As good as Lost Ark is, the bot infestation is getting out of hand. Amazon has been trying everything in its power to ebb the flow, but despite removing "several million" of them, more keep cropping up. While the devs are working to figure out a permanent solution, a regular wave of bans has been put in place to make sure the servers don't get too crowded for real players, however, even the real players feel Amazon and Smilegate are too lenient with the bans.
"As we continue our battle against bots in Lost Ark, we want to let players know that will be rolling out a wider, massive wave of fresh bot bans over the course of the next week," said a post on the Lost Ark forum. "While we are always banning bots from the game, with this large-scale ban wave you should expect to see more significant fluctuations in the number of concurrent users playing Lost Ark, and queues should decrease over time.
"We know that the botting issue has been an ongoing pain point for players, and that there’s still work to be done," continued the post. "Our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG are continuing to work through a variety of tools and options to rid Arkesia of bots at a larger scale."
However, players feel that the devs aren't being strict with accounts found to be linked with bots. If you head on over to the Lost Ark Subreddit, you'll see a number of players complaining that a simple ban wave just isn't enough anymore. Their biggest ask is that accounts that engage in real money transfer should be banned permanently. Real money transfer, or RMT, refers to when in-game items or resources are exchanged for real money.
Bots are vital to RMT, as they mine resources via exploits, which are then sold to players for real money. Perma-banning accounts that buy or sell items via RMT would go a long way in making bots redundant. What's more, these types of transfers are against Lost Ark's terms and conditions, so the devs would have every right to perma-ban accounts engaging in it.