Lost Ark devs apologize after wrongfully banning players for “speed hacking”

Lost Ark developers have apologized after a handful of players were wrongfully banned for “speed hacking” in a March ban wave. A number of players had said suspensions reversed, and the developers will be shoring up their systems to avoid false positives.

As soon as Lost Ark hit the western market, hackers found a way to tinker with the game one way or another. A popular method was “speed hacking” ⁠— being able to break the limits of how fast your character can move to quickly get from area to area.

Obviously, it gave players an edge over their legitimate counterparts because they could clear content faster. While ban waves have dealt with some of the speed hackers, Amazon Games and Smilegate’s solution has seemingly caught some innocent players in the fold.

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Some players were speed hacking in Lost Ark to progress quickly, but recent ban waves have hit innocent players too.

A number of players with game times spanning in the hundreds have reportedly been caught up in the “speed hacking” bans.

They went to the forums to plead with developers to be unsuspended. After a brief investigation, Community Manager ‘Roxx’ announced a number of accounts were found to be wrongfully banned, and would be reinstated.

“There were a number of accounts suspended in this timeframe as a result of one of our speed hack detection programs,” they said.

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“While almost all of these bans hit real speed hackers, it appears that the program did flag some connection issues as speed hacks, which lead to a small number of players being banned as false positives.

“Involved accounts should now be unsuspended, and if you were caught in this ban wave, we want you to know that there will be no strike against your account, and no repercussions.”

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Those shot down by false positives have been unbanned in Lost Ark.

The ban wave for speed hacking comes just after Amazon’s March 16 statement about spam bots in Lost Ark. The devs revealed they had banned more than 1 million bots, and were putting new systems in place to stem the flow further.

This includes increasing the rewards players earn by progressing through the game, and more gold in late-game content.

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The sentiment from that blog post was echoed by Roxx, who signed off by saying Smilegate and Amazon Games are “working hard to shore up our cheating detection tools to both crack down on bots and prevent situations like this from happening in the future.”