Lost Ark, the free-to-play action-MMORPG published by Amazon Games, has received a massive drop in user reviews on Steam, with recent reviews dropping to Mostly Negative in a matter of days. Spontaneous review bombs like this are rare for games unless some new patch or update drops and makes the game a significantly worse experience than it was before, but for Lost Ark, this was not the case. Instead, the offending incident that triggered so many players to leave negative reviews was a sweeping ban on inactive accounts, leaving players who hadn't logged on for a while bewildered to find the game inaccessible.
Lost Ark first launched in North America in February of last year after gaining popularity in South Korea in 2019. The game was praised for its depth in class customization with many comparisons being drawn to the Diablo series. However, its combat became too much of a grind at later levels, even by MMO standards, for it to have the staying power of other titans of the genre. As such, its player base began to dwindle over the past year since its launch and with the recent bans and review bomb, the game may never recover.
Lost Ark's Bans Puts a Stain on Many Players' Steam Profiles
On January 14, many players logged onto Steam to find they had been banned from Lost Ark despite not having touched the game in months. Some of the players banned had hundreds of hours in the game while others only a few, but still received a ban nonetheless. It turned out that these bans were due to player inactivity—not idling within the game, but from lack of logging on for a long enough period of time. As such, outraged players took to the review section on the game's Steam page to express their displeasure and warn others that their account may also be at risk of getting banned.
While getting banned from a game for not playing it is bad enough, to make matters worse, Lost Ark used Valve's anti-cheat, or VAC, system to issue the bans. Typically reserved for catching bots, this system is dangerous because it leaves a shameful mark on a player's Steam profile indicating that they've been banned from one or more games. Players with this mark on their profile risk being banned in other online multiplayer games as it's meant to deter bot accounts from accessing multiplayer servers secured by the VAC system.
A free-to-play game like Lost Ark runs the risk of incurring bot accounts along with real players since there is no barrier to entry, which can pose a threat to the in-game economy and interfere with legitimate players' experiences. With an active player count on the fall, Lost Ark has had an issue with bots in recent months, which would justify the use of Steam's platform-wide anti-cheat system to cull the bots from its servers. However, marking legitimate inactive players as bots and issuing a ban is a major problem for the game and could be seen as an abuse of Steam's system if not corrected.
Thankfully, it seems like developer Smilegate is aware of the problem and Lost Ark has responded to concerned players stating that the bans were triggered by a bug, and they are working to resolve the issue. As VAC bans are not appealable or reversible unless determined to be issued incorrectly, the ball is in Amazon and Smilegate's court to fix this situation. Unfortunately, with Lost Ark's declining player count, the game may not be able to bounce back from the review bomb triggered by these unjust bans.
Lost Ark is available now for PC.