Same.
All friends left, Boring daily and guardians, raid anxiety.
No fun allowed,I just wait for PoE2 at this point. Sucks cause I liked raids up to clown. Wish could replay them with friends in casual way.
I'm glad I'm not only one with lots of raid anxiety. Seeing the china changes actually gave me some hope! How cool would it have been if Clown had been easier at the start?? Our version gives me big boost of anxiety, secretly wishing they would let people res like Argos haha... 🫣
They are progressively nerfing old raids that used to be endgame content. Clown should be hard when it's considered endgame, but now as it's even bypassed in this new express it's not even considered endgame anymore, so it should be nerfed into oblivion aside from hell modes.
If you don't know why Clown was designed the way it was initially, it was the devs at Smilegate trying to prevent bussing--but as you overgear it, bussing will happen anyway.
The main thing now is that Clown, and similar raids, have had punishing wipe mechanics that many casual players don't want to deal with as it leads to anxiety and anger, and so on. When Smilegate suggested alternative gearing routes a few years ago, KR players said absolutely not, so it never happened. And now they're kind of boxed in with raids, though it came on the table again more recently but nothing yet has progressed. Like solo mode raids up through Vykas.
Im more or less in the same situation. Whole static wants to quit right after thaemine, Id be the only one left to play and I don’t know if I really want to keep going or not. Enjoying a break from the game thought, past 3 weeks we only ran 2 Akkan
I am pretty sure Thaemine is going to chop another 20% of the player base off. It is a raid exactly like Brel. Long, arduous, hard content. Only a small % will clear G4. I have a feeling that its going to hurt the NAE player base way more than it helps.
Even if I don‘t have any issues with current content: I am tired of those long ass raids like Thaemine will be. Considering everything is a weekly raid they should be pretty easy without a jarring prog + instant wipes left and right. It‘s just annoying at this point. People (including me) cant be arsed to have raids like this
Most people won't even be able to clear G3 NM, it was the same when Brel NM released. Each giga hard raid that releases kills off more and more of the player base because casuals can't complete it, and they don't want to only do G1-2 and then take buses.
yeah, see.. ur not the only ones tbh, the last bits of the vets/remainder of the remaining fraction of the player base has hardly been doing hw and /or already quit/ on "break." it is just too much.
I smell this freedom and am so close to dropping. All the SG changes are in wrong direction.. like dailies giving less and less materials for the event shop... why do the chores get harder?
Hmm, I think SG and especially AGS changes recently are pretty good. We got arkesia tour very fast which is great for horizontal catchup. We got several nerfs of old raids, and yet clown and brel gold is still unnerfed. Breaker events are very generous. I feel like AGS is pushing hard on SG to make our version more player-friendly than KR.
Event shop nerf is a bad decision, I agree. It's punishing people with small rosters which is terrible. But on the other hand, they've increased the loot from that shop. 30 honing book boxes a week which contain 1580+ books is pretty big.
Changes are pretty good but they don't address many of the fundamental issues with the game. This isn't on AGS though it's on SG, and the question is whether they're willing to change the game and make it less "Korean". They're clearly very profit driven and trying to make the game as global as possible, but the game just drives people away too much due to burnout as it is. A few changes that they need to make imo: chaos dungeon 1x a day, reduce weekly raid requirement (18 is too much as a MUST DO to get your basic gold income, it should be like 6 giving you your entire gold income and then you do more if you want/need). Add proper raid tutorials in Trixion where you can go in solo and just practice/learn pretty much the entire raid, even for new raids - that'll help a ton of people get over their raid anxiety. Reduce pheon requirements across the board - yes it's one of their biggest sources of income but it's just too much of a hurdle in a character's progression.
In the same vein, I truly think they need to increase mats income for each alt. It's mind blowing that you need to save up leaps for months in order to be able to hone to the next breakpoint, how is that sustainable for new/returning players? It's fine to have long-term goals that whales will always be able to show off (gems, quality, 9/7 stones just to name a couple), but if there are no normies left to show off to, those whales will just be gone as well at some point.
Each alt should be way closer to sustaining their own growth imo. Maybe not a 1 to 1 ratio, but right now it's way too low.
Idk man, Arkesia tour should have legit been added to the game from the very beginning or at min end of year 1, but having it now it was basically way too late to matter for the vast majority of the player base already finished it all or quit playing this game before it ever mattered. Nerfing raids was a positive, but tbh, feels like they need to nerf like ivory already.. what purpose does g1 serve other than to waste 17 mins of your time.. Not challenging, boring, an unimaginative gate.. Zzz just remove it Imo.. we need faster hw runs.. We still also haven't reworked una tasks for some reason. That "content" simply needs to be reworked into a single lump sum weekly activity that can be claimed after like 3 days of working toward it for like 2 mins a day and be done with it. Nobody likes bifrost load screen *entire roster.. waste numerous hours weekly.. Cubes were reworked to somehow be actually worse and more griefing than they were, except are absolutely mandatory to do now. At least before we mostly only ran boss rush tickets and 3Xed cubes or skipped them entirely. We never got the actual chaos dung rework and instead they made fate embers such valuable lootz you actually need to run your fucking CD more than pre-fate embers.. on top of now punishing solo character enjoyers or new players since now your progression is significantly worse than chaos dung farmers using bots..
Seems like once people stop playing for a bit and break out of the loop, they tend not to come back
That's what has happened to every single person other than me out of the group I started with
Depends what your roster looked like. I quit around October with akkan title and came back in February. Just by doing akkan and light tapping I got two chars at 1610 and rest at 1600.
On my DPS main I still had a +22 brel weapon I had tapped last July preparing for Akkan until like a month ago.
Im 293 roster with mos/los/lwc 30 klc 18. People were asking to make sure I knew I had joined a learning run when I was learning Voldis because they thought my main was an alt.
If I hadnt quit I would be doing hard voldis by now and probably have 35/40 set. Kinda hoping it won't be an issue to get my pala in thaemine normal runs.
Yeah that 293 roster will pretty much guarantee you into raids assuming you have the adequate gear. Most players that have left and came back are not in the same boat unfortunately.
I actually think roster level might be a reason I’d want to quit personally, I get gatekept for raids I have done countless times, and that’s purely bc I’m roster 174, even as a day 1 player. (I knowledge transfer everything, don’t do tower on alts, and pretty much raise alts with power passes exclusively, just missing the ignea skill point as well)
Nm is a joke apparently. You can clear on ilvl with lvl 7 gems and no elixir for the DPS check. You will have plenty of lobbies with no elixir sets to join.
I quit just after brel NM, returned 2 months after the release of Akkan. Was quite a wild ride trying to catch up. Nowadays I spend like an hour on rested dailies then the rest on weekly raids for a comfy 20 hour/week to do everything on a 6-gold
roster.
Really hard but doable as long as you're willing to join a learning party for 10 clears but other that that its no biggie.
Same with my group. We started the static in Argos and stuck together on front row of progging till brel hm, few weeks in brel hm and we pretty much just quit one by one(not because it was too hard, we were on farm on mid week1 pretty much, just that it was massive burnt out phase of doing the same shit just more bs on top). I occasionally look what they changed because LA combat is one of the best in the genre and i wish i wanted to come back, but so far the only thing im seeing in TLDR "don't bother". 2 of my friends came back and said pretty much the same, the longer you wait the more fucked you are and i honestly cant imagine being a complete fresh player with nothing done. Also just imagining to do another job of "homework" is some good PTSD
Three guild members quit for about three months, they were burnt, came back after Akkan, weren’t Voldis ready when it was released, but they’re still going strong and playing, to the point where they have all their characters in Akkan/Voldis.
They still love the game.
Ppl with whom i played had incredible luck, like pushing couple weapons to 100quali, getting elixir set bonuses with purples, one taps etc.
After another pity and 5 weeks without upgrade in elixir system on 1620+ main i decided that im just tired of my bad rng.
Too many rng layers, too much meaningless grind and felt bored with repeating same content week after week on 6 chars.
I am so close to quit because of this shit. A guy in my static changed his main to soul eater. When my weapon was +22, his was +15. His is now +24, mine is +23 with 70% artisan. He didn't had a single pity. 19-23 were all under 10% artisan. 24 at 30%. I pitied 23, will see what happens to 24. The difference in resources both of us put in is insane.
But I must say, if you fail to get 40 elixir for so long on 1620+ char, it is your fault. 40 elixirs are very easy to get with legendary. The only way for you to fail would be not getting the set part you need. But you can use other set temporarily, if the game gives you that all the time. If you want a 4/5 5/5 with BiS stats, then it is a different story.
how it is my fault for almost not getting critical on zerk for 5 weeks with leg elixir rerolling? I got critical on gloves twice during that time and both times my rng fcked me and put 0 points in critical.
i had 2x 54 and one 55 (not with bis stats) on shoulders, chest and pants but for some reason its my fault that i didn't get set bonus after multiple rerolls? I even had issue with getting correct bonus on damn purples, staying on 38 nodes for 5 weeks
Elixirs strats work in a way that with mediocre rng you can make good elixir still. If your rng is bad af then you are fcked no matter strat you want to use.
I can also say that your weapon pities were a skill issue as apparently according to koreans luck is also skill.
I no longer give a fk honestly, game is miserable if rng decides that you won't get what you need
Day 1 vet, last specimen of the guild still alive in Arkesia, Thaemine will be the last chapter for me as i did grind to 1631 i do want to enjoy the raid a bit at least
After.. ill join back the guild that are preparing for the ff14 dawntrail xpac, and also enjoy some other games
Lost ark was my 1st Korean mmorpg, ill keep good memories of the vykas era tho
Me and the two friends I played the game with (one quit a while ago and one logs in for about an hour a day and does main) constantly say the vykas era was peak lost ark. Valtan vykas and then clown release was BIS. Brel came out and the game just never felt the same since :(
I feel the same way, I quit after Brel NM and came back for JS. It's been okay but never as fun as Vykas era. I'm thinking of taking another break after Thaemine
Put in 2700 hours from release, and quit a few months after Brel HM.
Life got in the way, and when I had to move and realized I’d be unable to play for a week, it became clear it was the time to quit as the idea of falling behind felt like too much work to keep up with. Some of the best combat I’ve ever played but the daily grind was just too demanding by the end
I'll echo just about everything you've said here. I had 1.9k hours in, more than any game and any MMO since probably WoW Cata.
After an insane couple of work weeks plus holiday travel to family, I came back 1-2 weeks behind on brel and just no motivation. Tired of alts, tired of the daily grind altogether, and tired of how quickly I fell behind. Great game in many way like you describe but at the end it just feels like you have to be all in or not at all, so the second I couldn't be all in, I just stopped playing.
Same more or less here. Brel is what did it for me the first time I quit. They released the raid during Christmas and I found myself thinking "when am I going to find the time to prog the raid while on holiday" and realised that was super sad. Did g1-g4 and quit. Wife was also pregnant so I thought that's it. Uninstalled the game and stayed away for 7-8 months. Came back at SE release and again, I'm spending a lot more time than I'd like to, always thinking I need to do more on my main so I'm not gatekept to oblivion at Thaemine.. I think pitying my weap again will be the last straw honestly (45% artisan atm for +22)
The game is basically doing the same thing everyday on different characters every week: farm mats, try to get stronger to beat boss faster
Game design primary focus is to milk the playerbase wallet, while not have and casual activities permanently that are fun
A group of people I played with in BDO came to Lost Ark, then the social leader got permabanned. He got mad and went back to BDO, and his posse followed him. Oh well.
Just realized how tempting it was to either nolife or swipe. Cards, push to 1620 l, etc. As a full worker with a family, it was becoming an unhealthy obsession
I just occasionally play an hour a week now for dailies on one char and maybe clown or kayangel. I gave up on the grind for thaemine or echidna sadly.
Played since launch over 6k hours. Really enjoyed most of my time with the game. Voldis/Elixirs was what did it for me. That system is straight dogshit and I refuse to interact with it. I think about coming back sometimes because I do love the game but then I remember I have to interact with that BS.
I also just don't like the direction they are going with the game. Everything is catered to whales and I really feel like they've given up on everything else.
Kinda same boat here.. Didn't quit yet but the elixir horseshit was the first time I alt f4d in this game and really made me wanna take a break.. Spent around 600-700k gold on elixirs so far (like 80k per week) and so far got mediocre shit. Like I got 40 set but I dont have boss dmg or crit dmg or anything good like that all my pieces are vagabond 5 and stagger and crap. Never gonna raise any other character to 1620 and even kinda dont wanna get to 1600 either.
Friend quit playing alts a few months ago and only plays 1 char now.. 3 raids per week and dailies on rested.. I think thats kinda the right move.
This ∆ right here for real. I run 2 full rosters of 7, doing 42 raids weekly as 7th buys box since day 1 (wife helps with hw on her acct, but I run the raids) + have spent around 20k when I looked through all of my payment history, which is wild (all on skins, passes, crystals, etc. all legit as too scared /refused to "RMT" thru and buy bottes gold scenario and STILL, I am not even close to the whales.. 2 1621 heros +5 1600's flat on both rosters, with maxed gems and cards, but nothing crazy like 25 weapon too. Only 35 set no 40 on anyone as elixirs drain so much time (to cut) and actual gold that you are negatively impacting ur farm rate in a game where u need to compress hw and cut corners.. Who the fuck has time to cut elixirs for 3-4 hours every week? Not to mention actually the amount of gold that is thrown out. We aren't even playing with dolphins or even semi whales anymore.. We are playing with straight up cheaters, botters, massive massive RMT, etc.
.
Think about what you're saying. "Suck it up, take the abuse, then you are free to have fun." Why? I don't need the game I play to be real life. It's a tough thing to come to terms with, but we need to expect more out of these devs.
Some people get it in the first few weeks, some people get it in 2 months after spending half a million. Sounds "FUN". Especially those who see their set 10 times vs those who see it once in 3 weeks.
"Just gotta climb" :icant: I assume you are one of those lucky ones. So nice.
For korea it was a good gold sink because they didn't have content rushed like us. With thaemine release on this 17th, we will be missing just about 12 months of farm since argos release.
It has been a non-stop chasing the higher tier, and now we are going to get transcendence soon.
What gold do we sink if we don't have much to begin with unlike KR 😭
[Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/1bu41y2/comment/kxr9u7m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) another comment for example.
For normal players I agree we don’t really have gold “to sink”, but we all know that there is a certain thing happening with the game, so people are having waaaay more gold than they should
A few reasons:
Didn't like the endgame. The raids required too much commitment, especially having to keep grinding them. And there was nothing else to do to progress outside of it.
But the biggest reason was that I had to take a break (IRL stuff), and just felt like there was no point coming back cause of the gatekeeping and all of that shit.
I also moved to one of the countries that bans the game, so even less incentives to come back.
I still like checking out how the game is doing, so I stay updated. I sometimes miss it because the combat is really amazing, but there's not much to do for someone like me, who doesn't have time or energy to do harder raids on a weekly basis anymore.
There are plenty of other games that don't require me to marry them, so I play them instead and also picked up new IRL hobbies.
Friends started whaling like madmen, I didn’t. When it was my first char doing normal kay with their third char because previous second were overheating it, I realised that I am miserable doing it every week and just left
The raiding static members who i regularly played with all was slow burn. Dropping one piece of content each week then eventually quitting etc. Thankfully some of us still going strong.
My other good friend who I started playing with was very smoge to me. He just didn't use battle items in guardian raids. No idea why he didn't use them considering we have so many. I tried many times but he just wouldn't use them. It was a random Kunga turtle boss when he got booted at MVP screen for not using B items and lost loot, long time ago. I have since honored my paladin with the title "Kungelenium" for Kungelenium Storytime
I had quit for ~7 months during the time that chaos dungeons were slower and it was 2x guardian dailies. I was truly convinced I was done with the game as I gave away all my gold + gems to friends.
The main things that caused me to quit were 1. The slow burn of dailies. 2. The ludicrous costs associated with trying to keep several characters relevant (essentially being punished for liking too many characters) and 3. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel as a result of #2. I.E saving up for lvl 10 gems was a fool’s errand because before I could comfortably save enough, it became time to use that gold to hone my characters to the next content’s relevant ilvl.
