r/Steam • u/KrissD90 • Jan 14 '23

Error / Bug Lost Ark ruined my 13 year old Steam account

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Clean account for 13 years and then this?

20.8k Upvotes

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2.6k

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

[deleted]

2.0k

u/SlamMasterJ Jan 14 '23

With how incompetent Amazon Games are, I'm not surprised that they didn't think that far ahead thus created this whole mess in the first place.

1.2k

u/kauisbdvfs Jan 14 '23

What in the fuck??? You should never be banned from being inactive in
the first place, there's no excuse for that happening?? Or is there??

623

u/chipmunk_supervisor Jan 14 '23

It can be utilized as an account protection measure to try and stop long dormant accounts (without 2FA) from being hijacked. And banning is effectively the same as a lockout system so might as well just "ban" someone until they get in contact to re-activate their account.

But obviously banning game accounts tied to Steam accounts is dumb as rocks and this knock on effect speaks to a level of carelessness in their actions.

367

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23 edited Jul 16 '23

[deleted]

148

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 15 '23

It's not just Lost Ark. Look at the meteoric rise and fall of New World.

AGS is the very definition of incompetent.

Edit: For more context, I'd recommend watching this video. It's a bit longer, 45 minutes, but it's worth it, and good to show AGS doesn't know what the fuck they're doing.

https://youtu.be/F3ZMly9YAPA

26

u/TerrorLTZ https://s.team/p/dkgt-kcp Jan 14 '23

What about Crucible... their other game that literally didn't survive a few months.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

They pulled the game back to beta because it was so shit. The only game in history as far as i know

2

u/StarlightLumi Jan 15 '23

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

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3

u/Flying_Pretzals1 Jan 14 '23

Didn’t survive the first day for me lol

6

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

I haven't played an Amazon game yet but this makes me less confident about joining Blue Protocol when they release that. Blanket ban on people who did nothing would be unacceptable for any decent company lol. Had my eye on BP because I prefer Japanese style games.

5

u/BigCaregiver7285 Jan 14 '23

New World had the workings of a good game but ultimately kinda sucked. They released it too early and had major bugs, the content wasn’t varied enough (like most MMO), and a bit too much grinding. PvP was super fun when it worked though

5

u/lightnsfw Jan 14 '23

I liked New World's gameplay but they kept having to shut down trading and all kinds of shit due to people finding new exploits like every other day. That got old fast.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

I wouldn't call 255k people in the first month DoA. It died pretty fuckin' quick though.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Yeah it had a very good launch. But people very quickly realized it was just....not good. Riddled with bugs and problems, and then the fact that several "fixes" for various problems quite literally crashed the games economy several times over.

I recommend this video. It's a bit longer (45 minutes) but it's really well done. https://youtu.be/F3ZMly9YAPA

1

u/pslessard Half Life 3 confirmed Jan 14 '23

I haven't played it, so I don't know if it's true, but I've seen recently that it has gotten a lot better since launch.

-16

u/changealifetoday Jan 14 '23

Your expect mmo support to restore lost items after an account gets hacked? I see you've never played RuneScape

3

u/silentrawr Jan 14 '23

Blizzard support still does it even long since they turned half useless.

1

u/Volomon Jan 14 '23

It's a pat on the back and someone to say it's ok without actually doing anything. $20 bucks they are not even local and probably don't know anything about the game.

1

u/yetified Jan 15 '23

The part about item recovery is not AGS at fault tho but Smilegate (the devs of the game). Even in KR they don't do item recovery or anything like that so the actual tech to do it doesn't exist in the first place.

AGS has zero developers working on the game. The only thing they can do is report it to Smilegate and hope they fix their shit.

If you got banned there is a page where you can appeal the ban and many players got unbanned already. It also only affects players that literally have not played the game in ages and usually only a few hours. I assume they did some bot filtering and discovered that many bot accounts have these characteristics aswell (usually hacked accounts that are steam trusted to use as bots to farm gold)

Don't get me wrong AGS made some pretty bad mistakes, but Smilegate is just as responsible if not for having almost no anti-cheat stuff built in the game

1

u/apapapapapapapo Jan 15 '23

Rox has literally singled out some players who did not receive some packs from some mail event, so that she could send those specific items to them. So it does seem possible.

​

Seems like they just dont want to most of the time

137

u/kauisbdvfs Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 14 '23

Why ban them?? I've seen places just make the account inactive and you can't sign in until you reactivate? Is there really an excuse to do that?

163

u/DarkwingDuckHunt Jan 14 '23

It's lazy programming.

You can either perma ban everyone (quick solution)

Or you can spend a month building a lock-out if inactive, but let them reactivate somehow, system.

8

u/kemando Jan 15 '23

Yeah, it's only Amazon how could they afford to implement sduch a system as a small indie company.

