In addition to frequent banning, Amazon have taken extra steps to ensure that Lost Ark is not filled with bots all over. This way, they've lost 200 thousand concurrent users, and it's not a bad thing.
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.
This used to be the easiest way for a bot to obtain gold and do it on hundreds of characters at the same time. Before this update, Lost Ark was getting somewhere around 800k concurrent players before the update and yesterday, just after the update, it dropped to 590k.
This is not a bad thing, however. On the contrary, it's an extremely good thing. It means that Amazon have found an effective way to curb the bot population in their game, which will ensure that problems with the in-game economy don't pop up down the line.
Steam
While, on the other hand, the current players' numbers are indicative of the actual players playing the game, and they are not small in the slightest. We can even expect them to start rising, as the biggest problems are slowly but surely being solved.
It seems that Amazon have learned their lesson from New World, and don't intend to see Lost Ark crumble in the same way.
