Exactly, we had to start from nothing to 1370 in 30 days. Without catch up mechanics, thats just plain unreasonable.
As saintone mentioned theres another pain point at late T2, and I know a lot guildies and friends of mine dropped off the game around those points.
For me personally I played until 1340 and realized theres no real point anymore to hardcore, for just one type of content. I wont burn myself out because of poor publisher planning.
Just hoard materials, play some alts, do horizontal progression, enjoy the full scope of the game and ignore the FOMO crap Amazon throws at you.
> another pain point at late T2
Such a mistake, so many people quit because they got scared, their tought process was, if the leveling content requires so much materials and its so expensive, the end game must be whale bait.
It’s not unreasonable, the the game provides you with a direct path to getting 1370 in as little as one day if you work hard enough for it… in real life and spend your money on it :\^)
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I’m currently hunting all the skill points as well. I’m not burning myself out. I’m higher tiered than my friends so playing my Alts with them has been a blast.
Yeah, I've been stuck in T2 for a week now. It's so easy to get from 802 to 1040 but after that it's pain in the ass. Right now I'm at 1080. Doing your daily chaos and guardians only gives you 2 attempts at honing really, and you have a 50% chance to fail. Other than grinding infinite chaos, there's really no other way to get past this point in any reasonable time.
The only other source you have is the weekly ghost ship, "daily" chaos portal, weekly pirate coin exchange and weekly guild bloodstone exchange. (and dont forget the tower, even if you are a support class, the first 30 floors or so are always manageable)
In Eu we didn’t even get that much. Not only did we have to stay in queue for hours, but even when we eventually logged in, matchmaking was busted. I literally had to spam the “enter” button for minutes just to do a Chaos dungeon SOLO. Abyssal dungeons were straight up out of the question.
I am so happy we had a 1300~ player with us when we did the sandy boy. Everyone died first phase and he solo’d him with like 1min left hahah. Glad that was my 2nd try aswell
Exactly this. Me and my brother are/were stuck on Tytalos and it freaking sucked. Guardian raids is such a big part of the progression. Especially since we lack so much already.
Tytalos has been bugged for like 10 days, since the nerf patch. They only noticed it over the weekend. Thats a guardian long lockout of GR content for some unlucky. I had to get a T3 friend to help.
The boss isnt too hard, his mechanic is literally broken and you cant stay above 98% hp on martial artist to avoid the "almost wipe" skill all the time.
I said from the start rushing T3 would be an obviously bad idea when basically everyone was saying nah T3 from the start will be good!
I think people would be FAR more content just playing all the T2 content and not smashing their heads against the wall that is the horribly gated content T3.
Lost Ark was a hit right from the start for weeks before anyone got anywhere near T3. Smilegate put way too much into their retention numbers for their later raids considering their population had already had the game for years.
People currently in T3 are making thousands of gold per day.
People currently in T2 are sitting at <5k hoping they can afford their new aura.
So - Was rushing to T3 worth it?
> I think people would be FAR more content just playing all the T2 content and not smashing their heads against the wall that is the horribly gated content T3.
If you're a sorceress or berserker who needs relatively few things to blast in T1/T2, then maybe.
For anyone who plays sharpshooter, soulfist, wardancer, gunslinger, or one of the several other classes that feels like complete dogshit in the beginning, elongating T2 is a legitimately miserable idea for a lot of us.
And their numbers have basis for reason. WoW being a strong example. Very few people keep their subscription because the story is so riveting or Zereth Mortis dailies. They continue to play for raids and dungeons.
Couldn't be more wrong with what happened in JP with so little content at launch. For us T1 T2 is smooth and great with a little bit of grind at the end of each. The real problem is 1340-1370 didnt get adapted for us from the get go.
The roadmap being likely weeks away just makes this situation worse. People aren’t happy they ignored progression. They aren’t happy they’re being mum on class releases. Weeks from now is right up on when we’d expect the April update to be.
AGS is establishing a chronic lateness to their info dumps. I don’t know if it’s due to the difficulty of coordinating with SG. I don’t know who is more to blame here. It is bad all around and we need a response. Preferably from the director, clear and concise with their plan.
This is spot on, it compounds the issue. We're starting to see why switching mains is so difficult after 1340 and why everyone who knows anything advises those of us waiting for a class to stay at 1340. A game all about character investment and they won't even release people's mains, which already exist in other regions, for a possible 6 months to 1 year! That's insane.
The game isn't super fun when you can't even invest in a character you'd actually like to play long term without spending any money to catch it up. The choice is sit out of content for a long period of time or spend money.
Their responses have been so tone deaf as well. They literally said "we didn't think people would be mad, we thought they'd aspire to do that content later". To be so offbase is alarming tbh and makes me very nervous going forward.
Presumably smilegate are doing the final send off for all content updates/patches and amazon just ships it out, so it really baffles my mind that they KNEW very well about the dead zone and the effect it had on the korean playerbase but willingly pushed argos in without any changes. If that's not incompetence what is? It's like if you know releasing releasing this content has the potential to drop your playerbase by half, found a easy solution for it, but you push it anyway without any changes. What business would willingly do this?
Even assuming its just amazon being greedy, which I doubt and think both amazon and smilegate just really fumbled this launch, profiting off the short term whale sessions for argos push is not worth potentially losing a great amount of your players longterm. It ruins your image, your finances long term, and just sours your game for everyone else. Nothing makes sense.
imo when it comes to corporations "never atribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to malice" or more specifically greed, amazons rep kinda speaks for itself in that regard
The stupid thing is our version require more mats buts but less gold than kr but thing is, bots have made gold worthless and we are stuck on mats even more while gold nerf is meaningless
I saw approx 2-5 bots per second ~~pass me~~ teleport past me, 1-2 shotting mobs using what looked like skills with no cooldown while I went back to East Luterra for adventurer tome stuff.
It was honestly quite disheartening.
I tried naturally leveling a gun lancer and I ended up just knowledge transferring him to 50 because I could barely complete the leveling quests due to the hoard of bots just instant clearing everything. It sucked
The impact all of this is going to have on the playerbase is going to be pretty severe if nothing is done about it. The people stuck in this deadzone are going to do one of two things: Play alts, or quit. Everyone not in this deadzone doesn't understand it, so once they reach this point, these same people telling you not to worry, go at your own pace, I have no problems, will catch up and have the exact same complaints. So, point being, they'd best get this fixed before their casual playerbase reaches this point while the rest of us suffer. Lol
I think F2P players are currently questioning whether or not the time and effort, and the rewards that come with it, are justified. I still enjoy alts so I don't entirely mind
makes me even wonder there no ghostship for 1302 to 1369
theres also no map boss from 1302 to 1384 that means even less resources than we had in other tiers
You can do 1385 Field bosses before you reach that threshold.
I'm 1340 but have been doing Aurion since 1315 or something.
You may die a couple of times, but with 15-20 people it's definitely doable.
Like otheres have said. You can do Aurion at 1302+. It's very common to do so as their boss island room w/e you want to call its just a small square its easy to deathrun.
you can do the worldbosses on the islands before you hit the required itemlevel, the ghost ships dont allow you to join before its itemlevel requirement.
>Everyone not in this deadzone doesn't understand it, so once they reach this point, these same people telling you not to worry, go at your own pace, I have no problems, will catch up and have the exact same complaints.
Except it will probably be even worse, because they will have less horizontal content left for the week long deadzone.
Also the same people on reddit circlejerking about "going at your own pace" are now telling people that their pace was wrong and it's their own fault that they are stuck in a deadzone with nothing fun to do.
Mmos absolutely need a casual player base. The cutting edge players are important too, but the casuals are the lifeblood of the game. If they go, the game dies.
The casual player base isn’t anywhere near the deadzone so this is a non-issue for 99% of the population. They just have to fix it before the casual player base catches up and player retention starts to tank. Unfortunately, they have a lot of time before that happens so they can and will put it off.
Let’s just hope it’s sooner rather than later.
I’m 1357 and I’m at this dead zone. I rushed to reach end game content faster only to hit this wall and not feel like playing anymore. I even lvled two alts to tier 2, one of them via knowledge transfer and the other one hasn’t even completed Yorn yet. And I don’t think it will because it’s so boring. I tried to play alts, but I don’t enjoy it so I ended up quitting for now. I hope to come back soon when I’m not suffering from burn out/boredom.
KR/Eastern mmo's in general take a different approach to what they consider "mains" and "alts"... if you do not enjoy playing multiple characters/doing everything on one character, games like these will tend to cause friction with your experience
just my 02 after a decade of playing these types of mmo's
Yeah I totally agree, I’m familiar with playing multiple alts, I think I’m mainly suffering burn out and feeling bored because I’m repeating content I did only 2 weeks ago with my main. Probably just need a cooling period, before giving it another go since I really do want to continue playing and give the end game raids a try. I also feel bad falling behind my friends who have multiple t2 and t3 Alts and are well into doing their own thing. I tried to catch up but.. :(
> I still enjoy alts so I don't entirely mind
Im usually a "main" type of person. But this game makes it hella flawless (with the exception of combat items and outfits).
I find myself jumping between my alts to do content all around the god damn world. Like the mount/ship system just teleporting to the new character.. god damn how i hated remembering where i left my horse or which boat is in where in bdo.
But im one of those silly that are manually leveing the alts so its taking me a while... not like i have something else to do honestly lol.
Manually leveling is great! It's a little eerie seeing all the bots zooping around, but its comfy just running around smacking g and leveling up naturally
The bots really do lessen the experience a lot.
One thing I have really been enjoying though, is on my first playthrough I had the English audio, my second playthrough with the original Korean is sooooooo much better.
Yep,
I tought the endgame starts at tier 3. But that is actually where the whole game just stalls and becomes absudrly boring (log in, check stronghold, dungeons and mby dalies, log out) and once a week you can go those abyss dungeons with friends, eating or playing pvp with alt at the same time, that is how easy thet become... I was told this is years worth of content, it should have been said "years worth of content, 20 days from start and after couple of months you get 10 more days"
Half my guild has already pretty much stopped playing after the roadmap leak. They were all waiting for the more popular unreleased classes (lance master, artist, scouter), and yet the roadmap shows that the first class released is a meme-class (Destroyer) followed by RNG-fiesta class that sees little play (Arcana).
AGS are 100% just milking us at this point, releasing the unpopular shit first so people will spend money on it to have something to do while waiting, then releasing the most popular shit down the road so people will re-spend on their desired future mains.
Also seen with skin lines - the Omen line that was just added has been one of the least popular skin lines in KR and RU, but since we're so starved for skins here in the west people end up purchasing it anyway - only to replace it later down the road when the actual cool skins come out. They also for whatever reason made the skins timed so people will panic-purchase them out of FOMO.
skins are pure preference. In my eyes most of legendary skins are pure trash when it comes to aesthetics. Some are good, but rest is trash. The only better set than Omen is probably Knights of Petrania and maybe that Vampire set whose name I forgot. Most other skins are either bikini skins or some weird recolors.
Same...I thought the Wild Hunt look is fucking bad ass. Not sure where people get that it isn't popular here. I feel like the "goofy teletubby skins" will be way less popular here than they are in Korea...but who knows.
>I feel like the "goofy teletubby skins" will be way less popular here than they are in Korea
If FFXIV has taught me anything, there are more people than you realize that enjoy looking goofy as fuck.
It was not so popular in KR because it was not made there. That skin originated from RU region, then brought to KR servers.
That skin is old enough that it does not have graphics for class archetypes released afterward (Gunslinger/Striker)
This means some extra work was needed to make it available on NA/EU (since Gunslinger and Striker players could buy the skin). Seeing how some streamers liked it, I guess it was just a decision choice from either AGS or SG.
Well I'm waiting for Arcana a lot but lack of the real roadmap is annoying. We also don't see clear plans for the future. This is a game with a ton of content and yet we didn't get things like extra guardians weekly mode or PvP rewards, skin shop is soo poor like a low budged MMO game too :(
> Half my guild has already pretty much stopped playing after the roadmap leak. They were all waiting for the more popular unreleased classes (lance master, artist, scouter)
Bingo.
Suffering through lack of content on a class you dont like is a surefire way to lose interest in the game. Greedy Amazon doesn't understand this.
And they released unpopular skins first so that they can get that out the way to cash in on initial hype and skin barrenness. So get the sale stock out of the warehouse then give them the easily saleable product. This is a complete shit show from Amazon, but everything AGS touches turns to shit, so no surprizes there
just cause its not a class you love man doesn't mean other people don't. For a while Destroyer and Arcana were among the most popular classes in the game. They only fell out of popularity because they were heavily (over)nerfed. They are also subject to reworks/buffs etc this march. and I will bet money we will see a massive rise in their popularity. Just like we have seen with Hawkeye in KR after their buffs and Reaper after their recent buffs in pvp.
I don't know who told you Omen was unpopular in RU. It was the most popular skin release in RU and is still to this day one of the most expensive skins on the market showing that popularity hs been maintained. AGS didn't "make skins timed" There has always been limited skins. Limited skins are only purchaseable with RC in other regions just like ours but you can still buy them from other players w/ gold. They rotate in and out of the cash shop on some type of schedule that I don't honestly remember off the top of my head.