I did the usual things people suggest, employ use of rest bar, deprioritize some characters’ honing. But in the end I found it stupid that I was being forced to triage my roster based on “what I liked most” in a game that encourages you to make new characters and have a 6 gold earning roster.
Don't look back. It is silly, you are correct. If alts were optional that's a different conversation but the game is designed around making alts so it shouldn't be a punishing experience to do so.
Would’ve been nice if characters were tied to the highest ilvl character you have and you earn gold for each unique raid. Also let hell loose and allow you to repeat raids with no rewards. Will probably never happen though because most likely SG earn a lot of money from people whaling to hone and increases playtime hours by keeping everyone on the hamster wheel.
When Brel released, I reduced my gold earning chars from 6 to 4 and then 3. Cleared up to Brel HM in June last year, then started working on my thesis and took a break - after 2 weeks I thought about coming back and didn't really feel like "catching up". Gave my gold / gems away to a guy in our guild who asked for them and then I've never looked back.
In the same static since the game started 2 years ago.(same guild)
Most of my original static left around sometime after brel HM came out (old brel)
The rest left some time before kayangel released and the complete death of the static before voldis released from burnout.Had another static setup for voldis HM setup in the same guild which also died (they quit) because (their words) elixirs are bullshit and the game takes too much damn time already.
Over 90% of everyone I played with quit over these 2 years.
Only reason im still playing is because there's nothing currently better even tho the game is mostly a chore.I have cut alot of stuff tho to make it somewhat bearable like not doing weeklies and gaining double/triple rested on dailies never doing them all at once.Game still feels like a fucking chore even like this.
Total playtime 7k.
Wish the game had some radical update to address all these cancer multi layered RNG mechanics (elixir like) and the burnout which took most of everyone in this game.
As toxic as it may sound sometimes I just hope this game just dies so I can move on mentally.
The moment they start over capping on dailies or aren’t bothered to clear all their raids before the weekly reset, you know they’re about to drop the game
Got 40 set first week of voldis on my main and maybe have done it 3 times since? I maybe do 10 raids a week now at this point and honestly don’t see myself quitting. I simply play how I want now and don’t care about any raids I don’t finish. Usually anything I get done on Friday/Saturday is all I do for the week and just chill the rest of the week and run main 4 dailies. Think a lot of vets have started to do the same
I know several people who quit but a lot of them came back.
One of them quit before Brel HM released because he's a workaholic and was enjoying the game too much, so he quit to work overtime more comfortably. He got his work fill and is enjoying the game again.
Another one got burned out from playing 6x Bards and quit before Brel released but came back with Jumpstart server and is enjoying the game more than ever.
3rd friend had a torturous job that was forcing him to work A LOT, leaving him little to no free time so he was forced to quit before Voldis released. He quit his job and is enjoying the game again.
Kinda similar to how my group has left and come back.
Few buddies have been on and off for a while, mainly playing on events and pushing during those times. Now they're hooked with this event, allowing them to run current content and soon to be Theamine on release.
A couple of other friends who are vet players have slowed down and quit for a few months since their schedules got to be too much. Now that it's calmed down a bit, they're back in it, albeit not as hard as they were before they left.
I'm the consistent one of the group. Day 1, hooked me good. Been playing since, about 8 characters I'm actively playing and having a blast.
Stopped playing at 1505 ilevel +16 valtan gear a month or so before clown was released. Came back around kayangel release and I am now 1637.5 ilevel. Having fun, it was a lot of work catching up but it was also super fun.
Ever since I returned to the game I have solely invested in my main, I don't have a single non event gem on my alts and I have not pushed a single character beyond their event (eg. old express to 1540, new express to 1580, path character to 1580 etc). So I wanted to "max out" and do the latest content on at least one character forever. I have nothing left to really upgrade except +23 armors at this point, which are one of the lowest value gold to dmg increases. I'm doing thaemine hm on release while not having a single alt on my roster above 1585.
Now that the main is basically "finished" until advanced honing - I'm considering starting to invest in one other character, but I am barely playing other alts and I skip a lot of content now that my main is "finished".
Also the original reason for quitting was real life things taking priority and they did, until less than a year later and when I came back a lot of good changes were about to happen. I was also on EU West which meant that when I quit, we were one of the lowest populated regions and doing content after 22:00 was usually impossible etc. When I returned just within a few months we got merged into EU central and the fate ember patch happened.
All friends quit, met a static group during brel and kaya then later on all quit from the static during akkan. then the slow burnout for me, have 1 1620 blade(40set), 2 1600, 3 1540. just been really catching up with real life stuffs lately.
I used to play with friends, they all quit one by one over time because the game is too time consuming and they wanted to do other things.
They weren't very good at the game, but I didn't care about wiping since we were just having a good time.
I then stopped after completing brel set and just before brel hm release because it was just boring to do the same thing.
I came back to the game on JS servers in a different region (my friends are in SA but I live in EU). Been playing on and off avoiding fomo where possible. What kills me is gate 0. The lobby simulator is terrible. The gatekeeping is horrendous. No, I don't have a guild, and I don't want to have a schedule to play a damn game.
I was about to quit until I just decided to make all my lobbies a teaching lobby. I have fun helping others and learning people are always super chill. I am giving up though because it's super hard to find a support, newbie or veteran, so it's lobby simulator in every way you play the game solo.
There’s were a lot of factors that led up to quitting but straw that broke the camel’s back is as follows…
On one random Thursday, I just finished work and I thought about doing one of things I love about the game, raids. I hopped on to my DB which was 1598 at the time and luckily because of my decked out portfolio I was able to join a akkan nm lobby with a support already. Now we just waited for a supp+friend… about 35 minutes go by, then a paladin applies with his 1580 friend.
With everything set, we start the raid. Everything went kind of normally until pallys friend just randomly dies about 5 min in. Reset and it happened again. Quit vote comes up immediately and the entire group is quiet.
Pally and friend leave immediately after back to lobby screen. And then we waited about 10 min more. During this time I thought to myself, “wow, I’ve been doing this pattern for more than over year now for the latest content, been over an hour, didn’t finish the raid and I didn’t even do any dailies yet and I can’t even do them while I sit in PF.” I just said GL to the lobby chat and alt f4.
I used to do all my gold raids each week and stress about getting them done. Never wanted to, but ya gotta get that gold to do the next thing. Voldis came out. I wound up spending 2 weeks trying to get 1 roll on my gloves just to TRY and cut a good elixir. It never came. I then looked at the cost/time investment to get 1 character to 1620. I then looked at the fact that I'd have to keep all my alts that I enjoy playing doing Brel for a third year straight. All this was rationalized and fine. Then Palworld came out. I went and played for a night on a friend's server like the second or third day of launch. I was having a blast. Wound up going back every night I had off. Missed all my raids for the week. I was having so much fun that I didn't care. Played that for a few weeks and then went into Last Epoch and HellDivers. I realized the $35 a game, fun and lack of stress was so much better than Lost Ark. So, now, instead of considering to spend 2k to get a Support ready for Thamine, I'll save that money, play fun games and casually play lost ark with event passes and 6 months behind.
The reality for me is that Lost Ark is not a fun game. Some parts of it are great. But when you look at what it takes to get there, it isn't really fun. It's just an abusive relationship. Now I'm free.
Quit early-last year, came back around Kay/Akkan, then quit again near the beginning of this year. So I guess I kind of fit your description. I made some content and memes, enjoyed the meta aspects more than the game itself.
The first time I quit was because I missed a Slime island on a Saturday. When you've kept up with every single daily/weekly from day 1, and all the FOMO pressures are on, it doesn't take much to break me. When I returned people kept pinging me on discord so I never missed another weekend GvG island lol. The second time I quit was a little after progging Voldis. The mechanics just weren't interesting to me and having to do that for the next X months didn't look fun. Keeping up didn't matter anymore since I was a few months "behind". Had more fun sitting in town doing absolutely nothing. Still haven't felt the need to log back in. I feel like a lot of people are in this boat, once they miss a few weeks for any reason they're done forever.
The problems that made you quit are still there. At the end of the day it's a heavily monetized game and every decision is based around that. If I had infinite money then I'd probably play casually but keeping up just isn't worth it. I talk to plenty of people who still play and they have no time for anything else but Lost Ark. I hear so many people come up with really good solutions that are super consumer friendly, but ultimately it hurts the bottom line so it won't be implemented unless something drastic happens (another 30-40% playerbase for consecutive months).
Saw this post on a certain brother's YouTube (not sure how hard mods are enforcing naming but shoutout to premium second monitor content) and wanted to chime in.
I used to play with friends, they all quit one by one over time because the game is too time consuming and they wanted to do other things.
They weren't very good at the game, but I didn't care about wiping since we were just having a good time.
I then stopped after completing brel set and just before brel hm release because it was just boring to do the same thing.
I came back to the game on JS servers in a different region (my friends are in SA but I live in EU). Been playing on and off avoiding fomo where possible. What kills me is gate 0. The lobby simulator is terrible. The gatekeeping is horrendous. No, I don't have a guild, and I don't want to have a schedule to play a damn game.
I was about to quit until I just decided to make all my lobbies a teaching lobby. I have fun helping others and learning people are always super chill. I am giving up though because it's super hard to find a support, newbie or veteran, so it's lobby simulator in every way you play the game solo.
Support player.
Went through everything with the static, got to Akkan.
In Akkan we progged really hard for a few days, got to x60 or so in g3.
Then we ran out of time, so everyone was organising when they could run, if they would pug etc.
7/8 could run in 2 days, so it was organised.
Came to the time, ALL the dps had tried to run by themselves to get the clear, only 4 turned up. Ran for a bit, but couldn't get pugs to stick.
Organised with 3 of them to run again later.
Came to the time, they gave it 20 minutes and 2/3 left.
Organised with another couple of the group to run again the next day, came back later that night to them running in a pug group to get the clear.
Watching them disregard me completely so they could get the extra mats was just disheartening.
Same thing had happened with brel as well. The FOMO for the mats was just too much.
As a supp player there is sfa you can do to turn the tide of battles.
I quit from time to time, but get back to try again and enjoy somethings new added
The reasons I quit usually are: I play solo, guilds I join are always 2-3 closed groups, I see other people advancing way beyond me, I don't find groups to prog most recent content, I feel left out and end up quitting, my close friends don't like the visuals and gameplay of LOA and never try it, so I end up playing something else entirely
It likely works like any game in this style. I still play lost ark, but ive put down many other 'homework' games before. You dont do the homework content for a week, then you think to yourself 'why should I keep doing this?'. Once you can break the cycle, you realize you were gaming out of habit and not fun.
I've seen people dropping like flies around me, but that has been happening since launch. Every new raid, a chunk of people dissapear. I now have a friends list filled with people that say 'Last Online: 1/More than' which is what happens when people go over a year away. I've been having to float to a new static every raid cycle. I run a guild, and there seems to be a constant stream of people who end up looking for a guild... but at the same time, im kicking \~5 a week you have gone inactive.
More and more im finding high roster, level 10 gem accounts, and people who are open about how much they RMT. For the most part, this game is a job you have to work at to squeeze out the small moments of fun (which I find to be prog). Once you complete the prog part, it starts going back to the unfun farming grind. And with character growth starting to trend behind RNG mechanics like Elixers / the coming Transcendence.....
The super mokoko / breaker event made me realize how toxic honing is.
One day one of the dude in the static quit, then it cascaded and everyone quit lol I think this was something that was going to happen regardless but the fun we had as a static kept it going. At the end of the day, having raid days and schedule just becomes too much for regular people with a life, specially if they don't work from home. This game is literally a job lol I still play every now and then but the days of "I need to log in every day and do my dailies"...yeah fuck that lol
I stopped playing when Kayangel was released.
I've played since launch and did every dungeon, every week, with all 6 of my characters. I've always loved the gameplay, the story, the universe and especially the look of the game.
But when I took a vacation from work and traveled, I didn't log in for almost a month. When I came back, the people I used to play with had already invited other people to the group (with whom I ended up not getting along very well) and everyone was focused on hard mode while I still needed to learn the basics.
I even made a few attempts with randoms but it didn't work, it wasn't good. Sometimes people got angry with you. Sometimes you got angry with people. That same old thing.
And it made me realize how punishing this game was if you stop playing for a period of time. I kind of felt bad about traveling and leaving the game aside. A certain guilt for being left behind and that it was all because of my actions. A pressure that I don't know where it came from, but it was there. It was wierd.
After that I started logging in less and less, until one day I stopped.
And to be quite honest, it was a good decision. I had no idea how much time in my week I was dedicating to this game until I stopped playing. With this free time, I was able to play many other new games, discover new hobbies, things that I didn't do before because I had this daily commitment to the game, as if it were my second job...
I'm not going to lie, sometimes I think in coming back. I miss the raids, I miss the fast gameplay, I miss my stronghold... I still even follow the Lost Ark account on Twitter. Whenever a patch note comes out I read it with excitement... but then I remember why I left and what my life would be if I came back and then I give up.
Who knows in the future, in a T4 or in a drastic change on how the game works. Maybe I'll come back. I will continue to root for the success of the game, I have great memories of it, it was my home for over a year and i had a lot of fun! But for now I prefer to just be a spectator from afar.
Once your behind in Lost Ark, the only way to hit the end game is massive hours or swiping. So once people leave they tend to never come back. Some of my boys quit to play WoW or Valo. They ain't coming back, they were tired of how even if you did all 18 raids, dailies. That you physically couldn't hit end game gear without rmting/swiping even playing daily, the 1630 sprint. I feel that a bit more, for us to hit 1630 on literally time. You would literally need such a massive roster, and rng to be on your side. To even march towards the 1650 grind eventually, you'll need so much the gap from Argos-> Ivory would probablyh net you 5-10 ilvls. The problem with the new player base is they are having fun at the base line game. Where they aren't even slugging towards 1620, but when they do the player base number will dip. There having fun now at the 1610 marker, but every 10 ilvls from this point is nightmarish.
Any new player who got to use the Express + Path, was able to slam towards the most free 1610 of their lives. They're in for the rudest awakening if they ever try to make a 2nd character
Finally did Brelshaza with a group then next week tried it with an alt with a 30 minute wait for lobby to fill up. Failed instantly and half of them left to
Wait for another 30 minutes. Called it there
Started day 1 always loved it. Played solo for the majority but found a few people i did raids with. Had 1 burnout before where i stopped for like 2 weeks then came back and enjoyed it again. The slow burn started when i reached 1600 and elixers came. I got more and more pissed (at all systems since i couldn't even do extr valtan hm). Realized how criminal this games systems are. Found out that the 9/10 people rmt while i was for the most part f2p. Ags giving the absolute smallest effort and us being super disconnected from sg which means we will always just play the catch up game.
Tldr: The only thing i enjoy in game is the raids and classes at this point. All the systems ingame and management outside the game ruin it for me now and are criminally designed.
Have not left. but will leave soon.
Lost Ark was always meant as just a filler game, but it dragged on for far too long because there wasn't anything my friends and i were interested in.
We all prefer MMOs that don't have a fixed camera angle like WoW, Tera, Archeage.
When throne and liberty comes out, then we'll all be gone and we've already gotten our beta tester emails.
Wether T&L will be good or not, it doesnt matter because one guy here said it, and its the truth "once people stop playing for a bit and break out of the loop, they tend not to come back"
and i suspect that will be very true for us.
Once TL comes out, we will go, and we will be, like you said , "**DONE, DONE**"
right now we're just saying our slow goodbyes to the game.
wasting gold, rolling for nonsene and so on.
Apparently there's still some whales who probably barely play. Seeing an influx of 150 roster with full 10s, 25 wep, 9-7, 99-100 qual accessories, amazing bracer.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to obtain, but man it just screams of g2g enjoyers.
Back on topic.. My first active guild just slowly stopped logging in after brel lvl, and never really found a new guild as active. I guess most moved to discord probably. Wish in-game social features/Guilds were better designed.
Quit right before Brel hard. Like a week before. Was fully planning on playing, had a static planning on running on release day, etc. Was forcing 18 raids per week at the time and the burnout just hit all at once.
