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2 questions from somebody who hasn't played the game but has become interested in keeping track of the problems Lost Ark has been having with bots: 1. Has there been a big return of real-life players to the game since the extreme bot wave that happened last week? The Steam maximum concurrent player count number has been steadily increasing since the ban wave, but I don't know if that's a reflection of players coming back to the game or just bots figuring out how to recover from the new anti-botting measures. I know there's a content update for later this week, but I don't have the perspective to know if it's meaningful enough to bring players back on it's own. 2. Is there any legitimate way/reason for players in the Eastern Hemisphere reason to play the Steam version of Lost Ark? The game only has servers listed for the Americas and Europe, but the player population numbers don't drop as dramatically as I would expect during non-primetime Western hours. For example, the lowest concurrent player count yesterday was 250,000 and the highest was 350,000, but I would've expected the floor to be much lower when none of the geographic areas were in primetime gaming hours. It makes me think that there might still be hundreds of thousands of bots still in the game 24/7 that keep the population floor artificially high. But I might just be ignorant of a legitimate Asia/Oceana population that plays on the Western servers for community reasons or something. I'd also be interested to hear from any active players about their anecdotal observations of bots in the game pre and post ban wave. I was genuinely shocked at how much the most recent anti-bot measures culled the player population, and now I'm interested in trying to determine how deep that rabbit hole goes. It seems plausible that there were literally 10 bots for every 1 person in the game until last week, and even now it might be something like a 3 to 1 ratio. I suppose my ultimate motivation is just the schadenfreude in the idea that AGS published a Free-to-Play game with aggressive monetization policies and somehow managed to let 3rd-party services reap much of the profit from that monetization scheme.
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Jun 27, 2022 15:58
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I don't know if there's a big return of real-life players but I've certainly seen less bots in the last week and no queue times at all compared to 10000+ queues previously. They're definitely still present though and it might just be it'll take them a bit to level up and get to T3 areas again. From my perspective, the only content that will actually get players to return in big numbers will be new class releases. A single fight in Vykas isn't going to bring anyone back because of the grind involved to even access the fight. Players will return with the release of a new class and/or a catch-up power pass or event neither of which are slated for this patch. However, there is one slated for next month so that might bring some interest back. I'm not sure how they do it, but NA-W has a pretty decently sized population of CN/OCE players. I assume a good VPN. A lot of people blame CN for the bots, which has some truth to it, but I do see a significant amount of party finder listings in Chinese for Valtan so there's at least some population that are just normal players and not bots (or maybe both) from the east.
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Jun 27, 2022 18:38
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I don't know if I'm just lucky because of the server I picked, but I've never seen a queue on Regulus at any time of the day.
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Jun 27, 2022 18:56
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Hyper Inferno posted:I don't know if there's a big return of real-life players but I've certainly seen less bots in the last week and no queue times at all compared to 10000+ queues previously. They're definitely still present though and it might just be it'll take them a bit to level up and get to T3 areas again. From my perspective, the only content that will actually get players to return in big numbers will be new class releases. A single fight in Vykas isn't going to bring anyone back because of the grind involved to even access the fight. Players will return with the release of a new class and/or a catch-up power pass or event neither of which are slated for this patch. However, there is one slated for next month so that might bring some interest back. The graph for the player populations looks even weirder if you zoom in to just the 24 hour view:  I don't know if those sudden drops are what happens when a game server resets, or a bot farm goes down (either crashes or gets IP-banned or something), but even if you ignore those, it's weird to see a game with such a stable sine wave with no obvious inflection points or variance like you typically see for an international game that's focused on 1 or 2 regions. Usually when a game is only played/popular in a single region, you wind up with the crazy-skewed graphs like you get with Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (which is kind of a dead game in the US but is hugely popular in the AS region):  Anyways, thanks for the info. It helps give me a baseline as I check in every few days to see if there's any more sudden spikes of exponential player growth. Edit: I tried figuring out this kind of stuff by lurking the Lost Ark forums, but it seems like almost every post is a ban appeal request, so I'm not sure how much I'd trust any information I could glean from there.
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Jun 27, 2022 19:41
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Discospawn posted:2 questions from somebody who hasn't played the game but has become interested in keeping track of the problems Lost Ark has been having with bots: On NA West, there are definitely still bots and early game areas had bot trains even immediately after the ban. Gold selling spams did get a bit better but that's coming back as well. There are definitely a lot of chinese players on NA West as well, lot of party finders advertising in chinese with wechat codes.
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Jun 27, 2022 20:05
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Mari has had queues again starting yesterday, so the bots are back in significant numbers again.