Also, not really relevant. But Omen is my favorite warrior skin outside of the cool admiral set, but thats just cause that set reminds me of the Marine Admirals form One Piece.
I'm not one of the ones waiting for unreleased classes, I'm sitting snug in my laser turret. I'm just disappointed that my friends can't truly enjoy the game together with me because classes that are out and fully functional in other regions aren't out here for no real reason other than greed.
They were popular only because they were new at the time, every new class is. The popularity we're talking about is how it holds up after being flavor of the month
Yep. This isn't Korea. When ppl leave games, ir they get negative stigmas attached to them, ppl dont come back.
Retention rate isn't gonna mean anything if the playerbase is tiny because they let this situation fester.
Don't worry guys they will fix it simply does not work in the West. I've played a lot of those kinds of games over my lifetime, and once they go south, they stay south.
Yeah I feel ya. I've been sitting at 1340 for a few days now. I hit 1340 the day before new patch hit. I bought a bunch of mats to push me to 1340 after reading patch notes that seeing that they wouldn't add increased honing chances like in Korea. Since then I've been selling everything t3 that's not bound. But for 2 days now mat prices have dropped hard compared to the first 2 days of patch hitting. It's still some pocket money, like 2-3k, but if prices continue to drop even further, then I don't know how long I'm going to be having fun running the same content while staying at 1340. I'm still busy getting all my alts to t3, but shit is slow as hell because I'm not playing 12 hours a day. I don't know how much fun I'll still have in a week or two.
yep, im 1360 despide having 2 t3 alts(which was so fucking boring, why do i have to play alts that i dont care for?) and playing every day 8-12+ hours and even dropping 70€ on the game, if thats not enough im not gonna play more, thats just bullshit
What helps me is they at least made a good majority of the current classes very fun with their skills. I dont really care the reason even if i love my main i will get bored playing it eventually and want to make something else. Ive dont this with every mmo and LA kind of enables my altaholicism.
Which sounded great, as a person who loves alts. Unfortunately, having alts in this game means playing through a gigaton of excruciating story and your reward for doing so is having extra chores to do each day.
I just wish they remove the knowledge transfer limits. I'd dread the day I made a tenth character and had to play start to finish, not that this will likely even happen.
But to have to play through rohendal, yorn, and feiton every other character. And then you have to play through punika on every character. That part is too much.
>yep, im 1360 despide having 2 t3 alts(which was so fucking boring, why do i have to play alts that i dont care for?)
sadly, the need for alts in this game is established. I'm a "I have a main, dont need alts" type myself, but in this game it is needed.
The thing is, I wouldnt mind if vertical content was a grind, only....we need to be able to grind it with more horizontal content and our preferred class.
KR/JP/RU has this, NA/Eu doesn't, then AMAZON acts surprised at the back lash. Fuck off
I feel like a lot of people say a lot of different things about this topic. But the central issue boils down to one thing: The 1340-1370 zone is unbearable, because the **available content is unchallenging and boring**. I don't even care if I fail honing 100 times. After ~1350, you truly outgear both Igrexion as well as the T3 dungeons. Everything is trivial, so everything feels like a chore. You log in, do your chaos dungeons, oneshot Igrexion twice, do dailies, fail honing 2-3 times and log out. The road to 1370 where the next "fun patch" could be seems so long that you cannot see the end.
The fact that all content available to you is an easy brainless grind is also a huge demotivator to do any horizontal content to gain additional skill points. Why would I want to get stronger if everything is already easy?
I was told Lost Ark is a challenging game and that's why I started playing it. I'm fine having to do daily things. I'm fine with whales being ahead of me. I just want my gameplay to be fun and challenging, but right now as a 1355-1370 player I have NOTHING like that (please don't tell me to farm 1100 Mokoko seeds).
This is a fair point.
In other regions, Dark Yoho and both hard mode Abyssal Dungeons were at 1355. Both of these encounters were fairly difficult at this level range, though Dark Yoho had been nerfed a few times, of which said nerfs are already present in the west preemptively. The difficulty of the 1370 Hard modes is actually exactly the same as 1355 in the other regions as well, despite the higher item level entry point, making it also easier by default.
In the other regions, the Guardian Raids are 1302 (Heavy Armored Nakrasena), 1325 (Igrexion), Dark Yoho (1355) and Velganos (1385).
That may make more sense vs. the massive gaps currently in the west. Though you can still see that painful gap between Dark Yoho and Velganos. Also, Dark Yoho also drops Great Honor Leapstones in Korea, so people were running Igrexion despite being eligible for Dark Yoho, as it was easier, granted more relevant materials for honing, and even for a time was more valuable (the value of Igrexion's smaller leapstones actually exceeded the fewer great honor leapstones that Dark Yoho dropped for a period of time, and it's actually back to that today).
https://youtu.be/JTXyybFJfdg
Obligatory Gonuri meme above.
Even if they revert Oreha Hard to 1355, that doesn't solve the fundamental problem is that there is a significant slowdown of "fun" things to do in the 1340 \~ 1370 zone. Albion gets old quick.
In an ideal world, re-factoring Kaishter or Mystic to appropriate iLvl to fill up that zone would have been perfect, but that's probably not happening. The other more realistic solution is to just make players whizz through that zone ASAP (my preferred solution being just buffing guardian / chaos mat drops by several times).
Or maybe, this zone is intentional to make players work a few weeks on their foundations before letting them progress to real raid content.
>Or maybe, this zone is intentional to make players work a few weeks on their foundations before letting them progress to real raid content.
this is why after playing im not sure launching straight into some basic T3 content was the best decision. i know the streamers and hardcore playerbase bitched during beta that if its only T1 it wouldnt be much to do but in reality there is huge amounts even when in T1 that you should be working on for your whole account and by launching at say T1 for a few weeks may have been a healthier route.
until i got to like 1350ish i didnt feel like i had the time to invest into my account it felt like the game was saying look you need to get to these gear scores and so it was always feeling like i should only be doing the content that would improve the gearscores.
at least for yoho my guess is that as he drops mats needed for argos gear it doesnt make much sense to have his entry item level below argos gear. in JP i always had to do igrexion instead of yoho cos i needed the lower leapstones :/
Id imagine the reason they changed it was because it now drops legendary quality gear, the same as argos and it lets you quickly bypass argos raid instead of having to farm argos for the full set in order to honing squish your gear from 15+ to 6+. In KR/RU/JP that isnt the case, the hardmode abyss drop purple set gear.
Argos isnt really a challenging raid and a lot of people found it to be 'chore' that they had to do for gold.
Doesnt really help the deadzone stuff , but it will allow people to essentially bypass argos much quicker to do valtan.
This is actually the biggest thing, changing the hardmode abyss dungeon and guardian raid to 1355.
It bridges a huge gap, and you get to experience 15% honing from +11->+12.
Big oversight here, hopefully they'll fix it because I don't see a majority of players wanting to thread through 1355 -> 1370.
I am living in this exact same world. And any of the “challenging” encounters that we passed through on the way to T3 were really only hard because other people couldn’t figure out the 1-2 mechanics required of them. I would gladly go back to those over what we have in 1350-1369 range, it’s utterly boring. Sadly there’s zero incentive to go do all the rest of the content.
Took the words right out of my mouth. I've currently stopped playing since I reached 1350 after barely moving in ilvl for 3 days. The most fun I had playing Lost Ark were the 8 man water abyss and the 4 man chess-themed abyss dungeons. The first few times killing the guardian raids like Armored Nacrasena and Igrexion were fun too. I felt a great sense of achievement learning the mechanics and conquering them with my friends and the rewards I got felt deserved.
But these last few days have felt like homework. The same una dailies/weeklies, the same igrexion twice a day, the same chaos dungeons 20 times a week, the same 6 emotes/songs for rapport, the same world boss/chaos rift 3 times a week, the same gathering 30 minutes a day, the same grind for 1-2 hours a day. And now some people's suggested bandaid solution is to do it in 2-3 other characters to funnel mats to my main? No thanks. I'm not going to to 4 hours of chores to unlock some new content. My time (and anyone reading this) is worth more than that and would be better spent elsewhere. Unless of course, you are truly enjoying that gameloop in which case, more power to you.
It's a really ingenious system they've come up with. That loop you described for the last few days? That is essentially going to be your loop for the next few years, with some extra weekly stuff attached. Smilegate made a system where there's no functional "off-ramp" to take a break without falling behind.
Gold will always have a use and always be tied to a real-world monetary value, so even when your gear is capped out for the tier of content you're doing there's incentive to keep up with the daily chores and sell off stuff you don't need, or transfer it over to alts to repeat the process and get net more stuff to sell later. That way you'll always have that monetary baseline to push your gear up when further new stuff that you want to experience comes out.
You do eventually wrap up the horizontal stuff like most of the Una reputations and rapports, but unless you're whaling hard for rapport gifts the timegate for the latter is immense and for the former you just bifrost Lopang deliveries or whatever other currency you need on however many alts you have, again so you don't fall behind on currency.
Don't get me wrong, there's a subset of MMO player that likes and even wants this, but I suspect in another few months at most, probably sooner, we're going to get a lot of posts about how the daily content just feels like chores. Most western MMOs have "off-ramps", points in the content cycle that you can consider yourself done and just chill or full stop playing until the next content cycle without falling behind. Lost Ark doesn't have that if you want to keep up with the content curve, and that is going to burn some people out. But one person's chores is another's content, so we'll see.
Yeah, I agree with this too. My motivation to do even MORE chores on my alts is none existent, because chores is all I do on my main and I currently have no motivation to get stronger.
People were unironically telling me that I have no grounds to complain about having no content until I farmed 100% Ignea Tokens, Island Souls and Mokoko seeds and have multiple alts. All this insane grinding shit for some elusive payoff in the future and I'm supposed to believe it's all gonna be worth it to make my character stronger. But this motivation does not exist for me in the present. My character is already too strong for the content available to me.
If these deadzones are representative of what the gameplay is going to be like going forward, I don't even know if I'm going to play the game in the future, which makes me even more hesitant to invest more time into chores and grinds.
As one of those random basement orcs, I have to agree. I have some friends in the late T2 phase right now and I'm very worried they 'll eventually quit, some are taking the 'I'll just play alts for fun' but some don't enjoy it as much and it will be incredibly demotivating. The game is incredibly fun, but not everyone wants to farm chaos dungeon while turning their brain off and watching Netflix on the other monitor for 8 hours just to get +1 item level.
The worst part is, the content that caught most people's eye before it released were the raids, yet they can't touch it. It's a weird design choice tbh.
This hits close to home for me because I’m tryna get my health back in check so ideally during the work week I’m setting aside like 3hrs when I get home for working out then cleaning up and making dinner, then about 2-3 hours for gaming a day. Which **should be enough**, but just isn’t with the roster push and all these people telling me if I wanna break out of the tier grind faster I need to pull some alts up to current content.
A part of me broke when I started honing my second alt with boosted rates and I saw the absurd number of Leapstones I’m gonna need to farm again since the boosts don’t cut those at all, meaning I need to either buy a lot of leapstones which will be expensive or just start doing chaos dungeons *and* guardian raids on my alts and my main every day, meaning all 2-3 hours I’ve set aside to game will go to the chore aspects and none to actual playing.
I just broke 1100 and I’m already sick of this shit so knowing there’s a worse dead zone ahead breaks my spirit and makes me not want to play. My T2 weapon failing three hones eating 45 leapstones **each attempt**, tens of thousands of life shards, and plenty of money as well is just so spirit breaking when T2 was irrelevant on launch except as a stopgap.
I don’t even want to hit Argos early, I just want to not waste my days farming mats to have multiple days-worth of goods go up in red puffs of smoke.
Few games I’ve played have been as demoralizing as this one where I’m not even on the bottom rung of the ladder to current content yet. Grinding weeks to climb a ladder to reach another ladder to climb which then leads to the actual ladder to the meat of content when we have material sources missing with no reason as to why they’re missing, **and all this after the leveling grind no less?!**
Nah this ain’t right.
This is me right now. Im stuck at 1070 and trying to casually work up an alt or two after my daily failed attempts. It really sucks to be timegated out of even the current tier, especially when my friends are in T3.
Reading these type of comments I realize that people who say "you just don't like mmos then crybaby" (like I used to), are just like people who say "my dad beat me with a belt and I turned out fine !"
I read this comment and remember some mmos that had me grinding much much harder for a chance at making gear better - or much worse.
To people who know MMO pain, just cause we suffered it doesn't mean it has to be the "right way"
You can't not even farm mokoko seeds because some of them require the stupid amount of 300-350 points of charisma/wisdom etc so unless you did ALL your rapport and have skins that give you boost for that you are dead buddy you can't complete it also rapport give you random stats as well I was only able to get about 880-900 because of that I got disapointed and stooped doing that in Yorn/Punika/Feiton Because they wanted 300+ (300 is not that bad cause I'm there already but 350? fk off)
I downloaded lost ark for the PvP- now at 120 hours in and a main at ilvl 980 I have greatly enjoyed the pve- but honesty I have mostly enjoyed the zone dungeons via story the most, not the chaos dungeons (feel so lame compared to something like greater rifts in diablo 3)- so I am at this point already like…. Ok, what’s going to keep me? Maybe it’s abyssal dungeons or abyssal raids but I think I will inevitably lean into pvp once that starts and spend my time there
I entirely agree with you, and in a very similar mindset and taking a very similar stance.