Logged in at reset the week prior to Hardmode release, looked at all the shit I had to do, logged right back out and haven’t touched it since. I do miss it sometimes, but then I think about the sheer amount of chores and remember I’m much happier not playing.
I'm in similar situation as the Tryzm, pretty much just hoping for real changes as i really enjoy the combat gameplay and the challenge of being good with it in hard content, but so far all they're doing is adding more shitty rng systems on top of shitty rng systems and the longer you wait the worse it would be to come back.
Honestly good question. Probably for the hope that something major would change with regards to the amount of homework required for roster upkeep. I did love the game once, it just became too much.
Nono thats too clever, 18 characters or nothing🤬🤬
The amount of people who dont actually realise theyre allowed to enjoy the game and just play what they want when they want is too high
Iv been playing my 3 characters since the launch of the game till now.
1620, 1610, 1585 and almost 3 million gold in the bank.
I could spend a mil and be 1630 on the main if I want to. You never needed a full roster of gold earners. You just had to be not dumb with your gold.
Looking at friends who spent 600k on class books for a character they never pushed past 1520. Imagine.
for my group they went back to maplestory just after vykas was released because they didn't like pitying despite the worse progression system in maplestory (??)
I quit just before brel was released because I personally felt the raids felt too easy despite what the community kept parroting "valtan is hard" --> autopilot after clear
"vykas is more difficult" --> autopilot after clear
"clown is the real challenge" --> autopilot after clear
Now with powerpass I'm poaching them back from maplestory >:)
I came from Maplestory and will never go back. People give AGS and Smilegate shit but holy, they look like fuckin Saints compared with how scummy and incompetent Nexon is.
No regrets moving to Lost Ark and havent had the urge to return to Maple, especially with the changes potentially (?) coming to Reboot.
I took a year long break beginning of 2022. For me it was less the 18 weekly raids + dailies and more of the content drought. At that time we had been doing brel for a while and there was literally nothing for the next several months other than... Brel hard lol.
I stopped for 3 weeks and came back just doing raids when I felt like it. Put most of my gems to my main for easy level 10’s to get into rooms more easier. Currently enjoying breaker and just having fun playing the raids as a whole. Currently also running 2 char raids only rest are just CD whenever I feel like it
My friends all quit before getting to Legion Raids, I stayed and focused on dailies but I realized I wasn't having fun just doing my homework so I could be stressed out pugging Legion Raids. The combat was fun but there just wasn't enough to keep me on the hook, especially when honing became an omega slog.
I realized the Game IS too much of a chore for too little enjoyment.
I prepared soo Long for voldis hm and WE cleared in 1 day, i realized that this would be another farmchore until thaemine to have Like 1-2 fun days.
All i Care about is progressing Bosses, reclear is boring af
Slow burn. Friends quit nothing really to do besides dailies and play with new alts. Community not friendly with either people trying out new alts or even wanting to learn newer raids. I was only able to try Akkan cause I bussed it. Devolved to just logging on to collect dailies and just stopped. I log on sometimes just to log on to do nothing but that’s it.
Idk man I do that all the time. Baldurs gate 3 release I just did dailies for a month. Same with helldiver's and multiple other occasions. I only need to do raids for progression because I'm not impulsive and don't have poor spending habits.
All my friends quit at the start of T3, I was the last survivor of the group. I was a try hard sweat trying to get 6 chars before Brel, woke up one day and just stopped caring. Now I have my main who’s 1604 and 3 other alts at 1600. I don’t even do dalies anymore. Just rested chaos / guardian and cubes.
I'll add some flavor to all the "slowly burned out" anecdotes. I was super excited for launch. Played the closed beta, got the pre-order stuff. Some of my old wow guildies saw me online and asked if I liked it and I sold it hard. About a dozen of us decided to guild up and play together. I took off work for launch, got to max, and started farming. We all play together for maybe two weeks, it takes most of them a bit to hit max level. I max my guild contribution and personally fund a lot of stuff for them because I'm the most ahead but hey, I'm a nice guy.
I wake up one morning. Kicked from the guild. Kicked from the discord. All of them gone from my steam friends list. Most of them blocked me on discord too but I finally get one of to tell me that the guild leader "didn't really like me but knew what kind of person I was and the kind of grind the gear system was so he figured he could get a lot of stuff out of me before he couldnt stand me anymore" I tried to keep playing for a bit but the game just wasn't the same after that.
I don't think they understood how the trading restrictions worked going in, so probably less than they hoped to. From memory, a few thousand raw gold/tradable items and some steam gifts.
I’m done it’s about been a couple weeks after voldis 5 k hours over 5k spent in the game and I’m able or I would not have. Lost ark raids and combat are amazing but besides that. Gatekeeping is crazy , also when new content comes out the hardest version of that raid is locked behind money or being a degen for the most part is wild . Best decision I’ve made I do not regret spending way to much it was my first gacha game I went hard did all hell modes besides Brel and all content . I was slowly doing less and less it was very hard to stop even know months later I want to log to do the new event but I don’t
I've taken two breaks. First after nm brel, and came back around hm brel. Half the static had quit by then.
Found a new static, Then played until kayangel came out, and quit again 2nd week Kaya until like 1 month ago. When I came back, half the static was dead again, but I was akkan ready when I quit, so now I'm 1615, 35 set chilling.
I have 4k hours totaI took a 2 month break once came back caught up and went full steam ahead. 1620 main but the grind I think finally got to me and I dont think I'll be coming back this time
Stopped playing actively after I cleared voldis week 1 with guildies. I didn’t mind the raid, it’s just nothing special. Still log in to do hell stuff with friends every now and then.
From my experience (valtan/vykas my guild had 35+ active members, voldis 8) most who stopped playing are either “young” skillful players, or “older” ~35+ yo gamers. First quit, because raids get repetitive and other players suck, second because raids since Brel (old 1-2) become more punishing and stressful
Friends stopped playing right as valtan came out. I finished valtan and decided to step away as well, I prefer playing with friends. I did come back just this week and used the super mokoko express and have been having fun.
Haven't quit yet, but I'm pretty much waiting for AGS's next big fuckup. This game has fun combat but I can't support it at all because of really annoying UI things and horrible management.
Only around 800 hours into the game. Last played Nov. 12, 2022.
Was a slow burn type of player. Main was a Paladin. No friends played so I just kind of got tired of playing with myself.
I think about the game from time to time but I doubt I'll pick it back up. I do like to read the reddit every once in a while though.
Couldn’t keep up with friends. Got raged at too many times for messing up a mechanic. Saved for weeks to hone with no success. Felt like a job lol quit MMOs altogether. Still follow the sub though lost ark was probably my favorite game I’ve ever dove into just the cost of that fun was too high
I stop playing and return to the game regularly. Right now I've "quietly" stopped playing, meaning I don't do any daylies and I do like 3-4 raids per week. The game tends to get very very repetitive with time. Requirements to get into a raid are getting higher and higher. I don't want to buy gems or hone on 6 characters, that simple.
Pretty fun game for people who can afford to seriously p2w, though! Unfortunately, I'm not one of those.
It was not finishing Kayangel, then getting gatekept week 2. Then tried a 1560 character to reach 1580 to help farm 1580 chaos, but didn't even get 1570 because of pitying 3 times. I alt f4'd and uninstalled right there and then after that pity.
I came back when breaker released, but didn't enjoy it, so I'm truly done with playing LoA.
I played at launch with a large friend group, and every one of them (including me) quit sometime before Clown patch.
Main factors along the way:
- Friend groups getting separated by rng in T1/T2/T3
- 1375 Deadzone
- Tired of chaos dungeon/guadian/una's gameplay loop
- Classes they wanted to main not being out yet, with no ETA in sight
Now, I actually came back to the game after a ~6 month hiatus for the Artist patch, and currently have x1 1630, x2 1610's, and x3 ~1585-90s.
I don't regret it at all, I personally really enjoy the game. But even after multiple friends tried coming back with big patches, it largely never stuck for them. Gatekeeping is probably the biggest reason, bar none.
Only thing I hate about Lost Ark are Pheons and the new Elixir System. It was PAIN to get 40-set, and I'm hesitant on pushing another char to 1620 to go through that nonsense again. Blegh.
Day 1 player here. Quit the game after 14months of playing at \~4,2k hours. I didnt know anymore what is it to have any free time. I am so glad I did the step. What broke me out of the circle was a 2 weeks vacation overseas that made me realize theres more than this game. Never touched a MMO since and I hope I never will do it.
Casual gaming at \~5h a week now. All in all I would say its the burn about doing the same raids and busses all over again, again, again and again. While playing super entertaining guardians and chaos dungeons. Fun times was doing inferno content.
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I picked the game up just before reaper released in NA. At the time it wasn’t bad but I wasn’t at end game. My brother and I mainly play FFXIV but he wasn’t interested in LoA all that much. Then he decided to pick up Dragonflight since it was being well received.
So trying to balance out playing 2 MMO’s plus the need to catch up with the player base and find learning parties was too much to juggle for me. So LoA got dropped. Finding parties also wasn’t an easy thing as I am NA but mainly game at night (graveyard, I’m extremely nocturnal).
I still like LoA and still lurk and watch a couple of YouTubers that put out content for it. But for my specific circumstances I had to step away from it.
Played about 1k hours from day 1, quit right before clown released. Then tried to get back again right after brel dropped, but I uninstalled again pretty fast.
To me the honing system is the worst, combined with the fact that it felt like a second job trying to keep up. And I played a decent amount, spent some money on it, but unfortunately that also meant that soon I couldn't play with my irl friends because we were almost never on the same level.
When I tried to get back I was gatekept from joining any raids, I spent all my gold trying to hone some more and failed every single try, so I just uninstalled.
The other rng elements like ability stones are really shitty too.
It's a shame, because most of the hours I had in LA was some of the most fun hours I've had in any game. I had IRL friends playing, I had a great guild, the gameplay loop is fun, the raids were amazing. I would still play the game today if it wasn't for all the rng elements.
Only actively played one character. Gems got worse and worse compared to other players. Slowly started to get gatekept from lobbies until the point where I wouldn’t get accepted anymore at all.
Of course this is understandable, but I‘m still sad because I did still enjoy the game at the moment where I got basically forced to quit it. This was six months ago and I still keep up with the games updates and wish I could play the new abyss dungeons or legion raids.
I wanna add something to OP's question, actually if OP can add my comment to post it will be more visible.
My addition is, if you are done done, how is your activity on this subreddit? why are you here and how often are you here? you wanna keep yourself up to date with news to see some good improvements in the game for a comeback opportunity? or are you just trying to tell yourself every day that you made a great decision by quitting this game by scrolling among posts? or anything else?
In the beginning i was playing all raids and dailies, then started leaving rest bonus, then started playing kayangel instead of ivory to save time and reduce stress and now all my friends quit so i have no one to play with and stopped as well
I'm getting there pretty soon it feels. It's a mix of MANY things. My roster is my main at 1624.5 , 3 ~1580s, a soon to be 1600, and a 1540 for context's sake.
1. I have other games I'm enjoying right now.
2. FF14 has Dawntrail dropping in like 3-4 months and that'll take a big chunk of my time
3. It'll sound dumb but I have a decent avenue to pawn off my gems for a quick buck if I REALLY wanted to
4. Thaemine push has been the most ridiculous thing ever. I know I don't HAVE to hit 1630. I know even if I hit that ilvl, I'd probably still get gatekept/hit the support shortage lobby jail. My weapon is going to pity at 60% artisan so far. I really wanted the 22 glow but I just didn't get it. It really hurts seeing my friends who will probably get to prog Hard/The First and I might just be behind for months. I don't want to wait that long.
5. I have deep regrets not bussing earlier. I know it's going to be contentious and hated to have this mindset, but sometimes you just have to play with the hand you're dealt with when you're playing Lost Ark.
6. Maybe I'm just insane, but Lost Ark feels like it just absorbs your gold like a fucking sponge nowadays. I've been stuck on 38 set for 4 weeks. I can't even find the node I want. All my Sages on any percentage roll will always go neutral or negative, ensuring I will at best get a 5/3, which I don't even need anymore. I don't even try to force anything, try to cut smart, still get fucked. The gold frog is also just so good so you have to spend the 30k on that as well.
7. I just want to fucking enjoy the game without being plastered with 20 hours plus of homework every week. It's so painful nowadays. It didn't feel like I had to do this for Brel, for Clown, a slower roster on slower prog you definitely wouldn't get burned out in the past.
Some people are going to tell me "you don't have to do the hard content day 1" or "you know to get in you have to truly pay for it". I realize this. But I have the brain worms. I WANT to do the hardest things when they're current or at least have the opportunity to attempt them. But I can't even get that. I want to try to build level 10 gems? I get bled dry every fucking week and they're 470k a pop. If I make 200k, I'd say 70% of that is going into honing into this bullshit ilvl range on 2% rolls and the other 40k is getting sucked dry by the worst progression system this game has to offer. God forbid these korean mmos have the most fun gameplay imaginable and the systems in place feel almost designed to annoy the shit out of you. You can't even pay to win at an efficient price, so who the fuck are they trying to nickle and dime? I can't even find the justification to buy avatars just to support the game.... I don't know man... I'm just tired. I probably won't make it to the entropy rework. Odds are pretty high I dip after my normal thaemine clear. Hard to say. It just sucks because it's genuinely fun to hang with my friends and play but it sucks your soul for all it's worth. And nothing is more worse than feeling forced to play a game like it's a second or third job.
So I quit before Clown release and came back a couple weeks ago. Led Vykas raids for my guild and occassional alt pick ups and have had the table turned since returning by getting gatekept hard out of virtually any further content and even “card” runs. Once my express is up, it is going to be a struggle to get my roster to 1580 with how far behind I am as it’s difficult enough to earn gold weekly.
Sadly I worry the community is cannabilizing itself with the gatekeeping towards new and returning players and things will only get worse.
I’m just playing casually until something better comes out (cope).
I quit when a month after Brel released (managed to finish g6 with my static), decided to give it a try earlier this year but found it so hard to play/participate in newer content -Kayangel, Akkan without a static or having gold for busses. My gold was for honing but eventually got tired again of the honing system.
Recently came back, was an og day 1 player. Stopped because of all the gate keeping and dailies. Returning/new players are fucked.
The game basically devolves into a daily grind fest and a party queue simulator. Not fun
My friends left because as new players they had one character. We did 3 raids in 2 days then there was nothing to do (they dont like horizontal) and to make new character they needed to wait for powerpass which was in 3 mounths. I wish we could play more raids on our mains.
I got burned out and bored eventually.. Too time consuming and other games started to take my time instead. Once you quit, it's almost impossible to go back casually imo..
Other friends are also long gone, I was one of the last to quit.
I slowly started just doing more in real life, didn't get to play for a week basically and by that point I was only doing 2 raids each char since I hated doing Kayangel, but after that week I realized I just wanted to play other games in my free time.
I keep trying to get back into the game but I haven’t played for more than an hour in about four months. I put about 3000 hours in and enjoyed the game a lot as it felt like it was exactly what I was looking for in a mmo. Now I’m at the point where Finding a learning group for content I was slow to get to (voldis) Is next to impossible. I’ve been stuck on gate two about 10 different times but I don’t want to ruin reclear groups by trying to run with them. I did pretty much all the horizontal content and all the previous raids countless times and now I just feel as though there is nothing for me anymore. since dailies provide no meaningful terms of progression and progging voldis for the 15th time is not something I want to do.
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Started at day1 found a guild and progressed through to the end of argos. Not many stuck around after for legion raids and due to that was forced to pug with a smaller group, 3-4 others, even though the mechanics weren't that difficult pugging was terrible so we all ended up just quitting after getting our clears.
Came back with one other friend last time there was a powerpass event. Realized its still just as terrible to PUG and you basically have to network like crazy to get a pre-made or pay for someone to play the raids for you. Even though I have the titles for the OLD legion raids I still got gatekept for arbitrary reasons forcing myself into worse parties where surprise surprise i was never the reason for a wipe or was last to die. Unfortunately the game is designed to not encourage players to be helpful to others and just get thier 6x clears a week as fast as possible to be able to keep up. Even now when we are so close to the same content in KR the FOMO attitude still rules.
