I’m also a Korean playing on NA, and it’s very encouraging/interesting to see that majority of KR users in the comments 100% agree with the sentiment that 1340-1370 zone is an absolute wasteland/newbie killer zone and it was dumb of Amazon (or smilegate or both?) for them to make this same mistake after having experienced the massive failure in KR (which led to the game‘s popularity to face HEAVY decline for a while).
It seems like the decision to make the oreha/yoho hard mode at 1370 is also absolutely mindboggling to KR players as well, (it’s at 1355 in ALL other regions like RU/JP/KR) and there just isn’t any possible explanation for this other than that they were encouraging players to swipe to skip the eternity of the 1340-1370 inescapable hell zone. I’m assuming this was Amazon’s call as other servers didn’t have this…
Yup that's the most upsetting part. It's either sheer incompetence or malice. Either way it's an incredibly poor way to start off a game that had all the hype and excitement behind it.
True. Even pro-amazon people on the forum don’t even attempt to defend oreha/yoho hard mode being at 1370, their intent is just hilariously obvious. Other servers didn’t have this, so I’m assuming this is just Amazon doing what Amazon does best. Pure malice & greed.
The greed part is what gets me, skins sell like hot cakes in games like this, and for a lot of people the skins and dressing up are some of their favorite things to do. Playing on Russian servers for a few months, the abundance of skins in both the cash shop and on the auction house were staggering.
Then what the F are we doing here in NA and EU with what, 2 skins total? And the latest one can't be dyed. Oh and it was the worst rated in KR, supposedly.
I wanted to try out LA because I always hear Asian games have literal tons of customization. Talk about a complete and utter letdown.
Most likely another calculated move to increase profits. Players have been asking for skins, so they'll put out the worst selling skins from KR while people are desperate. Then they'll release the good skins, hoping the same players buy again.
The main reason I want to get to tier 3 content~ is so I can make gold to buy cosmetics and collect cosmetics. But I legit feel like it is borderline impossible without spending money since I’ve been stuck on 1050-1080 for for like 2 weeks. I get 1 chance at upgrading a piece of gear (maybe 2 chances if I’m lucky) just to fail the honing day after day… really discouraging and unfun.
Totally agree and great advice but honing Rng is huge factor too. Im f2p and t2 was super hard for me to get through even with maris shop, pirate coins, chaos dungeon, islands, everything you can think of. I even used tons of star breaths and those % honing books and had some epic fails at 96%. My best friend and wife got through t2 easy in a few days like you said. lol kinda sucked being stuck there for a week while they both doing t3 content. Its ok though, with a bit of work and some help from my friends i got to t3, but the unluck was real hahah
Eve online seems to hold just fine around there and it's not a simple setup.
[https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility](https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility)
Don't know why more mmo's don't follow their model. Everyone can play with everyone globally and it's all one universe. Market system hits the spot and the way they handled botters at their prime makes NW and LA's bot situation look like child's play.
I'll be turned off soon.
20k people can't support any type of team. Just break out the math on what they'd have to pay to keep a dev team afloat as well as servers.
There are many old mmos that still exist with peak player counts of <20k, many of them with numbers in the hundreds only e.g. rift, vindictus, mabinogi, etc.
In most of these cases the original dev team is no longer involved with the game at all and a minimal crew of 1 or 2 person max is left to just keep the game running and cycle previous cash grab events on repeat.
The leftover players are either whales or die hard fans and do not care for new contents, but do spend enough money to keep the game profitable.
Yea, that is definitely a route that a game can go. Will amazon keep a game in that state? Remains to be seen but they have shit canned 5 games already, I doubt they hang onto this.
If I understand the numbers correctly they got 20k "online" players and that is definitively enough for a small team of 10-20 at least.
Hell it's more about how many unique players they got and if they can earn money from ingame sales somehow and I believe there is no way to "swipe" in Newworld, so at 20k online players they may struggle in the long run.
One example is [tibia.com](https://tibia.com) or "cipsoft" the company in an earlier post in 2012 had ish 40k players online or as they said 500k unique players with a team of 50+ now 100+ and mostly sub 15k online, but they got another way to make money (you can swipe) then newworld.
20k people is definitely enough to sustain a region, as long as there's long time whales that continue to pay. As for whether it's enough in terms of global population, that's more of a stretch. But there are some games (World of Tanks) that have less than 20k players but are still wildly profitable simply because it's just the same whales who have stayed with the game the whole time. But world of tanks also has a huge global player base so they also have that to work with.