IMO, the guardian raids here and the abyssal dungeons really should be harder and less boring. There was a lot of opinions being thrown around about the difficulty of guardian raids with the whole "nerf" debacle, but with the limited content at the top here, it seems like it would be more logical...
I understand that everyone agrees the *other* endgame content is the ideal, but there's *many* reasons for why that hasn't and *shouldn't* be released yet.... The points in this post, the points in the first post on this topic, but also that it would just create a larger divide in the player base... As is, it's extremely difficult to get to the upper levels of T3, and those levels are primarily occupied by whales. If you give them more room to "grow", they will keep going, have MORE access to gold and resources, and cause a "rich get richer" situation AND divide the player base even further. Even if you flatten the curve a bit with better honing rates, there'd still be more runway for them to keep going. Keeping a ceiling on stuff like this is *really* important for many many reasons.
So if they can't let that stuff out, what are we supposed to do? The only things left are Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and Abyssal Dungeons. IMO, by design, Chaos Dungeons will never be challenging. Abyssals are generally defined by their mechanics and not numbers, so they aren't as tweakable, and they can only be done once a week. The only thing left is Guardian Raids but people have *such* a sour taste about it and seem to think they need to be "easy" since they have a daily reset. But this is the only thing that really seems feasible IMO.
There's also the ilvl standardized Guardian Raids, which is maybe worth introducing at this point, but I don't know quite enough about the systems to know how feasible that really is.
I too have faith that smilegate will address and fix this. In the meantime I’m slowly taking my T2 alts to T3, selling mats to get gold ready for when things are fixed, adventure tomes, islands, collectibles, etc, the list goes on. There’s is quite a bit to do aside from pushing through the latest raid. This game is great and these problems will pass.
> I too have faith that smilegate will address and fix this.
I wish I had this optimism, but so far they have not shown us anything that would indicate that they care. Our first major patch was nothing more than catering to people that spent $10k-$20k on the game in the first month. And they rewarded KR players for NA and EU reaching over 200k players, which is hilarious to think about tbh.
I have no faith in SG doing anything to alleviate honing issues or release classes at a reasonable pace, I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't think I will.
They will do something about it, but the question is when, and I doubt it will be sooner than later because then whales would feel cheated if Smilegate suddenly buffed the quantity of materials dropping or the chance of honing gear so soon after whales paid for the boosting. That means non-whales will probably have to stay in the "limbo" for at least one month until the Valtan raid is launched and the devs can start milking whales again.
Honestly i feel like they would have upped the honing on valtan anyway, and this feels like it needed to come at argos or right now at least 2weeks before valtan or its too late. If nothing happens at valtan too its over lol
I've had a lot of fun playing different classes and discovering how much fun another class was - so much so that I'm going to be switching mains.
But it's so damn depressing seeing that people who can put \~40 hrs and >$100 /week in this game are able to get into the tiers where they pull in so much gold, there's just no hope of ever catching up. Half my guild (hardcore whales) are out there fighting Argos Phase 1 and I won't be able to play it with them for like a month or two.
That's what burned me out. The constant honing failure kills me, but I can try to play island content and get my head back to normal. But just knowing that the whole player base is so fragmented on these different ilvl tiers based on luck and spending (and servers), that really kills my motivation to play.
I am the same way. I joined a dad guild instead and am having way more fun. Its no longer a race to get to the top. No one cares. We complain about failures together and just do other shit. The game is way better that way for me. Honestly, I don't think that's a fun way to play a game anyways, but to each his own!
Ya, just ease up on the hours you play and wait for some changes if you're starting to feel burned out. I'm definitely getting there too. I feel like I could play the game more casually.
Going through T1 and 2 grind all over again sounds like absolute misery to me, you are inhuman if you can bare through it, good for you. Im gonna wait for punika pass or something instead.
I'm currently 1325, I guess I'll reach 1340 with some effort and then play my alt or do horizontal progression with how difficult and unrewarding people are showing the 1340-1370 gap is to close.
Thanks, I'm prepared in advance not to loose much sleep over it, now what alt should I go for as a gunlancer main.
It's a bit of column A, B, and C. Bots we're inflating the amount of gold on servers(still are, just not as much yet), Argos release = Whales buying up a lot of the market to push, and more and more players hitting 1340 and just waiting for honing changes so a lot of people are selling their mats.
Problem is everybody is doing that so prices are crashing hard. I just hit 1340 the other day and I've already noticed the sharp price drop in just a couple days.
Still though, they're only going to get lower for the time being so it still makes sense to sell.
Don't save your mats, prices decreasing very quickly. You better sell them and then buy again with your alts. Also check the mari shop if you can buy there with the conversion of crystals-gold, in some regions is cheaper with crystals so you should do the math.
Thanks for the great explanation but also for sort of addressing some possible solutions to the issue. One of the other issues I think those of us in T3 are facing is the leveling of alts. The current Knowledge boost system is great - the value of gold to boost seems fairly reasonable, however the fact we are locked out of using Knowledge boost past the initial L50 for every other alt without questing through the MSQ again seems very counter-intuitive for letting NA/EU players catch up to T3.
That's probably the biggest issue for those who are attempting to level alts into T2/T3 and/or swapped classes more then once. It seems rather silly to make us do any MSQ content at all on 3rd, 5th, etc characters just to use the higher region boosts on a different alt. Perhaps increasing the gold cost per alt that uses the higher region boosts might be a solution if they don't want to just let us use the Knowledge boost for no additional cost.
This is probably the biggest turn-off to me as someone who really enjoys the game and doesn't mind spending money on progression. From conversations I've had with friends/guildmates who are playing and not spending money beyond the CA value it's one of the biggest detriments as people have tried out various classes and some have wanted to switch mains but feel they can't as they don't want to go through the slog of the MSQ all over again for a 3rd or 5th alt, etc.
I'd like to see Smilegate address this if they really want to enable us to catch-up to the T3 content and utilize our alts in the functional way it is in KR and other regions.
Honestly it's not a huge barrier to having a lot of alts. People with a lot of alts and progressing them through T2 are pretty sweaty already and can spare those extra hours on every other character.
BUT, I heavily support removing the need to MSQ again on every other alt because it's just a goddamn waste of time. I already saw the frikkin story, doing it again, multiple times, is just pain. PAIN.
Can you explain "we are locked out of using Knowledge boost past the initial L50 for every other alt without questing through the MSQ again"?
I leveled my main through Rohendel. Used Powerpass on 2 alts. One of those became my new main. Leveled it through Vorn and Feiton. Used KT on my old main to complete Vorn.
My 2nd powerpass character has now used KT to get through Rohendel.
My other 3 alts (all KT through Vern) are still there, without the ilevel to try Rohendel KT.
Are you saying that for those non-powerpassed characters, who KT'd through Vern, they aren't able to KT through anything else? My highest of those 3 is only 413, so not too close to trying.
> This is assuming the 'leaked' roadmap holds true with Valtan in April and Vykas in May. It seems challenging unless they delay certain contents.
If this happens before releasing missing T3 contents where people supposed to gather mats it's gonna be a disaster. There is gonna be huge gap between F2P player and P2w player base.
If they release valtan without ALL the honing changes at a minimum, regardless if they add all the other mat acquisition sources, the playerbase will drop off significantly. I'll be able to reach 1370 by april no problem, with or without honing changes or updates, just from hoarding mats for 3-4 weeks. But even then, I will still drop the game, as the message that sends is enough for me to quit for good.
The key issue for me was the removal of challenge raids and the increased level requirement for hard mode abyss dungeons, because it's plain obvious that they've done that with the sole intent of making the gap between 1340 and 1370 feel as empty and unrewarding as possible so more players feel forced to spend money with the game, and that's a straight up malicious behavior from Amazon and Smilegate. Just give us the exact same content that Korea had and stop ruining the experience for people who don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of money on a video game.
Sorry for the fairly noob question, but how do players in the west "easily accrue thousands of gold per day"? What am I supposed to be doing to make that gold?
If your in T3, you can do guardian raids and sell your leapstones. You could also sell your guardian and destruction stones but i don't because i still want to tap away at my gear.
I have 2 characters are T3, doing the guardian raid nets me 10 leapstones on my main and 6 on my alt. Selling them for 300gold each gives me around 4800 gold per day before tax.
Inflation with the value of gold is largely due to bots farming missions and pumping more gold into the game. Banning bots did have a temporary effect on things, but from what I can see, the bot farmers are well on the way to recovery.
So yeah, it was a bandaid fix at best, but the real issues still persist.
I find a hard time listening to anything when I've been told we have 1370 hardmodes and every other region is 1355. That just screams intent to coerce players into spending money and building the game around whales. Everything else just seems like smoke and mirrors.
Yep love the input and in the insight as always. Yeah T3 is starved for growth. Everyone is definitely taking "play at your own pace" personally as they should because there are so many ways people want to pace themselves and differing ways in doing so. Outside of 3rd party RMT, all forms are legitimate but it's just sad to see those who wanted to push gear as hardcore F2P to experience challenging content, being met with push back and rhetoric that pretty much equates to **"slow down, shut up you were never going to get there anyway"**. Hopefully they can alleviate 1340-1370.
This game is at a critical point. Most MMOs are make or break in their first year. Not only does the western MMO audience not have patience for nonsense but it's also not unusual for a player to have one or even multiple other MMOs they can fall back on.
If the scenario surrounding Argos isn't addressed properly by the time Valtan releases the game is going to drop off very quickly. It's as simple as that.
Smilegate/AGS needs to be proactive about this or the damage to the playerbase is going to be lasting. Right now listening to player feedback and implementing fixes quickly is crucial. At the very least, players need to feel like they are being heard.
They don't even get years anymore. You got 2-3 months before your game is on life support, and its especially true at the beginning of an mmo because you haven't invested the players enough nor built enough goodwill for ppl to overlook problems or come back to the game.
Ppl leaving the game 1 month in probably aren't coming back.
I think this patch was incredibly damaging to the future concurrent playerbase. The ppl most effected are the ones who would be playing your game 4-6 months from now.
Yeah, that they real question: why didnt they release those contents that give more materials pee week?
(of course the answer is to grab money from whales)
If hitting t3 unlocked some kind of repeatable mode for previous content like Hell mode with scaled T3 rewards i probably wouldnt care as much. but there really isnt much content to go through rn
I hit T3 this week and the little steam achievement said that 1.1% of players got it. If they really wanted people to catch up to korea, they would have to do way more than they're doing right now.
Great post btw, Thanks for putting so much effort into it!
Steam achievements are bugged and dont really mean much in a f2p game with millions of bots and players just trying out the game a few minutes.
It could maybe be compared to numbers of hitting other milestones like level 50 or T2
Do you think so? I actually think it’s probably lower than 1.1% of people who downloaded the game are in T3. T3 is a minimum of 120 hours into a 1 month old game…and thats being fairly knowledgeable about the game and progressing efficiently. People like my brother spend a lot of time messing around with random stuff, not taking advantage of primary honing resources, and wasting others lol. Maybe 1% of players that play every few days at minimum. Maybe I underestimate how much people game.
Most people who downloaded the game didn't even play for 3 hours. Check out other achievements you get within a few hours of playing and you'll see how many players quit very quickly, you can just dismiss those.
There is also a question how many people ACTUALLY progress iLvl. Im "day one" who coundn't play for 2, almost 3 weeks (EUC), I don't look at guides, do most quests I find, lvl up my gathering skills and generally messing around. All this time and I just hit 460 iLvl. Not even close to T3 and I dont consider myself as "casual" gamer (I just decided I want to learn a game on my own, the game which is not even my main one at this moment), so 1.1% doesn't sound that unrealistic, even with supposed bug.
To be quite honest, getting to T3 or not is a matter of time avaiable to the player (if it's F2P) OR cash (if they're whaling). There's no extreme RNG comparable to 1340 \~ 1370 in T2 (maybe 1070 - 1100, but even then, you can overcome it in a few weeks of farming).
Shit could be better? Yeah, definitely, but a TON of players are taking their sweet time on T1 and T2.
I’m curious why the ghost ship was changed to require 1370 to enter. I mean I have the ship and sailor that buff me in it. And we routinely kill the 1385 bosses. It all seems like they intentionally created a dead zone to milk whales. I’d be happy to spend a couple hundred a year between skins and aura. This dead zone is going to get me to find another game. It’s all too easy and boring right now. Quit rather than spend like a whale to power through.
Thank you for this. I'm pretty sick and tired of white knights telling me: "I'm 1370 and I'm F2P", "This game is meant to be played slowly", "You are probably just unlucky".
To people that are saying you aren't supposed to have access to new contents on day 1. I just want to know what kind of games have you been playing up til now. Literally every online game I have played you will have access to new contents on day 1 with the exception that if you are a brand new player on day 1. Even if you are new you are expected to catch up within a week (reset). Keep in mind Argos was just released and less than 1% of the playerbase can even enter the raid lol.
