Lost Ark or Lost Bots?

 While I only briefly tried out Lost Ark (it wasn't

for me at the time compared to current offerings such as New World) the game has been interesting to follow.  Lost Ark was drawing massive concurrent player numbers on Steam for it's North American playerbase and as a fan of MMORPGs seeing a game regularly cruising at 300,000+ concurrent players is what I want to see for the genre.  Also of interest was how this game, already two years old in other parts of the world where it launched before, would manage when so much about the game was already known.  

 One key aspect of that is how bots would shape the game.  Bots a problem for all online games and Lost Ark, booming in popularity, seemed like it had its fair share of bots.  At time I heard jokes about "50% of players are bots" and some brave enough to say 50% was lowballing it.  Well now we have a pretty good idea that it was probably 50%+ bot population.

 Using Steam DB charts like the unscientific tool they are we can see the sharp drop in player numbers immediately after the massive bot ban wave in early January.  The game is just now recovering to 100,000+ player peaks and right after the ban wave the peak numbers were just a meager 50-60,000.  The game literally cratered from 300,000+ peak concurrent players to less than 100,000 which gives good evidence some 200,000+ players at peak concurrency were bots.  Holy freakin' crap.

 Lost Ark... neigh!  Lost Bots!  Hopefully the Lost Ark faithful, the actual players, are enjoying the freedom from bots.  I doubt all bots are gone but a good chunk appear to be.