Publisher Amazon Games and developer Smilegate RPG announced Lost Ark is banning over 1 million accounts for bots and spam.

While the free-to-play online action RPG was originally launched in Asia back in 2018, its recent western release has been plagued with bots and spamming since the servers went live.

To combat this, Lost Ark is banning over 1 million accounts for bots and spam, according to developer Smilegate RPG and western publisher Amazon Games.

“Maintaining a fair and fun gameplay experience for our players is a top priority for the team,” the developer said in a new statement. “While we intend to make a massive impact with this ban wave, we know that there is more work to be done and want players to know that this is only one step in what will be an active and ongoing process.”

They added, “Looking ahead, we will continue our work on detecting and removing botting, cheating, and harmful behavior from Lost Ark at scale, which includes expanding our anti-cheat tools, improving bot identification methods, and rolling out more ban waves as frequently as is necessary.”

The teams noted that with how widespread this ban is, “it is possible that a small number of players may be erroneously identified as bots.”

If you happen to mistakenly get banned in their one million account banning spree, you can appeal the ban with a support ticket.

Lost Ark was released in the west on February 11th, 2022 on Windows PC (via Steam). In case you missed it, you can find our review on the game here.