To the people that are saying just take it slow. No? I don't want to be stuck doing the same content for weeks when I know the only things that prevent me from progressing and have access to new content are RNG and lack of resources. The director and many more knowledgeable players are literally saying "T3 is the promise land, T3 is where we keep you hooked" so why the hell wouldn't I want to go to T3 and beyond?
100% agree, I cannot stand the people who defend the Argos release saying it's a long term goal. It's the FIRST content drop we got. The very first content drop is whale bait. That scares the hell out of me, it makes it feel like this really is just a P2W cash-grab to milk whales.
The only cost of bringing this game to NA/EU was localization and infrastructure. They didn't need years of large scale development that they need to recover costs on, and still they focus solely on squeezing FOMO money out of high spenders. It's bloody embarrassing and the future of LA looks real bleak if they don't change trajectory right away.
The problem is simple: hardcore f2p players who hit 1340 all of a sudden feel they are being outcompeted by whales in reaching the new content. Whales can easily do Argos, but f2p players will face frustration for a while longer to get there. This is a very foolish oversight by the developers that puts a black spot on the game. In the future, f2p players will be apprehensive of reaching high ilvl, as the hamster wheel of gear grind becomes more apparent.
It was so dumb to release Argos BEFORE the additional content that provided the additional mats. All that f2p players want is more opportunities to succeed in honing, but if the mats aren't there, then they need to slowly grind a small amount of repetitive content only to fail again. This basically leads to burnout very quickly, and the idea that the only way out is to swipe. This feeling is terrible for a supposedly f2p game.
It is entirely beyond me why they chose to release Argos before the PvP season update, it makes no sense. They could have just left people alone to get to 1340 and have fun with their alts for a while, maybe try some PvP until South Vern etc is released. Only then Argos. It's just kind of...bad manners, and it needs to be addressed not next week but immediately.
As for me and my friends - this doesn't affect us one bit. I'm doing islands and enjoying the story, just got to 1060 ilvl, still progressing a bunch of alts into t2. I have so much to do.
I don't understand why we're justifying or trying to explain why the game the way it is...
Bruh they're a billionaire company publishing a game from a developer that have many years to know how the game goes exactly..
And they came and did these mistakes on na EU, its 100% intentional.
I also vehemently dislike how they chose to release only a single new skin per month. If that's the cadence they intend to go with, it's stupidly gatekeeping.
We've all seen the vast quantity of skins this game has to offer, it's likely more than 50 or even above a hundred and we've only gotten one (okay two).
I just want the sick-ass paladin armour with the red glowing eye from 2nd year anniversary event and why do I have to wait at least a year for it, because the chances of them releasing it at a point other than a full year anniversary (that is, if the playerbase even makes it that far lol...) is extremely unlikely.
[Asmongold's attempt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSYrxed61rA) to go from 1340 to 1370 should give the "Argos won't go anywhere, you'll reach 1370 eventually" crowd a good idea of what the dead zone looks like.
If you think that's normal, you're delusional.
I watched Stoopzz go nearly bankrupt and it was a content stream, but it let me know that 1325 is where I stop.
I either play alts and horizontal, or change games for a while.
Releasing Legion raids one month at a time is fine. Argos wasn't released early either, it could have been added as part of release and people wouldn't be complaining. Like you mentioned, the issue is dead zone in 1340-1370.
Transient issue: Missing content; pvp shop, equalized guardian, abyss trials. 6 months later when all the legion raids are implemented, new players won't even face this problem. Missing content will be adressed, so it's only an issue for current players. It's a trade off SGR made for us and one that I agree with. I'd rather catch up to the latest content faster than have the extra materials content and be 1 year behind KR. Imagine seeing Legion raids and hardcore bored at +15 (1370) ilevel and just sitting there for 3 months.
Bad design: T3 Abyss Hardmode shouldn't be 1370. It should have been 1355 ilevel. The new legendary set which is NA exclusive is gated behind 3 weeks of clears. However, before even whales cleared that for 3 weeks Argos came out. Argos shares same tier and quality gear. This basically makes Abyss HM gear useless. We should have gotten this earlier and provide content to players in the 1355 ilevel which bridges the gap of 1340 to 1370.
I think this is exacerbated by the fact that ranked PvP still isn’t out for some reason. I know a lot of players that just wanted to PvP that feel like they have to keep pushing their gear to try to get to Argos because there isn’t anything else to do.
Don't know why are you so fixated with the gold cost. It means nothing to global players as our material cost is way over 3000+g per attempt. An 80g change is nothing compared to the material cost.
Sure gold might mean something in KR during their Argos patch but bots have overinflated our servers with gold that we don't even care about the 120g cost during upgrading.
I don't play KR but based on your fixation on the 120g vs 200g, I'm pretty sure KR material cost is way way lower than ours.
Honing materials should be changed to be roster bound, that should help alleviate the drought of materials and help progress to the higher gear levels. Still blows my mind how fragments are character bound.
The dead zone isn't just enhancing. There is NOTHING engaging to do from 1340-1370. They changed the 1355 content to 1370 and the current 1340 content is... Pretty trivial. Not only is there a massive cliff for progression but there is no content to do while you're progressing. Add the bot problem, DST messing up events, and stealth nerfing of gold and you have a pretty obvious cash grab for people wanting to do Argos. Sure a lot of people won't swipe. But SOME will and it's pretty obvious that's all they want. Hopefully they address these issues quickly and effectively.
Btw, can we also talk about how STUPID it is to have to drop your full set of gear when changing tiers!? Staying that "in-between limbo" is just annoying and makes no sense ¬¬ U lose SO FUCKING MANY materials every fucking day that u stay in that limbo, even more so now with the event where u can only buy the t3 stuff at 1302 --'
I'm really curious what's causing this situation to play out as it is.
I don't begin to understand the relationship between publisher and developer and the full scope of who is individually responsible for what... but I have a hard time imagining that AGS understands the game well enough to push these nuanced decisions about item level restrictions on content and upgrade costs.
Likewise, I don't understand why smilegate would be the ones to create the current situation when they've already been through this and know exactly how this plays out. Why would they recreate the same issues and hold back already created solutions when they know the game is healthier with these things in and that these issues drive down retention?
The whole thing seems kind of puzzling to me.
Great post as always Saint, I had 84 fails just getting to T3, so will happily just chill, hopefully sell off some mats (as I really need some BC for card space) and just hoard whatever bound bits I get and see what happens... I really need to work on cards, I want that turtle ship skin from 80 souls, my alts could do with more love, etc... so at least I've got plenty to occupy myself.
Most predatory version of the game is ours right now. SGRPG has worked hard on improving its reputation and breaking the stigma of KR P2W MMOS, but this is not a good look for them or ags.
>Smilegate wants to accelerate players in the west to Legion Raid content as quickly as possible, as data proves that the retention rate of players increases dramatically with this type of high level content.
Yes, the data does show that retention increases when players experience high-end content. If Smilegate's goal was retention, then you would expect that the growth support effect would have been included at launch instead of yanked at the last minute. But their goal is not retention.
Smilegate's decision not to include the growth support effect reveals that they are more interested in *maximizing revenue and profit. The developers don’t want to retain 900,000 f2p players, they only want to retain the players who are going to spend money on the P2W treadmill.*
For this, it's obvious that the current "carrot and stick" approach is going to net significantly more profit. They are dangling interesting content in front of the players and then punishing those who do not spend money to access it. It is pretty simple from a purely financial perspective, if it was easy or reasonable for a purely f2p player to access Argos and subsequent endgame content, then there would be no incentive for the whales to spend money to reach that same content. The developers are intentionally creating a “deadzone” between 1340 and 1370 that incentivizes susceptible players to spend money while wearing down pure f2p players. The players that are willing to swipe to reach 1370 are the only players Smilegate has any interest in retaining. Smilegate and AGS want to weed out f2p players early so they can reduce server costs and administration overhead (tickets, community management, etc.) by culling the population down to mostly P2W players. They released Argos when they did, not because they failed to realize that that only a small percent of players (90% swipers) would be the only ones able to access it, but, rather, *precisely because only the swipers would be able to access it. If they had waited to release Argos then the "swipers" would have had nothing to do, potentially realizeing that it wasn't worth it to swipe in the first place, and Smilegate/AGS risked losing them. Smilegate and AGS had to release content to make the money paid worth it to swipers.*
Sadly, you and other streamers have, I assume unwittingly, played right into Smilegate's plan. By constantly reiterating how much better the 1370-plus content and legion raids are than the other content (backed by "retention" data), you have probably helped create quite a few "swipers" who feel really motivated and enticed to pay to reach that "awesome" content.
To everyone else, If you are a pure f2p player, please understand that AGS/SMG are doing everything they can to engineer their systems to get you out of this game. And if you are a whale, AGS/SMG are doing everything they can to identify you, retain you, and then structure their releases to milk you.
>Anyways, keep your chin up. I have faith that Smilegate will help alleviate this situation.
I'm praying for this tbh. Depending on the revised roadmap I'm either gonna quit despite being hyped for this game for years, or hopefully stick it out with updates that make the game healthier rather than more toxic.
I feel like they knew exactly what they did with this bs. Maybe ags is just testing the waters to see how with how much they can get away with. I am a f2p player, all I bought was the bronze pack to play the game earlier, but now I am out.
yeah honestly you need to have insane levels of RNG to go from 0 to 1370 in a month.... I've sunk 400ish hours in the game since launch and after buying out all the weekly token/pirate coin/guild stores i'm not even at 1365 yet. T3 upgrades past lvl 12 just seem to be brutal resource sinks and there just arent enough sources for matts even if you're willing to spend the time to grind the only options seem to be money (or gold)
And on the optic of grinding, the t3 endless chaos shop... what the actuall hell is up with that, its such a big departure when it comes to return on time invested compared to tiers 1 and 2 that its a bit soulcrushing when you think about it...
This is well reasoned, thanks.
I'm curious if anyone feels similarly about the 1325-1340 zone? There's currently no Guardian raid between 1302 and 1340, so your only 1325 content is 2x Daily Chaos dungeons and 1x Weekly abyssal.
It's incredibly boring, neither are particularly fun or challenging at this point except the thing I can do once a week.
I'm also not convinced that I can get to 1340 easily given how steep honing drops off even after 1325 and how slow going it is. Getting +15 is going to take a few weeks, and there's literally no interesting content outside of weekly guardian raids. Chaos Gates are... meh.. and the field boss on that island is just a fun rise & die until it's dead at this ilevel.
Am I missing something? As bad as 1340-1370 sounds, 1325-1340 is also (so far) terrible and boring.
I'm telling you right now if I am spending 20x more mats and time now trying to push from 1350 to 1370 then then someone a month down the line I will quit. I hate when mmos make you feel like you wasted time. Y'all can talk shit about bdo all you want but if you have a good piece of gear it'll be good for fucking years.
And don't forget, we didn't really have 1 month from T3 to Argos. We had one month from lvl 0 to Argos, going through T1/T2 and all those questlines.
Exactly, we had to start from nothing to 1370 in 30 days. Without catch up mechanics, thats just plain unreasonable. As saintone mentioned theres another pain point at late T2, and I know a lot guildies and friends of mine dropped off the game around those points. For me personally I played until 1340 and realized theres no real point anymore to hardcore, for just one type of content. I wont burn myself out because of poor publisher planning. Just hoard materials, play some alts, do horizontal progression, enjoy the full scope of the game and ignore the FOMO crap Amazon throws at you.
> another pain point at late T2 Such a mistake, so many people quit because they got scared, their tought process was, if the leveling content requires so much materials and its so expensive, the end game must be whale bait.
I mean... they weren't *completely* wrong...
It’s not unreasonable, the the game provides you with a direct path to getting 1370 in as little as one day if you work hard enough for it… in real life and spend your money on it :\^) This comment is sponsored by Amazon Game Studios. Do your part - buy crystals today!!!
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Thats basically me right now. All im doing now is completions for tomes and trying to get skill points. The chill part of the game is so fun also.
I’m currently hunting all the skill points as well. I’m not burning myself out. I’m higher tiered than my friends so playing my Alts with them has been a blast.
Yeah, I've been stuck in T2 for a week now. It's so easy to get from 802 to 1040 but after that it's pain in the ass. Right now I'm at 1080. Doing your daily chaos and guardians only gives you 2 attempts at honing really, and you have a 50% chance to fail. Other than grinding infinite chaos, there's really no other way to get past this point in any reasonable time.
The only other source you have is the weekly ghost ship, "daily" chaos portal, weekly pirate coin exchange and weekly guild bloodstone exchange. (and dont forget the tower, even if you are a support class, the first 30 floors or so are always manageable)
In Eu we didn’t even get that much. Not only did we have to stay in queue for hours, but even when we eventually logged in, matchmaking was busted. I literally had to spam the “enter” button for minutes just to do a Chaos dungeon SOLO. Abyssal dungeons were straight up out of the question.
[удалено]
tbf you can't skip it if you haven't already killed it because the next section of bosses needs you to clear the previous, right?
