’t just with servers that were added later, actual populated regions also feel partially extinct.

A fan on reddit now made a comparison with the Korean version and thus provided material for discussion. He notes that there are around 260,000 simultaneous users online in Korea. These are spread over 8 different servers and one region.

The West is currently writing similar numbers, i.e. 252,000 simultaneous users, but currently distributes them across 58 servers in 5 regions.

Regions are server clusters. While you can play together within the same region via detours, this is not possible at all between regions.

The opposite opinion: Some users in the comments find the turmoil exaggerated and at least the high number of regions simply necessary. User ffiction8 also points out that players in the West are spread across more than 10 different time zones and therefore, while the 24-player peak is almost identical, we have significantly more actual players than Korea.

Some comments consider the entire discussion pointless. The user Ikrai1212 writes that more servers were simply necessary for the launch. At the same time, it is now the case that there are too many servers. Both opinions do not have to be mutually exclusive.

There is also a discussion about what could happen to the Europe West region. Because while it is technically possible to close servers on the same cluster and migrate them to others, this is not easily feasible with an entire region.

Smilegate and Amazon already confirmed in March that a transfer between regions is not technically possible. However, if the player numbers on the Europa West server continue to decrease, players fear that it could soon go under completely.

“Amazon is in a no-winner situation”

How is the mood among the fans? Despite the discussion about the servers, the general mood surrounding the MMORPG has improved. The steps taken against the bots displease some, but the result is very well received.

You notice that as soon as other topics are discussed in the forums. You quickly get the feeling that people are currently more positive about Amazon than they were a few weeks ago. There are also many players in the server discussion who point out that Amazon could hardly do anything right.

They had to bring more servers to launch to reduce the huge queues. Even though they knew that they couldn’t easily switch them off again. Here you can see a refreshing amount of understanding for the publisher in the comments section.

What are the fans saying? We would like to share some of the comments with you so that you can form your own opinion (via reddit):

• RenegadeReddit writes: “Amazon is in a no-win situation. They had to set up more servers to handle the launch. Now they have no technology to fuse these.”
• Jiend wonders, “Why don’t they use the Guild Wars 2 server structure? They apply their patches live, without downtime. Not being able to play once a week is just crazy in 2022. No matter how full those servers end up being.”
• Retrac says: “It would be great if each region was reduced to 5 servers. You can’t exactly compare us with Korea anyway. We have at least 4 peak times a day across EU, NA and OCE. So we should easily have 2 to 3 times more players than Korea.”
• jimmyslol writes: “No matter how many servers. You lost 70% Steam population in one day. It’s crazy how many bots were in the game.”
• Bogzy writes, “It’s been a long battle against the bots, but it’s finally showing results. Good work.”

What do you think of the current situation in Lost Ark? Do you still play the MMORPG regularly? Still having problems with bots? How busy is your server currently? Write it to us in the comments here on MeinMMO.

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