Lost Ark, Smilegate RPG's recently launched game, is being through a hard time. Waves upon waves of spam messages have been seen in chat all over the game. People keep sending messages like "add me" to trade amethyst crystal shards, a valuable currency in the game", and the craze has snowballed out of control.

Source: Lost Ark

On February 11, Smilegate RPG launched Lost Ark, a free-to-play, massively multiplayer online action role-playing game, in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. Later that week, the game hit 1.3 million concurrent players, marking itself as one of Steam's most-played games by player numbers. But what happened next is unexpected to its users and its publisher Smilegate RPG.

While most first-time players are queuing to get into the game, it turns out that many have already been harassed by a plethora of spambots who are selling in-game items for real money in the chat.

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

According to a statement made by Lost Ark, these accounts have been muted and blocked, however, the sheer volume of spam and scammers makes it difficult to filter out every single one.

Source: Twitter

Source: Lost Ark

As the game continues to attract new players, how Smilegate is going to deal with this issue will definitely have consequences in the future. Until now, Smilegate has chosen to institute a system to track the legitimacy of a player, the same thing they did in the South Korea region.

Before its high-profile launch to western players, Lost Ark was initially released in 2019 for the South Korea region, where players need to register with real identities to prove they are human and legitimate users. The user identifies and behavior verification is a common method used by websites and apps to filter out suspicious users and traffic.

This is where you need CAPTCHAs.

CAPTCHAs are sort of "old-fashioned" but effective to deal with bot traffic. One of the main reasons that online businesses are tortured by bot attacks, such as ATO, credential stuffing, card fraud, denial of inventory, etc., is that they are unprepared when they battle the bots.

Bot detection tools are not rare in the market, to be honest, they are inundated. Some have strict rules to detect and block suspicious traffic, resulting in false-positive problems and a horrible user experience. Some provide a relatively good user experience by compromising on security. In the end, it becomes companies' choice to choose between user experience and security, which is the hardest choice in the world.

To accurately identify bots while keeping legitimate users' experience uninterrupted, GeeTest made a major upgrade to the flagship product GeeTest CAPTCHA. The new upgrade is called Adaptive CAPTCHA which is the 4th generation of GeeTest CAPTCHAs. It ensures both ease of use and security in every step of the online customer journey.

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• Adaptive security strategies: 7-layer dynamic security strategy changes with the patterns that bots attack and transforms to 4374 security strategies per defense cycle, increasing 3.714 times the cost of cyber attackers.
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An ideal bot management solution is one that can achieve a balance between security and a good user experience. The game industry was not just targeted by bot-driven attacks yesterday. Bot problems have been irritating both game publishers and players for a long time. It is unavoidable and worthwhile for game developers and publishers to rethink this issue.

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