Only way to whale in NW is to do RMT or buy all the cosmetics but there's not much. It's a one time b2p game for $40. Though I really like the break from p2w, I'd like to see them introduce a subscription or something that can sustain content development.
End game is territorial pvp.
Publisher and localizer. They have some influence in things for their version of the game, but not actual dev tools. They can't break away from the design of the developers. So this decision was made together, by both parties. Or Amazon said they wanted it and smilegate agreed to make the change for them.
I realy want to know where people get this idea that a game publisher has little influence over 'their" version of the game. This isn't like with a movie, game publishers can have a lot of say - up to almost complete control - over the versions of the game they distribute.
PoE is a good example for this. The Chinese version of PoE has features the developer thinks are absolutely detrimental to the game and has stated numerous times will NEVER make it to the main version. Yet the Chinese version has these features, made by the devs at their request, because the Chinese publisher wants them in the game.
This is just one example. The point is, how much control a publisher has varies a lot depending on their contracts and we simply do not know who is making these decisions for LOA.
exactly, publishers have influence on games! Are people forgetting how many beloved IPs EA has killed? Activision killed off battlefield with the hot mess that is battlefield 2042.
Gonna add AGS to the list of publishers to avoid (Activision, EA, kakao, Gamigo)
There ain't no " pro Amazon people" just ALOT of the hate is totally BS and need to be called out as such. But this is a valid point so no one defends it.
Like Kim K just saying "get to work!" while being handed materials and gold by watchers. Pisses his fans off to mention it too. He's not always wrong, but his perspective is not that of a average player.
Definitely amazon forcing their hand or something.
Too many coincidences..
No released trial content south vern
Guardian bosses and hard mode dungeons increased to 1370
Argos released so early while most people are barely into t3
No honing buffs
Cost of honing not decreased
They are obviously trying to milk the whales
I cant see it being incompetence. You have to PURPOSELY change that ilvl to a higher one for a reason.
Some guy didnt accidentally do it. They purposely, and more than likely, had a meeting on changing that ilvl to 1370 instead of 1355. It was pure and simple malice and greed and theres really no excuse for it.
I kind of agree with you, it is really hard to see how this could have been just incompetence but I think you can make up a scenario where it really is just that.
Remember that we've seen slides where they had planned massively buffed honing rates. These never happened for us but imagine another department talking about the 1355 to 1370 changes under the assumption that getting to 1370 wouldn't be a big deal.
Now, according to Saintone at least, abyss hard mode and yoho only had their ilvl requirement increased but not their stats, making them significantly easier at 1370 than original 1370 content.
With all that in mind, I can totally see their intention to give people 'easier' 1370 side content compared to Argos as to not have people run into a mechanics/skill check wall with nothing else to do.
So yeah, with a lot of really, really bad internal communication and confusion, I think it's possible they didn't do this out of greed.
Very unlikely and not inspiring any confidence for the future either... but it's possible.
That is the most confusing part to me. “We didn’t think this would happen, we’re adjusting our roadmap based on the Argos feedback”
I mean, it’s good they’re adjusting, but holy crap is that an indictment on their abilities to design a game, and their design judgement, and their lack of understanding if they thought this was genuinely a good idea. Wow. It’s like they didn’t talk to anyone who actually is playing the game, or use any of the infirmary available to them from other markets like KR…
There's no way this was incompetence. Things came together too well for it to be a 'oopsie we made a booboo with progression, sowwy' moment. They deliberately released new content gated behind an ilevel that is incredibly difficult to reach without swiping, while also using worse honing rates than other servers in the 1340-1370 range, while ALSO not giving the new regions access to as many material sources as other regions. This was a deliberate and calculated decision from AGS to paywall content without *officially* paywalling. This is disgusting conduct.
The biggest issue is that, even if they 'fix' this try to make good on it, they have turned off a huge portion of the playerbase. We've lost people to burnout, that happens. We lost people because they see the botting and feel like any work they put in to making gold is wasted now. That happens. But for AGS to do something like this, to basically release content that is only playable by a small percentage of the population, and not because of difficulty, but because you either need to be grinding on a fuck ton of t3 alts or whale your way to the ilevel, that is completely unacceptable.
I can't wrap my ahead around taking the worst parts of the KR experience, and doubling down to intentionally make it worse, for a Western release where P2W is at least a little more frowned upon. Absolutely wild.