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Jun 27, 2022 20:17
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WarpedLichen posted:There are definitely a lot of chinese players on NA West as well, lot of party finders advertising in chinese with wechat codes. It's not that I think all Asian players are nefarious in Lost Ark, it's just my understanding that almost all the large-scale gold sellers and bot networks are based out of the AS region and it seems inherently suspicious that a Chinese player would choose to play Amazon's version of Lost Ark that's years behind the SmileGate version and doesn't provide any servers closer than the ones in Central Europe. Cinara posted:Mari has had queues again starting yesterday, so the bots are back in significant numbers again.
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Jun 27, 2022 20:29
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Certain regions have more bots for sure, NAWest being one of the worst. But Mari is also one of the most populated servers in the game, and like previously mentioned has lots of legitimate players from other regions. This means it has a high player count at literally all hours of the days, so it's the most impacted by bots.Discospawn posted:Silly question that I wouldn't expect you or anybody to be able to answer, but is there any way to know for sure that these are 'real' players and not some kind of system for bots to find each other or just the Chinese equivalent of gold selling spam? There's no servers for China or Oceania. The only real choice for them is to either play on one of the more "dead" regions like Russia or Japan, but those come with a ton of other caveats. Or they can play on the western launch not in their own region and most of them opted to play on NAWest because at launch it had the best pings for them. Cinara fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jun 27, 2022 |
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Jun 27, 2022 21:04
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Cinara posted:There's no servers for China or Oceania. The only real choice for them is to either play on one of the more "dead" regions like Russia or Japan, but those come with a ton of other caveats. Or they can play on the western launch not in their own region and most of them opted to play on NAWest because at launch it had the best pings for them.
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Jun 27, 2022 22:18
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Discospawn posted:Ah, I didn't realize there were servers for Russia or Japan. The official Lost Ark server status page just lists Western regions, so I assumed the Asia versions would have much better latency for anybody in that entire third of the globe, but if they initially offered support there and then dropped it, that would make sense for them trying to stick with the Steam version of the game. Russia and Japan are basically dead at this point.
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Jun 27, 2022 22:25
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Russia and Japan are entirely different regions and versions of the game, and yea both of them are more or less dead playerbase wise. They had pretty bad support initially so most dedicated players just moved to playing on KR if they could, and the rest just swapped to the western release when that happened.
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Jun 27, 2022 22:42
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 I did it! After 11 hours over the course of a week I managed to beat Valtan Hard mode with random party finder groups. I only beaten Valtan on normal so trying to do it on Hard was a complete new learning experience for me. All the bad habits I picked up on normal had to be relearned. At the end of this experience I could confidently say, I can get to the ghost phase reliably every time and counter Valtan/Ghosts on most attacks. I honestly didn't think it would take this long to learn the fight because even at like the 6 hour mark I was still not that confident in my dodging ability. I was getting knocked off. I was getting clipped by random axe hits. My counters were missing and I was getting slammed into a wall. But whatever its done and I'm glad I did it because despite the super stressful fight where I have to have full concentration at all time just to not die, it was a really fun experience. I can see why they said after playing Legion Raids they started retaining players. I loved every second of Valtan. Coming from someone who did savage raids on FF14. I found that to be so simple and predictable I was getting bored. We actually 7 manned the clear because one person kept dying. Also I managed to record the kill if anyone is interested in seeing what valtan hard is like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpO22SxLcIE Velveteen fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Jun 29, 2022 |
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Jun 29, 2022 05:19
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Wrath of the Covetous Legion Release Notesquote:Added a CAPTCHA system as an ongoing bot prevention measure. Sometimes when entering a new zone, you may be asked to submit a text CAPTCHA response within several minutes.
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Jun 29, 2022 17:32
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this is all your fault for complaining about bots. i was happy to take my super inflated gold returns on selling t3 mats, but noooo. now i have to think with my human brain sometimes while playing the game. jk it's fine we'll see if it does something
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Jun 29, 2022 17:40
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quote:Fixed an issue causing the "Crystal Benefactor" title to be considered new each time Lost Ark was launched. hahaha finally!
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Jun 29, 2022 17:45
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They should implement the CAPTCHA in such a way that it is practice for the Vykas raid.
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Jun 29, 2022 18:13
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Leopard pet! Want red panda pet please.
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Jun 29, 2022 19:05
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Wait, is that CAPTCHA real. It is. Wow, that's hella dumb. I'm hella out, no matter the frequency. Captchas are the dumbest thing. Jack-Off Lantern fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jun 29, 2022 |
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Jun 29, 2022 19:11
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As a casual that's only just hit 1400, glad to see Thronespire as additional content to do other than the four things I can do once a week in between chaos dungeons.
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Jun 29, 2022 19:16
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Jack-Off Lantern posted:Wait, is that CAPTCHA real. I wanna see how it plays out, and if it triggers under certain conditions and how often. On paper, I am not a fan of this as an idea to combat bots. Punishing your entire playerbase isn't the solution.
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Jun 29, 2022 19:21
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Typically the “which of these are bicycles” part of the captcha only happens when you fail through all the other checks for humanity. Hopefully that’s what they implemented.
