Lost Ark had previously banned over 1 million accounts that were suspected of being cheaters or bots earlier in March. Some Lost Ark players use bots to gain an advantage over their opponents because the bots can earn loot and experience points while the players are away from their keyboards. When it comes to a free-to-play game as popular as Lost Ark, bots and cheaters were an unavoidable part of the equation due to the fact that there are few consequences for being banned from a free Lost Ark Gold store . Users can usually simply create a new account and begin cheating again without having to pay any additional money to regain access to the game or any other resources. Smilegate and Amazon, on the other hand, have devised a way to circumvent this.
Users who have spent less than five dollars on Steam will have their Lost Ark Gold store accounts restricted following the release of the most recent weekly update for Lost Ark. This means that they will no longer be able to engage in player-to-player trades, send in-game gifts, exchange Royal Crystals for gold, or even send in-game mail with attachments as a result of this change. Smilegate acknowledges that, while this will most likely not completely eliminate the game's bot problem, it should make a significant difference in the long run. It is likely that reducing the number of bots in the game will also resolve another issue that the game has been experiencing. Smilegate announced last month that it would not be increasing the capacity of Lost Ark's European central server. This was a serious problem because the game still does not allow players to transfer their progress to other servers, which means that if their regular server is full, they would have to start over from the beginning on another server.
Because Lost Ark had more than 500,000 players on Steam when its North American and European servers first launched, and the number of players has remained relatively consistent ever since the game appears to be still popular.
Despite the positive reception and critical acclaim received by the game, some players have taken exception to the fact that many users believe Lost Ark contains pay-to-win mechanics. A response from Amazon acknowledged the issues and stated that it will be implementing changes in order to ensure that players are not forced to spend real money to advance further in the . In addition, the company has postponed some end-game content to give players more time to reach those levels through natural means. The PC version of Lost Ark is now available.