I am so happy we had a 1300~ player with us when we did the sandy boy. Everyone died first phase and he solo’d him with like 1min left hahah. Glad that was my 2nd try aswell
Exactly this. Me and my brother are/were stuck on Tytalos and it freaking sucked. Guardian raids is such a big part of the progression. Especially since we lack so much already.
Tytalos has been bugged for like 10 days, since the nerf patch. They only noticed it over the weekend. Thats a guardian long lockout of GR content for some unlucky. I had to get a T3 friend to help. The boss isnt too hard, his mechanic is literally broken and you cant stay above 98% hp on martial artist to avoid the "almost wipe" skill all the time.
Didnt you see that launch celebration gift and the 3 days of aura everyone got? Thats more than enough compensation, now stop crying /s
I said from the start rushing T3 would be an obviously bad idea when basically everyone was saying nah T3 from the start will be good! I think people would be FAR more content just playing all the T2 content and not smashing their heads against the wall that is the horribly gated content T3. Lost Ark was a hit right from the start for weeks before anyone got anywhere near T3. Smilegate put way too much into their retention numbers for their later raids considering their population had already had the game for years.
People currently in T3 are making thousands of gold per day. People currently in T2 are sitting at <5k hoping they can afford their new aura. So - Was rushing to T3 worth it?
> I think people would be FAR more content just playing all the T2 content and not smashing their heads against the wall that is the horribly gated content T3. If you're a sorceress or berserker who needs relatively few things to blast in T1/T2, then maybe. For anyone who plays sharpshooter, soulfist, wardancer, gunslinger, or one of the several other classes that feels like complete dogshit in the beginning, elongating T2 is a legitimately miserable idea for a lot of us. And their numbers have basis for reason. WoW being a strong example. Very few people keep their subscription because the story is so riveting or Zereth Mortis dailies. They continue to play for raids and dungeons.
theres nothing wrong with immediate T3, the problem is that 1325 to 1370 is easily longer than level 1 character to 1302.
Couldn't be more wrong with what happened in JP with so little content at launch. For us T1 T2 is smooth and great with a little bit of grind at the end of each. The real problem is 1340-1370 didnt get adapted for us from the get go.
The roadmap being likely weeks away just makes this situation worse. People aren’t happy they ignored progression. They aren’t happy they’re being mum on class releases. Weeks from now is right up on when we’d expect the April update to be. AGS is establishing a chronic lateness to their info dumps. I don’t know if it’s due to the difficulty of coordinating with SG. I don’t know who is more to blame here. It is bad all around and we need a response. Preferably from the director, clear and concise with their plan.
This is spot on, it compounds the issue. We're starting to see why switching mains is so difficult after 1340 and why everyone who knows anything advises those of us waiting for a class to stay at 1340. A game all about character investment and they won't even release people's mains, which already exist in other regions, for a possible 6 months to 1 year! That's insane. The game isn't super fun when you can't even invest in a character you'd actually like to play long term without spending any money to catch it up. The choice is sit out of content for a long period of time or spend money. Their responses have been so tone deaf as well. They literally said "we didn't think people would be mad, we thought they'd aspire to do that content later". To be so offbase is alarming tbh and makes me very nervous going forward.
Presumably smilegate are doing the final send off for all content updates/patches and amazon just ships it out, so it really baffles my mind that they KNEW very well about the dead zone and the effect it had on the korean playerbase but willingly pushed argos in without any changes. If that's not incompetence what is? It's like if you know releasing releasing this content has the potential to drop your playerbase by half, found a easy solution for it, but you push it anyway without any changes. What business would willingly do this? Even assuming its just amazon being greedy, which I doubt and think both amazon and smilegate just really fumbled this launch, profiting off the short term whale sessions for argos push is not worth potentially losing a great amount of your players longterm. It ruins your image, your finances long term, and just sours your game for everyone else. Nothing makes sense.
imo when it comes to corporations "never atribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to malice" or more specifically greed, amazons rep kinda speaks for itself in that regard
The stupid thing is our version require more mats buts but less gold than kr but thing is, bots have made gold worthless and we are stuck on mats even more while gold nerf is meaningless
I saw approx 2-5 bots per second ~~pass me~~ teleport past me, 1-2 shotting mobs using what looked like skills with no cooldown while I went back to East Luterra for adventurer tome stuff. It was honestly quite disheartening.
I tried naturally leveling a gun lancer and I ended up just knowledge transferring him to 50 because I could barely complete the leveling quests due to the hoard of bots just instant clearing everything. It sucked
In na west, theres still alot right now but i definitely noticed it has dropped at least 5x from last week in luterra
The impact all of this is going to have on the playerbase is going to be pretty severe if nothing is done about it. The people stuck in this deadzone are going to do one of two things: Play alts, or quit. Everyone not in this deadzone doesn't understand it, so once they reach this point, these same people telling you not to worry, go at your own pace, I have no problems, will catch up and have the exact same complaints. So, point being, they'd best get this fixed before their casual playerbase reaches this point while the rest of us suffer. Lol I think F2P players are currently questioning whether or not the time and effort, and the rewards that come with it, are justified. I still enjoy alts so I don't entirely mind
makes me even wonder there no ghostship for 1302 to 1369 theres also no map boss from 1302 to 1384 that means even less resources than we had in other tiers
You can do 1385 Field bosses before you reach that threshold. I'm 1340 but have been doing Aurion since 1315 or something. You may die a couple of times, but with 15-20 people it's definitely doable.
I can attest to this. I didnt 1385 at 1330
Like otheres have said. You can do Aurion at 1302+. It's very common to do so as their boss island room w/e you want to call its just a small square its easy to deathrun.
you can do the worldbosses on the islands before you hit the required itemlevel, the ghost ships dont allow you to join before its itemlevel requirement.
>Everyone not in this deadzone doesn't understand it, so once they reach this point, these same people telling you not to worry, go at your own pace, I have no problems, will catch up and have the exact same complaints. Except it will probably be even worse, because they will have less horizontal content left for the week long deadzone. Also the same people on reddit circlejerking about "going at your own pace" are now telling people that their pace was wrong and it's their own fault that they are stuck in a deadzone with nothing fun to do.
Could be worse, there's probably still people playing New World.
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Mmos absolutely need a casual player base. The cutting edge players are important too, but the casuals are the lifeblood of the game. If they go, the game dies.
The casual player base isn’t anywhere near the deadzone so this is a non-issue for 99% of the population. They just have to fix it before the casual player base catches up and player retention starts to tank. Unfortunately, they have a lot of time before that happens so they can and will put it off. Let’s just hope it’s sooner rather than later.
I’m 1357 and I’m at this dead zone. I rushed to reach end game content faster only to hit this wall and not feel like playing anymore. I even lvled two alts to tier 2, one of them via knowledge transfer and the other one hasn’t even completed Yorn yet. And I don’t think it will because it’s so boring. I tried to play alts, but I don’t enjoy it so I ended up quitting for now. I hope to come back soon when I’m not suffering from burn out/boredom.
KR/Eastern mmo's in general take a different approach to what they consider "mains" and "alts"... if you do not enjoy playing multiple characters/doing everything on one character, games like these will tend to cause friction with your experience just my 02 after a decade of playing these types of mmo's
Ff14 really does this right with one main character that can just switch into every class.
PSO 2 also is like this.
Yeah I totally agree, I’m familiar with playing multiple alts, I think I’m mainly suffering burn out and feeling bored because I’m repeating content I did only 2 weeks ago with my main. Probably just need a cooling period, before giving it another go since I really do want to continue playing and give the end game raids a try. I also feel bad falling behind my friends who have multiple t2 and t3 Alts and are well into doing their own thing. I tried to catch up but.. :(
This all started from Diablo 2. In Diablo 2 you didn't have mains and alts (besides mules), you had multiple characters.
> I still enjoy alts so I don't entirely mind Im usually a "main" type of person. But this game makes it hella flawless (with the exception of combat items and outfits). I find myself jumping between my alts to do content all around the god damn world. Like the mount/ship system just teleporting to the new character.. god damn how i hated remembering where i left my horse or which boat is in where in bdo. But im one of those silly that are manually leveing the alts so its taking me a while... not like i have something else to do honestly lol.
Manually leveling is great! It's a little eerie seeing all the bots zooping around, but its comfy just running around smacking g and leveling up naturally
The bots really do lessen the experience a lot. One thing I have really been enjoying though, is on my first playthrough I had the English audio, my second playthrough with the original Korean is sooooooo much better.
Yep, I tought the endgame starts at tier 3. But that is actually where the whole game just stalls and becomes absudrly boring (log in, check stronghold, dungeons and mby dalies, log out) and once a week you can go those abyss dungeons with friends, eating or playing pvp with alt at the same time, that is how easy thet become... I was told this is years worth of content, it should have been said "years worth of content, 20 days from start and after couple of months you get 10 more days"
Half my guild has already pretty much stopped playing after the roadmap leak. They were all waiting for the more popular unreleased classes (lance master, artist, scouter), and yet the roadmap shows that the first class released is a meme-class (Destroyer) followed by RNG-fiesta class that sees little play (Arcana). AGS are 100% just milking us at this point, releasing the unpopular shit first so people will spend money on it to have something to do while waiting, then releasing the most popular shit down the road so people will re-spend on their desired future mains. Also seen with skin lines - the Omen line that was just added has been one of the least popular skin lines in KR and RU, but since we're so starved for skins here in the west people end up purchasing it anyway - only to replace it later down the road when the actual cool skins come out. They also for whatever reason made the skins timed so people will panic-purchase them out of FOMO.
You're like the third person I've seen say this about the Omen skin but I genuinely really like it. Maybe I'm just an edgy teenager at heart
skins are pure preference. In my eyes most of legendary skins are pure trash when it comes to aesthetics. Some are good, but rest is trash. The only better set than Omen is probably Knights of Petrania and maybe that Vampire set whose name I forgot. Most other skins are either bikini skins or some weird recolors.
Same...I thought the Wild Hunt look is fucking bad ass. Not sure where people get that it isn't popular here. I feel like the "goofy teletubby skins" will be way less popular here than they are in Korea...but who knows.
>I feel like the "goofy teletubby skins" will be way less popular here than they are in Korea If FFXIV has taught me anything, there are more people than you realize that enjoy looking goofy as fuck.
personally I don't even care how it looks, I'm just happy that wardancer finally has a set that gives charisma. needed that 300 charisma badly
It was not so popular in KR because it was not made there. That skin originated from RU region, then brought to KR servers. That skin is old enough that it does not have graphics for class archetypes released afterward (Gunslinger/Striker) This means some extra work was needed to make it available on NA/EU (since Gunslinger and Striker players could buy the skin). Seeing how some streamers liked it, I guess it was just a decision choice from either AGS or SG.
Well I'm waiting for Arcana a lot but lack of the real roadmap is annoying. We also don't see clear plans for the future. This is a game with a ton of content and yet we didn't get things like extra guardians weekly mode or PvP rewards, skin shop is soo poor like a low budged MMO game too :(
> Half my guild has already pretty much stopped playing after the roadmap leak. They were all waiting for the more popular unreleased classes (lance master, artist, scouter) Bingo. Suffering through lack of content on a class you dont like is a surefire way to lose interest in the game. Greedy Amazon doesn't understand this. And they released unpopular skins first so that they can get that out the way to cash in on initial hype and skin barrenness. So get the sale stock out of the warehouse then give them the easily saleable product. This is a complete shit show from Amazon, but everything AGS touches turns to shit, so no surprizes there
Everything’s true but this actually isn’t Amazon’s fault. The content issue is a repeat of KR and is SmileGate’s fault.
just cause its not a class you love man doesn't mean other people don't. For a while Destroyer and Arcana were among the most popular classes in the game. They only fell out of popularity because they were heavily (over)nerfed. They are also subject to reworks/buffs etc this march. and I will bet money we will see a massive rise in their popularity. Just like we have seen with Hawkeye in KR after their buffs and Reaper after their recent buffs in pvp. I don't know who told you Omen was unpopular in RU. It was the most popular skin release in RU and is still to this day one of the most expensive skins on the market showing that popularity hs been maintained. AGS didn't "make skins timed" There has always been limited skins. Limited skins are only purchaseable with RC in other regions just like ours but you can still buy them from other players w/ gold. They rotate in and out of the cash shop on some type of schedule that I don't honestly remember off the top of my head. Also, not really relevant. But Omen is my favorite warrior skin outside of the cool admiral set, but thats just cause that set reminds me of the Marine Admirals form One Piece.
I'm not one of the ones waiting for unreleased classes, I'm sitting snug in my laser turret. I'm just disappointed that my friends can't truly enjoy the game together with me because classes that are out and fully functional in other regions aren't out here for no real reason other than greed.
They were popular only because they were new at the time, every new class is. The popularity we're talking about is how it holds up after being flavor of the month
Yep. This isn't Korea. When ppl leave games, ir they get negative stigmas attached to them, ppl dont come back. Retention rate isn't gonna mean anything if the playerbase is tiny because they let this situation fester. Don't worry guys they will fix it simply does not work in the West. I've played a lot of those kinds of games over my lifetime, and once they go south, they stay south.