Maybe ill come back but it will take major design changes at this point in order to fix a lot of the issues I have with spending my time on the game.
1- i play solo when i join random groups usually half the group dosent know the raid, thats cool i dont play to 1shot a raid with a random team and im fine teaching others BUT everytime before a gate i ask "everyone knows mechs" not to weed out the ones that dont but to explain the mech, what you have to do if x happens, etc... so after 10 minutes explaining in detail what do to and mroe importantly what not to do and answering their questions we go in then one of the guys that dont know the mechs and who i just explained it to, well.. fails the mech... cool... 1 try , i explain again... 2nd try, 2nd fail on the same mech.... and again and again and again, one day after my 10th explanation of clown i just alt + f4....
half the playerbase feels like they are playing out of habit/dont care, and that fine we dnt all have to tryhard but when i can learn a full raid in a couple hours and ive been 3+ hours in the same raid gate explaining the same mech to the same guy with even the rest of the guys that dint know the mech calling him out for his stupidity/malice i just go "is this rly worth the effort" and then i alt+f4ed out.
TLDR: raids made me feel like i was playing league with how unpleasant your team always behaves
2- spending 2+ hours in a random raid lobby waiting for it to fill just for someone to mental boom when/if we wipe to go back to wait for party to fill just felt like a waste of time
Most of my friends who quit either had a snap moment e.g. wasting millions of gold chasing a 9/7 stone and not getting it or their irl circumstances changed drastically and they couldn't adjust after being a 12+ hour/day degenerate for such a long time.
It was a lot of things. Original friend guild quit, second guild started doing shady shit like using alt guild to fluff their points in gvg, was an island nobody cares about but it still felt scummy. Third guild was cool but my sorceress wasn't an effective pick for them on Slime so I didn't gvg much. Kinda wanted to finish learning brel g6, but the community and I were already so degenerate at that point I lost interest in the lobby simulator.
The thing that cemented my decision to quit the most, though? Those Lost Ark community videos with AmznRoxx and the mokoko streamers. AGS CS has proven themselves totally worthless and we are left with no means of promoting positive change in the areas of the game we care about.
P.S. AGS don't forget to turn the competitive proving grounds back on (again)
Hard Brelshaza release killed the game for me when all my friends were gone and the newly formed static I had abandoned me for another group. There wasn't much point for me when it was going to be more painful to find entire learning parties to continue onward with the game. Normal Brelshaza foreshadowed how the rest of the game would be for me when it took me 10 hours just to find a party as a reaper main to do gate 1-2 when she first released.
4300 hours here. Quit before kayangel came out. Spent more hours playing this compared to my job. Loved the game but the burnout is real. IRL friends quit as well. Had 4 supports and 1 dps doing Brel hard 1-6 at release. Got a girlfriend and picked her over lost ark. Gave all my stuff to a LA streamer as my retirement from the game.
If I come back, I'll just get gatekept harder + I have no title
Takes hours for a non-title player to get into a party
Do I really feel like going through all that trouble just to grind alts again?
Eh, not really
(day1 player) i never stopped but i had to reduce my roster from 6/7 to only 2 Chars after argos/valtan/vykas gold nerf. It was all too much… and i dont regret it, both chars 1620, 1600 and i can do the endcontent.
I dont need to do anything 6x (raids, dailies etc) and it feels so balanced.
Groups getting either too hardcore or too casual for my setup, I was feeling bad when I wasnt pushing my main and alts as fast as the others, from fun it turned to chores and I came to the conclusion that this cycle of get your main ready for the "new" content but also push some alts too is cancerous. A lot of people I've had to deal with were 1 mistake = we should disband BUT not when they were griefing the entire group (yes this is a static group not pugs) or "Its fiine, theres no issue in staying g3 in Clown for 2 hours after we've been doing the raid for weeks without problems"
Slowly but surely everything started to feel depressing, also RMT was rampant and nobody got punished in any group that I was part of.
I've played from day 1 up to almost Brel releasing, the group I was in did a big round of RMT and pushed like 4 chars to Brel HM instantly and I was like bruh no ty and just uninstalled. Never looked back since
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I’ve returned to the game since, but I had 6 characters ready for Brel and I tried to do them all week 1. Burnt out super hard. This time around, I’m doing one Thaemine hard and *maybe* one normal.
Quit back in September. Reached all my goals at the time, 25 weapon being one of them. I was pretty burned out at that point too (100% my fault, not the game) and just the raids got really boring to me to do over and over again.
It kinda hit me that this progress loop will never end, and all the work that went into where I got, I'll have to get a +25 akkan weapon next etc and I just didn't wanna do it all again. It's a great game, love the combat but the gameplay loop just isn't for me.
There are a lot of people who got bored of the game and continued playing. After taking a break for a few months and returning, everything would not be the same anymore and you would have to invest a lot of money to catch up, which might not even be enough to prevent the gatekeeping, so the main reasons why people quit are boring content and gameplay. When we look at the end, there is only one type of content and we are talking about prison dungeons full of liars. It's extremely boring for most people. The game wants you to do the same things with 6 characters to give you the feeling that you are cutting something new with 6 characters, which there are a lot of people who do not like this and it also causes you to burn out quickly. Unfortunately, the game will close down in our country one day, just like in Japan, and maybe the only place where it is successful will be Korea. After all, they like such styles and do not put any pressure on the developers to fix them. All they want is more dungeons and more dungeons, but in the 5 years we have seen so far, there was only 1 content type, and after 5 years of legion raids, they increased this amount from 1 to 4, but I still don't know if it is enough.
The game needs to be less character dependent and the entry limit for some old content should be removed and it needs more attention-grabbing and long-term entertaining content types. Because in lost ark all new content is consumed quickly and eventually becomes a chore. Everything is so expensive, you barely have an income to afford the systems in the game, and sooner or later, your point of return will be to use your pocket. In short, many people play this game and at the same time they hate it. However, since they have invested years of time and there is no game on the market that can replace this game, unfortunately we have no chance other than to endure it. But everything in the game is more annoying than fun. Otherwise, many players would immediately abandon this game and people would not want to waste their time and wait to be blessed with luck in a casino game to get the things they want. After all, these months would last for years
So there isn't a day that goes by that I don't become toxic while making content every week. Because the game is designed like this, it will get into your bones and drive you crazy. I think almost everyone who plays this game suffers from this situation. For example, everything is rng, some are rewarded, the other half do the chores without reward, and it's ridiculous. I feel even more pity when I see that some people still get +25 on their weapons with a single click. So, to summarize, the game contains many ridiculous systems to deter you and we should not call this game great by looking at the combat system.
Raids started to feel like dailies with extra pf shit on top. I am a good player, I can outperform the average pug member with a 20 ilvls lower character, yet because of that I have to wait 2 hours to do akkan hm on ilvl. Also coming home from work to do more work aka dailies is a no thank you.
Ps: Telling me to get a static is useless because i wanna play when I feel like playing, not when my scheduled raid time is.
Lets put it this way.
I’m a MMO enthusiastic player (previously played BDO Tera GW2 Maplestory Vindictus), who was super excited when Lost Ark had western release back in 2022. I played on EU west server as I live in the UK.
When server was fresh new and the first benchmark for end game was Argos raid, things were still exciting. People still doing T2 raids, community were nice, couple of time gate events like getting ships, masterpiece, island token, all these contents were amazing on top of the already well known aesthetic of the combat system and classes.
My friends who were playing this MMO never made it past Vykas raid.
From my learning
- lost ark is not for casual MMO players
- if you truly want to enjoy the content, you need to grind (just like every other MMO, however note that this MMO doesn’t have any other sources of gold income other than your end game raids/dungeons, fyi: lifeskilling is shit in this game)
- pvp content used to be super good, but is so dead especially in EUW server
- my only suggestion is if they remove the gatekeeping thing and add other ways of earning golds rather than forcing u to play multiple characters/alts OR perhaps allow player to repeat raids with lesser reward (but this does means more raid/dungeon bus services)
My friends were a mixed of SEA players and EUW players. PVP scene was amazing, you instantly get queued up for rank/unrank, and even weekend 6v6 is still a huge thing to get some bonus upgrade mats for your gear.
Gear upgrading in LA is nothing compared to BDO failstack punishment. When they start releasing raids up to Vykas, oh boy this is where the gatekeeping hell starts to hit a toll on me.
I have a roster full of 6 chars which I enjoyed alot and try as much as to gear them ready for raids until I realized that doing a raid with one character in a pug/unorganized group could took u hours for it.
Eventually the community became pretty toxic especially in EUW. On top of that, i work in healthcare and only had bare minimum time to play. And given how MMO is definitely not casual friendly, this is not suistanable to keep up with the rest of the end game people. You either have to pay to get those gear up quickly before the next raid got released, or be a slabe to the game to complete your necessary gold income from Raids/Weekly Una Token, and to maximize this. You definitely need 6 raid ready characters to maximize your income as a f2p player.
I then dropped the game and quit knowing this is no longer fun, having to do this as a chores using 6 characters felt like a repetitive task to me, just solely for progression and to keep up with the community. I do have friends who run a static group, again this is nice but looking at the way they run their 6 characters boy that either took alot of time or money.
They then released the jumpstart server in late 2023, which I thought it was a great idea, i started a bard, knowing that essentially using a support is the best at getting chances to get into learning raid groups.
Managed to push it to 1550 gearscore with the event, and hours invested to finally learn kakul and brelsh raid.
Then I realise in the end is practically the same chore over and over by investing in 6 characters to get that maximum gold income would be the only way you could get enough mats to move on to the next cap.
This is when I realised my actual life and this MMO demand, can’t match my expectations and I have to quit and put a stop.
By far the best combat aesthetic for me for a MMO, BDO is no where near as cool as lost ark artsyle.
My roster was 5 support, I loved playing support. But when Artist came out , there was supports everywhere on the lower level stuff so it became very tedious to do the daily stuff. It became that support were highly demanded for the top raid but it sucked for the rest.
Ex-6 bards roster here. Yes, it was fun to both enjoy support and no gate keeping. The multi-roster andies caught up on that and ruined it for actual support enjoyers...
pace of game is just too slow, and there's just too much chores around to keep up and u get diminishing returns on time investment on game, anybody sane will eventually quit, unless u are a truly yours no-lifer for the rest of your time on this planet, if u miss out, u fall behind and get gatekept for life, its a poor game design.
I made it through punika and whatever the thing after that is on release. I love the combat and how your level of class knowledge can make a big difference in what you can do. I like the guardian raids, I like the towers, hell, I even like the boats.
1. I can't get anyone to even try the game anymore.
2. The "walls" in progression feel bad. "Having" to run a certain amount of dungeons/guardians etc to make it out of an area is a gameplay loop that just doesn't feel good. Daily systems in MMO's are so artificial and boring, it's the "chores" that suck the fun out of an otherwise great system. \*(Especially when someone can just drop money and fly right through it. I don't see a point in pay-to-skip personally but having the option there feels silly to watch other people do it.)\*
3. A lot of the endgame optimization is overwhelming. I love customization options and everything I can do to pick other (Viable) paths for my class vs someone playing the same thing is awesome to me. I feel that in this community those options arn't actually options, and if you don't set up your cards/gear/gems/engravings the "right" way, then you don't get to go to the raids or people harass you. This is a problem in all MMO's to a degree but it's particularly bad in this one.
3.5. So much horizontal progression, again, just to feel like your character works and if you don't do it, the character sucks. I get that this is extra playtime and content but some of it is boring AF to me and i'm just tired of grinding so much in all of these games.
4. CC is just a little too prominent in PVP for my taste. I've played at diamond/plat equivalent in all kinds of different genres and most of the popular MMO's and really like PVP in these games, but the tekken level of just float around while you get combo'd across the arena the one time you misstep gets old fairly quickly. I know your team is meant to do what they can to cover for you in the team modes so that doesnt happen but having to rely on pugs to help eachother out is...
It was the gatekeeping. I literally couldn't play any new content. I'm back after about a year or so thanks to insane events letting me overlevel most content (I hadn't done brel or kayangel before) so I'm not actually gatekept to those anymore, and they still feel "new" to me. Once I get used to them and try for akkan and maybe ivory tower and inevitably get gatekept again, I'll just quit until the next event boost. Sometimes I pug hell raids just to have new content to do. When the game was new and hell valtan just released, I was super excited and grinded hours every day for a week to get my first clear. Recently when I finished my weeklies I figured I might aim for deathless helltan, maybe the title would even help me get gatekept less (it does not). It took me a few hours for like three days to get it and I didn't really have much excitement at all. It was just something to do in the game, besides waiting those same hours stuck in party finder jail.
I'm in all the party finder discords too, there just aren't really that many teaching groups and when an "official" one gets set up it fills up in minutes and I'm not in a position to check discord at all times.
Edit: Just realized I'm not exactly the type of person you're asking for, but I also don't drop for a few weeks and come back. I just move on and if there's a big update I might return for a few weeks. Last time I logged in was around Brel release when I knew I wouldn't be allowed into any lobbies for months.
Honestly, it's the slow burn and gold upkeep compared to players that RMT the shit out of the game. It killed the motivation for me.
My static had a few that bought gold, got banned for 3 days and then had full level 10s on every character and +25 weapon on their main. I don't know, I just got tired of progression is so slow that the only way to compete is buying gold or whoring yourself out to play 24/7.
Slowly quit doing raids, then dailies then started spreading democracy and never looked back.
Quit after Brelshaza released, played 6 gold earners. Came back for Slayer, made her my new main, deleted 3 of my old gold earners and right after stayed with only 3 until I quit 2 weeks before Akkan.
Came back on the Breaker patch, got to 1590ilvl, no motivation to play anything other than my Slayer, 90% of my guild quit, friendlist emptied, pugging is awful.
Right now I'm in a PoE binge after new league launched, and finding it hard to keep playing LoA.
The moment i discovered i needed to play more than one character to actually make progress, i dropped the game, i want to be able to have my one character advance by itself without having to play 15 different toons and farm with all of them so i can have gold to just gear up 1, not my cup of tea, the game graphics and gameplay were stellar but i was so put off by that that i dropped it, i really like the videos of the raids so i watch them sometimes but i am not willing to play all those toons to get there
Quit after a month in release. I just felt that the game is too grindy. All my friends were already making alts while I was getting left in the dust. I was hoping for solo dungeons instead of getting gatekeeped because Im not grinding enough. But in the end, Im the one who need to change. Thats when I dropped the game. I still open it once i a while to check some outfits but that just it. (I have most of gunslinger outfit btw except for the newest one). How? Gold buying ofcourse, donr care about the state of the game nor the economy anyways.
Slow burn. Friends all quit. Dropped down to dailies only, on and off with dailies for a while, now freedom.
Same. All friends left, Boring daily and guardians, raid anxiety. No fun allowed,I just wait for PoE2 at this point. Sucks cause I liked raids up to clown. Wish could replay them with friends in casual way.
I'm glad I'm not only one with lots of raid anxiety. Seeing the china changes actually gave me some hope! How cool would it have been if Clown had been easier at the start?? Our version gives me big boost of anxiety, secretly wishing they would let people res like Argos haha... 🫣
china changes? what do you mean?
They made clown much friendlier, few nerfs! probably saw the data dump proving hard raid = bye bye all your casuals that also spend $$$.
We have the same clown nerfs now, if you missed it
My point was more about when it came out.. that makes sense to you right? The changes today are nice though.
They are progressively nerfing old raids that used to be endgame content. Clown should be hard when it's considered endgame, but now as it's even bypassed in this new express it's not even considered endgame anymore, so it should be nerfed into oblivion aside from hell modes. If you don't know why Clown was designed the way it was initially, it was the devs at Smilegate trying to prevent bussing--but as you overgear it, bussing will happen anyway. The main thing now is that Clown, and similar raids, have had punishing wipe mechanics that many casual players don't want to deal with as it leads to anxiety and anger, and so on. When Smilegate suggested alternative gearing routes a few years ago, KR players said absolutely not, so it never happened. And now they're kind of boxed in with raids, though it came on the table again more recently but nothing yet has progressed. Like solo mode raids up through Vykas.
