Earlier in March, Lost Ark banned over 1 million accounts Lost Ark Gold that were suspected to be cheaters or bots. Some Lost Ark players employ bots to gain advantages over other players, as the bots can earn loot and XP while users are away from their keyboards. Bots and cheaters were an inevitability in a free-to-play game as popular as Lost Ark due to the fact that there are very few penalties when a player is banned from a free game. Users can usually just create a new account and begin cheating again without having to shell out more money to gain access to the game. However, Smilegate and Amazon have found a way to counteract this.
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After Lost Ark's last weekly update, users that have spent less than five dollars on Steam will have their game accounts restricted. This means that they will no longer be able to initiate player-to-player trades, send in-game gifts, exchange Royal Crystals for gold, or even send in-game mail with attachments. Smilegate acknowledges that while this will likely not stop the game's bot problem entirely, it should make a sizable difference.
Reducing the number of bots in the game will likely also solve another issue that it was experiencing. Smilegate noted last month that it would not increase Lost Ark's European central server capacity This was a rather serious issue, as the game still does not have a way for players to transfer their progress to other servers, which means that they would have to start fresh on Lost Ark Gold for sale another server if their regular server is full.