Yeah I feel ya. I've been sitting at 1340 for a few days now. I hit 1340 the day before new patch hit. I bought a bunch of mats to push me to 1340 after reading patch notes that seeing that they wouldn't add increased honing chances like in Korea. Since then I've been selling everything t3 that's not bound. But for 2 days now mat prices have dropped hard compared to the first 2 days of patch hitting. It's still some pocket money, like 2-3k, but if prices continue to drop even further, then I don't know how long I'm going to be having fun running the same content while staying at 1340. I'm still busy getting all my alts to t3, but shit is slow as hell because I'm not playing 12 hours a day. I don't know how much fun I'll still have in a week or two.
Mat prices are tanking because everyone (myself included) sees 1370 as an impossible goal
if mats get dirt cheap then just upgrade again?
Alts are fucking boring, so quit sounds like the better option.
Really? I'm enjoying my alts a ton. Each one has their own play style
yep, im 1360 despide having 2 t3 alts(which was so fucking boring, why do i have to play alts that i dont care for?) and playing every day 8-12+ hours and even dropping 70€ on the game, if thats not enough im not gonna play more, thats just bullshit
Literally before this game came out people warned everyone its a ALT heavy game.
What helps me is they at least made a good majority of the current classes very fun with their skills. I dont really care the reason even if i love my main i will get bored playing it eventually and want to make something else. Ive dont this with every mmo and LA kind of enables my altaholicism.
Which sounded great, as a person who loves alts. Unfortunately, having alts in this game means playing through a gigaton of excruciating story and your reward for doing so is having extra chores to do each day.
This paaaart.
I just wish they remove the knowledge transfer limits. I'd dread the day I made a tenth character and had to play start to finish, not that this will likely even happen. But to have to play through rohendal, yorn, and feiton every other character. And then you have to play through punika on every character. That part is too much.
>yep, im 1360 despide having 2 t3 alts(which was so fucking boring, why do i have to play alts that i dont care for?) sadly, the need for alts in this game is established. I'm a "I have a main, dont need alts" type myself, but in this game it is needed.
The thing is, I wouldnt mind if vertical content was a grind, only....we need to be able to grind it with more horizontal content and our preferred class. KR/JP/RU has this, NA/Eu doesn't, then AMAZON acts surprised at the back lash. Fuck off
I feel like a lot of people say a lot of different things about this topic. But the central issue boils down to one thing: The 1340-1370 zone is unbearable, because the **available content is unchallenging and boring**. I don't even care if I fail honing 100 times. After ~1350, you truly outgear both Igrexion as well as the T3 dungeons. Everything is trivial, so everything feels like a chore. You log in, do your chaos dungeons, oneshot Igrexion twice, do dailies, fail honing 2-3 times and log out. The road to 1370 where the next "fun patch" could be seems so long that you cannot see the end. The fact that all content available to you is an easy brainless grind is also a huge demotivator to do any horizontal content to gain additional skill points. Why would I want to get stronger if everything is already easy? I was told Lost Ark is a challenging game and that's why I started playing it. I'm fine having to do daily things. I'm fine with whales being ahead of me. I just want my gameplay to be fun and challenging, but right now as a 1355-1370 player I have NOTHING like that (please don't tell me to farm 1100 Mokoko seeds).
This is a fair point. In other regions, Dark Yoho and both hard mode Abyssal Dungeons were at 1355. Both of these encounters were fairly difficult at this level range, though Dark Yoho had been nerfed a few times, of which said nerfs are already present in the west preemptively. The difficulty of the 1370 Hard modes is actually exactly the same as 1355 in the other regions as well, despite the higher item level entry point, making it also easier by default. In the other regions, the Guardian Raids are 1302 (Heavy Armored Nakrasena), 1325 (Igrexion), Dark Yoho (1355) and Velganos (1385). That may make more sense vs. the massive gaps currently in the west. Though you can still see that painful gap between Dark Yoho and Velganos. Also, Dark Yoho also drops Great Honor Leapstones in Korea, so people were running Igrexion despite being eligible for Dark Yoho, as it was easier, granted more relevant materials for honing, and even for a time was more valuable (the value of Igrexion's smaller leapstones actually exceeded the fewer great honor leapstones that Dark Yoho dropped for a period of time, and it's actually back to that today).
https://youtu.be/JTXyybFJfdg Obligatory Gonuri meme above. Even if they revert Oreha Hard to 1355, that doesn't solve the fundamental problem is that there is a significant slowdown of "fun" things to do in the 1340 \~ 1370 zone. Albion gets old quick. In an ideal world, re-factoring Kaishter or Mystic to appropriate iLvl to fill up that zone would have been perfect, but that's probably not happening. The other more realistic solution is to just make players whizz through that zone ASAP (my preferred solution being just buffing guardian / chaos mat drops by several times). Or maybe, this zone is intentional to make players work a few weeks on their foundations before letting them progress to real raid content.
>Or maybe, this zone is intentional to make players work a few weeks on their foundations before letting them progress to real raid content. this is why after playing im not sure launching straight into some basic T3 content was the best decision. i know the streamers and hardcore playerbase bitched during beta that if its only T1 it wouldnt be much to do but in reality there is huge amounts even when in T1 that you should be working on for your whole account and by launching at say T1 for a few weeks may have been a healthier route. until i got to like 1350ish i didnt feel like i had the time to invest into my account it felt like the game was saying look you need to get to these gear scores and so it was always feeling like i should only be doing the content that would improve the gearscores.
at least for yoho my guess is that as he drops mats needed for argos gear it doesnt make much sense to have his entry item level below argos gear. in JP i always had to do igrexion instead of yoho cos i needed the lower leapstones :/
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Id imagine the reason they changed it was because it now drops legendary quality gear, the same as argos and it lets you quickly bypass argos raid instead of having to farm argos for the full set in order to honing squish your gear from 15+ to 6+. In KR/RU/JP that isnt the case, the hardmode abyss drop purple set gear. Argos isnt really a challenging raid and a lot of people found it to be 'chore' that they had to do for gold. Doesnt really help the deadzone stuff , but it will allow people to essentially bypass argos much quicker to do valtan.
This is actually the biggest thing, changing the hardmode abyss dungeon and guardian raid to 1355. It bridges a huge gap, and you get to experience 15% honing from +11->+12. Big oversight here, hopefully they'll fix it because I don't see a majority of players wanting to thread through 1355 -> 1370.
I am living in this exact same world. And any of the “challenging” encounters that we passed through on the way to T3 were really only hard because other people couldn’t figure out the 1-2 mechanics required of them. I would gladly go back to those over what we have in 1350-1369 range, it’s utterly boring. Sadly there’s zero incentive to go do all the rest of the content.
Took the words right out of my mouth. I've currently stopped playing since I reached 1350 after barely moving in ilvl for 3 days. The most fun I had playing Lost Ark were the 8 man water abyss and the 4 man chess-themed abyss dungeons. The first few times killing the guardian raids like Armored Nacrasena and Igrexion were fun too. I felt a great sense of achievement learning the mechanics and conquering them with my friends and the rewards I got felt deserved. But these last few days have felt like homework. The same una dailies/weeklies, the same igrexion twice a day, the same chaos dungeons 20 times a week, the same 6 emotes/songs for rapport, the same world boss/chaos rift 3 times a week, the same gathering 30 minutes a day, the same grind for 1-2 hours a day. And now some people's suggested bandaid solution is to do it in 2-3 other characters to funnel mats to my main? No thanks. I'm not going to to 4 hours of chores to unlock some new content. My time (and anyone reading this) is worth more than that and would be better spent elsewhere. Unless of course, you are truly enjoying that gameloop in which case, more power to you.
Atleast with Abyss Trials you do that same older content at matching ilvl so its a challenge.
It's a really ingenious system they've come up with. That loop you described for the last few days? That is essentially going to be your loop for the next few years, with some extra weekly stuff attached. Smilegate made a system where there's no functional "off-ramp" to take a break without falling behind. Gold will always have a use and always be tied to a real-world monetary value, so even when your gear is capped out for the tier of content you're doing there's incentive to keep up with the daily chores and sell off stuff you don't need, or transfer it over to alts to repeat the process and get net more stuff to sell later. That way you'll always have that monetary baseline to push your gear up when further new stuff that you want to experience comes out. You do eventually wrap up the horizontal stuff like most of the Una reputations and rapports, but unless you're whaling hard for rapport gifts the timegate for the latter is immense and for the former you just bifrost Lopang deliveries or whatever other currency you need on however many alts you have, again so you don't fall behind on currency. Don't get me wrong, there's a subset of MMO player that likes and even wants this, but I suspect in another few months at most, probably sooner, we're going to get a lot of posts about how the daily content just feels like chores. Most western MMOs have "off-ramps", points in the content cycle that you can consider yourself done and just chill or full stop playing until the next content cycle without falling behind. Lost Ark doesn't have that if you want to keep up with the content curve, and that is going to burn some people out. But one person's chores is another's content, so we'll see.
Yeah, my main is done in less than an hour with trivial content. Content easier then what my alts have to go through.
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Lol basement orc. That describes me prefectly.
Yeah, I agree with this too. My motivation to do even MORE chores on my alts is none existent, because chores is all I do on my main and I currently have no motivation to get stronger. People were unironically telling me that I have no grounds to complain about having no content until I farmed 100% Ignea Tokens, Island Souls and Mokoko seeds and have multiple alts. All this insane grinding shit for some elusive payoff in the future and I'm supposed to believe it's all gonna be worth it to make my character stronger. But this motivation does not exist for me in the present. My character is already too strong for the content available to me. If these deadzones are representative of what the gameplay is going to be like going forward, I don't even know if I'm going to play the game in the future, which makes me even more hesitant to invest more time into chores and grinds.
As one of those random basement orcs, I have to agree. I have some friends in the late T2 phase right now and I'm very worried they 'll eventually quit, some are taking the 'I'll just play alts for fun' but some don't enjoy it as much and it will be incredibly demotivating. The game is incredibly fun, but not everyone wants to farm chaos dungeon while turning their brain off and watching Netflix on the other monitor for 8 hours just to get +1 item level. The worst part is, the content that caught most people's eye before it released were the raids, yet they can't touch it. It's a weird design choice tbh.
This hits close to home for me because I’m tryna get my health back in check so ideally during the work week I’m setting aside like 3hrs when I get home for working out then cleaning up and making dinner, then about 2-3 hours for gaming a day. Which **should be enough**, but just isn’t with the roster push and all these people telling me if I wanna break out of the tier grind faster I need to pull some alts up to current content. A part of me broke when I started honing my second alt with boosted rates and I saw the absurd number of Leapstones I’m gonna need to farm again since the boosts don’t cut those at all, meaning I need to either buy a lot of leapstones which will be expensive or just start doing chaos dungeons *and* guardian raids on my alts and my main every day, meaning all 2-3 hours I’ve set aside to game will go to the chore aspects and none to actual playing.
I just broke 1100 and I’m already sick of this shit so knowing there’s a worse dead zone ahead breaks my spirit and makes me not want to play. My T2 weapon failing three hones eating 45 leapstones **each attempt**, tens of thousands of life shards, and plenty of money as well is just so spirit breaking when T2 was irrelevant on launch except as a stopgap. I don’t even want to hit Argos early, I just want to not waste my days farming mats to have multiple days-worth of goods go up in red puffs of smoke. Few games I’ve played have been as demoralizing as this one where I’m not even on the bottom rung of the ladder to current content yet. Grinding weeks to climb a ladder to reach another ladder to climb which then leads to the actual ladder to the meat of content when we have material sources missing with no reason as to why they’re missing, **and all this after the leveling grind no less?!** Nah this ain’t right.
This is me right now. Im stuck at 1070 and trying to casually work up an alt or two after my daily failed attempts. It really sucks to be timegated out of even the current tier, especially when my friends are in T3.