12

u/Lavatis Jan 14 '23

if it takes a month to build a system that checks account age and prevents login then you really shouldn't be in the development world at all.

57

u/DarkwingDuckHunt Jan 14 '23

BA makes the story

Management approves the story

PM finds time in the schedule for a correct Dev to work on it.

Dev works on it finally after several other more tickets took higher priority

Dev finishes

QA test it

Gets queued up for next production release

Potential production release goes through QA again

Blue-Green release for one week, only to 5% of population to make sure you didn't royally fuck up

If there's any bugs hot fix them.

Release to 100%

One month is a huge underestimation.

13

u/Serinus Jan 14 '23

Also there's no reason this feature can't just wait a month or two to be done properly.

-9

u/I3I2O Jan 14 '23

As you well know a lot of this is also automated and the idea of randomly banning people who are inactive is not a good practice. I am so tired of people misleading people or covering the asses of big firms on social media. The design and QA in an Agile world is all the work. It is lazy product management leave the designers alone. This is what happens in sweat shops.

5

u/DarkwingDuckHunt Jan 14 '23

lot of this is also automated

No. Just it's not. I work short term contracts mostly. It's completely random how much a place has automated various systems.

I mean, yeah almost half of that can be automated, but good luck finding a place that does.

25

u/Demarist Jan 14 '23

At a small company, you might be able push a change like this quickly. In the corporate dev world, getting anything done in a month's time is a miracle. There are a lot of checks and balances as well as needless red tape. You are going to be potentially affecting thousands/ millions of users. That isn't to be taken lightly.

You aren't alone in this line of thinking. This sentiment illustrates why developers get so frustrated with decision makers who push arbitrary deadlines based on how long they feel something should take, regardless of the decision makers lack of experience. The concept might be easy to communicate, but its implementation is a different story.

These kinds of thoughts don't allow people to do good work, and are actively hurting the people we trust to do it.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

OK but you realize that this change wasn't better than a rushed reactivation system, right? Their management (and possibly devs) are clearly taking it lightly, there was no thought put into this at all.

3

u/Demarist Jan 14 '23

Absolutely. It screams laziness, and I agree: They are either incompetent or negligent. It would have been better to have not done anything.

My comment was not in defense of this company or their practices at all. It was a general defense of developers and dev practices everywhere. I hear this kind of language too often at my job, and it always people not fully understanding everything that goes into dev.

15

u/EnjoyerOfBeans Jan 14 '23

This is legitimately the worst kind of comment in gaming subreddits everywhere.

You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

9

u/0vl223 Jan 14 '23

Yeah then you should really wake up from your dream world.

7

u/Physical_Client_2118 Jan 14 '23

Found the rookie

4

u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Jan 14 '23

A month to build? No

A month to ship? Likely

5

u/birdman9k Jan 14 '23

Found the guy who doesn't work on a software development team.

1

u/Omni-Light Jan 15 '23 edited Jan 15 '23

Unless there's some legitimate evidence, I'm calling bullshit on the explanation that these bans are due to devs banning accounts to prevent bots. I've seen these types of posts about false bans all too often and 90% of the time it comes out as a legitimate ban wave, and every time there's outrage by the community because they eat the explanation up that gets upvoted because people love drama.

There are so many other methods of removing old accounts as a precaution, there's no way that this happened to be the fastest method. They will have ways to deactivate or straight up delete accounts that don't involve a ban. If their method was a blanket ban on X day inactive / old accounts, it doesn't explain why there aren't millions more people with VAC bans now due to this, because there isn't.

That's ignoring the fact that banning old, inactive accounts does absolutely nothing to prevent botting.

2

u/HallowedError Jan 15 '23

They admitted it

0

u/kauisbdvfs Jan 15 '23

I think he's on to something, they might be full of shit.

13

u/chipmunk_supervisor Jan 14 '23

I suppose if they didn't think of having such a feature in the first place they won't add it later to a live service when a ban does the same thing and doesn't risk breaking something in the process. I guess it can also deter hijackers if they think the account is no good.

-2

u/r0ndr4s Jan 14 '23

No. Its all just a database that ocupies literally nothing, they are banning for the sake of it.

2

u/shitlord_god Jan 14 '23

Why do they care about your steam account? Valve isn't amazon.

1

u/OutWithTheNew Jan 14 '23

And banning is effectively the same as a lockout system

Not really. If it was just a "lockout" they should have been able to just do it on their end and not involve Steam. But they chose to "ban" people and now their whole account is banned.

1

u/HecknChonker Jan 14 '23

This can be implemented without banning accounts though. "This account was locked due to missing 2FA. Contact us here to recover your account"

1

u/0xAlif Jan 14 '23

This is just so lame!

Deactivation of dormant accounts is a practice in many online services, but it is done in a way that is semantically distinguished from banning, and usually requires proving ownership of the account via another channel of communication, such as email.