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Jun 29, 2022 19:36
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No after huge queues this is just the final step. They're too dumb to run this game and the legit players are punished for it.
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Jun 29, 2022 19:49
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Jack-Off Lantern posted:No after huge queues this is just the final step. They're too dumb to run this game and the legit players are punished for it. Good bye
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Jun 29, 2022 19:55
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why don't they just hire a guy to write a computer code that bans all the bots with a method that does not at all inconvenience me
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Jun 29, 2022 19:57
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Zotix posted:Good bye lol for real. good riddance imagine how insufferable group content with someone with so little patience would be
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Jun 29, 2022 19:57
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cams posted:why don't they just hire a guy to write a computer code that bans all the bots with a method that does not at all inconvenience me To paraphrase that park ranger trash can joke, there is considerable overlap among our smartest bots and dumbest players
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Jun 29, 2022 19:58
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It probably actually wont be a problem, and all of our local friendly bots will figure out how to get around it within a day.
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Jun 29, 2022 20:24
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If they are smart it will only show up in certain situations anyways, so legit players should see them extremely rarely. Things like oh you have entered endless chaos for over an hour today lets start showing you some.
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Jun 29, 2022 20:35
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Pragmatica posted:
Does this patch note mean that Lost Ark has had similar problems?
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Jun 29, 2022 21:41
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Discospawn posted:In New World, AGS has had continued problems since launch with it's Achievements & Titles system, with the game not properly tracking progress, or deleting progress, or giving messages on every login or zone transition for every achievement you've ever unlocked like you just acquired them for the first time. Yep it does.
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Jun 29, 2022 21:43
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No it's just this one title, I assume due to the way it's granted as part of the crystalline aura subscription that can expire.
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Jun 29, 2022 21:45
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I said come in! posted:Yep it does.
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Jun 29, 2022 21:47
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AGS has nothing to do with errors like this in Lost Ark. To expand on that, Smilegate has had issues in every region besides KR they launched the game in. The western release just happens to also be the biggest launch by far so the problems are compounded far more. KR is the only region they truly focus on and it shows. They have been making more of an effort for the western version and it does have some QOL / monetization changes that are far better than what KR has, but they still have a long ways to go. Oh also, start saving all the +4s you get to inventory pages. Ideally get one of every +4 you could potentially want on the class saved to a slot if you can. Anything stored in your tripod inventory when we eventually get the tripod change patch will be automatically converted to the new system. There's a good chance we get this patch not too much after KR gets it in July, as most of the QOL/balance stuff has been pushed faster to us. 
Cinara fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jun 29, 2022 |
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Jun 29, 2022 22:12
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The game has been in a pretty alright state and I am lookin forward to the patch when I get to play friday night/this weekend. that's my hot take as someone with way too many hours in this game who is still enjoying it
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Jun 29, 2022 23:15
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I'm still enjoying Lost Ark, but I don't play nearly as much as I use to. Too many other games to play, so its less that Lost Ark has gotten less interesting, and more just busy with other things.
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Jun 30, 2022 00:26
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I am still very much enjoying the game and am excited for Vykas this week. We're gonna be going in on normal on alts first since one of our supports is out Thursday, then doing the main hard mode run on Friday. Gonna be a lot of wiping at first I am sure, just like Valtan was, though normal doesn't seem too bad as the mechanics allow for one or two people to gently caress up and not wipe. Hard will be rough though, especially with how hard Vykas hits, I expect the dps in my group to be ground pov a lot at the start. Also super happy we ended up getting the stronghold buff, I stockpiled a ton of mats this week to push a couple more alts to 1415 and a couple to 1445.
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Jun 30, 2022 00:42
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Progress is just abysmally slow from 1370 to 1415 without spending money. Like even if I'm not hitting pity I'm getting 2/3 of the way there most of the time. Really cuts down on my play time and doesn't make me want to build more than the one alt I have.
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Jun 30, 2022 04:33
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1415 on alts is a lot different than on your main, since there's no hurry you just chill at 1370 until you have the bound great honors.
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Jun 30, 2022 06:18
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S.J. posted:Progress is just abysmally slow from 1370 to 1415 without spending money. Like even if I'm not hitting pity I'm getting 2/3 of the way there most of the time. Really cuts down on my play time and doesn't make me want to build more than the one alt I have. Yeah, I feel like 1370-1415 is just as bad as the 1340-1370 "desert' and I almost stopped playing at that point. Post 1415 actually kinda revitalized my interest in the game - you gain access to relic accessories and have to tinker with your build again, despite my initial misgiving, Valtan is actually fun (as long as you are in the party that doesn't self-destruct with passive aggressive bitching after first wipe) and while more expensive and with even smaller chance to success, 4 ilevels per successful honing, makes it feel a bit better, that the pre-1415 grind.
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Jun 30, 2022 06:46
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You can even chill at 1355 if you send your dispatches out on Yoho.
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