Wander into one of the starting areas inThrone And Liberty, and you’ll see the stuttering movements of bots repeatedly killing wasps in fields. Head into a dynamic event in one of the level 50 areas, and you’ll see bots die repeatedly as groups of players clean them up in a PvP zone. One of my guildmates even had a bot appear in their dungeon run. It’s no surprise the bots have already arrived in Throne And Liberty. Both New World and Lost Ark were plagued by the same problem, making this an unfortunate quirk of all three Amazon MMOs.
The presence of bots in New World was catastrophic for the in-game economy. They ran common routes for node harvesting, beating normal players to high-level rewards. These were then sold on the auction house to generate coins for coin-selling websites. Amazon made changes to third-party overlay apps to hinder bot pathing and became stricter with banning players who purchased gold from illicit sources. Some would argue that the problem had already impacted the state of the game, permanently. Lost Ark had similar botting problems, and when I last checked, there were still reports of them running around servers to this day.
Things are a little different in Throne And Liberty. The mob drops are astronomically low for items that are worth any Lucent, T&L’s in-game currency, and you’re able to’t currently craft any Rare Lithographs. For those not in the know, these Lithographs are the only way to craft Blue-level items. Apparently, these were removed due to a bug in an update on Korean servers a few months ago, but now people are coming to realize that the removal of these Lithographs is probably to reduce the profits that bots are making from farming blue items in the open world. If they can’t craft Rare Lithographs, they can’t sell the items they make for Lucent on the marketplace. Much of the game is also time-gated behind restricted currencies, so you can only farm so many open-world dungeons or co-op dungeons before calling it a day.
Despite these restrictions and changes however, bots are still rampant in Throne And Liberty. It’s a free-to-play MMO with microtransactions, so bots are to be expected - but what sort of knock-on effect does this number of bots have on the lifecycle of the game? What can Amazon actually do to prevent the same problems that happened in New World and Lost Ark?
Solving The Botting Problem Before It’s Too Late
The bots are even sending spam mail.
Amazon came closest to solving the botting problem in Lost Ark with absolutely massive banwaves, sometimes wiping out tens of thousands of bot accounts at the same time. The problem is that without taking down the makers of these accounts, more appear at a rate faster than Amazon is capable of banning them.
This causes the in-game economy to tank. Prices fluctuate wildly. Some players purchase currencies from websites, bypassing Amazon’s own storefront. It’s not entirely down to Amazon, and in NCSoft’s case with Throne And Liberty, the game still has botting problems on Korean servers. Some players reported huge guilds that used bots to AFK farm and then transfer Lucent to their main accounts.
User verification from Steam or in-game is a good place to start with preventing bots, although many aren’t keen on the idea of two-factor authentication, or on a more complicated level, providing identification to play a video game. Other options include better bot prevention via Easy Anti-Cheat, linking your game account to your Amazon account, or even captcha solutions every time you log-in to play. There are some concerns, maybe, that these measures might turn away ordinary players.
As it stands, it’s still early days with Throne And Liberty, but I am worried it’s falling into the same pitfalls as its predecessors. A big bot problem is not a great image for the game, or its credibility. Amazon have worked hard to renegotiate some of the pay-to-win discussion around the game, so it’d be a shame for their diligence there to be marred by an ongoing bot problem. We’ll have to see what the plan is to tackle them, if they have one at all.
