The Reasons Behind the Review Bombing of Lost Ark Are Described

The free-to-play action massively multiplayer online role-playing game (free-to-play action MMORPG) Lost Ark, which is published by Amazon Games, has seen a significant decline in the number of positive user reviews posted on Steam. Recent reviews have become Mostly Negative in a matter of days. Rarely do games receive spontaneous review bombs like this one, and when they do, it's usually because a new patch or update has been released that makes playing the game a significantly less enjoyable experience than it was before. However, this was not the case with Lost Ark. Instead, a blanket ban on inactive accounts was the offending incident that caused so many players to leave negative reviews. This left players who hadn't logged on in a while bewildered to find that the game was inaccessible to them. This was the incident that caused so many players to leave negative reviews. After gaining traction in South Korea in 2019, Lost Ark was introduced to the North American market for the first time in February of the previous year. The game received a lot of praise for the amount of depth it has in the class customization, with many people drawing comparisons to the Diablo series.

Its combat, on the other hand, became too much of a grind at later levels, even by the standards of MMOs, which prevented it from having the staying power of other titans of the genre. Because of this, the game's player base has been steadily decreasing over the course of the past year since it was first released, and considering the recent bans and review bomb, it's possible that it will never recover. On January 14, many players discovered, upon logging into Steam, that despite the fact that they had not played Lost Ark in several months, they had been banned from the game. Some of the banned players had played the game for hundreds of hours, while others had played for only a few hours, but they were still banned regardless. It turned out that these bans were a result of player inactivity; specifically, not idling while playing the game, but rather failing to log on for a sufficient amount of time over a sufficient period of time. As a consequence of this, irate players have taken to the review section on the Steam page for the game in order to voice their disapproval and caution other users that it is possible that their accounts will also be banned.

Even though being banned from a game for not playing it is bad enough, the anti-cheat system that Valve uses, known as VAC, was used by Lost Ark to issue the bans. This made the situation even worse. This method, which is typically reserved for catching bots, is risky because it leaves a disgraceful mark on a player's Steam profile, indicating that they have been banned from one or more games. Players who have this mark on their profile run the risk of being banned from participating in other online multiplayer games. The purpose of this mark is to discourage bot accounts from accessing multiplayer servers that are protected by the VAC system. Because there is no entry requirement, a free-to-play game like Lost Ark runs the risk of attracting bot accounts along with real players. This can put a strain on the in-game economy and make things more difficult for real players. In recent months, Lost Ark has been experiencing issues with bots, which would justify the use of Steam's platform-wide anti-cheat system to remove the bots from its servers. This is because the active player count has been on the decline in recent months.
 

If the issue is not fixed, however, the game has a significant problem in that it incorrectly labels legitimate inactive players as bots and then bans them

- This could be considered an abuse of Steam's system

- Lost Ark has responded to concerned players stating that the bans were triggered by a bug, and they are working to resolve the issue

- Thankfully, it appears that the developer Smilegate is aware of the problem, and Lost Ark is also working to resolve the issue

- Because bans issued by the VAC are not subject to appeal or reversal unless it is determined that they were issued in error, the onus is on Amazon and Smilegate to find a solution to this problem

- Unfortunately, as the number of players who play Lost Arks continues to decrease, the game may not be able to recover from the review bomb that was caused by these unjust bans