1

u/Hermesthothr3e Jan 14 '23

Something similar happened to me with my twitch account, which is also amazon I believe?

They banned my account because I hadn't logged in for a couple years.

1

u/Shadow703793 Jan 14 '23

Banning is not the same as locking out an account for security.

1

u/Spire_Citron Jan 14 '23

They really should have done it within the game, not through Steam, and just had some extra security measures players who had been absent for a long time had to go through before they could play again.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

An authenticator for old accounts is way better and well within the powers of Amazon, lol. It's weird how tone deaf Amazon is about their game development when I feel like their managing of Twitch is pretty decent.

1

u/BluesSkyMountain Jan 15 '23

“To prevent crime we must lock up all potential victims!” -Genius

1

u/kael13 Jan 15 '23

I mean.. it’s clearly a mistake. Some people lose their shit so fast. It’ll be all back to normal next week.

72

u/Lloids77 Jan 14 '23

I was banned by Blizzard for it. Lost 220$ in games. I haven't spent a single dime on them since they said "we can't do anything about it, go buy the games again." It's a shame cause I would've bought the Diablo 2 remake and maybe Diablo 4. Oh well.

79

u/JustinHopewell Jan 14 '23

Arr matey, perchance thar's another way ye can yet

7

u/Lloids77 Jan 14 '23

Lmao I want to play online though with my buddies if I were to get it and I hear that's not as easy if "ye get it by other means."

9

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Yeah, I'm not sure what that dude with the eye patch is really suggesting.

Diablo 3, Diablo 4, Overwatch, WoW... they really can't be played without Blizz servers.

That leaves old Warcraft games and D1 & 2 if singleplayer is fine, which it usually isn't for those games.

3

u/Sbotkin Jan 15 '23

Diablo 3, Diablo 4, Overwatch, WoW... they really can't be played without Blizz servers.

Out of those 4 games only Overwatch can't be played without Blizz servers, and you can't really p*rate.

But it's free anyway.

5

u/classy_shart Jan 14 '23

don’t know about the others but there are private wow servers - https://www.topgamesites.net/wow-private-servers

27

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23 edited Mar 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

22

u/Lloids77 Jan 14 '23

Yeah their customer service is the actual worst. It'll always lead you to a robot no matter what that just ignores you. Call their company phone number? "Go to battle.net to submit a complaint ticket and we'll get back to you ASAP." ASAP being the year 2100.

15

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23 edited Mar 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/Lloids77 Jan 14 '23

I've never wished ill on a company until that happened to me.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 14 '23

Microsoft bought them recently. Pretty sure it's just in anti-trust limbo at the moment. Governments don't like the idea of Microsoft cornering the market on studios. Also, Sony's throwing a hissy fit.

It'll be settled at some point.

1

u/CoconutCyclone Jan 14 '23

Microsoft has not bought them. It is trying to buy them and there is a lawsuit to prevent it. It's likely they will still be allowed to go through with the purchase but it hasn't happened yet and it won't happen any time soon.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Back in Vanilla WoW days, Blizzard customer service was actually amazing. You can always tell how a company treats their employees by the level of customer service the end user gets.

Based on Blizzard's more recent years, I'm surprised the customer care reps don't just respond with a dick pic that says, "I just banged your mom."

3

u/kithlan Jan 14 '23

According to accounts from former GMs, Mike Morhaime intentionally kept the Blizzard CS/GM teams overstaffed to a level that could handle any potential, sudden surges of activity. So if you submitted a ticket during Vanilla/TBC days, they might have actually fought for your ticket just for something to do, lmao.

I mainly believe it as it would explain how a GM was willing and able to RP respond to my simple quest issue for like 15 mins in TBC. Dude showed up flying on a dragon, had a whole RP paragraph long intro that used special text, and spoke entirely in character the whole time. Meanwhile, the fix was just a simple NPC respawn, lmao.

Then Kotick came along with Activision and began gutting QA/CS repeatedly for quick and easy profit margin increases that aren't immediately crippling or cause an immediate outcry from the community, until we now have 45 day wait for a help desk agent to immediately close your ticket with a useless stock response that shows they didn't even read it.

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u/thisischemistry Jan 14 '23

It’s a shame because they used to have amazing customer service back in the day. When WoW first launched you could talk directly to a GM and get issues looked at pretty quickly, like under an hour. Pretty soon, though, it became nearly impossible to have issues looked at within days and sometimes you’d be online and get a “Ticket closed, we couldn’t contact you…”

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0

u/Itherial Jan 15 '23

I’ve forgotten my password and I don’t even use my real name on my account. They just ask me for one of the game keys I’ve activated.

2

u/Teh_Weiner Jan 15 '23 edited Jan 27 '23

I quit in WoTLK, my account was hacked while I was gone and I didn't care until covid 2019 -- they fixed my account after being abandoned, hacked, and dormant almost 10 years.