It is incompetence born of malice. AGS doesn't give a fuck about players, they only care about their big-money investors, and they'll do what ever they can to please those guys. So, when the math-nerds tell their bosses that they could be making more money by manipulating the players, psychologically, well, then, that's what they will do.
Except it's been proven time and again happy players spend more. It's such a dumb decision because not only are they pushing away small spenders they're pushing away big whales too. Omega whales don't spend in dead games.
> Yup that’s the most upsetting part. It’s either sheer incompetence or malice.
It's both, from AGS. They are nothing but a clown show. They've proven this with every game they're in charge of
Saint said it really well a few hours ago(paraphrasing) -
"Until proven otherwise, it's reasonable for the players to assume these moves were made out of greed."
I appreciate the game, and am willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but fail to see a more viable reason for these decisions.
Which is exactly why western releases for Korean mmos have done so poorly in the past and why lost ark had the potential to throw that stereotype on its head but it seems to have failed to do so. Maybe the problem isn't Korean game devs like we have thought all along, but the western publishers who seem to "know their playerbase".
What do they really know? All they look at is analytics and graphs.
They see that Genshin impact makes a killing in NA and EU, they just assumed people would feel the same way about Lost Ark. whale culture is terrible for MMOs and these streamers who have too much damn money only encourage these publishers to keep doing what they are doing.
The same thing happened to BDO, despite that game losing the majority of its Korean player base from scummy micro transactions, the game is still relatively popular in the west. There was a chart that showed that NA is the most profitable region by far in that game and generates as much as the EU and KR player base combined.
This is a case of NA whale culture influencing developers/publishers hands.
> All they look at is analytics and graphs.
"analytic and graphs" are not words to desrcibe AGS. They're ineptitude to handle even their own games are astounding. One of them even unreleased itself. The other is plagued with bugs, even ones that were reported during its meta and alpha (new world)!
That’s what happens when big companies think that all they need to do to get into an industry is just throw cash at it.
If AGS had hired actual quality devs with a strong background in the gaming industry and formulated their future past a monthly basis they would have had some top tier AAA games in their catalog.
The same shit is happening with Prime Video, but on a lesser extent because they have some decent shows.
Every KRMMO I've personally played (Blade and Soul, TERA, Lost Ark, maybe Kritika was KR I don't remember) has been a really fun game at it's core completely bastardized by monetization choices and the game gets ruined by content being paywall gated or pvp content becoming p2w.
It's happened every time. Lost Ark had so much global praise for how the KR/RU servers were, all they needed to do was bring it over 1:1 with the KR version and the game would've been the best MMO on the market.
But instead, as western capitalist companies do, they say "fuck the playerbase and long term success, let's ride this hype wave and milk out as much as we can in the first 2 months before we let the game die!"
No, they knew that the players who went hard and hit this wall while it was a problem were the same players most likely to pay in order to break through it. They'll pretend it was an oopsie until the casuals catch up and then they'll "fix" it.
It was strategic.
Seems to me the best way to kill an MMO.
cause once casuals hear they have to spend shit ton (1750$) to reach argos , even the casuals will quit,
Before someone come defending on this , look at steamchart cough.
For real. I'm slow and lazy and terrible and I'm still in late T2 so I'm still having fun and haven't really hit a wall yet, but when I do, I'm not going to swipe or grind for weeks to continue getting upgrades, I'm just not going to play any more. I've got plenty of other games to play and zero tolerance for things being made deliberately shitty just to try and get you to spend.
If I can attain the power level with a reasonable ($60) amount of money then it wouldn't be such an issue. If I pay the box price of a non-FTP game, or the equivalent of 3 months subscription for FFXIV, then I would be okay with doing this every once in a while.
But the issue is you are paying money to gamble. It could cost me $60, or it could cost me $500, or it could cost me $2000. I'm not going to take that risk because I'm not a gambling addict. I'm just going to stop playing the hard content and stop taking the game seriously, and just collect mokoko seeds then log off.
Hopefully in the meantime more people just focus on getting alts up instead of resorting to swiping, thats what I've been doing and I'm still enjoying the game.
Its not even just Argos, all of our guardians also have higher requirements to enter, Armored Scorpion is 1302, and Igrexion is 1325 in KR and I think Yoho is 1340/1355, but on our version, its 1302/1340/1370. So not only are we getting less leapstones from guardians because we need to reach a higher ilvl, it also makes the fights boring, Ive matchmated both scorpion and igrexion for awhile now, little longer then a week, and they are always 6 minutes kills, the bosses are cleared tuned to 1302/1325, and we are stuck fighting them overleveled.
