Lost Ark Peak Players Down More Than 80 Percent from All Time High - Is the Drop Due to Bot Bans?

System · July 2022

Scot · July 2022

Well first with every game being a three month wonder you have to ask where would the population be without the bots? Secondly what choice did they have, from what people have said players were leaving because of the bots. Not my cup of MMORPG stew but I see this one stabilising with decent numbers.

theGnade · July 2022

I think the main reason is the whole business model. I mean look at devs idea...."We are limiting your spending to 400$ a day. That is how ethical we are". P2W is strong in this one. The content was easy too and then they watered it even more down, because some players cried how hard it was. And in the end it's a basically a mobile game.

Quinnthalas · July 2022

No, its the same drop off every new big thing gets after the initial wave gets bored of it.

If I could attach a meme it would be the "first time?" one to this story.

maskedweasel · July 2022

A 600k drop in one month is huge. No way that could be all bots.. but bots are probably a big chunk of those numbers.

eoloe · July 2022

Through the F2P model the industry is pushing monetization more and more aggressively.

What they may not realize is that players also adapt, enjoy and take advantage of the product until the first paywall and then jump on the next new F2P shiny.

TheDalaiBomba · July 2022

eoloe said:

Through the F2P model the industry is pushing monetization more and more aggressively.

What they may not realize is that players also adapt, enjoy and take advantage of the product until the first paywall and then jump on the next new F2P shiny.

This would actually be a very interesting crash trigger. A race to the bottom, where the industry falsely sees declining F2P revenue as not pushing microtransactions hard enough, while gamers have collectively migrated to playing until the first paywall is felt then immediately abandoning the title. That would be a sort of ironic loop.

It honestly wouldn't be that far-fetched.

Machkeznho · July 2022

ON top of the pay to win aspects which I and many I know despise, we also found the combat and the story to be boring and uninspired never even got much past the hour marker and checked out the "store" before we were like gross. I get it games are expensive, but our global economy is in shambles and a play model like this is for whales and whales don't sustain video games.

eoloe · July 2022

Datastar said:

whales don't sustain video games.

I would argue the opposite.

whtninja2004 · July 2022

It's that new flavor of the week mentality. I am personally still chugging along at New World where a lot of these players jumped ship from. It's a marathon not a race kids...These games are way more fun when you take your time some and enjoy the ride. It's like speeding to the next red light only to wait.

Veexer_Nui · July 2022

Obviously it's the bots. The drop coincides with the exact date that Lost Ark announced action against bots and the banning of all Korean ips.
You can even notice it in-game, every area is basically dead.
Also you can tell which of these comments are paid shills, tell us you don't play the game without telling us.

[Deleted User] · July 2022

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Quizzical · July 2022

For a game to lose 3/4 of its players in a month isn't that unusual if it's the month immediately following launch, or even an expansion that brings a lot of old players back. For a game to have maintained 2/3 of its playerbase four months after launch, but then lose 3/4 of that remaining playerbase between four and five months after launch, is extremely weird. The game had probably lost 80% of its launch players long ago, and bots were propping up the player numbers. Getting rid of the bots makes it look like a precipitous drop.

How many bots does the game have now? Is the playerbase still mostly bots, or are the bots mostly gone?

Quizzical · July 2022

templarga said:

I quit the moment I realized I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the currencies, how they were obtained, how they worked together and how they were spent. It felt like keeping track of my bills in real life.

I need a spreadsheet to keep track of what I'm doing in nearly every game I play. Including old NES and SNES console games.

Dattelis · July 2022

I agree with others that its just how it is with this and other mmorpgs, with this update honestly not being all that interesting to me as say when arcanist drops later. But ultimately, the progression is kind of 'the same' with little variation. You fight as high as you can for mats to upgrade and fight again for as high as you can for mats to upgrade, over and over and over. Honing fails dont feel great either when you either have to wait until your dailies reset or pay real money (I guess grind for gold is an option....maybe) to advance. Of course there's other horizontal things, but not everyone engages in them.

Hefaistos · July 2022

whtninja2004 said:

It's that new flavor of the week mentality. I am personally still chugging along at New World where a lot of these players jumped ship from. It's a marathon not a race kids...These games are way more fun when you take your time some and enjoy the ride. It's like speeding to the next red light only to wait.

