That's not to say that people at Amazon Game Studios have been absconding with this. Based on previous reports from the publisher, updates to Lost Ark Gold anti-cheat software have consistently reduced the numbers of bots in waves. But like the nature of any anti-cheat or cheater fight, the player base is always rebounding following these ban waves as users have discovered a way to circumvent the cheating software and have re-installed the sketchy software they had on their computer.

This ongoing botting issue has led some to speculate on the "real player count" of Lost Ark, and while it's not possible to tell precise numbers, shifts in overall player number, such as the elimination of an easily exploitable gold farming technique reportedly eliminated a staggering 200 000 players from the top of the list in March. These incidents have sometimes come out as strong indications of how many bots were present behind the scenes. To be clear, we'll likely never find any exact numbers, because websites like the aforementioned Steamcharts and SteamDB although useful, aren't official tracking websites and , therefore, might be off slightly.

We're now on June 16 And it appears bots as well as real money traders have been hit hard. A few days earlier the announcement, it was made via Twitter along with an official post at the Lost Ark forums that a "massive" ban will be in the pipeline along with the scheduled update. They were not kidding! The patch is believed to have had extra power under the hood which has led to a greater decline in the number of players following the patch. The number of concurrent players reached 550.000 after the patch, but began plummeting to around 200.000 over the weekend.

This led to two completely different reactions from the two factions. On popular cheating forums and botting hubs, threads that feature players performing fake damage checks are easily found postings that report which accounts received bans, the duration of the bans Lost Ark Gold Buy, as well as what activities or services they performed in game may have resulted in them being caught by Amazon's surveillance.