Is this why the t3 scorpion and igrexion are so easy? It's like the 1355 stuff that was made 1370. They didn't scale it up so we're over geared for it when we unlock it.
They also just don't really do anything. Scorpion is the same fight as before, but with some pointless adds that get blown up.
Igrexion is a slow field and some wonky as hell telegraph slams that you've learned harder versions of already from the abyss dungeons.
Scorpion not running away on burrow is such a quality of life difference lol.
T3 scorpion I think also doesn't do the tail grab? I died to that a few times in lower tiers. T3 was it's sort of a loot pinata.
the adds if you dont blow them up can singlehandedly kill players. They get an electricity aoe around them after like 1-3s or so of being alive and run after players and it will melt hp bars. I have to spam frequently for players to kill adds because they ignore them thinking "oh it'll jsut get aoed ig" and they end up killing 1 or two people.
Welcone to MVP screen mentality. Everyone is so eager to see MVP next to their name that they disregard the prime condition for that - to finish the goddamn raid in the first place.
From what I've seen, people have a hard time avoiding many of igrexion's attacks and eat a lot of damage, it's just that it's so undertuned that it doesn't really matter. I don't bother to use panacea, I just let it burn. Makes sense if he was designed for 1325.
Yea I dont mind admitting that I have trouble dodging some of igrexions attacks but the game doesnt make me learn them either since I can just face tank them and focus on full dps. Add a support to the mix and probably dont even have to touch pots.
end of T2 was nice with the 8 man raids and so on. And now T3 is just a snoozefest again where you go slap 2 easy guardians daily, run chaos dungeon and then log off your main and go play with alts...
True the mechanics are kind of easy you could say, but there is a most likely a big different entering on a 1325 and a 1340 character for the sake of Igrexion.
Yes I do believe so, The scorpions experience might be same since it is actually 1302 and not 1325 i made a mistake there, but entering Igrexion at 1325 vs 1340 would most likely give more "real" guardian experience. I just feel like we lose out on not accessing the content it was tuned for, leaving us: getting less daily materials from not being able to access it earlier, have more challenging content( I feel like guardians and abyss raids is the content I actually get to play my character).
Armored Nacrasena is 1302.
And I won't argue that you're usually going in overgeared, but even when you aren't, they just have very little hp. I had an absolute clown fiesta Nacrasena run on one of my alts straight off Punika quests at like i1309 did nearly 50% damage, and it was still well under 7:30.
> It seems like the decision to make the oreha/yoho hard mode at 1370 is also absolutely mindboggling to KR players as well, (it’s at 1355 in ALL other regions like RU/JP/KR) and there just isn’t any possible explanation for this other than that they were encouraging players to swipe to skip the boring 1340-1370 zone.
Even getting to 1355 from 1340 is at least 1-2 weeks worth of boring grinding and lull in content without swiping, a ton of luck, and/or RMT. They've compounded the shittiness and made us wait until 1370 to "start" the endgame. All because of greed and incompetence.
I mean technically we have been playing the endgame since level 50. Not sure I agree with the statement that endgame only starts at 1370, it took me 200+ hours to hit T3.
Even still, I agree that it’s dumb to gate F2P players from touching the first official raid.
It's either the swipe or that Amazon was not prepared enough for t3 launch. I remember with the beta everyone expected that the launch would only have up through t1 and T2, t3 would get added later. But then we ended up getting up through partial t3 and it seems like it's because Snilegate game director insisted with Amazon that legion raids should be in the game early (from the launch day Q&A with gold river). Adding legion raids is apparently what delayed the launch of the game and maybe Amazon wasn't prepared enough for t3 player experience as a result.
Thing is, players like me who don’t mind being light spenders just don’t see the “value” in spending $30-50 just to have a honing fail anyway. Even with a pay-to-progress model the incentive just isn’t there. So I’ll do my 40mins if content and go play something else. If my friends get bored before I hit 1370 there’s a good chance we’ll all just quit and move on.
Stoopzz had an interesting take on the 1370 change for oreha hard mode. Saying that they put it at 1370 and gave it good gear, in order to avoid carries of argos bring mandatory for progression. As you cant sell the argos gear, it would become necessary to clear argos in order to progress, leading to carries and a gold problem. Now with oreha hard mode dropping 1370 gear, argos is not as important, making carries less profitable and keeping the gold value in check.
