The Lost Ark team announced on March 4 that it permanently terminated “over a million illicit accounts” that were running bots from the game.

The announcement was made via a blog, which stated that the team realizes that botting has been a major issue since the game’s release, and that they have been “hard at work on building effective tools and ways to identify and remove bots from the game.” That hard work is now beginning to pay off.

The Lost Ark crew stated, “Maintaining a fair and engaging gameplay experience for our gamers is a major concern for the team.” “While we hope to make a significant effect with this ban wave, we recognize that there is still much work to be done and want players to understand that this is just the first step in what will be an active and ongoing effort.”

“In the future, we will continue to work on detecting and eradicating botting, cheating, and disruptive activity from Lost Ark on a large scale, which includes increasing our anti-cheat technologies, upgrading bot identification algorithms, and deploying new ban waves as needed.”

A tiny group of gamers who were “erroneously classified as bots” may also have been blacklisted, according to the team. If this has occurred to you and you are not a bot, but an actual human who has been “earnestly playing Lost Ark” and has not “modified their gameplay in any way,” you can appeal the ban by sending a ticket on Lost Ark’s support site.

This news comes on the heels of the March update for Lost Ark, which features new story and endgame content, as well as a new raid. While Lost Ark was only recently launched in North America, it was released in South Korea in 2019 and contains a “rich of material that has yet to make its way to the western shores of Areksia.” Fortunately, all of that is going to change.