Smilegate Bans Over 1 Million Lost Ark Accounts For Using Bots – Gaming – .Geeks

In this game genre, it often takes a lot of time in the long run to raise a character to a higher level.

That is a ‘nice side effect’ of bots, the majority just go for the materials, loot and gold.

The conversion rate through those crystals is thought to be 1:3, a little seller is now doing 1k:1 (will go up a bit now), buying gold is already 3x cheaper than via the royal crystals. There have been several ‘tests’ in buying and apparently the first penalty you get is a 24h ban (unlike bots that get perma immediately) and as far as I saw them in the discord, nobody has lost their gold.

The nicest aspect is always bot vs player, with WoW as an example you suddenly got a breakpoint that your net revenue per hour of grinding was higher than the current purchase price (farmers never sell directly, always through a buyer), plus that many ‘good’ bot are just paid subscriptions, that suddenly a lot more people just started farming for 8 hours a day just to earn 20-30 dollars a day. No one here ever goes to work for $30 a day, but there are dozens of countries where that is a very ‘decent’ salary.

I don’t do much with botting yet, but despite it being bad/wrong/blabla, I have enormous respect for the bot makers, this is level of programming that is downright brilliant. From pixel detection to near-level AI frameworks, the GW2 versions I’ve seen are near-level average AI bot opponents of PVE (vs computer) NPCs.

The bots that are all caught as far as I know are the linear versions on fixed routes, the classic bot so to speak, will have quite an impact but demand for gold remains high enough that they just try it 10x, F2P has its advantages in terms of game, but also the disadvantage that everyone can just try again

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