The wave of Lost Ark bans on Steam aimed at restricting bot accounts seems to have hit a lot of Steam users with fake bans. If you’ve just found out that you’ve been banned from Lost Ark after not playing it for a while, you’re not alone: many Valve Store users are reporting that the free Amazon game is banned from Steam even though they’ve barely played it. Or not. charging for several months. This follows a wave of bot bans that reduced the number of Lost Ark players to a third of the previous number.
In most cases, it turns out that the majority of affected accounts are those that have not played the game recently or have relatively little playing time. Players may not have noticed if this didn’t happen. It was because of a Steam notification they had received. a ban. While that might not seem like a big deal if the player in question wasn’t planning on returning to Lost Ark, permanent bans do leave a mark on your Steam account.
Since then, the number of positive reviews for Lost Ark on Steam has dropped to 52% in the last 30 days, with a big spike in negative reviews on January 14, when it appears players were banned. Meanwhile, The Lost Ark Reddit was forced to resort to a pinned post from the moderators due to the high volume of posts from inactive players asking why they were suddenly banned, seemingly out of the blue.
As a fairly casual Lost Ark player who hasn’t logged in for months but still keeps it installed in case I get stung, my curiosity was understandably piqued. I launch the game and, voila, a message awaits me: “Your account has been permanently blocked. If you think you received this penalty in error, you can appeal. Reason: cheating. Obviously take my word for how much you think it’s worth, but I’ve certainly never used any sort of bot or cheat while playing the game.
Some players say that their appeals to Amazon Games have already paid off, reporting that they were not banned after contacting them. I submitted my own ticket; aside from the steam black tags, I’d like to be able to play Lost Ark again at some point when I have the time. A thread on the Lost Ark forums points out that this isn’t the first time a huge wave of bans has mistakenly affected innocent players.
A comment on a Reddit thread suggests a possible reason, pointing to the fact that a recent December update requires new accounts to verify their trust status before they can use most multiplayer economy tools. Therefore, the user suggests that inactive players may have been banned to try and prevent farmers from gaining a potential pool of old accounts that they could take advantage of.
Amazon Games and developer Smilegate have yet to comment on the matter. We’ve also reached out to Valve for comment on this, given the nature of player’s Steam accounts marked with the ban record, and will update this story with any response.
The Lost Ark Witcher collaboration is about to kick off, which might explain why the old gamers are back for one of the best new PC MMOs we’ve seen in the past year. If you plan to play (and currently can), our Lost Ark tier list will help you pick the best class to play.
Source : PC Gamesn
