‘Lost Ark’ is restricting new Steam accounts with bot prevention system

In today’s (March 24) update for Lost Ark, the developer is introducing a new “fraud and bot prevention system” which limits your access to a small number of systems if your Steam account isn’t in “good standing”.

Good standing essentially means that you have met a “small purchase requirement” needed to use Steam’s social systems, and if you’re one of those people, you won’t be affected by this new system at all.

If you’re not at that “trusted” status it basically means you haven’t spent more than £4-5 on the Steam store. Due to this you will have smaller Lost Ark daily purchase limits than others, but will also be prevented from the following activities:

• Initiating player-to-player trades (requests can still be received)
• Sending in-game gifts
• Exchanging Royal Crystals for Gold
• Sending in-game mail with attachments

This is all to try and stop bots from ruining the experience for other Lost Ark players. Amazon Game Studios says that its “goal is for players to always enjoy their time in Lost Ark, safe from users engaging in fraudulent purchases or the negative impact bots have on both the economy and player experience”.

The studio used this update to remind people that buying or selling gold or other in-game items is against its code of conduct and will result in “disciplinary action”.

“Additional improvements to our anti-cheat programs have also been enabled in this update to help prevent cheaters and bots, alongside a few more changes we’ve developed with Smilegate RPG behind the scenes”, it said, though the developer conceded it won’t solve everything, but will continue to crack down on fraudulent purchases and bots.

Due to this update, the game will be unavailable for eight hours from 7am GMT (12am PDT, 3am EDT), and when it returns this new update will be live.

This update also adds new content in the form of the casual guardian raid event, competitive proving grounds season one, and a massive amount of free gifts for players. The list of freebies includes animal skins, an appearance change ticket, pheons, two legendary card pack selections, and much more.

Elsewhere in the gaming world, The Sims 4 developer Maxis is teasing a big ‘[redacted]’ update, but keeping coy on what it’ll include, though we do know it’s going to include a gameplay feature and more clothing.