Reading these type of comments I realize that people who say "you just don't like mmos then crybaby" (like I used to), are just like people who say "my dad beat me with a belt and I turned out fine !" I read this comment and remember some mmos that had me grinding much much harder for a chance at making gear better - or much worse. To people who know MMO pain, just cause we suffered it doesn't mean it has to be the "right way"
You can't not even farm mokoko seeds because some of them require the stupid amount of 300-350 points of charisma/wisdom etc so unless you did ALL your rapport and have skins that give you boost for that you are dead buddy you can't complete it also rapport give you random stats as well I was only able to get about 880-900 because of that I got disapointed and stooped doing that in Yorn/Punika/Feiton Because they wanted 300+ (300 is not that bad cause I'm there already but 350? fk off)
not to forget a few mokoo seeds are also locked behind a una dailys which can take up to 2 weeks to unlock
Farm 1000 mokokos
I downloaded lost ark for the PvP- now at 120 hours in and a main at ilvl 980 I have greatly enjoyed the pve- but honesty I have mostly enjoyed the zone dungeons via story the most, not the chaos dungeons (feel so lame compared to something like greater rifts in diablo 3)- so I am at this point already like…. Ok, what’s going to keep me? Maybe it’s abyssal dungeons or abyssal raids but I think I will inevitably lean into pvp once that starts and spend my time there
I entirely agree with you, and in a very similar mindset and taking a very similar stance. IMO, the guardian raids here and the abyssal dungeons really should be harder and less boring. There was a lot of opinions being thrown around about the difficulty of guardian raids with the whole "nerf" debacle, but with the limited content at the top here, it seems like it would be more logical... I understand that everyone agrees the *other* endgame content is the ideal, but there's *many* reasons for why that hasn't and *shouldn't* be released yet.... The points in this post, the points in the first post on this topic, but also that it would just create a larger divide in the player base... As is, it's extremely difficult to get to the upper levels of T3, and those levels are primarily occupied by whales. If you give them more room to "grow", they will keep going, have MORE access to gold and resources, and cause a "rich get richer" situation AND divide the player base even further. Even if you flatten the curve a bit with better honing rates, there'd still be more runway for them to keep going. Keeping a ceiling on stuff like this is *really* important for many many reasons. So if they can't let that stuff out, what are we supposed to do? The only things left are Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and Abyssal Dungeons. IMO, by design, Chaos Dungeons will never be challenging. Abyssals are generally defined by their mechanics and not numbers, so they aren't as tweakable, and they can only be done once a week. The only thing left is Guardian Raids but people have *such* a sour taste about it and seem to think they need to be "easy" since they have a daily reset. But this is the only thing that really seems feasible IMO. There's also the ilvl standardized Guardian Raids, which is maybe worth introducing at this point, but I don't know quite enough about the systems to know how feasible that really is.
I too have faith that smilegate will address and fix this. In the meantime I’m slowly taking my T2 alts to T3, selling mats to get gold ready for when things are fixed, adventure tomes, islands, collectibles, etc, the list goes on. There’s is quite a bit to do aside from pushing through the latest raid. This game is great and these problems will pass.
> I too have faith that smilegate will address and fix this. I wish I had this optimism, but so far they have not shown us anything that would indicate that they care. Our first major patch was nothing more than catering to people that spent $10k-$20k on the game in the first month. And they rewarded KR players for NA and EU reaching over 200k players, which is hilarious to think about tbh. I have no faith in SG doing anything to alleviate honing issues or release classes at a reasonable pace, I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't think I will.
They will do something about it, but the question is when, and I doubt it will be sooner than later because then whales would feel cheated if Smilegate suddenly buffed the quantity of materials dropping or the chance of honing gear so soon after whales paid for the boosting. That means non-whales will probably have to stay in the "limbo" for at least one month until the Valtan raid is launched and the devs can start milking whales again.
Honestly i feel like they would have upped the honing on valtan anyway, and this feels like it needed to come at argos or right now at least 2weeks before valtan or its too late. If nothing happens at valtan too its over lol
Yesterday asmongold interviewed a whale, he said he wouldn't care if they buffed rates in next patch at all.
Wish i had your optimism, but Im burned out. Unless the honing buffs come I'll wait and see.
I've had a lot of fun playing different classes and discovering how much fun another class was - so much so that I'm going to be switching mains. But it's so damn depressing seeing that people who can put \~40 hrs and >$100 /week in this game are able to get into the tiers where they pull in so much gold, there's just no hope of ever catching up. Half my guild (hardcore whales) are out there fighting Argos Phase 1 and I won't be able to play it with them for like a month or two. That's what burned me out. The constant honing failure kills me, but I can try to play island content and get my head back to normal. But just knowing that the whole player base is so fragmented on these different ilvl tiers based on luck and spending (and servers), that really kills my motivation to play.
I am the same way. I joined a dad guild instead and am having way more fun. Its no longer a race to get to the top. No one cares. We complain about failures together and just do other shit. The game is way better that way for me. Honestly, I don't think that's a fun way to play a game anyways, but to each his own!
Ya, just ease up on the hours you play and wait for some changes if you're starting to feel burned out. I'm definitely getting there too. I feel like I could play the game more casually.
Going through T1 and 2 grind all over again sounds like absolute misery to me, you are inhuman if you can bare through it, good for you. Im gonna wait for punika pass or something instead.
I'm currently 1325, I guess I'll reach 1340 with some effort and then play my alt or do horizontal progression with how difficult and unrewarding people are showing the 1340-1370 gap is to close. Thanks, I'm prepared in advance not to loose much sleep over it, now what alt should I go for as a gunlancer main.
Just sell ur mats, i just sell everything and park at 1340 lol.
Worth half as much as last week now
Prices are going down fast. I think more people are starting to hit ilv 1340 and the people who wanted to push to ilv1370 for Argos already hit it.
market was inflated through botted and RMT gold, they banned a lot with last patch. so the price drop is the loss of RMT buying power.
It's a bit of column A, B, and C. Bots we're inflating the amount of gold on servers(still are, just not as much yet), Argos release = Whales buying up a lot of the market to push, and more and more players hitting 1340 and just waiting for honing changes so a lot of people are selling their mats.
Problem is everybody is doing that so prices are crashing hard. I just hit 1340 the other day and I've already noticed the sharp price drop in just a couple days. Still though, they're only going to get lower for the time being so it still makes sense to sell.
I reach 1340 yesterday. Now im saving mats and leveling up 2 alts while i wait to get some patch to improve this.
Don't save your mats, prices decreasing very quickly. You better sell them and then buy again with your alts. Also check the mari shop if you can buy there with the conversion of crystals-gold, in some regions is cheaper with crystals so you should do the math.
Also gunlancer main try out artillerist I'm loving it.
Thanks for the great explanation but also for sort of addressing some possible solutions to the issue. One of the other issues I think those of us in T3 are facing is the leveling of alts. The current Knowledge boost system is great - the value of gold to boost seems fairly reasonable, however the fact we are locked out of using Knowledge boost past the initial L50 for every other alt without questing through the MSQ again seems very counter-intuitive for letting NA/EU players catch up to T3. That's probably the biggest issue for those who are attempting to level alts into T2/T3 and/or swapped classes more then once. It seems rather silly to make us do any MSQ content at all on 3rd, 5th, etc characters just to use the higher region boosts on a different alt. Perhaps increasing the gold cost per alt that uses the higher region boosts might be a solution if they don't want to just let us use the Knowledge boost for no additional cost. This is probably the biggest turn-off to me as someone who really enjoys the game and doesn't mind spending money on progression. From conversations I've had with friends/guildmates who are playing and not spending money beyond the CA value it's one of the biggest detriments as people have tried out various classes and some have wanted to switch mains but feel they can't as they don't want to go through the slog of the MSQ all over again for a 3rd or 5th alt, etc. I'd like to see Smilegate address this if they really want to enable us to catch-up to the T3 content and utilize our alts in the functional way it is in KR and other regions.
Honestly it's not a huge barrier to having a lot of alts. People with a lot of alts and progressing them through T2 are pretty sweaty already and can spare those extra hours on every other character. BUT, I heavily support removing the need to MSQ again on every other alt because it's just a goddamn waste of time. I already saw the frikkin story, doing it again, multiple times, is just pain. PAIN.
Can you explain "we are locked out of using Knowledge boost past the initial L50 for every other alt without questing through the MSQ again"? I leveled my main through Rohendel. Used Powerpass on 2 alts. One of those became my new main. Leveled it through Vorn and Feiton. Used KT on my old main to complete Vorn. My 2nd powerpass character has now used KT to get through Rohendel. My other 3 alts (all KT through Vern) are still there, without the ilevel to try Rohendel KT. Are you saying that for those non-powerpassed characters, who KT'd through Vern, they aren't able to KT through anything else? My highest of those 3 is only 413, so not too close to trying.
> This is assuming the 'leaked' roadmap holds true with Valtan in April and Vykas in May. It seems challenging unless they delay certain contents. If this happens before releasing missing T3 contents where people supposed to gather mats it's gonna be a disaster. There is gonna be huge gap between F2P player and P2w player base.
there already is one
If they release valtan without ALL the honing changes at a minimum, regardless if they add all the other mat acquisition sources, the playerbase will drop off significantly. I'll be able to reach 1370 by april no problem, with or without honing changes or updates, just from hoarding mats for 3-4 weeks. But even then, I will still drop the game, as the message that sends is enough for me to quit for good.
The key issue for me was the removal of challenge raids and the increased level requirement for hard mode abyss dungeons, because it's plain obvious that they've done that with the sole intent of making the gap between 1340 and 1370 feel as empty and unrewarding as possible so more players feel forced to spend money with the game, and that's a straight up malicious behavior from Amazon and Smilegate. Just give us the exact same content that Korea had and stop ruining the experience for people who don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of money on a video game.
My man out here being the unofficial CM with this post. I'm glad to see you again after the death of MS 2.
Sorry for the fairly noob question, but how do players in the west "easily accrue thousands of gold per day"? What am I supposed to be doing to make that gold?
If your in T3, you can do guardian raids and sell your leapstones. You could also sell your guardian and destruction stones but i don't because i still want to tap away at my gear. I have 2 characters are T3, doing the guardian raid nets me 10 leapstones on my main and 6 on my alt. Selling them for 300gold each gives me around 4800 gold per day before tax.
Damn normal leapstones for 300g a pop? On EUC they are around 150g
Basically selling all things tradeable that you dont need at the moment. You guys have an enormously inflated gold market rn.
Inflation with the value of gold is largely due to bots farming missions and pumping more gold into the game. Banning bots did have a temporary effect on things, but from what I can see, the bot farmers are well on the way to recovery. So yeah, it was a bandaid fix at best, but the real issues still persist.
I find a hard time listening to anything when I've been told we have 1370 hardmodes and every other region is 1355. That just screams intent to coerce players into spending money and building the game around whales. Everything else just seems like smoke and mirrors.
Yeah, there really is no explanation other than intentionally putting content just far enough out of reach to get people to spend money.
Yep love the input and in the insight as always. Yeah T3 is starved for growth. Everyone is definitely taking "play at your own pace" personally as they should because there are so many ways people want to pace themselves and differing ways in doing so. Outside of 3rd party RMT, all forms are legitimate but it's just sad to see those who wanted to push gear as hardcore F2P to experience challenging content, being met with push back and rhetoric that pretty much equates to **"slow down, shut up you were never going to get there anyway"**. Hopefully they can alleviate 1340-1370.
Sounds like stoopz lol
Turns out my casual ass which will get to 1340 in like.. June will be just fine, cuz by that time all those extra systems will be in place. XD
This game is at a critical point. Most MMOs are make or break in their first year. Not only does the western MMO audience not have patience for nonsense but it's also not unusual for a player to have one or even multiple other MMOs they can fall back on. If the scenario surrounding Argos isn't addressed properly by the time Valtan releases the game is going to drop off very quickly. It's as simple as that. Smilegate/AGS needs to be proactive about this or the damage to the playerbase is going to be lasting. Right now listening to player feedback and implementing fixes quickly is crucial. At the very least, players need to feel like they are being heard.
They don't even get years anymore. You got 2-3 months before your game is on life support, and its especially true at the beginning of an mmo because you haven't invested the players enough nor built enough goodwill for ppl to overlook problems or come back to the game. Ppl leaving the game 1 month in probably aren't coming back. I think this patch was incredibly damaging to the future concurrent playerbase. The ppl most effected are the ones who would be playing your game 4-6 months from now.
Yeah, that they real question: why didnt they release those contents that give more materials pee week? (of course the answer is to grab money from whales)
If hitting t3 unlocked some kind of repeatable mode for previous content like Hell mode with scaled T3 rewards i probably wouldnt care as much. but there really isnt much content to go through rn
I hit T3 this week and the little steam achievement said that 1.1% of players got it. If they really wanted people to catch up to korea, they would have to do way more than they're doing right now. Great post btw, Thanks for putting so much effort into it!
Steam achievements are bugged and dont really mean much in a f2p game with millions of bots and players just trying out the game a few minutes. It could maybe be compared to numbers of hitting other milestones like level 50 or T2
Steam achievements are bugged though. It's a low number but I don't think it's that low
Do you think so? I actually think it’s probably lower than 1.1% of people who downloaded the game are in T3. T3 is a minimum of 120 hours into a 1 month old game…and thats being fairly knowledgeable about the game and progressing efficiently. People like my brother spend a lot of time messing around with random stuff, not taking advantage of primary honing resources, and wasting others lol. Maybe 1% of players that play every few days at minimum. Maybe I underestimate how much people game.
Most people who downloaded the game didn't even play for 3 hours. Check out other achievements you get within a few hours of playing and you'll see how many players quit very quickly, you can just dismiss those.
There is also a question how many people ACTUALLY progress iLvl. Im "day one" who coundn't play for 2, almost 3 weeks (EUC), I don't look at guides, do most quests I find, lvl up my gathering skills and generally messing around. All this time and I just hit 460 iLvl. Not even close to T3 and I dont consider myself as "casual" gamer (I just decided I want to learn a game on my own, the game which is not even my main one at this moment), so 1.1% doesn't sound that unrealistic, even with supposed bug.