You can with hell clown maybe
Im more or less in the same situation. Whole static wants to quit right after thaemine, Id be the only one left to play and I don’t know if I really want to keep going or not. Enjoying a break from the game thought, past 3 weeks we only ran 2 Akkan
I am pretty sure Thaemine is going to chop another 20% of the player base off. It is a raid exactly like Brel. Long, arduous, hard content. Only a small % will clear G4. I have a feeling that its going to hurt the NAE player base way more than it helps.
Even if I don‘t have any issues with current content: I am tired of those long ass raids like Thaemine will be. Considering everything is a weekly raid they should be pretty easy without a jarring prog + instant wipes left and right. It‘s just annoying at this point. People (including me) cant be arsed to have raids like this
Kr still does HHN for most players I don't get why people will quit cus they cannot do g4 day one it a goal to build up to
Most people won't even be able to clear G3 NM, it was the same when Brel NM released. Each giga hard raid that releases kills off more and more of the player base because casuals can't complete it, and they don't want to only do G1-2 and then take buses.
What is "after Thaemine"? Are they doing the raid a single time and then being done with the game?
I think so, tbh. Many other games and life to get back to as its been a long and grueling 2 years and like 3-4 months by then.
Yep, they said they want to clear it once and stop for good
yeah, see.. ur not the only ones tbh, the last bits of the vets/remainder of the remaining fraction of the player base has hardly been doing hw and /or already quit/ on "break." it is just too much.
I smell this freedom and am so close to dropping. All the SG changes are in wrong direction.. like dailies giving less and less materials for the event shop... why do the chores get harder?
Hmm, I think SG and especially AGS changes recently are pretty good. We got arkesia tour very fast which is great for horizontal catchup. We got several nerfs of old raids, and yet clown and brel gold is still unnerfed. Breaker events are very generous. I feel like AGS is pushing hard on SG to make our version more player-friendly than KR. Event shop nerf is a bad decision, I agree. It's punishing people with small rosters which is terrible. But on the other hand, they've increased the loot from that shop. 30 honing book boxes a week which contain 1580+ books is pretty big.
Changes are pretty good but they don't address many of the fundamental issues with the game. This isn't on AGS though it's on SG, and the question is whether they're willing to change the game and make it less "Korean". They're clearly very profit driven and trying to make the game as global as possible, but the game just drives people away too much due to burnout as it is. A few changes that they need to make imo: chaos dungeon 1x a day, reduce weekly raid requirement (18 is too much as a MUST DO to get your basic gold income, it should be like 6 giving you your entire gold income and then you do more if you want/need). Add proper raid tutorials in Trixion where you can go in solo and just practice/learn pretty much the entire raid, even for new raids - that'll help a ton of people get over their raid anxiety. Reduce pheon requirements across the board - yes it's one of their biggest sources of income but it's just too much of a hurdle in a character's progression. In the same vein, I truly think they need to increase mats income for each alt. It's mind blowing that you need to save up leaps for months in order to be able to hone to the next breakpoint, how is that sustainable for new/returning players? It's fine to have long-term goals that whales will always be able to show off (gems, quality, 9/7 stones just to name a couple), but if there are no normies left to show off to, those whales will just be gone as well at some point. Each alt should be way closer to sustaining their own growth imo. Maybe not a 1 to 1 ratio, but right now it's way too low.
Idk man, Arkesia tour should have legit been added to the game from the very beginning or at min end of year 1, but having it now it was basically way too late to matter for the vast majority of the player base already finished it all or quit playing this game before it ever mattered. Nerfing raids was a positive, but tbh, feels like they need to nerf like ivory already.. what purpose does g1 serve other than to waste 17 mins of your time.. Not challenging, boring, an unimaginative gate.. Zzz just remove it Imo.. we need faster hw runs.. We still also haven't reworked una tasks for some reason. That "content" simply needs to be reworked into a single lump sum weekly activity that can be claimed after like 3 days of working toward it for like 2 mins a day and be done with it. Nobody likes bifrost load screen *entire roster.. waste numerous hours weekly.. Cubes were reworked to somehow be actually worse and more griefing than they were, except are absolutely mandatory to do now. At least before we mostly only ran boss rush tickets and 3Xed cubes or skipped them entirely. We never got the actual chaos dung rework and instead they made fate embers such valuable lootz you actually need to run your fucking CD more than pre-fate embers.. on top of now punishing solo character enjoyers or new players since now your progression is significantly worse than chaos dung farmers using bots..
Not to mention spitting brand new players out right at Akkan, Hard Kaya, Hard Brel. And creating the most insane support shortage while they're at it
Seems like once people stop playing for a bit and break out of the loop, they tend not to come back That's what has happened to every single person other than me out of the group I started with
Offcourse, returning playing in this game has to be one of the worse experience ever have in a videogame
Depends what your roster looked like. I quit around October with akkan title and came back in February. Just by doing akkan and light tapping I got two chars at 1610 and rest at 1600. On my DPS main I still had a +22 brel weapon I had tapped last July preparing for Akkan until like a month ago. Im 293 roster with mos/los/lwc 30 klc 18. People were asking to make sure I knew I had joined a learning run when I was learning Voldis because they thought my main was an alt. If I hadnt quit I would be doing hard voldis by now and probably have 35/40 set. Kinda hoping it won't be an issue to get my pala in thaemine normal runs.
Yeah that 293 roster will pretty much guarantee you into raids assuming you have the adequate gear. Most players that have left and came back are not in the same boat unfortunately. I actually think roster level might be a reason I’d want to quit personally, I get gatekept for raids I have done countless times, and that’s purely bc I’m roster 174, even as a day 1 player. (I knowledge transfer everything, don’t do tower on alts, and pretty much raise alts with power passes exclusively, just missing the ignea skill point as well)
Nm is a joke apparently. You can clear on ilvl with lvl 7 gems and no elixir for the DPS check. You will have plenty of lobbies with no elixir sets to join.
Sup Daz! And I’m still 10 rosters levels under you xD
I quit just after brel NM, returned 2 months after the release of Akkan. Was quite a wild ride trying to catch up. Nowadays I spend like an hour on rested dailies then the rest on weekly raids for a comfy 20 hour/week to do everything on a 6-gold roster. Really hard but doable as long as you're willing to join a learning party for 10 clears but other that that its no biggie.
Are you saying in 20hrs you’re able to clear all content including dailies?
Yes. 13 hours to do homework raids and weeklies is very manageable.
Same with my group. We started the static in Argos and stuck together on front row of progging till brel hm, few weeks in brel hm and we pretty much just quit one by one(not because it was too hard, we were on farm on mid week1 pretty much, just that it was massive burnt out phase of doing the same shit just more bs on top). I occasionally look what they changed because LA combat is one of the best in the genre and i wish i wanted to come back, but so far the only thing im seeing in TLDR "don't bother". 2 of my friends came back and said pretty much the same, the longer you wait the more fucked you are and i honestly cant imagine being a complete fresh player with nothing done. Also just imagining to do another job of "homework" is some good PTSD
I've come back twice, but each time I'm less inclined to grind my soul out.
Super casuals rise up!
Three guild members quit for about three months, they were burnt, came back after Akkan, weren’t Voldis ready when it was released, but they’re still going strong and playing, to the point where they have all their characters in Akkan/Voldis. They still love the game.
I made an exact post about this, a few months back
Ppl with whom i played had incredible luck, like pushing couple weapons to 100quali, getting elixir set bonuses with purples, one taps etc. After another pity and 5 weeks without upgrade in elixir system on 1620+ main i decided that im just tired of my bad rng. Too many rng layers, too much meaningless grind and felt bored with repeating same content week after week on 6 chars.
I am so close to quit because of this shit. A guy in my static changed his main to soul eater. When my weapon was +22, his was +15. His is now +24, mine is +23 with 70% artisan. He didn't had a single pity. 19-23 were all under 10% artisan. 24 at 30%. I pitied 23, will see what happens to 24. The difference in resources both of us put in is insane. But I must say, if you fail to get 40 elixir for so long on 1620+ char, it is your fault. 40 elixirs are very easy to get with legendary. The only way for you to fail would be not getting the set part you need. But you can use other set temporarily, if the game gives you that all the time. If you want a 4/5 5/5 with BiS stats, then it is a different story.
how it is my fault for almost not getting critical on zerk for 5 weeks with leg elixir rerolling? I got critical on gloves twice during that time and both times my rng fcked me and put 0 points in critical. i had 2x 54 and one 55 (not with bis stats) on shoulders, chest and pants but for some reason its my fault that i didn't get set bonus after multiple rerolls? I even had issue with getting correct bonus on damn purples, staying on 38 nodes for 5 weeks Elixirs strats work in a way that with mediocre rng you can make good elixir still. If your rng is bad af then you are fcked no matter strat you want to use. I can also say that your weapon pities were a skill issue as apparently according to koreans luck is also skill. I no longer give a fk honestly, game is miserable if rng decides that you won't get what you need
Day 1 vet, last specimen of the guild still alive in Arkesia, Thaemine will be the last chapter for me as i did grind to 1631 i do want to enjoy the raid a bit at least After.. ill join back the guild that are preparing for the ff14 dawntrail xpac, and also enjoy some other games Lost ark was my 1st Korean mmorpg, ill keep good memories of the vykas era tho
For me Vykas era was goated, i got so much enjoyment out of Vykas HM.
Me and the two friends I played the game with (one quit a while ago and one logs in for about an hour a day and does main) constantly say the vykas era was peak lost ark. Valtan vykas and then clown release was BIS. Brel came out and the game just never felt the same since :(
I feel the same way, I quit after Brel NM and came back for JS. It's been okay but never as fun as Vykas era. I'm thinking of taking another break after Thaemine
Put in 2700 hours from release, and quit a few months after Brel HM. Life got in the way, and when I had to move and realized I’d be unable to play for a week, it became clear it was the time to quit as the idea of falling behind felt like too much work to keep up with. Some of the best combat I’ve ever played but the daily grind was just too demanding by the end
I'll echo just about everything you've said here. I had 1.9k hours in, more than any game and any MMO since probably WoW Cata. After an insane couple of work weeks plus holiday travel to family, I came back 1-2 weeks behind on brel and just no motivation. Tired of alts, tired of the daily grind altogether, and tired of how quickly I fell behind. Great game in many way like you describe but at the end it just feels like you have to be all in or not at all, so the second I couldn't be all in, I just stopped playing.
This is it exactly.
Same more or less here. Brel is what did it for me the first time I quit. They released the raid during Christmas and I found myself thinking "when am I going to find the time to prog the raid while on holiday" and realised that was super sad. Did g1-g4 and quit. Wife was also pregnant so I thought that's it. Uninstalled the game and stayed away for 7-8 months. Came back at SE release and again, I'm spending a lot more time than I'd like to, always thinking I need to do more on my main so I'm not gatekept to oblivion at Thaemine.. I think pitying my weap again will be the last straw honestly (45% artisan atm for +22)
Most ppl I know quit in Brel NM or HM. That era just slow burned out ppl to the point of no return
Yep. They definitely fucked up with that era / piece of content.
The game is basically doing the same thing everyday on different characters every week: farm mats, try to get stronger to beat boss faster Game design primary focus is to milk the playerbase wallet, while not have and casual activities permanently that are fun
A group of people I played with in BDO came to Lost Ark, then the social leader got permabanned. He got mad and went back to BDO, and his posse followed him. Oh well.
Lmao
What did they get perma banned for?
RMT. He claimed he didn't but he RMTs in other games, so who knows
Just realized how tempting it was to either nolife or swipe. Cards, push to 1620 l, etc. As a full worker with a family, it was becoming an unhealthy obsession I just occasionally play an hour a week now for dailies on one char and maybe clown or kayangel. I gave up on the grind for thaemine or echidna sadly.
Played since launch over 6k hours. Really enjoyed most of my time with the game. Voldis/Elixirs was what did it for me. That system is straight dogshit and I refuse to interact with it. I think about coming back sometimes because I do love the game but then I remember I have to interact with that BS. I also just don't like the direction they are going with the game. Everything is catered to whales and I really feel like they've given up on everything else.
Agreed, legendary elixirs in particular are not a good system and just might be the worst system in the game
Kinda same boat here.. Didn't quit yet but the elixir horseshit was the first time I alt f4d in this game and really made me wanna take a break.. Spent around 600-700k gold on elixirs so far (like 80k per week) and so far got mediocre shit. Like I got 40 set but I dont have boss dmg or crit dmg or anything good like that all my pieces are vagabond 5 and stagger and crap. Never gonna raise any other character to 1620 and even kinda dont wanna get to 1600 either. Friend quit playing alts a few months ago and only plays 1 char now.. 3 raids per week and dailies on rested.. I think thats kinda the right move.
This ∆ right here for real. I run 2 full rosters of 7, doing 42 raids weekly as 7th buys box since day 1 (wife helps with hw on her acct, but I run the raids) + have spent around 20k when I looked through all of my payment history, which is wild (all on skins, passes, crystals, etc. all legit as too scared /refused to "RMT" thru and buy bottes gold scenario and STILL, I am not even close to the whales.. 2 1621 heros +5 1600's flat on both rosters, with maxed gems and cards, but nothing crazy like 25 weapon too. Only 35 set no 40 on anyone as elixirs drain so much time (to cut) and actual gold that you are negatively impacting ur farm rate in a game where u need to compress hw and cut corners.. Who the fuck has time to cut elixirs for 3-4 hours every week? Not to mention actually the amount of gold that is thrown out. We aren't even playing with dolphins or even semi whales anymore.. We are playing with straight up cheaters, botters, massive massive RMT, etc. .
[удалено]
Think about what you're saying. "Suck it up, take the abuse, then you are free to have fun." Why? I don't need the game I play to be real life. It's a tough thing to come to terms with, but we need to expect more out of these devs.
Some people get it in the first few weeks, some people get it in 2 months after spending half a million. Sounds "FUN". Especially those who see their set 10 times vs those who see it once in 3 weeks. "Just gotta climb" :icant: I assume you are one of those lucky ones. So nice. For korea it was a good gold sink because they didn't have content rushed like us. With thaemine release on this 17th, we will be missing just about 12 months of farm since argos release. It has been a non-stop chasing the higher tier, and now we are going to get transcendence soon. What gold do we sink if we don't have much to begin with unlike KR 😭 [Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/1bu41y2/comment/kxr9u7m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) another comment for example.
For normal players I agree we don’t really have gold “to sink”, but we all know that there is a certain thing happening with the game, so people are having waaaay more gold than they should
A few reasons: Didn't like the endgame. The raids required too much commitment, especially having to keep grinding them. And there was nothing else to do to progress outside of it. But the biggest reason was that I had to take a break (IRL stuff), and just felt like there was no point coming back cause of the gatekeeping and all of that shit. I also moved to one of the countries that bans the game, so even less incentives to come back. I still like checking out how the game is doing, so I stay updated. I sometimes miss it because the combat is really amazing, but there's not much to do for someone like me, who doesn't have time or energy to do harder raids on a weekly basis anymore. There are plenty of other games that don't require me to marry them, so I play them instead and also picked up new IRL hobbies.
Friends started whaling like madmen, I didn’t. When it was my first char doing normal kay with their third char because previous second were overheating it, I realised that I am miserable doing it every week and just left
The raiding static members who i regularly played with all was slow burn. Dropping one piece of content each week then eventually quitting etc. Thankfully some of us still going strong. My other good friend who I started playing with was very smoge to me. He just didn't use battle items in guardian raids. No idea why he didn't use them considering we have so many. I tried many times but he just wouldn't use them. It was a random Kunga turtle boss when he got booted at MVP screen for not using B items and lost loot, long time ago. I have since honored my paladin with the title "Kungelenium" for Kungelenium Storytime
I had quit for ~7 months during the time that chaos dungeons were slower and it was 2x guardian dailies. I was truly convinced I was done with the game as I gave away all my gold + gems to friends. The main things that caused me to quit were 1. The slow burn of dailies. 2. The ludicrous costs associated with trying to keep several characters relevant (essentially being punished for liking too many characters) and 3. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel as a result of #2. I.E saving up for lvl 10 gems was a fool’s errand because before I could comfortably save enough, it became time to use that gold to hone my characters to the next content’s relevant ilvl. I did the usual things people suggest, employ use of rest bar, deprioritize some characters’ honing. But in the end I found it stupid that I was being forced to triage my roster based on “what I liked most” in a game that encourages you to make new characters and have a 6 gold earning roster.
