Lost Ark restricts new Steam accounts to fight bots

pcgamesn.com:

Lost Ark‘s next weekly update, arriving tomorrow, is making use of Steam’s trusted account features in order to fight bots. Steam accounts that have lost – or have not yet earned – the platform’s ‘trusted’ status are losing access to a number of features as part of an effort to block the bots that are currently crowding the game.

New Steam accounts are classified as ‘limited‘ until that account makes a purchase of at least $5 USD from the Steam store. Until then, those limited accounts are restricted from using most of the platform’s social features, as part of Valve’s effort to prevent fraud on Steam. Now, the Lost Ark devs are using that same feature to battle bots in the MMO.

As of this weekly update, Lost Ark players with limited Steam accounts will no longer be able to initiate player-to-player trades, though trade requests can still be accepted. They’ll also no longer be able to send in-game gifts, exchange Royal Crystals for gold, or send in-game mail with attachments.

“Additional improvements to our anti-cheat programs have also been enabled in this update to help prevent cheaters and bots,” the devs say in the announcement, “alongside a few more changes we’ve developed with Smilegate RPG behind the scenes. We can’t spill all our secrets, or those engaging in these activities would catch wind. We know this won’t solve everything, and we will continue cracking down on users engaging in fraudulent purchases and bots.”

Lost Ark will go down for maintenance on Thursday, March 24 at 12am PDT / 3am EDT / 7am GMT. Downtime is expected to last for eight hours, and once servers are back up, this weekly update will be live.