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I wonder how many hardcore New World players haven't logged into that game today because they've been waiting for Lost Ark to come online so they can create a character. It seems like an efficient way for Amazon to hurt both games simultaneously. The player count on Steam jumped from 250k to 500k in the last 10 minutes, so it looks like something has finally changed.
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Feb 12, 2022 00:50
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2DCAT posted:I'm Robert! I'm not a child, I'm a peddler! A proud peddler!
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Feb 13, 2022 00:49
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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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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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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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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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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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I said come in! posted:Yep it does.
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Jun 29, 2022 21:47
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I'm hearing reports that the new event involves waiting afk for several minutes to listen to the sound of waves on a beach? Supposedly there are 3 daily quests that each have separate 3 minute afk timers to wait out? Also, comms are saying there's a new boss fight that's borderline impossible and upon completion doesn't seem to drop enough coin to even cover the repair costs from the fight? Confirm/deny? (I was just trying to see if there was a screenshot of the new Captcha system in action and could only find posts complaining about the new event)
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Jun 30, 2022 20:15
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Today's Lost Ark population numbers show a huge drop off, with almost 100,000 players disappearing over 7 hours this morning. Have there been server problems today, or is this just another ban wave of bots? I assume the latter, as I couldn't find any official announcement about server downtime today, but I figure you all would be able to say for certain. It seems to pretty closely mirror the drop off of the last ban wave they did 2 weeks ago, but it doesn't look like the population numbers have hit a floor yet.
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Jul 14, 2022 22:24
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SweetJahasus posted:This may be a weird question, but it appears you don't play the game but pay I credibly close attention to the concurrent player numbers. It just seems like an odd fascination to me. Why do you care about player metrics? For Lost Ark, I became intrigued with the game after the first bot ban wave revealed that there was something like a 10-1 bot-to-person ratio, which blew my mind because of how excessive that seemed. Since then, I've added the game to the list I follow to see if the game ever figures out a way to 'fix' that problem, and what the actual player count is if they ever manage to get rid of the bots. Today's dramatic drop off went from a high of about 250,000 players to a new low of about 120,000 people, and that number is still falling. I just wanted to check in to see if there was a legitimate reason for this (related to server issues or Steam problems), or if this implies that bots managed to make up more than half the game's population just 2 weeks after the last ban wave. That seems fascinating to me. That's not to say that I assume the game is a failure like some of the other games I mentioned, just that it's in an even weirder place where it seems unknowable how many real, human people are playing the game.
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Jul 15, 2022 01:01
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Zotix posted:It was never 10:1, that's a huge exaggeration. 4:1 at worst, concurrently logged in. If you look at the graph of the player population after the anti-bot measures and heavy ban wave 2 weeks ago, around July 1st, the concurrent population dipped to 90,000 players (presumably most of which were humans) at it's lowest point:  So during non-peak hours, I think it's pretty clear that the ratio was close to 10-1. You can argue that the ratio wasn't as bad during prime-time hours, when players made up a larger % of the population, which we can estimate to be around 150,000 players if we trust the highest peak after the ban wave, but even then you'd be looking at a 5-1 ratio.
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Jul 15, 2022 17:50
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EVERY TIME GOING posted:Great to see the game still bringing new players through regular patches and events. So many of them working diligently through the quests in the sub-50 zones :3 quote:Afpkgtg Discospawn fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Oct 2, 2022 |
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Oct 1, 2022 22:24
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Khorne posted:They deleted these mails and claim to be taking back the pheons in ~20 minutes.  It's funny to think about how a problem like this gets introduced, and then how the decision to 'fix' it is equally clumsy. quote:"Pheons claimed from these emails will be deducted as well." Reading through the Lost Ark forums and subreddit is hilarious. This seems to be a catalyzing incident for the community that has been growing more and more frustrated with the game for months. I think this is finally a problem with the game that has to be AGS' fault, despite the fact that they're technically only the game's publisher and it's never been disclosed how much of the game's management is under their control versus Smilegate's. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Nov 14, 2022 |
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Nov 14, 2022 16:01
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Khorne posted:I suppose I'm more upset that they are so poorly ran that they'd make the same mistake over and over again? It feels like a symptom of a toxic work environment, where every employee is following management tasking to the letter instead of pushing back on bad decisions, but I'd love to get an in-depth autopsy of the company to learn more about what's behind all of this.