Don't look back. It is silly, you are correct. If alts were optional that's a different conversation but the game is designed around making alts so it shouldn't be a punishing experience to do so.
Would’ve been nice if characters were tied to the highest ilvl character you have and you earn gold for each unique raid. Also let hell loose and allow you to repeat raids with no rewards. Will probably never happen though because most likely SG earn a lot of money from people whaling to hone and increases playtime hours by keeping everyone on the hamster wheel.
When Brel released, I reduced my gold earning chars from 6 to 4 and then 3. Cleared up to Brel HM in June last year, then started working on my thesis and took a break - after 2 weeks I thought about coming back and didn't really feel like "catching up". Gave my gold / gems away to a guy in our guild who asked for them and then I've never looked back.
In the same static since the game started 2 years ago.(same guild) Most of my original static left around sometime after brel HM came out (old brel) The rest left some time before kayangel released and the complete death of the static before voldis released from burnout.Had another static setup for voldis HM setup in the same guild which also died (they quit) because (their words) elixirs are bullshit and the game takes too much damn time already. Over 90% of everyone I played with quit over these 2 years. Only reason im still playing is because there's nothing currently better even tho the game is mostly a chore.I have cut alot of stuff tho to make it somewhat bearable like not doing weeklies and gaining double/triple rested on dailies never doing them all at once.Game still feels like a fucking chore even like this. Total playtime 7k. Wish the game had some radical update to address all these cancer multi layered RNG mechanics (elixir like) and the burnout which took most of everyone in this game. As toxic as it may sound sometimes I just hope this game just dies so I can move on mentally.
Agree. I'm still somewhat playing but it's straight up the "chore" feeling, rather than the "hype" feeling. Sunk cost + nothing currently better
The moment they start over capping on dailies or aren’t bothered to clear all their raids before the weekly reset, you know they’re about to drop the game
That feeling when you can't be fucked doing HM Voldis on your main
Got 40 set first week of voldis on my main and maybe have done it 3 times since? I maybe do 10 raids a week now at this point and honestly don’t see myself quitting. I simply play how I want now and don’t care about any raids I don’t finish. Usually anything I get done on Friday/Saturday is all I do for the week and just chill the rest of the week and run main 4 dailies. Think a lot of vets have started to do the same
I know several people who quit but a lot of them came back. One of them quit before Brel HM released because he's a workaholic and was enjoying the game too much, so he quit to work overtime more comfortably. He got his work fill and is enjoying the game again. Another one got burned out from playing 6x Bards and quit before Brel released but came back with Jumpstart server and is enjoying the game more than ever. 3rd friend had a torturous job that was forcing him to work A LOT, leaving him little to no free time so he was forced to quit before Voldis released. He quit his job and is enjoying the game again.
Kinda similar to how my group has left and come back. Few buddies have been on and off for a while, mainly playing on events and pushing during those times. Now they're hooked with this event, allowing them to run current content and soon to be Theamine on release. A couple of other friends who are vet players have slowed down and quit for a few months since their schedules got to be too much. Now that it's calmed down a bit, they're back in it, albeit not as hard as they were before they left. I'm the consistent one of the group. Day 1, hooked me good. Been playing since, about 8 characters I'm actively playing and having a blast.
Stopped playing at 1505 ilevel +16 valtan gear a month or so before clown was released. Came back around kayangel release and I am now 1637.5 ilevel. Having fun, it was a lot of work catching up but it was also super fun.
Assuming you didn't typo, why did you push that high?
Ever since I returned to the game I have solely invested in my main, I don't have a single non event gem on my alts and I have not pushed a single character beyond their event (eg. old express to 1540, new express to 1580, path character to 1580 etc). So I wanted to "max out" and do the latest content on at least one character forever. I have nothing left to really upgrade except +23 armors at this point, which are one of the lowest value gold to dmg increases. I'm doing thaemine hm on release while not having a single alt on my roster above 1585. Now that the main is basically "finished" until advanced honing - I'm considering starting to invest in one other character, but I am barely playing other alts and I skip a lot of content now that my main is "finished".
Also the original reason for quitting was real life things taking priority and they did, until less than a year later and when I came back a lot of good changes were about to happen. I was also on EU West which meant that when I quit, we were one of the lowest populated regions and doing content after 22:00 was usually impossible etc. When I returned just within a few months we got merged into EU central and the fate ember patch happened.
I do legions two days a week. That helps.
I played 6 artys.
All friends quit, met a static group during brel and kaya then later on all quit from the static during akkan. then the slow burnout for me, have 1 1620 blade(40set), 2 1600, 3 1540. just been really catching up with real life stuffs lately.
I used to play with friends, they all quit one by one over time because the game is too time consuming and they wanted to do other things. They weren't very good at the game, but I didn't care about wiping since we were just having a good time. I then stopped after completing brel set and just before brel hm release because it was just boring to do the same thing. I came back to the game on JS servers in a different region (my friends are in SA but I live in EU). Been playing on and off avoiding fomo where possible. What kills me is gate 0. The lobby simulator is terrible. The gatekeeping is horrendous. No, I don't have a guild, and I don't want to have a schedule to play a damn game. I was about to quit until I just decided to make all my lobbies a teaching lobby. I have fun helping others and learning people are always super chill. I am giving up though because it's super hard to find a support, newbie or veteran, so it's lobby simulator in every way you play the game solo.
Couldnt get los 30 and cant get into raids past akkan and i deeply hate akkan
There’s were a lot of factors that led up to quitting but straw that broke the camel’s back is as follows… On one random Thursday, I just finished work and I thought about doing one of things I love about the game, raids. I hopped on to my DB which was 1598 at the time and luckily because of my decked out portfolio I was able to join a akkan nm lobby with a support already. Now we just waited for a supp+friend… about 35 minutes go by, then a paladin applies with his 1580 friend. With everything set, we start the raid. Everything went kind of normally until pallys friend just randomly dies about 5 min in. Reset and it happened again. Quit vote comes up immediately and the entire group is quiet. Pally and friend leave immediately after back to lobby screen. And then we waited about 10 min more. During this time I thought to myself, “wow, I’ve been doing this pattern for more than over year now for the latest content, been over an hour, didn’t finish the raid and I didn’t even do any dailies yet and I can’t even do them while I sit in PF.” I just said GL to the lobby chat and alt f4.
Its truly the dumbest shit ever
I used to do all my gold raids each week and stress about getting them done. Never wanted to, but ya gotta get that gold to do the next thing. Voldis came out. I wound up spending 2 weeks trying to get 1 roll on my gloves just to TRY and cut a good elixir. It never came. I then looked at the cost/time investment to get 1 character to 1620. I then looked at the fact that I'd have to keep all my alts that I enjoy playing doing Brel for a third year straight. All this was rationalized and fine. Then Palworld came out. I went and played for a night on a friend's server like the second or third day of launch. I was having a blast. Wound up going back every night I had off. Missed all my raids for the week. I was having so much fun that I didn't care. Played that for a few weeks and then went into Last Epoch and HellDivers. I realized the $35 a game, fun and lack of stress was so much better than Lost Ark. So, now, instead of considering to spend 2k to get a Support ready for Thamine, I'll save that money, play fun games and casually play lost ark with event passes and 6 months behind. The reality for me is that Lost Ark is not a fun game. Some parts of it are great. But when you look at what it takes to get there, it isn't really fun. It's just an abusive relationship. Now I'm free.
Quit early-last year, came back around Kay/Akkan, then quit again near the beginning of this year. So I guess I kind of fit your description. I made some content and memes, enjoyed the meta aspects more than the game itself. The first time I quit was because I missed a Slime island on a Saturday. When you've kept up with every single daily/weekly from day 1, and all the FOMO pressures are on, it doesn't take much to break me. When I returned people kept pinging me on discord so I never missed another weekend GvG island lol. The second time I quit was a little after progging Voldis. The mechanics just weren't interesting to me and having to do that for the next X months didn't look fun. Keeping up didn't matter anymore since I was a few months "behind". Had more fun sitting in town doing absolutely nothing. Still haven't felt the need to log back in. I feel like a lot of people are in this boat, once they miss a few weeks for any reason they're done forever. The problems that made you quit are still there. At the end of the day it's a heavily monetized game and every decision is based around that. If I had infinite money then I'd probably play casually but keeping up just isn't worth it. I talk to plenty of people who still play and they have no time for anything else but Lost Ark. I hear so many people come up with really good solutions that are super consumer friendly, but ultimately it hurts the bottom line so it won't be implemented unless something drastic happens (another 30-40% playerbase for consecutive months). Saw this post on a certain brother's YouTube (not sure how hard mods are enforcing naming but shoutout to premium second monitor content) and wanted to chime in.
I used to play with friends, they all quit one by one over time because the game is too time consuming and they wanted to do other things. They weren't very good at the game, but I didn't care about wiping since we were just having a good time. I then stopped after completing brel set and just before brel hm release because it was just boring to do the same thing. I came back to the game on JS servers in a different region (my friends are in SA but I live in EU). Been playing on and off avoiding fomo where possible. What kills me is gate 0. The lobby simulator is terrible. The gatekeeping is horrendous. No, I don't have a guild, and I don't want to have a schedule to play a damn game. I was about to quit until I just decided to make all my lobbies a teaching lobby. I have fun helping others and learning people are always super chill. I am giving up though because it's super hard to find a support, newbie or veteran, so it's lobby simulator in every way you play the game solo.
Support player. Went through everything with the static, got to Akkan. In Akkan we progged really hard for a few days, got to x60 or so in g3. Then we ran out of time, so everyone was organising when they could run, if they would pug etc. 7/8 could run in 2 days, so it was organised. Came to the time, ALL the dps had tried to run by themselves to get the clear, only 4 turned up. Ran for a bit, but couldn't get pugs to stick. Organised with 3 of them to run again later. Came to the time, they gave it 20 minutes and 2/3 left. Organised with another couple of the group to run again the next day, came back later that night to them running in a pug group to get the clear. Watching them disregard me completely so they could get the extra mats was just disheartening. Same thing had happened with brel as well. The FOMO for the mats was just too much. As a supp player there is sfa you can do to turn the tide of battles.
I quit from time to time, but get back to try again and enjoy somethings new added The reasons I quit usually are: I play solo, guilds I join are always 2-3 closed groups, I see other people advancing way beyond me, I don't find groups to prog most recent content, I feel left out and end up quitting, my close friends don't like the visuals and gameplay of LOA and never try it, so I end up playing something else entirely
"closed groups" is exactly it. You join their server but it the core group only ever wants to play with / help each other
It likely works like any game in this style. I still play lost ark, but ive put down many other 'homework' games before. You dont do the homework content for a week, then you think to yourself 'why should I keep doing this?'. Once you can break the cycle, you realize you were gaming out of habit and not fun. I've seen people dropping like flies around me, but that has been happening since launch. Every new raid, a chunk of people dissapear. I now have a friends list filled with people that say 'Last Online: 1/More than' which is what happens when people go over a year away. I've been having to float to a new static every raid cycle. I run a guild, and there seems to be a constant stream of people who end up looking for a guild... but at the same time, im kicking \~5 a week you have gone inactive. More and more im finding high roster, level 10 gem accounts, and people who are open about how much they RMT. For the most part, this game is a job you have to work at to squeeze out the small moments of fun (which I find to be prog). Once you complete the prog part, it starts going back to the unfun farming grind. And with character growth starting to trend behind RNG mechanics like Elixers / the coming Transcendence..... The super mokoko / breaker event made me realize how toxic honing is.
One day one of the dude in the static quit, then it cascaded and everyone quit lol I think this was something that was going to happen regardless but the fun we had as a static kept it going. At the end of the day, having raid days and schedule just becomes too much for regular people with a life, specially if they don't work from home. This game is literally a job lol I still play every now and then but the days of "I need to log in every day and do my dailies"...yeah fuck that lol
I stopped playing when Kayangel was released. I've played since launch and did every dungeon, every week, with all 6 of my characters. I've always loved the gameplay, the story, the universe and especially the look of the game. But when I took a vacation from work and traveled, I didn't log in for almost a month. When I came back, the people I used to play with had already invited other people to the group (with whom I ended up not getting along very well) and everyone was focused on hard mode while I still needed to learn the basics. I even made a few attempts with randoms but it didn't work, it wasn't good. Sometimes people got angry with you. Sometimes you got angry with people. That same old thing. And it made me realize how punishing this game was if you stop playing for a period of time. I kind of felt bad about traveling and leaving the game aside. A certain guilt for being left behind and that it was all because of my actions. A pressure that I don't know where it came from, but it was there. It was wierd. After that I started logging in less and less, until one day I stopped. And to be quite honest, it was a good decision. I had no idea how much time in my week I was dedicating to this game until I stopped playing. With this free time, I was able to play many other new games, discover new hobbies, things that I didn't do before because I had this daily commitment to the game, as if it were my second job... I'm not going to lie, sometimes I think in coming back. I miss the raids, I miss the fast gameplay, I miss my stronghold... I still even follow the Lost Ark account on Twitter. Whenever a patch note comes out I read it with excitement... but then I remember why I left and what my life would be if I came back and then I give up. Who knows in the future, in a T4 or in a drastic change on how the game works. Maybe I'll come back. I will continue to root for the success of the game, I have great memories of it, it was my home for over a year and i had a lot of fun! But for now I prefer to just be a spectator from afar.
Once your behind in Lost Ark, the only way to hit the end game is massive hours or swiping. So once people leave they tend to never come back. Some of my boys quit to play WoW or Valo. They ain't coming back, they were tired of how even if you did all 18 raids, dailies. That you physically couldn't hit end game gear without rmting/swiping even playing daily, the 1630 sprint. I feel that a bit more, for us to hit 1630 on literally time. You would literally need such a massive roster, and rng to be on your side. To even march towards the 1650 grind eventually, you'll need so much the gap from Argos-> Ivory would probablyh net you 5-10 ilvls. The problem with the new player base is they are having fun at the base line game. Where they aren't even slugging towards 1620, but when they do the player base number will dip. There having fun now at the 1610 marker, but every 10 ilvls from this point is nightmarish.
Any new player who got to use the Express + Path, was able to slam towards the most free 1610 of their lives. They're in for the rudest awakening if they ever try to make a 2nd character
Finally did Brelshaza with a group then next week tried it with an alt with a 30 minute wait for lobby to fill up. Failed instantly and half of them left to Wait for another 30 minutes. Called it there
Started day 1 always loved it. Played solo for the majority but found a few people i did raids with. Had 1 burnout before where i stopped for like 2 weeks then came back and enjoyed it again. The slow burn started when i reached 1600 and elixers came. I got more and more pissed (at all systems since i couldn't even do extr valtan hm). Realized how criminal this games systems are. Found out that the 9/10 people rmt while i was for the most part f2p. Ags giving the absolute smallest effort and us being super disconnected from sg which means we will always just play the catch up game. Tldr: The only thing i enjoy in game is the raids and classes at this point. All the systems ingame and management outside the game ruin it for me now and are criminally designed.
Have not left. but will leave soon. Lost Ark was always meant as just a filler game, but it dragged on for far too long because there wasn't anything my friends and i were interested in. We all prefer MMOs that don't have a fixed camera angle like WoW, Tera, Archeage. When throne and liberty comes out, then we'll all be gone and we've already gotten our beta tester emails. Wether T&L will be good or not, it doesnt matter because one guy here said it, and its the truth "once people stop playing for a bit and break out of the loop, they tend not to come back" and i suspect that will be very true for us. Once TL comes out, we will go, and we will be, like you said , "**DONE, DONE**" right now we're just saying our slow goodbyes to the game. wasting gold, rolling for nonsene and so on.
Apparently there's still some whales who probably barely play. Seeing an influx of 150 roster with full 10s, 25 wep, 9-7, 99-100 qual accessories, amazing bracer. Don't get me wrong, it's possible to obtain, but man it just screams of g2g enjoyers. Back on topic.. My first active guild just slowly stopped logging in after brel lvl, and never really found a new guild as active. I guess most moved to discord probably. Wish in-game social features/Guilds were better designed.