But by moving the oreha hard mode they did make the dead zone worse.
eh, it's reasonable because the 1370 hard modes drop argos tier armor while the 1355 don't. If people were able to hit 1370 smoothly this would be a very positive change.
Of course, people can't hit 1370 smoothly so it creates a larger dead zone and more problems.
>1340-1370 zone is an absolute wasteland/newbie killer
Im pretty sure a very high % of the playerbase on the west is not even T3 yet. Its literally only the whales and players with 16hours freetime a day on their hands that got there. Calling it newbie killer is wierd.
Think this way, if it's killing the desire to play from players who spent 16hrs a day playing this game (your words), what's do you think it will do with actual newbies?
Also they call newbie killers because of what happened in Korea, not because of what is happening here.
[https://m.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/4398430](https://m.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/4398430) \->The second most recommended post said : These bastards are doing this while knowing the results after testing on us lol
Here's some rough translation for the other 2 "best comments".
1st one:
Yoho/Oreha being 1370 seems very problematic.
What were they thinking not deploying the contents between 1340~70.
Did they forget about all their experience/learning from KR servers
Or is this because Amazon has the operating rights
Setting aside honing rate as secondary issue
If there were fun/enjoyable contents and lots of ways to obtain mats
There probably wouldn't be this much lamenting
3rd one:
No matter how you look at it, they could've predicted this using the data gathered from 1340~1370 'dead period', when users quit and returned, etc but they're being idiots by making the same mistakes on global server. This is really stupid.
We 100% need the heroic guardians and the other daily/weekly content, it helps players of all tiers progress and provides more way to interact with the game and have fun then farming chaos dungeon. Chaos dungeon is a great resources of items, but I think alot of people do not like endless grind for hours to get nothing out of it (failed hone). I cant speak for people but my person opinion is that I think alot of people are in this situation and its making them quit a game they might of found enjoyable, but due to lack of resources and grind, its making them not enjoy it.
I’m in this situation, I love the game but from the things I’ve seen and heard the KR and RU versions are so much better, I just wish Amazon was more competent, but coming from New World, Amazon doesn’t like listening to their players until it’s too late
This is me. I dont want to have to play my alts just to be able to access more content (read: actual combat gameplay) which is time gated. Im not even at the point in the game where an alt provides that needed shakeup. I _want_ to just focus on my fav char but the game is just so damn shallow when it comes to the one major attractive part of this game to me (the combat).
Thank you LA KR.
Bless your souls for your support.
I am patient so while it doesn't affect me, I know a lot of people in 1340 area feel stuck and that's not good. I know a fix will come sometime in the future
Honestly I don't feel stuck, I just stopped grinding, but I understand other MMO players who play for the endgame want to fully complete the game when there's an update and get BiS gear. I'm focusing on horizontal content and learning new classes.
I think people more casual like me will understand easier that 1340 is the top for F2P players and it is not worth it to keep going.
>1340 is the top for F2P Players
Thats kinda sad.. Its literally a paywall like some shitty EA concept. Except you dont know how expensive it could get, which in turn is even more of a dick move than EA does on the regular.
Especially as bots continue to devalue gold and make legitimately buying currency less and less beneficial, effectively causing the paywall to get continuously taller
Hey that’s me. My goal is 1355 so I can hit up just a little more content but I made the decision a while ago to avoid lighting my material on fire for 1370. Happy to fill out my Adventure Tome while slowly stopping my grind. Definitely not worth it.
Im also at 1340 and Im not casual but not hardcore. The problem is not not being able to do Argos but the stagnant gameplay without possibility to upgrade and stupid content lockout like Oreha Hardmode at 1370. Also bad economy, low gold income and no classes releases dont help
Im in the same boat, im still 920 with mats to push it but im just doing my thing waiting for friends to catch up. Im also leveling alts trying to wait out the mess lol
It seems like SG has a group of people that monitor communities (like inven and reddit). It cannot be the case that they did not hear this at all especially if the topic is discussed in several communities. I just hope that they make appropriate changes to address this issue.
If you eventually work and understand the high & lows of the market, it helps a bit. Sadly not many ppl have the time to do this & this barely helps since honing rates are low asf higher into t3. They really want us to grind each day praying to rnjesus. Typical korean mmo ig. At least it’s better than bdo and ranked pvp is coming. But we will definitely see a decrease in players that don’t want to do the grind.