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Nov 14, 2022 16:22
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Tagichatn posted:Smilegate are the ones that make the game, AGS is just publishing it. Players have been quick to defend Lost Ark/AGS by saying "AGS only publishes the game," and relying on the fact that we don't know what aspects of the game AGS is involved in, and where SmileGate is involved, to deflect criticism. The argument kind of goes like, "if you don't know exactly which team is responsible for the problem, you shouldn't blame anybody." But issues like accidentally giving players rewards in an email, and then taking the servers down for 2+ hours to remove those rewards (even if it results in a negative balance for players who used them), is entirely within AGS' area of responsibility for the game. There's just no way this is somehow the result of a SmileGate employee making a mistake and then calling long-distance and yelling in Korean about how important it is for players to not get free resources.
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Nov 14, 2022 18:33
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Olds posted:I still have my pheons from this morning so no harm, no foul. 
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Nov 14, 2022 20:21
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It looks like AGS got around to performing another bot ban wave: It's funny to see this, because the New World community has started regularly posting images and gifs that look similar to the Lost Ark bot screencaps (e.g. 1 real player surrounded by 6 Level 11 characters named 'eikdddoosdfja"), but that game has never seen a bot ban wave of any magnitude. This graph probably demonstrates exactly why AGS will never crack down on bots in New World, because of the possibility that the game's already unimpressive player population might actually just be a fraction of what the Steam charts show. Edit: I just realized this ban wave makes the thread's title accurate (again). Discospawn fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 04:00
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Man, AGS couldn't have scripted a funnier combination of screencaps:  The first post is from their official forums 2 days ago, but the player complaints seem to be more recent (or at least the subreddit's stickied post about them is). Meanwhile, the game's player count has already increased 66% from 2 days ago after the ban wave:  So this doesn't seem to have been the silver bullet AGS was hoping for. Edit: It seems like the unwarranted bans happened just today, different from the bot ban wave. You can tell by the Steam reviews that are pouring in now from people who haven't thought about the game in nearly a year and were greeted with a ban message as soon as they started up Steam today: 
Discospawn fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 06:07
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The story continues: The first official response to this issue was posted 5 minutes ago:  The game has received nearly 1,000 new negative reviews on Steam in 1 day because of this, which may eventually turn the game's overall review grade from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed" if it continues:  The game has gained another ~25,000 players since yesterday, showing the same linear growth of bots that the game has always seen after ban waves:  Khorne posted:This was kinda deliberate. They're unbanning people who contact them within ~24 hours. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 21:16
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The new Witcher crossover update went live this morning. Here are some highlights. They implemented a CAPTCHA system for the US-West region with today's update. Here's some examples of the prompts:   It seems like an odd choice to use the word 'inverted' instead of the simpler 'upside-down'. When I think of an 'inverted animal' I always think of the failed teleportation scene from Cronenberg's The Fly. The patch also introduced a weird rendering bug for the gunslinger class:   GIF of what the bug looks like in motion: https://gfycat.com/possiblefaroffafricanmolesnake They also released this message on the Official News part of their forums, which I thought was really funny:  "To avoid further issues we just turned everything off."
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Jan 18, 2023 16:29
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Update: Apparently there's a new UI for upgrading bracelets, but players are reporting that the game hard crashes if you open the UI and then click on a bracelet: Edit: Apparently this is a feature from a future version of the game, and shouldn't have been included in the current Western Hemisphere version of the game. Discospawn fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jan 18, 2023 |
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Jan 18, 2023 19:57
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New update released a "Tea Time" emote that let's you make it look like characters are kissing:
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Feb 15, 2023 21:04
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Count Thrashula posted:Having not played this game since US launch, is it worth coming back and starting fresh?
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Apr 14, 2023 04:13
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