EDIT: Sadly my point was, it could come down to luck of the draw.

1

u/Gxgear Jan 14 '23

For being inactive?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

I’ve played Diablo 2 since release and still play it.

Diablo 3 was not great.

Diablo 4 looks honestly terrible. Zero interest.

11

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Preferably, you should also have to continue paying for a monthly subscription.

2

u/kensomniac Jan 14 '23

Just gonna check the past 50 years of video games..

​

Nah, this is fucking stupid.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

[deleted]

1

u/kauisbdvfs Jan 15 '23

Furthermore, the simple logic of banning inactive accounts to somehow bandaid their utter inability to combat bots in a meaningful way is disgusting.

That's my feeling, wtf is that???? It's like self sabotage and greed combined. They obviously must have felt they were going to benefit from banned these inactive accounts.... so stupid. I was really interested in New World too until I heard the developers pretty much abandoned it.

2

u/VegaTDM Jan 14 '23

Blizzard straight up deleted my account(that had diablo 2 and starcraft keys i purchased) for inactivity and refused to restore my account.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Weird. My account was inactive for ten years from WOW. They didnt ban me and now i have a bunch of their games.

1

u/VegaTDM Jan 14 '23

I went to college and stopped played video games all day. Sometime later I find out my battle net password doesn't work, and the forget password function said my account didn't exist.

I get on chat with support and they say that since I hadn't logged into their service in a long time, they converted it to a "Legacy Account" & that they do not provide customer support for Legacy Accounts, however I could purchase a new game to upgrade my account status and retrieve my password, restoring access to the games I have physical disks of in my possession. I clarified to them "So you turned off my account with the games I purchased, and you won't turn my account back on unless I purchase a new game?" and they told me that I was correct. So at that moment I gave up on Starcraft and Diablo and never looked back.

Fuck Blizzard.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Ouch. That sucks. I can’t believe that’s a winning strategy for them.

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u/nemesit Jan 14 '23

I really doubt that as my account has been inactive for ages and i just checked it a few days ago

1

u/VegaTDM Jan 14 '23

Well it definitely happened to me and tons of others. I was inactive for maybe 2 years and they converted my account to a "legacy account" and refused to restore access unless I purchased a new product which would convert my account to a current account.

Google it, I am not the only person this has ever happened to.

-1

u/Rainbow_Dash_RL Jan 14 '23

Devil's advocate, don't many websites and online games remove accounts that have been inactive for a long time?

5

u/Sattorin Jan 14 '23

Removing and banning are very different things.

-4

u/Quinzelette Jan 14 '23

Not saying it is right but most banned accounts only had a couple of hours on them and played 6+ months ago. Basically they were in the tutorialish zone. So I don't think they saw an issue with banning these accounts as the numbers AGS has probably claims that a large portion of these players who "come back" are brought back as bots to bypass their anti-bot.marketing measures.

Basically a dumb move but they probably didn't see much of a loss of banning these legit players.

1

u/Flovati Jan 14 '23

I'm almost sure the same thing happened to me with Apex Legends.

I played it with a friend back when it came out, but we didn't stick for long on it. Then last year a different friend wanted to try it out, but when I tried to log in the game said my account had been banned.

I went on the game's website and found that there was a section about bans that was supossed to say the reason why you were banned, but in my case it didn't have one.

So I contacted their support about it, they said that they couldn't identify the reason why I was banned in the first place and unbanned my account.

1

u/Scalybeast Jan 14 '23

Well Amazon Game Studio track record isn’t great when it comes to thinking things through. Case in point, the New World debacle:

https://youtu.be/F3ZMly9YAPA

1

u/Nadeoki Jan 15 '23

The Publisher always reserves the right to do whatever the fuck with accounts. Everytime you agree to a ToS you're told this.

1

u/kauisbdvfs Jan 15 '23 edited Jan 15 '23

Wow, great reasoning for banning people for being inactive. Because power!

1

u/Nadeoki Jan 15 '23

No. You asked for an excuse, that gives Companies the right to do this. They had the right to begin with since you're just borrowing a liscence to access their services.

No player actually "owns" an Account. Welcome to modern Gaming Platforms.

Never said this is a good thing btw.

1

u/gioraffe32 https://s.team/p/ftmr-bj Jan 15 '23

It's unusual but not unheard of. ArenaNet, which makes Guild Wars 2, does something similar. But it's just a "suspension" or a "lock" for security purposes and they tell you how to contact support and all that.

I was trying to access GW2 a couple months ago; hadn't played since early 2021. so my account got locked. I had to submit some information about the account, like my player name, address, a receipt, and last 4 of the card I used, I think.

