Lost Ark players are reporting large numbers of gold spammers and farming bots clogging up the chat and obstructing player progress. These are two slightly different issues, but they both have the same result of hampering players' experiences of the massively popular MMO.
Gold spammers are chat-bots programmed to regularly advertise sales of gold (one of Lost Ark's numerous currencies) in the public chat, making it more difficult for players to communicate effectively and organise group activities. On top of this, there are also reports of large numbers of character bots grinding starter zones. Not only is this stopping players from accessing key enemies in zones, the bots are also contributing to the lengthy server queues players are having to sit through in order to play the game.
A good visualisation of the latter problem was provided in this post by user nitoss in the Lost Ark forums. In the post, you can clearly see berserker bots, all wearing identical kit, queueing up to receive quests at NPCs. Nitoss claims there are "massive" numbers of bots "in almost every channel, every zone of the map, in every continent."
You can see an example of the bots in the image below:
Amazon is aware of the Gold spamming issue and is taking steps to address it. In a status update from the 20th of February, the Lost Ark team said "We are also aware of the increase in gold sellers spamming chat and are running frequent scripts to ban them." They are also working on a "more permanent fix" and in the meantime, suggested that players use Lost Ark's in-built options for chat filtering. "You can create a new chat tab by clicking the "+" icon in the chat box and selecting the chat types you want to include or exclude," the post explains. "This will allow you to hide area chat."
The update doesn't mention the presence of farming bots in the game, however. And these aren't the only problems Lost Ark is currently facing either. Many players are encountering issues surrounding a premium account bonus known as Crystalline Aura, while players in Australia and New Zealand are struggling with latency issues due to the lack of Oceania region servers.