The only thing fun is the weekly content. Thats it. EUNA version its a scam. People are doing Valtan and Vykas with Brelshaza stats that means they wont change the gear for 1 year

P2W SCAM!

Sovrath · July 2022

Quizzical said:

templarga said:

I quit the moment I realized I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the currencies, how they were obtained, how they worked together and how they were spent. It felt like keeping track of my bills in real life.

I need a spreadsheet to keep track of what I'm doing in nearly every game I play. Including old NES and SNES console games.

Seeing your posts over the years I'd bet dollars to donuts that's more of a "you" thing than a game thing.

For me, if I had to use a spreadsheet I'd quit. Having said that, that's different than taking notes. If a game required me to take notes on various things such as lore that has actual meaning in game play or puzzles or notable objects/happenings that might be important.

But a spreadsheet? not my thing.

Iselin · July 2022

Neither players suddenly getting bored nor the release of Diablo Immortal explain this drop. But holy shit, were there really that many bots?

Raagnarz · July 2022

I quit because of the bots and I know I wasn't alone. 3 months in and literally still 10k server ques because of bots. I also didn't like where they were going with MTX and I'm someone who gave them a good clip of money. The game is extremely well made I won't bash them on that. But I got tired of wanting to sit down and play and slapped in the face with a 9k que. I want to play a game I give money to when I want to play it. I don't want to have to plan ahead by 4-6 hours of when I might want to play and que it up then just so I have a chance to play it. So I simply uninstalled and started playing games that allowed me to play when I wanted to. I understand que's in the first week or month after launch. 3+ months zero excuse for them and zero interest from me about any excuse. Elden Ring and Guardians of the Galaxy made me forget about Lost Ark quite nicely.

Celcius · July 2022

Yep absolutely due to bot bans. The game is still doing EXTREMELY well. If I had to guess, it is still one of the top 3 MMOs number wise. 200-300k concurrent is still absolutely insane and it is still constantly in top 3 on Steam. I got burned out on the game personally due to having the endless amount of 'player engagement' type content. (Forced into alts, events on timers, A TON of dailies,ect) The p2w elements of the game didn't really bother me too much.

Asm0deus · July 2022

After an update when there ban waves pop always drops drastically as there a massive amount of bots in this game and you see the real pop when it dips down like this.

That said I think the game is still doing good....however of the real players lots have stopped playing or just log in do dailies and log out.

The way end game is set up is odd and many will stop due to only being able to do content once a week. Also once you hit endgame if you dislike group dungeons and auto fail mechanics you are likely to move on to another game as that is all it's about and that's the content you need to run to make gold and progress etc.

Kyleran · July 2022

Iselin said:

Neither players suddenly getting bored nor the release of Diablo Immortal explain this drop. But holy shit, were there really that many bots?

I'd say yes, at least from my observations I'm the past month.

jeatac · July 2022

Fun Game! Terrible Pay model!!

Mendel · July 2022

Quizzical said:

For a game to lose 3/4 of its players in a month isn't that unusual if it's the month immediately following launch, or even an expansion that brings a lot of old players back. For a game to have maintained 2/3 of its playerbase four months after launch, but then lose 3/4 of that remaining playerbase between four and five months after launch, is extremely weird. The game had probably lost 80% of its launch players long ago, and bots were propping up the player numbers. Getting rid of the bots makes it look like a precipitous drop.

How many bots does the game have now? Is the playerbase still mostly bots, or are the bots mostly gone?

This also leads to the question of how companies are counting players. In my world, if I can't /tell them or /invite them, that's not a player.

hyllyh · July 2022

i stopped playing cause of bots.

for the fun, after this article, i created an alt and putted it in start zone.

on side, i put a little window which count each click i do as number...

i reached 100 bots in less than 3 mn and deleted account^^

now, this can be done for a YT video but i dont care.

edit: i counted bot all named : jdqttzapd, ttrkezy, mvvpfpz etc

kitarad · July 2022

Holy shit!!! 80% bots OMG!!!

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Lost Ark Peak Players Down More Than 80 Percent from All Time High - Is the Drop Due to Bot Bans?

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

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Lost Ark Peak Players Down More Than 80 Percent from All Time High - Is the Drop Due to Bot Bans?

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV