Lost Ark Chats Are Being Flooded With Bots Selling Gold For Real Money

thegamer.com:

Lost Ark is already a huge success for Amazon, but it isn't without problems. Players report that chats are being flooded with bots selling in-game gold for real money.

There isn't much you can do about it other than blocking the bots as they pop up to peddle their websites, but it's a big game of whack-a-mole. You strike one down, another ten take its place, and it's in part to how Lost Ark differs in the West.

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In South Korea, you can't sign up without ID, verifying that players are real. But in the West, there's no such requirement and so anyone can make an account, bots or scammers or grifters. That means it's easier to get in and flood the chat with your services.

Unlike New World, another Amazon-published MMO, there aren't any economic problems and gold is fairly easy to get - buying it outright is more of a time-saver than anything, and there's no guarantee that any of these spammers are legit. What's more, you can already buy gold with real money thanks to the exchange system in-game, but it's expensive.

The concern here is that bots will grow from spamming chat with links and offers to in-game nuisances, not unlike New World's bot problems. But right now, the chat's spam is an annoying headache that players are struggling to keep up with. One commenter replied, "The [blocking] process takes too many steps, and the required message is silly too. I'd like to see a one-click option to report and block gold spammers."

What's more, there's a block list limit. With so many flooding the chat, this means you'll eventually lose the ability to get rid of them. The workaround right now is to clear your block list and hope that Amazon has banned the spammers, but