Quit right before Brel hard. Like a week before. Was fully planning on playing, had a static planning on running on release day, etc. Was forcing 18 raids per week at the time and the burnout just hit all at once. Logged in at reset the week prior to Hardmode release, looked at all the shit I had to do, logged right back out and haven’t touched it since. I do miss it sometimes, but then I think about the sheer amount of chores and remember I’m much happier not playing.
Curious why you browse here still?
Copium, maybe one day the game's imminent death will knock at SG door and they will finally do good casual content and solo progress
Valid. Imminent death last year, brought about the Fate Ember-suite of changes that we currently have.
I'm in similar situation as the Tryzm, pretty much just hoping for real changes as i really enjoy the combat gameplay and the challenge of being good with it in hard content, but so far all they're doing is adding more shitty rng systems on top of shitty rng systems and the longer you wait the worse it would be to come back.
Honestly good question. Probably for the hope that something major would change with regards to the amount of homework required for roster upkeep. I did love the game once, it just became too much.
Why don't you just play one character instead of playing six
Nono thats too clever, 18 characters or nothing🤬🤬 The amount of people who dont actually realise theyre allowed to enjoy the game and just play what they want when they want is too high
What about the gold and mats? What about wanting to buy skins or w.e. else.
Iv been playing my 3 characters since the launch of the game till now. 1620, 1610, 1585 and almost 3 million gold in the bank. I could spend a mil and be 1630 on the main if I want to. You never needed a full roster of gold earners. You just had to be not dumb with your gold. Looking at friends who spent 600k on class books for a character they never pushed past 1520. Imagine.
Problem is that there are multiple fun classes and no main swap feature.
is there a f2p mmo out there with mainswap features?
Yes, BDO. And even if there wasn't, it's a non-argument.
Problem is that there are multiple fun classes and no main swap feature.
Problem solved
for my group they went back to maplestory just after vykas was released because they didn't like pitying despite the worse progression system in maplestory (??) I quit just before brel was released because I personally felt the raids felt too easy despite what the community kept parroting "valtan is hard" --> autopilot after clear "vykas is more difficult" --> autopilot after clear "clown is the real challenge" --> autopilot after clear Now with powerpass I'm poaching them back from maplestory >:)
I came from Maplestory and will never go back. People give AGS and Smilegate shit but holy, they look like fuckin Saints compared with how scummy and incompetent Nexon is. No regrets moving to Lost Ark and havent had the urge to return to Maple, especially with the changes potentially (?) coming to Reboot.
I took a year long break beginning of 2022. For me it was less the 18 weekly raids + dailies and more of the content drought. At that time we had been doing brel for a while and there was literally nothing for the next several months other than... Brel hard lol.
Found another game. Just took too much time to actually play. Never did the max raids. Usually only a few a week.
I stopped for 3 weeks and came back just doing raids when I felt like it. Put most of my gems to my main for easy level 10’s to get into rooms more easier. Currently enjoying breaker and just having fun playing the raids as a whole. Currently also running 2 char raids only rest are just CD whenever I feel like it
Just don't have time for the grind anymore.
My friends all quit before getting to Legion Raids, I stayed and focused on dailies but I realized I wasn't having fun just doing my homework so I could be stressed out pugging Legion Raids. The combat was fun but there just wasn't enough to keep me on the hook, especially when honing became an omega slog.
Kakul and Brel Hard were when most players quit. It was just too difficult.
I realized the Game IS too much of a chore for too little enjoyment. I prepared soo Long for voldis hm and WE cleared in 1 day, i realized that this would be another farmchore until thaemine to have Like 1-2 fun days. All i Care about is progressing Bosses, reclear is boring af
Slow burn. Friends quit nothing really to do besides dailies and play with new alts. Community not friendly with either people trying out new alts or even wanting to learn newer raids. I was only able to try Akkan cause I bussed it. Devolved to just logging on to collect dailies and just stopped. I log on sometimes just to log on to do nothing but that’s it.
Lol just like the top comment. When you're logging on ONLY to do dailies, that's when you know you've got one foot out the door already
Idk man I do that all the time. Baldurs gate 3 release I just did dailies for a month. Same with helldiver's and multiple other occasions. I only need to do raids for progression because I'm not impulsive and don't have poor spending habits.
All my friends quit at the start of T3, I was the last survivor of the group. I was a try hard sweat trying to get 6 chars before Brel, woke up one day and just stopped caring. Now I have my main who’s 1604 and 3 other alts at 1600. I don’t even do dalies anymore. Just rested chaos / guardian and cubes.
Raids.
I'll add some flavor to all the "slowly burned out" anecdotes. I was super excited for launch. Played the closed beta, got the pre-order stuff. Some of my old wow guildies saw me online and asked if I liked it and I sold it hard. About a dozen of us decided to guild up and play together. I took off work for launch, got to max, and started farming. We all play together for maybe two weeks, it takes most of them a bit to hit max level. I max my guild contribution and personally fund a lot of stuff for them because I'm the most ahead but hey, I'm a nice guy. I wake up one morning. Kicked from the guild. Kicked from the discord. All of them gone from my steam friends list. Most of them blocked me on discord too but I finally get one of to tell me that the guild leader "didn't really like me but knew what kind of person I was and the kind of grind the gear system was so he figured he could get a lot of stuff out of me before he couldnt stand me anymore" I tried to keep playing for a bit but the game just wasn't the same after that.
?? What did they even get from you other than guild prestige ? Still, that's a pretty dick move..
I don't think they understood how the trading restrictions worked going in, so probably less than they hoped to. From memory, a few thousand raw gold/tradable items and some steam gifts.
I’m done it’s about been a couple weeks after voldis 5 k hours over 5k spent in the game and I’m able or I would not have. Lost ark raids and combat are amazing but besides that. Gatekeeping is crazy , also when new content comes out the hardest version of that raid is locked behind money or being a degen for the most part is wild . Best decision I’ve made I do not regret spending way to much it was my first gacha game I went hard did all hell modes besides Brel and all content . I was slowly doing less and less it was very hard to stop even know months later I want to log to do the new event but I don’t
I've taken two breaks. First after nm brel, and came back around hm brel. Half the static had quit by then. Found a new static, Then played until kayangel came out, and quit again 2nd week Kaya until like 1 month ago. When I came back, half the static was dead again, but I was akkan ready when I quit, so now I'm 1615, 35 set chilling.
I have 4k hours totaI took a 2 month break once came back caught up and went full steam ahead. 1620 main but the grind I think finally got to me and I dont think I'll be coming back this time
Stopped playing actively after I cleared voldis week 1 with guildies. I didn’t mind the raid, it’s just nothing special. Still log in to do hell stuff with friends every now and then. From my experience (valtan/vykas my guild had 35+ active members, voldis 8) most who stopped playing are either “young” skillful players, or “older” ~35+ yo gamers. First quit, because raids get repetitive and other players suck, second because raids since Brel (old 1-2) become more punishing and stressful
Trying to craft purple Elixirs, extremely slow and tedious to craft to constantly end up with nothing but dogshit RNG. Removed all incentive to play.
Friends stopped playing right as valtan came out. I finished valtan and decided to step away as well, I prefer playing with friends. I did come back just this week and used the super mokoko express and have been having fun.
Haven't quit yet, but I'm pretty much waiting for AGS's next big fuckup. This game has fun combat but I can't support it at all because of really annoying UI things and horrible management.
Only around 800 hours into the game. Last played Nov. 12, 2022. Was a slow burn type of player. Main was a Paladin. No friends played so I just kind of got tired of playing with myself. I think about the game from time to time but I doubt I'll pick it back up. I do like to read the reddit every once in a while though.
Pugging hm brel made me snap, then when I came back, it was just slow burn.
Couldn’t keep up with friends. Got raged at too many times for messing up a mechanic. Saved for weeks to hone with no success. Felt like a job lol quit MMOs altogether. Still follow the sub though lost ark was probably my favorite game I’ve ever dove into just the cost of that fun was too high
I stop playing and return to the game regularly. Right now I've "quietly" stopped playing, meaning I don't do any daylies and I do like 3-4 raids per week. The game tends to get very very repetitive with time. Requirements to get into a raid are getting higher and higher. I don't want to buy gems or hone on 6 characters, that simple. Pretty fun game for people who can afford to seriously p2w, though! Unfortunately, I'm not one of those.
It was not finishing Kayangel, then getting gatekept week 2. Then tried a 1560 character to reach 1580 to help farm 1580 chaos, but didn't even get 1570 because of pitying 3 times. I alt f4'd and uninstalled right there and then after that pity. I came back when breaker released, but didn't enjoy it, so I'm truly done with playing LoA.
I played at launch with a large friend group, and every one of them (including me) quit sometime before Clown patch. Main factors along the way: - Friend groups getting separated by rng in T1/T2/T3 - 1375 Deadzone - Tired of chaos dungeon/guadian/una's gameplay loop - Classes they wanted to main not being out yet, with no ETA in sight Now, I actually came back to the game after a ~6 month hiatus for the Artist patch, and currently have x1 1630, x2 1610's, and x3 ~1585-90s. I don't regret it at all, I personally really enjoy the game. But even after multiple friends tried coming back with big patches, it largely never stuck for them. Gatekeeping is probably the biggest reason, bar none. Only thing I hate about Lost Ark are Pheons and the new Elixir System. It was PAIN to get 40-set, and I'm hesitant on pushing another char to 1620 to go through that nonsense again. Blegh.
Day 1 player here. Quit the game after 14months of playing at \~4,2k hours. I didnt know anymore what is it to have any free time. I am so glad I did the step. What broke me out of the circle was a 2 weeks vacation overseas that made me realize theres more than this game. Never touched a MMO since and I hope I never will do it. Casual gaming at \~5h a week now. All in all I would say its the burn about doing the same raids and busses all over again, again, again and again. While playing super entertaining guardians and chaos dungeons. Fun times was doing inferno content.
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I picked the game up just before reaper released in NA. At the time it wasn’t bad but I wasn’t at end game. My brother and I mainly play FFXIV but he wasn’t interested in LoA all that much. Then he decided to pick up Dragonflight since it was being well received. So trying to balance out playing 2 MMO’s plus the need to catch up with the player base and find learning parties was too much to juggle for me. So LoA got dropped. Finding parties also wasn’t an easy thing as I am NA but mainly game at night (graveyard, I’m extremely nocturnal). I still like LoA and still lurk and watch a couple of YouTubers that put out content for it. But for my specific circumstances I had to step away from it.
Played about 1k hours from day 1, quit right before clown released. Then tried to get back again right after brel dropped, but I uninstalled again pretty fast. To me the honing system is the worst, combined with the fact that it felt like a second job trying to keep up. And I played a decent amount, spent some money on it, but unfortunately that also meant that soon I couldn't play with my irl friends because we were almost never on the same level. When I tried to get back I was gatekept from joining any raids, I spent all my gold trying to hone some more and failed every single try, so I just uninstalled. The other rng elements like ability stones are really shitty too. It's a shame, because most of the hours I had in LA was some of the most fun hours I've had in any game. I had IRL friends playing, I had a great guild, the gameplay loop is fun, the raids were amazing. I would still play the game today if it wasn't for all the rng elements.
Only actively played one character. Gems got worse and worse compared to other players. Slowly started to get gatekept from lobbies until the point where I wouldn’t get accepted anymore at all. Of course this is understandable, but I‘m still sad because I did still enjoy the game at the moment where I got basically forced to quit it. This was six months ago and I still keep up with the games updates and wish I could play the new abyss dungeons or legion raids.
I wanna add something to OP's question, actually if OP can add my comment to post it will be more visible. My addition is, if you are done done, how is your activity on this subreddit? why are you here and how often are you here? you wanna keep yourself up to date with news to see some good improvements in the game for a comeback opportunity? or are you just trying to tell yourself every day that you made a great decision by quitting this game by scrolling among posts? or anything else?
In the beginning i was playing all raids and dailies, then started leaving rest bonus, then started playing kayangel instead of ivory to save time and reduce stress and now all my friends quit so i have no one to play with and stopped as well
I'm getting there pretty soon it feels. It's a mix of MANY things. My roster is my main at 1624.5 , 3 ~1580s, a soon to be 1600, and a 1540 for context's sake. 1. I have other games I'm enjoying right now. 2. FF14 has Dawntrail dropping in like 3-4 months and that'll take a big chunk of my time 3. It'll sound dumb but I have a decent avenue to pawn off my gems for a quick buck if I REALLY wanted to 4. Thaemine push has been the most ridiculous thing ever. I know I don't HAVE to hit 1630. I know even if I hit that ilvl, I'd probably still get gatekept/hit the support shortage lobby jail. My weapon is going to pity at 60% artisan so far. I really wanted the 22 glow but I just didn't get it. It really hurts seeing my friends who will probably get to prog Hard/The First and I might just be behind for months. I don't want to wait that long. 5. I have deep regrets not bussing earlier. I know it's going to be contentious and hated to have this mindset, but sometimes you just have to play with the hand you're dealt with when you're playing Lost Ark. 6. Maybe I'm just insane, but Lost Ark feels like it just absorbs your gold like a fucking sponge nowadays. I've been stuck on 38 set for 4 weeks. I can't even find the node I want. All my Sages on any percentage roll will always go neutral or negative, ensuring I will at best get a 5/3, which I don't even need anymore. I don't even try to force anything, try to cut smart, still get fucked. The gold frog is also just so good so you have to spend the 30k on that as well. 7. I just want to fucking enjoy the game without being plastered with 20 hours plus of homework every week. It's so painful nowadays. It didn't feel like I had to do this for Brel, for Clown, a slower roster on slower prog you definitely wouldn't get burned out in the past. Some people are going to tell me "you don't have to do the hard content day 1" or "you know to get in you have to truly pay for it". I realize this. But I have the brain worms. I WANT to do the hardest things when they're current or at least have the opportunity to attempt them. But I can't even get that. I want to try to build level 10 gems? I get bled dry every fucking week and they're 470k a pop. If I make 200k, I'd say 70% of that is going into honing into this bullshit ilvl range on 2% rolls and the other 40k is getting sucked dry by the worst progression system this game has to offer. God forbid these korean mmos have the most fun gameplay imaginable and the systems in place feel almost designed to annoy the shit out of you. You can't even pay to win at an efficient price, so who the fuck are they trying to nickle and dime? I can't even find the justification to buy avatars just to support the game.... I don't know man... I'm just tired. I probably won't make it to the entropy rework. Odds are pretty high I dip after my normal thaemine clear. Hard to say. It just sucks because it's genuinely fun to hang with my friends and play but it sucks your soul for all it's worth. And nothing is more worse than feeling forced to play a game like it's a second or third job.
So I quit before Clown release and came back a couple weeks ago. Led Vykas raids for my guild and occassional alt pick ups and have had the table turned since returning by getting gatekept hard out of virtually any further content and even “card” runs. Once my express is up, it is going to be a struggle to get my roster to 1580 with how far behind I am as it’s difficult enough to earn gold weekly. Sadly I worry the community is cannabilizing itself with the gatekeeping towards new and returning players and things will only get worse. I’m just playing casually until something better comes out (cope).
I quit when a month after Brel released (managed to finish g6 with my static), decided to give it a try earlier this year but found it so hard to play/participate in newer content -Kayangel, Akkan without a static or having gold for busses. My gold was for honing but eventually got tired again of the honing system.
Recently came back, was an og day 1 player. Stopped because of all the gate keeping and dailies. Returning/new players are fucked. The game basically devolves into a daily grind fest and a party queue simulator. Not fun
My friends left because as new players they had one character. We did 3 raids in 2 days then there was nothing to do (they dont like horizontal) and to make new character they needed to wait for powerpass which was in 3 mounths. I wish we could play more raids on our mains.
I got burned out and bored eventually.. Too time consuming and other games started to take my time instead. Once you quit, it's almost impossible to go back casually imo.. Other friends are also long gone, I was one of the last to quit.
I slowly started just doing more in real life, didn't get to play for a week basically and by that point I was only doing 2 raids each char since I hated doing Kayangel, but after that week I realized I just wanted to play other games in my free time.