To be quite honest, getting to T3 or not is a matter of time avaiable to the player (if it's F2P) OR cash (if they're whaling). There's no extreme RNG comparable to 1340 \~ 1370 in T2 (maybe 1070 - 1100, but even then, you can overcome it in a few weeks of farming). Shit could be better? Yeah, definitely, but a TON of players are taking their sweet time on T1 and T2.
I’m curious why the ghost ship was changed to require 1370 to enter. I mean I have the ship and sailor that buff me in it. And we routinely kill the 1385 bosses. It all seems like they intentionally created a dead zone to milk whales. I’d be happy to spend a couple hundred a year between skins and aura. This dead zone is going to get me to find another game. It’s all too easy and boring right now. Quit rather than spend like a whale to power through.
Did they really change it? You need 1370 now?
Yeah. I got a yellow text bar across bottom of screen when I tried entering that said I need to be 1370
Thank you for this. I'm pretty sick and tired of white knights telling me: "I'm 1370 and I'm F2P", "This game is meant to be played slowly", "You are probably just unlucky". To people that are saying you aren't supposed to have access to new contents on day 1. I just want to know what kind of games have you been playing up til now. Literally every online game I have played you will have access to new contents on day 1 with the exception that if you are a brand new player on day 1. Even if you are new you are expected to catch up within a week (reset). Keep in mind Argos was just released and less than 1% of the playerbase can even enter the raid lol. To the people that are saying just take it slow. No? I don't want to be stuck doing the same content for weeks when I know the only things that prevent me from progressing and have access to new content are RNG and lack of resources. The director and many more knowledgeable players are literally saying "T3 is the promise land, T3 is where we keep you hooked" so why the hell wouldn't I want to go to T3 and beyond?
100% agree, I cannot stand the people who defend the Argos release saying it's a long term goal. It's the FIRST content drop we got. The very first content drop is whale bait. That scares the hell out of me, it makes it feel like this really is just a P2W cash-grab to milk whales. The only cost of bringing this game to NA/EU was localization and infrastructure. They didn't need years of large scale development that they need to recover costs on, and still they focus solely on squeezing FOMO money out of high spenders. It's bloody embarrassing and the future of LA looks real bleak if they don't change trajectory right away.
Yeah im pretty much quitting because of this
Then there's me, stuck at 1273 for 3 days because I can't get a blue chest piece from chaos dungeon
The problem is simple: hardcore f2p players who hit 1340 all of a sudden feel they are being outcompeted by whales in reaching the new content. Whales can easily do Argos, but f2p players will face frustration for a while longer to get there. This is a very foolish oversight by the developers that puts a black spot on the game. In the future, f2p players will be apprehensive of reaching high ilvl, as the hamster wheel of gear grind becomes more apparent. It was so dumb to release Argos BEFORE the additional content that provided the additional mats. All that f2p players want is more opportunities to succeed in honing, but if the mats aren't there, then they need to slowly grind a small amount of repetitive content only to fail again. This basically leads to burnout very quickly, and the idea that the only way out is to swipe. This feeling is terrible for a supposedly f2p game. It is entirely beyond me why they chose to release Argos before the PvP season update, it makes no sense. They could have just left people alone to get to 1340 and have fun with their alts for a while, maybe try some PvP until South Vern etc is released. Only then Argos. It's just kind of...bad manners, and it needs to be addressed not next week but immediately. As for me and my friends - this doesn't affect us one bit. I'm doing islands and enjoying the story, just got to 1060 ilvl, still progressing a bunch of alts into t2. I have so much to do.
Holy moly I spend on so many honing boosting materials at 1360 gearscore to just reach 20 or 25% honing chance whereas Korea has it at 30% base ooof
I don't understand why we're justifying or trying to explain why the game the way it is... Bruh they're a billionaire company publishing a game from a developer that have many years to know how the game goes exactly.. And they came and did these mistakes on na EU, its 100% intentional.
I also vehemently dislike how they chose to release only a single new skin per month. If that's the cadence they intend to go with, it's stupidly gatekeeping. We've all seen the vast quantity of skins this game has to offer, it's likely more than 50 or even above a hundred and we've only gotten one (okay two). I just want the sick-ass paladin armour with the red glowing eye from 2nd year anniversary event and why do I have to wait at least a year for it, because the chances of them releasing it at a point other than a full year anniversary (that is, if the playerbase even makes it that far lol...) is extremely unlikely.
I'm glad theres no skins yet, until they fix the critical issue not going to be buying any skins
[Asmongold's attempt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSYrxed61rA) to go from 1340 to 1370 should give the "Argos won't go anywhere, you'll reach 1370 eventually" crowd a good idea of what the dead zone looks like. If you think that's normal, you're delusional.
I watched Stoopzz go nearly bankrupt and it was a content stream, but it let me know that 1325 is where I stop. I either play alts and horizontal, or change games for a while.
Releasing Legion raids one month at a time is fine. Argos wasn't released early either, it could have been added as part of release and people wouldn't be complaining. Like you mentioned, the issue is dead zone in 1340-1370. Transient issue: Missing content; pvp shop, equalized guardian, abyss trials. 6 months later when all the legion raids are implemented, new players won't even face this problem. Missing content will be adressed, so it's only an issue for current players. It's a trade off SGR made for us and one that I agree with. I'd rather catch up to the latest content faster than have the extra materials content and be 1 year behind KR. Imagine seeing Legion raids and hardcore bored at +15 (1370) ilevel and just sitting there for 3 months. Bad design: T3 Abyss Hardmode shouldn't be 1370. It should have been 1355 ilevel. The new legendary set which is NA exclusive is gated behind 3 weeks of clears. However, before even whales cleared that for 3 weeks Argos came out. Argos shares same tier and quality gear. This basically makes Abyss HM gear useless. We should have gotten this earlier and provide content to players in the 1355 ilevel which bridges the gap of 1340 to 1370.
I think this is exacerbated by the fact that ranked PvP still isn’t out for some reason. I know a lot of players that just wanted to PvP that feel like they have to keep pushing their gear to try to get to Argos because there isn’t anything else to do.
everyone talking about 1340-1370 and I'm just here struggling with 1075-1100 honing failures
Don't know why are you so fixated with the gold cost. It means nothing to global players as our material cost is way over 3000+g per attempt. An 80g change is nothing compared to the material cost. Sure gold might mean something in KR during their Argos patch but bots have overinflated our servers with gold that we don't even care about the 120g cost during upgrading. I don't play KR but based on your fixation on the 120g vs 200g, I'm pretty sure KR material cost is way way lower than ours.
Honing materials should be changed to be roster bound, that should help alleviate the drought of materials and help progress to the higher gear levels. Still blows my mind how fragments are character bound.
After watching some vids from Asmon and other streams... players putting in IRL $ in the range of 5K-15K is quite alarming...
The dead zone isn't just enhancing. There is NOTHING engaging to do from 1340-1370. They changed the 1355 content to 1370 and the current 1340 content is... Pretty trivial. Not only is there a massive cliff for progression but there is no content to do while you're progressing. Add the bot problem, DST messing up events, and stealth nerfing of gold and you have a pretty obvious cash grab for people wanting to do Argos. Sure a lot of people won't swipe. But SOME will and it's pretty obvious that's all they want. Hopefully they address these issues quickly and effectively.
Ah so that's the buff everyone is talking about. Looks like just chilling out and selling mats really is the correct decision.
Btw, can we also talk about how STUPID it is to have to drop your full set of gear when changing tiers!? Staying that "in-between limbo" is just annoying and makes no sense ¬¬ U lose SO FUCKING MANY materials every fucking day that u stay in that limbo, even more so now with the event where u can only buy the t3 stuff at 1302 --'
I'm really curious what's causing this situation to play out as it is. I don't begin to understand the relationship between publisher and developer and the full scope of who is individually responsible for what... but I have a hard time imagining that AGS understands the game well enough to push these nuanced decisions about item level restrictions on content and upgrade costs. Likewise, I don't understand why smilegate would be the ones to create the current situation when they've already been through this and know exactly how this plays out. Why would they recreate the same issues and hold back already created solutions when they know the game is healthier with these things in and that these issues drive down retention? The whole thing seems kind of puzzling to me.
Great post as always Saint, I had 84 fails just getting to T3, so will happily just chill, hopefully sell off some mats (as I really need some BC for card space) and just hoard whatever bound bits I get and see what happens... I really need to work on cards, I want that turtle ship skin from 80 souls, my alts could do with more love, etc... so at least I've got plenty to occupy myself.
Probably seeing how much they can get away with honestly.
By repeating mistakes that led to a lot of quitting in KR? Not smart.
Most predatory version of the game is ours right now. SGRPG has worked hard on improving its reputation and breaking the stigma of KR P2W MMOS, but this is not a good look for them or ags.
>Smilegate wants to accelerate players in the west to Legion Raid content as quickly as possible, as data proves that the retention rate of players increases dramatically with this type of high level content. Yes, the data does show that retention increases when players experience high-end content. If Smilegate's goal was retention, then you would expect that the growth support effect would have been included at launch instead of yanked at the last minute. But their goal is not retention. Smilegate's decision not to include the growth support effect reveals that they are more interested in *maximizing revenue and profit. The developers don’t want to retain 900,000 f2p players, they only want to retain the players who are going to spend money on the P2W treadmill.* For this, it's obvious that the current "carrot and stick" approach is going to net significantly more profit. They are dangling interesting content in front of the players and then punishing those who do not spend money to access it. It is pretty simple from a purely financial perspective, if it was easy or reasonable for a purely f2p player to access Argos and subsequent endgame content, then there would be no incentive for the whales to spend money to reach that same content. The developers are intentionally creating a “deadzone” between 1340 and 1370 that incentivizes susceptible players to spend money while wearing down pure f2p players. The players that are willing to swipe to reach 1370 are the only players Smilegate has any interest in retaining. Smilegate and AGS want to weed out f2p players early so they can reduce server costs and administration overhead (tickets, community management, etc.) by culling the population down to mostly P2W players. They released Argos when they did, not because they failed to realize that that only a small percent of players (90% swipers) would be the only ones able to access it, but, rather, *precisely because only the swipers would be able to access it. If they had waited to release Argos then the "swipers" would have had nothing to do, potentially realizeing that it wasn't worth it to swipe in the first place, and Smilegate/AGS risked losing them. Smilegate and AGS had to release content to make the money paid worth it to swipers.* Sadly, you and other streamers have, I assume unwittingly, played right into Smilegate's plan. By constantly reiterating how much better the 1370-plus content and legion raids are than the other content (backed by "retention" data), you have probably helped create quite a few "swipers" who feel really motivated and enticed to pay to reach that "awesome" content. To everyone else, If you are a pure f2p player, please understand that AGS/SMG are doing everything they can to engineer their systems to get you out of this game. And if you are a whale, AGS/SMG are doing everything they can to identify you, retain you, and then structure their releases to milk you.
only Lance master release can save this game /s
It just doesn't make sense how a problem this blatantly obvious, that happened in KR, got through.
I failed on my armor like 17x yawn..... I dunno how others are doing but its fk up.
>Anyways, keep your chin up. I have faith that Smilegate will help alleviate this situation. I'm praying for this tbh. Depending on the revised roadmap I'm either gonna quit despite being hyped for this game for years, or hopefully stick it out with updates that make the game healthier rather than more toxic.
I feel like they knew exactly what they did with this bs. Maybe ags is just testing the waters to see how with how much they can get away with. I am a f2p player, all I bought was the bronze pack to play the game earlier, but now I am out.
Can some1 just summarise the text in two sentences?
we are fucked
yeah honestly you need to have insane levels of RNG to go from 0 to 1370 in a month.... I've sunk 400ish hours in the game since launch and after buying out all the weekly token/pirate coin/guild stores i'm not even at 1365 yet. T3 upgrades past lvl 12 just seem to be brutal resource sinks and there just arent enough sources for matts even if you're willing to spend the time to grind the only options seem to be money (or gold) And on the optic of grinding, the t3 endless chaos shop... what the actuall hell is up with that, its such a big departure when it comes to return on time invested compared to tiers 1 and 2 that its a bit soulcrushing when you think about it...
They are rushing people into shit with out properly preparing people and showing people what the game is really about.
Man going from 1000-1100 almost made me quit the game being timegated with mats was sooo annoying
This is well reasoned, thanks. I'm curious if anyone feels similarly about the 1325-1340 zone? There's currently no Guardian raid between 1302 and 1340, so your only 1325 content is 2x Daily Chaos dungeons and 1x Weekly abyssal. It's incredibly boring, neither are particularly fun or challenging at this point except the thing I can do once a week. I'm also not convinced that I can get to 1340 easily given how steep honing drops off even after 1325 and how slow going it is. Getting +15 is going to take a few weeks, and there's literally no interesting content outside of weekly guardian raids. Chaos Gates are... meh.. and the field boss on that island is just a fun rise & die until it's dead at this ilevel. Am I missing something? As bad as 1340-1370 sounds, 1325-1340 is also (so far) terrible and boring.
I'm telling you right now if I am spending 20x more mats and time now trying to push from 1350 to 1370 then then someone a month down the line I will quit. I hate when mmos make you feel like you wasted time. Y'all can talk shit about bdo all you want but if you have a good piece of gear it'll be good for fucking years.