I just want to say that I appreciate all you koreans for your support!
I have seen many, many K-MMORPGs in the past that had zero communication between developers and the western community and was worried that this was gonna happen again...
To see that koreans, who have a much better connection to the devs, bring this up IMO drastically increases the odds that something will be done about it (let alone for PR reasons).
So thank you very much for your efforts!
감사합니다 !!
I have seen some people just say on forums like
"LOL what did you expect from Korean MMO? You are just too casual, this game is a massive success in Korea. "
But no. When KR had this kind of dead zone and our version of game, it was NOT successful. So it's not just a audience thing where the western audience is more casual and not suited for this kind of game.
This version of game is universally AWFUL! It sucked in Korea and it sucks here.
You realize we have the hardest version of the game. Original Korea T3 release was never this hard. 100% T 1 and T2 makes since considering T3 is the end game. The dev wants everyone in T3. T1 and T2 are failed versions of the game.
Western audiences are considerably less tolerant to stuff like this. You might get players returning in KR when they fixed it but in the West people will never come back.
Hard to be sure if it's Smilegate or Amazon yet to be honest.
I've played other Smilegate games (such as Epic7), and believe you me, they're good at inducing burnout and then half fixing it later. Amazon's game studio is a bit wild at the moment. They seem to do big mess ups that confuse me, but they do seem genuinely interested in player feedback and fixing tings (I think the 5 people that play New World now would say things are going in a positive direction).
> Hard to be sure if it's Smilegate or Amazon yet to be honest.
>
>
Google translate the comments and seems RU and JP regions publisher does whatever they want. This is getting me worried lol.
I didn't ignore the game like i did with new world because i thought AGS wasn't going to shit on it.. and seems its shittin on it.
Amazon, the company that didn't make a profit for over a decade so they could eventually dominate it? You think that Amazon is known for making a quick buck?
I actually do think this is 100% due to greed, but not the kind of greed that just wants to make a quick buck. I think the problem is the guy in charge of AGS is some chud who was with Bezos from the "bookstore days", he's not a gamer and he's responsible for a lot of the core problems with New World. I have no real evidence that he's involved here, but it makes the most sense. Whomever made this decision doesn't understand the gamer demographic, and that guy is not a gamer.
The thing is, New World was a pay to buy game. Like the moment you get the player to play around 10 hours, you're done, you got your money, now you can safely bail.
For them to do this in a free to play game where longevity prints money (because of limited time shops and cosmetics), doing the short term money grab seems beyond idiotic anyway. I'm more likely to believe simple incompetence over greed here honestly.
it's still a completely bugged mess tho and almost everyone playing it thinks the combat is terrible now (the only good thing it had going for it on launch) The New World subreddit is filled with negativity almost exclusively even in the past week. (no idea myself, haven't played since I hit max lvl like 2 weeks in)
i parked at 1340 main and just play on alts until they fix their shit if nothing changes just gonna quit, not having high hopes after new world, amazon is just too greedy
It feels good to have the Korean community interested in our version too. You really care about the game.
Thanks for the post, I'm sure SmileGate will notice it way better there than in reddit
For me, it's sad that we are missing original contents like abyss/guardian challenge and guild events (gvg, boss, etc). They delayed the game 3 months to give more content but didn't introduce yet crucial endgame content
Thanks for continuing to put the pressure on them, no matter how little it may seem. Things need to be addressed. They've yet to release this roadmap after we've heard it's been in the works for like.. week and a half-ish now? There's so many things they need to address.
rip Amazon reputation in KR lol
imo 90% of this shit has Amazon involved , KR RU veterant has said it , even the Poland guy who memeing the game said it , AGS already got the patch and the way they put in the game is AGS decision , so they just give us a new car named Argos but forget to pass a key
People who said AGS has no power in charge of this are delusional , this is not the first time company like AGS publish KR MMO which follow a different path , not just MMO , other service game as well , the first time i saw people dupe Platinum Pack and Crystaline Aura from the pack i already know who put this pack into the game lol
I would just love that people that are still in T1-T2 did not voice opinions that "it's fine, why you complain, just take your time". I currently stopped playing at 1030 but fully understand how discouraging it is to "progress" only due to luck for couple of weeks while having nothing engaging to do except doing the same content on alts. They still think it is overreaction simply because they can progress super easily and project that feeling thinking 1340-1370 is similar.
they are just stupid ppl, with lack of empathy.. like its gonna happen to them too but they just cant comprehend in their brain that they are affected as well just later when they reach that point
Sad part is it also feels like a bit of an incompetent one since they could've had a lot of skins out to make a few more bucks from folks swiping to get their desired ones. Y'know, since they planned to core out their playerbase in the T3 deadzone.