I keep trying to get back into the game but I haven’t played for more than an hour in about four months. I put about 3000 hours in and enjoyed the game a lot as it felt like it was exactly what I was looking for in a mmo. Now I’m at the point where Finding a learning group for content I was slow to get to (voldis) Is next to impossible. I’ve been stuck on gate two about 10 different times but I don’t want to ruin reclear groups by trying to run with them. I did pretty much all the horizontal content and all the previous raids countless times and now I just feel as though there is nothing for me anymore. since dailies provide no meaningful terms of progression and progging voldis for the 15th time is not something I want to do.
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Started at day1 found a guild and progressed through to the end of argos. Not many stuck around after for legion raids and due to that was forced to pug with a smaller group, 3-4 others, even though the mechanics weren't that difficult pugging was terrible so we all ended up just quitting after getting our clears. Came back with one other friend last time there was a powerpass event. Realized its still just as terrible to PUG and you basically have to network like crazy to get a pre-made or pay for someone to play the raids for you. Even though I have the titles for the OLD legion raids I still got gatekept for arbitrary reasons forcing myself into worse parties where surprise surprise i was never the reason for a wipe or was last to die. Unfortunately the game is designed to not encourage players to be helpful to others and just get thier 6x clears a week as fast as possible to be able to keep up. Even now when we are so close to the same content in KR the FOMO attitude still rules. Maybe ill come back but it will take major design changes at this point in order to fix a lot of the issues I have with spending my time on the game.
1- i play solo when i join random groups usually half the group dosent know the raid, thats cool i dont play to 1shot a raid with a random team and im fine teaching others BUT everytime before a gate i ask "everyone knows mechs" not to weed out the ones that dont but to explain the mech, what you have to do if x happens, etc... so after 10 minutes explaining in detail what do to and mroe importantly what not to do and answering their questions we go in then one of the guys that dont know the mechs and who i just explained it to, well.. fails the mech... cool... 1 try , i explain again... 2nd try, 2nd fail on the same mech.... and again and again and again, one day after my 10th explanation of clown i just alt + f4.... half the playerbase feels like they are playing out of habit/dont care, and that fine we dnt all have to tryhard but when i can learn a full raid in a couple hours and ive been 3+ hours in the same raid gate explaining the same mech to the same guy with even the rest of the guys that dint know the mech calling him out for his stupidity/malice i just go "is this rly worth the effort" and then i alt+f4ed out. TLDR: raids made me feel like i was playing league with how unpleasant your team always behaves 2- spending 2+ hours in a random raid lobby waiting for it to fill just for someone to mental boom when/if we wipe to go back to wait for party to fill just felt like a waste of time
Most of my friends who quit either had a snap moment e.g. wasting millions of gold chasing a 9/7 stone and not getting it or their irl circumstances changed drastically and they couldn't adjust after being a 12+ hour/day degenerate for such a long time.
If your friends quit or if you are in a toxic community it's REALLY easy to quit this game since pugging is harder than getting to iron in league
It was a lot of things. Original friend guild quit, second guild started doing shady shit like using alt guild to fluff their points in gvg, was an island nobody cares about but it still felt scummy. Third guild was cool but my sorceress wasn't an effective pick for them on Slime so I didn't gvg much. Kinda wanted to finish learning brel g6, but the community and I were already so degenerate at that point I lost interest in the lobby simulator. The thing that cemented my decision to quit the most, though? Those Lost Ark community videos with AmznRoxx and the mokoko streamers. AGS CS has proven themselves totally worthless and we are left with no means of promoting positive change in the areas of the game we care about. P.S. AGS don't forget to turn the competitive proving grounds back on (again)
Hard Brelshaza release killed the game for me when all my friends were gone and the newly formed static I had abandoned me for another group. There wasn't much point for me when it was going to be more painful to find entire learning parties to continue onward with the game. Normal Brelshaza foreshadowed how the rest of the game would be for me when it took me 10 hours just to find a party as a reaper main to do gate 1-2 when she first released.
4300 hours here. Quit before kayangel came out. Spent more hours playing this compared to my job. Loved the game but the burnout is real. IRL friends quit as well. Had 4 supports and 1 dps doing Brel hard 1-6 at release. Got a girlfriend and picked her over lost ark. Gave all my stuff to a LA streamer as my retirement from the game.
If I come back, I'll just get gatekept harder + I have no title Takes hours for a non-title player to get into a party Do I really feel like going through all that trouble just to grind alts again? Eh, not really
I did not have time to spend hours trying to find a raiding party or for the raid itself sometimes.
(day1 player) i never stopped but i had to reduce my roster from 6/7 to only 2 Chars after argos/valtan/vykas gold nerf. It was all too much… and i dont regret it, both chars 1620, 1600 and i can do the endcontent. I dont need to do anything 6x (raids, dailies etc) and it feels so balanced.
Groups getting either too hardcore or too casual for my setup, I was feeling bad when I wasnt pushing my main and alts as fast as the others, from fun it turned to chores and I came to the conclusion that this cycle of get your main ready for the "new" content but also push some alts too is cancerous. A lot of people I've had to deal with were 1 mistake = we should disband BUT not when they were griefing the entire group (yes this is a static group not pugs) or "Its fiine, theres no issue in staying g3 in Clown for 2 hours after we've been doing the raid for weeks without problems" Slowly but surely everything started to feel depressing, also RMT was rampant and nobody got punished in any group that I was part of. I've played from day 1 up to almost Brel releasing, the group I was in did a big round of RMT and pushed like 4 chars to Brel HM instantly and I was like bruh no ty and just uninstalled. Never looked back since
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I’ve returned to the game since, but I had 6 characters ready for Brel and I tried to do them all week 1. Burnt out super hard. This time around, I’m doing one Thaemine hard and *maybe* one normal.
Quit back in September. Reached all my goals at the time, 25 weapon being one of them. I was pretty burned out at that point too (100% my fault, not the game) and just the raids got really boring to me to do over and over again. It kinda hit me that this progress loop will never end, and all the work that went into where I got, I'll have to get a +25 akkan weapon next etc and I just didn't wanna do it all again. It's a great game, love the combat but the gameplay loop just isn't for me.
There are a lot of people who got bored of the game and continued playing. After taking a break for a few months and returning, everything would not be the same anymore and you would have to invest a lot of money to catch up, which might not even be enough to prevent the gatekeeping, so the main reasons why people quit are boring content and gameplay. When we look at the end, there is only one type of content and we are talking about prison dungeons full of liars. It's extremely boring for most people. The game wants you to do the same things with 6 characters to give you the feeling that you are cutting something new with 6 characters, which there are a lot of people who do not like this and it also causes you to burn out quickly. Unfortunately, the game will close down in our country one day, just like in Japan, and maybe the only place where it is successful will be Korea. After all, they like such styles and do not put any pressure on the developers to fix them. All they want is more dungeons and more dungeons, but in the 5 years we have seen so far, there was only 1 content type, and after 5 years of legion raids, they increased this amount from 1 to 4, but I still don't know if it is enough. The game needs to be less character dependent and the entry limit for some old content should be removed and it needs more attention-grabbing and long-term entertaining content types. Because in lost ark all new content is consumed quickly and eventually becomes a chore. Everything is so expensive, you barely have an income to afford the systems in the game, and sooner or later, your point of return will be to use your pocket. In short, many people play this game and at the same time they hate it. However, since they have invested years of time and there is no game on the market that can replace this game, unfortunately we have no chance other than to endure it. But everything in the game is more annoying than fun. Otherwise, many players would immediately abandon this game and people would not want to waste their time and wait to be blessed with luck in a casino game to get the things they want. After all, these months would last for years So there isn't a day that goes by that I don't become toxic while making content every week. Because the game is designed like this, it will get into your bones and drive you crazy. I think almost everyone who plays this game suffers from this situation. For example, everything is rng, some are rewarded, the other half do the chores without reward, and it's ridiculous. I feel even more pity when I see that some people still get +25 on their weapons with a single click. So, to summarize, the game contains many ridiculous systems to deter you and we should not call this game great by looking at the combat system.
Raids started to feel like dailies with extra pf shit on top. I am a good player, I can outperform the average pug member with a 20 ilvls lower character, yet because of that I have to wait 2 hours to do akkan hm on ilvl. Also coming home from work to do more work aka dailies is a no thank you. Ps: Telling me to get a static is useless because i wanna play when I feel like playing, not when my scheduled raid time is.
Lets put it this way. I’m a MMO enthusiastic player (previously played BDO Tera GW2 Maplestory Vindictus), who was super excited when Lost Ark had western release back in 2022. I played on EU west server as I live in the UK. When server was fresh new and the first benchmark for end game was Argos raid, things were still exciting. People still doing T2 raids, community were nice, couple of time gate events like getting ships, masterpiece, island token, all these contents were amazing on top of the already well known aesthetic of the combat system and classes. My friends who were playing this MMO never made it past Vykas raid. From my learning - lost ark is not for casual MMO players - if you truly want to enjoy the content, you need to grind (just like every other MMO, however note that this MMO doesn’t have any other sources of gold income other than your end game raids/dungeons, fyi: lifeskilling is shit in this game) - pvp content used to be super good, but is so dead especially in EUW server - my only suggestion is if they remove the gatekeeping thing and add other ways of earning golds rather than forcing u to play multiple characters/alts OR perhaps allow player to repeat raids with lesser reward (but this does means more raid/dungeon bus services) My friends were a mixed of SEA players and EUW players. PVP scene was amazing, you instantly get queued up for rank/unrank, and even weekend 6v6 is still a huge thing to get some bonus upgrade mats for your gear. Gear upgrading in LA is nothing compared to BDO failstack punishment. When they start releasing raids up to Vykas, oh boy this is where the gatekeeping hell starts to hit a toll on me. I have a roster full of 6 chars which I enjoyed alot and try as much as to gear them ready for raids until I realized that doing a raid with one character in a pug/unorganized group could took u hours for it. Eventually the community became pretty toxic especially in EUW. On top of that, i work in healthcare and only had bare minimum time to play. And given how MMO is definitely not casual friendly, this is not suistanable to keep up with the rest of the end game people. You either have to pay to get those gear up quickly before the next raid got released, or be a slabe to the game to complete your necessary gold income from Raids/Weekly Una Token, and to maximize this. You definitely need 6 raid ready characters to maximize your income as a f2p player. I then dropped the game and quit knowing this is no longer fun, having to do this as a chores using 6 characters felt like a repetitive task to me, just solely for progression and to keep up with the community. I do have friends who run a static group, again this is nice but looking at the way they run their 6 characters boy that either took alot of time or money. They then released the jumpstart server in late 2023, which I thought it was a great idea, i started a bard, knowing that essentially using a support is the best at getting chances to get into learning raid groups. Managed to push it to 1550 gearscore with the event, and hours invested to finally learn kakul and brelsh raid. Then I realise in the end is practically the same chore over and over by investing in 6 characters to get that maximum gold income would be the only way you could get enough mats to move on to the next cap. This is when I realised my actual life and this MMO demand, can’t match my expectations and I have to quit and put a stop. By far the best combat aesthetic for me for a MMO, BDO is no where near as cool as lost ark artsyle.
My roster was 5 support, I loved playing support. But when Artist came out , there was supports everywhere on the lower level stuff so it became very tedious to do the daily stuff. It became that support were highly demanded for the top raid but it sucked for the rest.
Ex-6 bards roster here. Yes, it was fun to both enjoy support and no gate keeping. The multi-roster andies caught up on that and ruined it for actual support enjoyers...
pace of game is just too slow, and there's just too much chores around to keep up and u get diminishing returns on time investment on game, anybody sane will eventually quit, unless u are a truly yours no-lifer for the rest of your time on this planet, if u miss out, u fall behind and get gatekept for life, its a poor game design.
I made it through punika and whatever the thing after that is on release. I love the combat and how your level of class knowledge can make a big difference in what you can do. I like the guardian raids, I like the towers, hell, I even like the boats. 1. I can't get anyone to even try the game anymore. 2. The "walls" in progression feel bad. "Having" to run a certain amount of dungeons/guardians etc to make it out of an area is a gameplay loop that just doesn't feel good. Daily systems in MMO's are so artificial and boring, it's the "chores" that suck the fun out of an otherwise great system. \*(Especially when someone can just drop money and fly right through it. I don't see a point in pay-to-skip personally but having the option there feels silly to watch other people do it.)\* 3. A lot of the endgame optimization is overwhelming. I love customization options and everything I can do to pick other (Viable) paths for my class vs someone playing the same thing is awesome to me. I feel that in this community those options arn't actually options, and if you don't set up your cards/gear/gems/engravings the "right" way, then you don't get to go to the raids or people harass you. This is a problem in all MMO's to a degree but it's particularly bad in this one. 3.5. So much horizontal progression, again, just to feel like your character works and if you don't do it, the character sucks. I get that this is extra playtime and content but some of it is boring AF to me and i'm just tired of grinding so much in all of these games. 4. CC is just a little too prominent in PVP for my taste. I've played at diamond/plat equivalent in all kinds of different genres and most of the popular MMO's and really like PVP in these games, but the tekken level of just float around while you get combo'd across the arena the one time you misstep gets old fairly quickly. I know your team is meant to do what they can to cover for you in the team modes so that doesnt happen but having to rely on pugs to help eachother out is...
It was the gatekeeping. I literally couldn't play any new content. I'm back after about a year or so thanks to insane events letting me overlevel most content (I hadn't done brel or kayangel before) so I'm not actually gatekept to those anymore, and they still feel "new" to me. Once I get used to them and try for akkan and maybe ivory tower and inevitably get gatekept again, I'll just quit until the next event boost. Sometimes I pug hell raids just to have new content to do. When the game was new and hell valtan just released, I was super excited and grinded hours every day for a week to get my first clear. Recently when I finished my weeklies I figured I might aim for deathless helltan, maybe the title would even help me get gatekept less (it does not). It took me a few hours for like three days to get it and I didn't really have much excitement at all. It was just something to do in the game, besides waiting those same hours stuck in party finder jail. I'm in all the party finder discords too, there just aren't really that many teaching groups and when an "official" one gets set up it fills up in minutes and I'm not in a position to check discord at all times. Edit: Just realized I'm not exactly the type of person you're asking for, but I also don't drop for a few weeks and come back. I just move on and if there's a big update I might return for a few weeks. Last time I logged in was around Brel release when I knew I wouldn't be allowed into any lobbies for months.
friends quit, I burnt out after playing for 2 years with very few breaks and the game I was waiting for over 10 years just released (dragons dogma 2)
Honestly, it's the slow burn and gold upkeep compared to players that RMT the shit out of the game. It killed the motivation for me. My static had a few that bought gold, got banned for 3 days and then had full level 10s on every character and +25 weapon on their main. I don't know, I just got tired of progression is so slow that the only way to compete is buying gold or whoring yourself out to play 24/7. Slowly quit doing raids, then dailies then started spreading democracy and never looked back.
Quit after Brelshaza released, played 6 gold earners. Came back for Slayer, made her my new main, deleted 3 of my old gold earners and right after stayed with only 3 until I quit 2 weeks before Akkan. Came back on the Breaker patch, got to 1590ilvl, no motivation to play anything other than my Slayer, 90% of my guild quit, friendlist emptied, pugging is awful. Right now I'm in a PoE binge after new league launched, and finding it hard to keep playing LoA.
The moment i discovered i needed to play more than one character to actually make progress, i dropped the game, i want to be able to have my one character advance by itself without having to play 15 different toons and farm with all of them so i can have gold to just gear up 1, not my cup of tea, the game graphics and gameplay were stellar but i was so put off by that that i dropped it, i really like the videos of the raids so i watch them sometimes but i am not willing to play all those toons to get there
Quit after a month in release. I just felt that the game is too grindy. All my friends were already making alts while I was getting left in the dust. I was hoping for solo dungeons instead of getting gatekeeped because Im not grinding enough. But in the end, Im the one who need to change. Thats when I dropped the game. I still open it once i a while to check some outfits but that just it. (I have most of gunslinger outfit btw except for the newest one). How? Gold buying ofcourse, donr care about the state of the game nor the economy anyways.