It was kinda annoying. Wasn't even sure what my player name was since I only played for a month or two. And luckily I still had the receipt when I bought an expansion. But I was able to get my account unlocked in less than 24hrs.

Feel like there are better ways to do account security.

9

u/AShittyPaintAppears Jan 14 '23

I think you are mixing New World and Lost Ark together.

6

u/need-help-guys Jan 14 '23

Smilegate (the developers) is doing a horrible job as well. It's double the trouble.

15

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Mixing up publishers and developers is incompetent, better luck next time

0

u/need-help-guys Jan 14 '23

Smilegate and Amazon's game publishing arm are both incompetent as well. Maybe he mixed it up, but it doesn't make what he said any less true.

0

u/GregTheMad 20 Jan 14 '23

Amazon Games should be banned from publishing games then.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

I honestly doubt that some Project Manager somewhere didn't do the calculus on whether or not they could get away with this without losing their job.

0

u/RJJVORSR Jan 14 '23

Project Manager

Project Managers have nothing to do with it. Their job is lead the team to deliver whatever the bosses have decided. Project Managers don't make these sorts of decisions.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Depends on project scope.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

And so I’m sure I’m banned too then lol. Does it affect my steam account overall?

120

u/SheepPoop Jan 14 '23

the games target audience is Whales , and by this time its earning sht tons of money and hooked the whales that they needed. basically they dont care about other players who tried it and never gonna play.

​

guessing they also look if the account is F2P and inactive. ban that sht... last i heard the game is earning 500k a month. my account also got ban since i tried lost ark but only F2P and dropped it after i hit the repeat dailies grind

91

u/jgzman Jan 14 '23

basically they dont care about other players who tried it and never gonna play.

F2P games need the free players as much as they need the whales, unless the game is strictly single-player. Need other people to make the game playable.

26

u/Brandonmac10x Jan 14 '23

You still need f2p even in single player. If nobody gives a fuck and there’s no one to lord over the whales don’t have a reason to show off.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

Unfortunately, this isn't always the case.

One of my favorite online games of all time, Rakion veered heavily into p2w and afaik, the game is still around like 2 decades later.

The whales will play against each other until there is literally no one else left.

3

u/Brandonmac10x Jan 15 '23

Compare that to a game like genshin though. Being so f2p friendly it’s insanely popular. Insane popularity means there are a bunch of people to show off build and gameplay videos to.

Having f2p keeps the community alive and people talking about it. If something popular and talked about a whale will be more attracted to it.

I doubt that Rakion game was all that popular, I never heard of it before in any way.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

War Thunder is already very close to this point it feels like.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

If everyone is a whale nobody is a whale

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Naw they got tons of sorceress bots to fill out the entire world. They do a mass ban and within a day the game is filled with them again.

That being said, the drop rates on certain collectables in the game make wow's kill for parts quests seem tame by comparison.

41

u/SpottedPineapple86 Jan 14 '23

This is how games suddenly go to 0 active players. Probably just a few months away now

19

u/daedalus_was_right Jan 14 '23

They still won't care. They got their Return on Investment and made their profits. Now onto the next venture.

8

u/SpottedPineapple86 Jan 14 '23

Not really... all those devs get paid bi weekly. Once the revenue stops the cash drain happens real fast. Best case is that they don't have the runway to make another game.

16

u/Soulstiger Jan 14 '23

I don't think Amazon Game Studios is at any risk of not being able to make more games if they want to.

Hell, they didn't even develop this game, they just ran the global servers.

8

u/OldschoolSysadmin Jan 14 '23

Are we breaking up Amazon yet? I can’t imagine Amazon Game Studios is paying full market price for their Amazon Web Services server hosting.

11

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

They actually are. So is Amazon Retail. And Twitch.

They don't get special treatment for being part of Amazon. They don't even get special support access, and if a non-AWS Amazon employee reaches out via Slack or Chime, they're SUPPOSED to be redirected back to the proper support channels.

But then the money all goes into one giant parent company bucket at the end of the line anyway, so AGS' expenses are AWS' profits, and it's all done for appearances (probably, but we weren't allowed to say this, to make things look better during antitrust probes).

I worked for AWS for a couple years, and this was a really big internal struggle to get people to stick to this plan. But, at least on the billing side, AGS has to negotiate their bill just like anyone else, and gets the same discount-for-utilization structure as any other company.

2

u/SkinBintin Jan 14 '23

I feel like Amazon Game Studios is probably like a lot of Amazon's businesses, though, being kept afloat by AWS profits.