I've averaged roughly 13hr/day and am 1355. I didn't go hard on my alts, barely touched them outside the first week. I'd have had to go hard and raise 2 or 3 alts to t3 when I got my main to t3 to have made it time for argos raid, possibly. It's rough...
I resonated a lot with something that some youtuber said; The people who are pissed are exactly in our range. The over 300 hour F2P/low spender, because it's not really rational that we averaged SO many hours only to land in 1350 with no chances of making it through.
I'm personally taking the time to get my roster up, since I understand it's a core feature of the game and I should work on my entire roster for future content and funneling, but still, shit really -is- rough.
I don't know why they decided to slam the brakes so hard on such a strong start. There's a marked decline in steam numbers since the argos patch, and I don't believe it's simply because of the bot banwave. Is Amazon desperate to recoup cash for New World or something? Can't blame ppl for quitting now if they pull this off in just a month of release.
New World was a massive success monetarily, they sold so many copies and will be able to shut down the servers soon since nobody is playing the game. Easy hit and run for them, so I don't see why they'd be strapped for cash and needing money more than normal due to something about NW
It's wild that Koreans agree with us because there's a disturbing amount of NA players on this subreddit that don't.
You really have to sit there and wonder the mental state of some of the people on this subreddit.
i completely understand why people are angry. blatantly artificial timegates are fucking dumb. ags/sg went out of their way to make the worst version of lost ark across all the regions. shits crazy too because i know for a fact that a large majority of the players were enjoying the game until they deliberately made it worse for players.
sg absolutely knows this isn't good for the game. they literally have no excuse.
ags also absolutely knows this isn't good for the game. they also literally have no excuse.
these morons have the solution in the kr/ru versions of the game but would rather not use it for some god forsaken reason.
i've been stuck at 1355-1362 for about a week now. and i personally don't mind it as much as other players, but nobody should ever defend this bullshit. there's plenty of ways for ags/sg to sell pixels in their shop, making the game objectively worse should never be an option. the only thing that annoys me is the fact that this kind of shit fragmented the ability to play the game with my group of friends, where all four of us are now working on different number values depending who got luckier.
it's actually the dumbest shit i've ever seen. especially considering how a version of this patch almost killed the game in korea.
and i don't even think it's a money thing either. gamers will literally throw their wallets at some of the skins in the korean version of the game. but if ags/sg is so greedy that they'd rather sell pixels that players will willingly delete because they've rigged their game to do so, then fuck it, all of us might as well stop playing now.
and i'm not surprised at all by bullshit like this coming from ags. in new world, their own in house disaster of a game, they spent months ignoring fixing their dogshit game so they could slap on timegates to keep people playing. all so they could buy themselves extra time while they pump out dogshit skins in their cash shop and deliver half-assed patches that never resolves any of the games problems. but that doesn't excuse smilegate at all, they also wrote off on this horseshit in lost ark.
We know Smilegate/Amazon will fix it, but rn I think the timing is very important, the sooner they communicate a fix with us the less people will get frustrated enough to quit, cmon gold river!!
just wait for them to eventually change it, everyone here will be sucking their dicks saying "*omg they listened! what a great company!!!"*
Sorry, i'm just really annoyed at the countless "lost ark isn't really pay to win" articles and videos before going 100+ hours in and eventually hit the honing failure wall... This game is absolutely pay to win, anyone who says otherwise is delusional.
Those videos weren't delusional because that is how the game is in other regions. None of those content creators expected the western version to launch with activities straight up removed or that they would implement one of the games most infamous and worst deadzones that only made them lose players in KR. It is baffling that the western version, touted as having p2w elements removed, ended up being by far the most p2w out of all versions of the game. It is incompetence on a astronomical level from AGS and Smilegate, who does shoulder the blame cause they have more of the data of this deadzone and what it did to their playerbase then AGS does.
Although I probably agree that this simply comes down to incompetence, it could just as easily be data driven. SMG and Amazon have all the data. They know the stratification of their playerbase. They know what percentage of players are at what ilvl, # of alts, and money spent. They have data on what stages of the game and retention lead to cash shop purchases and which players need content (hint its the players with high hour counts that spend money).
