Every western MMO has been suffering from the same problem recently. That problem is, of course, bots and their exploitation of the game. Here is another way Amazon have found of combating that issue.
Only recently Amazon Game Studios have announced that they have banned around one million bots from the game and will continue doing so for as long as it takes. However, it seems they've underestimated just how long that is.
Spam accounts and bots are a rampant issue in Lost Ark, currently, with some servers having more bot population than actual players in them, especially during normal, and not peak hours of gameplay.
Now, to combat this problem, Amazon have removed 7k gold of rapport rewards from Feiton NPCs and replaced the rewards with silver instead.
Smilegate
This change is an undocumented one in the patch notes, and Amazon have yet to give any kind of explanation for it. Of course, the reason itself is obvious. If they cannot ban all the spam accounts, they can remove the root of the problem, and make them unable to exploit the system for easy gold.
The player base, while surprised by the sudden change, are understanding of the change, After all, they are the ones hit the hardest by the spam accounts filling up queues, and making a general mess of things.
Hopefully, this will prove to be an effective deterrent to that issue, and get the game back on the right track.