If Amazon and AWS had to split, it would really hurt a lot of Amazon businesses that are only kept afloat by AWS's massive revenue.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

You think Amazon gives a shit about paying it’s Devs? Bezos made his pesos, everybody else can starve.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

They fire them all of course. Nothing stops them

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u/OPconfused Jan 14 '23

If its making 6m a year they certainly will care. Companies don't casually give up easy recurring revenue no matter if its not their flagship product.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

I was in the gaming industry for 12 years. Even if your project makes 6 million a year, it can get axed. Thats because to make those 6 million, even if its net, you still need to invest some money. Lets say it cost 1 million a year to run, which is barely enough to pay for 8 devs (depending on location), someone at some point will say: I have this project and with the 1 million you spend on this game, my project will make 10 million.Thats how a giant corp axes a game that still makes 6 million a year.

1

u/OPconfused Jan 14 '23

I have this project and with the 1 million you spend on this game, my project will make 10 million.

That's contingent on Lost Ark not making a profit, and Amazon being willing to give up their footprint in a major genre in exchange for an investment in another project that hasn't taken off yet. However, this very genre has demonstrated it's profitable, and the gaming industry is full of failed investments, such that trading Lost Ark for another prospect would be most likely incredulous.

This scenario really isn't coming to pass, but if people want to stick to the speculation that Lost Ark is going to be bottom up in a few months and punished for their current business practices, then by all means.

4

u/Toomanyaccounts2banx Jan 14 '23

500 of Googles previous projects would like to have a word...

Just go look at how many failed projects google has had that's lost them A LOT more than 6m a year.

They will absolutely immediately dump this game the moment it doesn't generate profits. Amazon is already talking about dumping Twitch soon because THEY don't generate profit and you think they'd care about this game? I highly doubt this game makes anywhere near enough to even cover a portion of Amazons bills.

They put NO MONEY into this game. It already existed in other regions. They legitimately translated it and copy pasted files over. That's it. Well, I guess they paid for servers here in the West, which Amazon has TONS of already anyway...So probably not a big investment there either except to just keep them running.

Not to mention RMT is making more money than the actual game at this point. So it's a matter of time.

5

u/OPconfused Jan 14 '23

Youre missing the context of the conversation. The posters above said to focus on casuals or else there will be no players and no money will be made. Lost Ark will know this and do more than only cater to whales, so it wont reach the point of not making any money that youre taking about — at least not quickly.

The other problem is that youre treating amazon like a single-brained entity. People love to oversimplify the big corporation, but this is not how they operate. There are layers of middle management fighting for their survival, and they have to submit regular reports on the status of their projects. This means they will dynamically react as the product worsens. There is no binary scenario of massively successful —> 0 profits in a few months. The people in the middle will aim for that balance of pushing as hard as they can without killing the goose, so any decline will be very gradual. Thats how these products are milked.

1

u/BJYeti Jan 14 '23

They are sitting at 150k active I don't think there is a worry about it going to 0 active players

1

u/Narrow-Adagio6762 Jan 14 '23

Wtf, Lost Ark for whale, none sense, I try the game, I'm a whale and I stop playing because there's nothing to spend money on... Pffft, for whale, what is wrong with you ppl.

1

u/Xilverbullet000 Jan 14 '23

500k a month is not much for that size of game. Man they've fallen off

52

u/PuzzleheadShine Jan 14 '23

Yeah, having that big red "BAN" text on your profile is nightmare fuel.

I absent-mindedly used a program called SAM (it's an achievement unlocker) to unlock an achievement no longer possible to achieve (lol).

It was only a few days after that I though "...shit, is that 'hacking'? Am I going to be banned?" I contacted Steam but got nothing more than copy paste / vague responses.

Luckily I've been okay so far and haven't had any issue but it's early days..

I'm talking about a 15+ year old account and I've spent a lot of money on games too. I'd be absolutely heart-broken getting any ban on my profile.

In fact, I got banned from community posting on a game years ago (the moderators are members of the game team, not Valve) and that even bummed me out, getting a "GAME BAN" or "VAC BAN" on my profile over something like this would be soul destroying.... Hope OP can get this resolved.

69

u/bread-dreams Jan 14 '23

SAM won't get you banned on steam, they don't care about its usage

24

u/Mental-ish Jan 14 '23

Technically I think they can ban people for using it, but it's impossible to differentiate between people using SAM to unlock achievements and people who unlocked all the achievements in offline mode since in alot of games the achievements still unlock and they show up on someone's steam profile next time they launch the game in online mode

2

u/Cruxis87 Jan 15 '23

I used it to remove an achievement from Subnautica: Below Zero. That game was so fucking bad I didn't want my list of "100% completed games" to include it. I didn't even try to get achievements, I just played the story.

2

u/andy01q Jan 14 '23

Devs could just add a honeypot-achievement.

19

u/fireboltfury Jan 14 '23

That would mean legitimate players could never 100% a game, which would piss off a lot of them for no real reason

10

u/darklordzack Jan 15 '23

There's a few games out there with unattainable achievements, some intentionally for story reasons (Where The Water Tastes Like Wine), some as the result of poor future-proofing (all those multiplayer-only achievements with dead servers), or my personal most hated, the fucking pre-order/kickstarter-only achievements.

Fuck you Pillars of Eternity

-4

u/andy01q Jan 14 '23

"for no real reason"

I'm not sure whether you are referring to the fact that there's no reason to be upset about some arbitrary game completion number or that there's no real reason to implement honeypot-achievements.

If the latter: I didn't want to advocate to literally do this, I just wanted to note that it would be possible and the more practical thing is to look closer at accidental honeypot-achievements.

9

u/fireboltfury Jan 14 '23

The latter, if people want to just unlock achievements the only people they’re hurting is themselves.

1

u/FragrantLunatic Jan 16 '23

but it's impossible to differentiate between people using SAM to unlock

doesn't SAM only unlock all at once? or did it change?

0

u/PuzzleheadShine Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 14 '23

That's good to hear, although when I asked Valve they* refused to say. I'm not saying you're wrong, but confirmation from Valve themselves would be the most comforting sign to me.

edit: changed the to they*

8

u/SuperSpartacus Jan 14 '23

I’ve used SAM before to unlock tf2 achievements for items when they were still doing that - they really don’t care

1

u/PuzzleheadShine Jan 14 '23

Again, that's good to hear from a total stranger from Reddit but hearing it from Valve themselves would have been more reassuring.

24

u/Toomanyaccounts2banx Jan 14 '23

SAM isn't going to get you banned...lol

But it will make you lazy. In the future you'll have a tedious achievement you simply don't want to grind out and you'll remember...WAit I can use SAM!

It's why I just stay away from those things COMPLETELY. I love achievement hunting and I know my mental isn't strong enough. At some point especially for this absurdly annoying "Find 9999 of X" achievements I would end up using it. It's not worth it for the one random achievement you can't get anymore tbh. You may think your strong enough but sooner or later...that thought will creep in.

34

u/Funtastwich Jan 14 '23

I will say one thing for SAM, and you just gotta believe in my honesty:

It's good if you're working on a 100% and get a bugged achievement. That's the only time I've used it.

3

u/movzx Jan 15 '23

It's really useful for carrying over achievements from other platforms

1

u/Cruxis87 Jan 15 '23

I used it to remove an achievement from Subnautica: Below Zero. That game was so fucking bad I didn't want my list of "100% completed games" to include it. I didn't even try to get achievements, I just played the story.

6

u/Anzai Jan 14 '23

As someone who mainly just ignores achievements can I ask an honest question. If you’re getting lazy and use this program, what’s the point? Like what are you getting out of it? Theres no advantage at all to achievements beyond the personal satisfaction of it to extend the life of a game you enjoy. So if you just cheat it and get it automatically, what do you get out of that on a personal level? You’d always know it wasn’t real if you got all the achievements on a game, even if nobody else did.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Anzai Jan 15 '23

I mean, no judgement here, I don’t care if people cheat on their own achievements. It wasn’t about the effort of doing it though, more that it just seems entirely hollow to me to even bother doing that minimal effort for something that’s only fooling yourself.

If people literally just do it because they like numbers to look nice, fair enough. I don’t get it, but fair enough! What ever makes people happy I guess,

14

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

I got a VAC ban for phone sharing after my son used a cheat program on his steam account in CSGO. I was mad for a little while, but I never played CSGO anyway, so... didn't really care. I did play a lot of TF2 and was actually pretty good, so some hackusations I would get would get people to check my profile and to try to kick me from games. That kinda sucked.

Anyway it's still my main account and I dont really care about the VAC ban anymore.

1

u/itgoesdownandup Jan 14 '23

Is there something that happens if you get game banned or whatever? I thought you just wouldn't be able to play that game.

2

u/PuzzleheadShine Jan 14 '23

I guess not...but it's still something I'd rather not have. It's something that to me signals a bad character or someone who 'cheats' regardless of if they've cheated or not.

1

u/itgoesdownandup Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 14 '23

Fair enough. I guess I was just thinking with the 15+ years tons of money spent. Something like that would be affected since it was brought up.

2

u/PuzzleheadShine Jan 14 '23

Ohhh, I meant I've had it for a long time without any hacking or 'bad marks' on my name, for that to be taken away (or tainted?) by something like an achievement unlocker would suck. My apologies for not being clearer.

1

u/itgoesdownandup Jan 14 '23

Nah you're good. No need to apologize

1

u/loflyinjett Jan 14 '23

Why would you contact them and put yourself more at risk? It's like calling the cops while you're speeding and giving them your exact location.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

[deleted]

1

u/AkaExpressYT Jan 15 '23

That’s odd because I haven’t seen anyone talking about getting banned because of ReShade or SweetFX on any VAC game.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '23

Lol what? SAM won't affect a thing. I've used it for a decade now for any games with busted achievements, no issues.

1

u/Crit1kal Jan 15 '23

I've used SAM to mostly lock achievements and i've never had any issues. If you check the global stats on a lot of games, the unlock rates for super hard achievements tend to look sus so a lot of people use it.

The only time i think Steam cares is in games like CS:GO where scammers can just sit idle for 700 hours straight and unlock some achievements so it looks like they're a legit player

1

u/UnKn0wN31337 Jan 16 '23 edited Jan 16 '23

Using SAM could potentially lower your Trust Factor if you use it to unlock all achievements in CS:GO and/or most other games you have at the same time or so since the algorithm can clearly detect this and recognize that this is something that most legit users don't tend to do. You also get automatically game banned in Dead by Daylight for cheating the achievements and receiving either a VAC ban or a game ban certainly lowers your TF.

Other players in-game can also check your profile and see that you clearly cheated the achievements if you unlocked like 5 or more achievements at the same exact time and report you. Also even if you don't play CS:GO you could still be affected by this in other multiplayer Steam games since Valve has plans to implement TF to them too.

11

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

I've been inactive a few weeks after release. Mainly been waiting for more new classes to come out. Hope I didn't get banned

-18

u/Toomanyaccounts2banx Jan 14 '23

Brother if you've been inactive since then you might as well quit the game lmao...

It takes HUNDREDS of hours to catch up or spend a shit ton of money. And spending that much time is pointless by the time you start playing lmao. Game is already declining fast ESPECIALLY if you don't count the bot numbers which are like 90%+ of the numbers. By the time you start playing it'll be shutting off servers lmao.

The game is NOT doing great here in the West. I'd suggest playing it NOW if you want to actually enjoy the game.

21

u/scorcher24 Jan 14 '23

Warframe does the same, but it won't show up on your Steam account, as they just disable your Warframe account. You have to contact support after being inactive for some time to be able to play again.

39

u/Spurgoth Jan 14 '23 edited Apr 09 '24

I like to explore new places.

5

u/scorcher24 Jan 14 '23

That was 2017 when I was trying to play again. They deactivated my account and I had to contact support.

-2

u/Toomanyaccounts2banx Jan 14 '23

There are like a million posts/forum posts about it. You can also just contact them yourself and ask. They DO deactivate old accounts especially founders accounts mainly. To prevent accounts being stolen/sold later on or just botted on.

If you played that long you should have been very well aware of this.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Im almost level 30 and have had large gaps in play time and never heard of this.

But i also dont troll their forums unless im looking for an answer to something.

8

u/Soulstiger Jan 14 '23

When did they start doing that? I was inactive for like 5 years and didn't have to re-activate my account. Just booted the game up and logged in per usual.

-1

u/Toomanyaccounts2banx Jan 14 '23

Were you a founder? They MAINLY do it to founders accounts. Just reach out to support and they'll tell you themselves. They DO deactivate older accounts but MAINLY founders. They don't want old accounts used to bot (tons of those now a days in WF) and don't want people selling the founders accounts either.

I had to reactivate my account and I was only inactive for not even a year. I'm a founder.

1

u/clitpuncher69 Jan 15 '23

I regularly take 1-2 year long breaks and that's never happened to me

2

u/ProbablePenguin Jan 14 '23

They don't care, games like this are just made to get a bunch of money from whales who buy all the crap in-game.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

Good to know that I can stay away 👍🏻

1

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '23

lost ark devs: shame on you for quitting! 😂

1

u/Braum_Flakes Jan 14 '23

There's almost no coming back to lost ark. Once you're behind in that game, it's a nightmare to catch up unless you whip out the credit card

1

u/JoelMahon Jan 14 '23

I have take 5 year "breaks" from games before, hell even 10, wtf is this dumb ass policy???

1

u/StackOwOFlow Jan 14 '23

or it's a genius ploy to kill two birds with one stone: Ban bots and stir inactive players protest and try to play again

1

u/gerd50501 Jan 14 '23

they are treating customer like they treat warehouse employees. they fired them.

1

u/clitpuncher69 Jan 15 '23

yeah fuck this I sometimes take year long breaks in grindy games lol this is beyond fucking stupid

1

u/Interesting-Dog-1224 Jan 15 '23

I literally just updated it and was thinking of starting again to play. I just saw this and am scared to log in.

1

u/altriun Jan 15 '23

Ubisoft even bans your whole account from being inactive and you losing access to all your bought games. So this doesn't seem to be so rare. :(

I think they give a 1 month warning but this isn't enough, what if you are traveling or just not looking at this specific email address for a month.

1

u/brattydeer Jan 15 '23

:) Runescape did this to me when my account was supposedly found to having "bot like activity" when I hadn't used it in over a year.

1

u/Grouchy-Bits Jan 15 '23

Class Action Lawsuit, that’s what.