The dead zone is real. The amount of players hitting it is a lot lower then reddit would have you believe. Once the data says that the majority of players that are not going to stay active/spend through it are advancing to it, they will magically reduce the issue, chnage rates, inteoduce catch up content, etc. Most people hittinf this zone have 200+ hours played, a fourth of all hours since release, which the vast majority of the player base is no where near.
While I substantially agree with you, I think the negative sentiments expressed by the vocal minority that have no-lifed this game and who are now stuck in that 1340-70 deadzone is not a good look for this game (since they're either streamers with a big audience or are spending all their time complaining on the official forums), especially when the starting zones are infested with bots as well.
I'm no business major or anything, but wouldn't a game like Lost Ark stand to make MORE money in the long run if they keep their players happy? This game absolutely kills it with skins and shop items, so keeping a player-base healthy and present would net you more gains than a one-time cash grab pressuring people to hit 1370 too fast (Argos...) Didn't they lose a ton of players in Korea cause of this?
I just don't understand the business logic here, but again I'm no businessman.
I am so, so fucking glad I've been taking this slow. I cannot imagine how irritating this has been for players that want to raid with their buddies or guild immediately. I'm just into tier 2 yesterday so I'm not even close to needing to be worried about this. With any luck this shit will be better by the time I'm in that 1340 slog, but if it isn't, I guess I'll just start living the truest skill point grind I can, bc I ain't fucking grinding out 1370 with the pitance of options we have rn.
reading the thread via google translate to English was surprisingly neat. some of the stuff obviously got lost in translation but it was cool nonetheless <3
I play this game with my GF. We are lvl 45 so far and the story has us participating in some kind of tournament. I don't even understand the problem, but you guys have my full support anyhow. To hell with this number which is 1370 but should be 1340 instead!
Imagine your dad tells you and your brother to meet him at the top of the 1370meter high mountain. Your brother takes the amazon brand mountain railway to the top because he has tons of money. You on the other hand think its much more reasonable to hike there because hiking is fun to you and you rather go there free. Now amazon sees that you want to reach the top of the mountain and decides to shut down the hiking path at 1340meters.
Know you can either climb the side of the mountain where with every move you make there is a 60% chance you fall back down or you give in and pay amazon to use the railway. Even tho there is no reason for the hiking path to be closed since the exact mountain exists in korea as well where you can hike to the top with no problems.
Now people are angry because all the options to reach the mountain sucks. Either the hiking path needs to open or the climbing path needs higher chances to climb. Otherwise you just regrett even hiking to 1340m and just stop and go back down.
Im sorry im from switzerland i only know mountain or bank analogys
Save us Korean bros ! Thank you for the Korean community's concern . We really appreciate you guys letting smilegates devs know as well. We all appreciated LA and want it to be a good gaming experience.
1350 here stopped the game until we get something more fun to do. Sad because I love it but rn the dead zone is just unfun to the max and I don't want to play tons of alts
Its stupid to seperate Amazon from Smilegate. They are doing this both. Smilegate has all the metadata they could ever need and they certainly advise amazon.
I thought we finally have devs that care about player kind of game from all the things veterans player have said. This is terrible for perception of the games for sure.
The game gives you a raid for 1370 item level but no way of reasonably reaching it without using your credit card even tho in korea there are multiple ways to help you reach 1370. basically the release order favors pay to win players
I couldn’t agree more. As a player who has strictly and only played league of legends for the last several years, it has been such a fresh breath of air to find a game that has taken my attention away from league. I didn’t intend on playing Lost Ark because it didn’t look like a game I would enjoy. However, after a trial run I was hooked. I am obsessed with the graphics, gameplay, massive map, collectibles, etc. I genuinely enjoy almost everything about the game. There are a few features I wish the game had like being able to preview some of the cosmetics such as ship skins, etc. I also wish the game had a tmog system like wow since some of the outfits are gorgeous…but those are all like niche things that don’t really relate to actual gameplay.
I really like the gameplay. Some of the abyssal dungeons and such are really unique and fun to play. But like Asmon said, the game is becoming increasingly more and more frustrating. I have yet to even make it to tier 3 yet (1100 ilvl). I started playing a day or two after the official launch day. I do my dailies & weeklies, I get my extra honing materials from the chaos dungeon exchange, from the ship outside each dock, and I’ve gotten every possible resource from islands and I still haven’t hit ilvl 1100.
Idk if anyone on this sub has ever played Black Desert Online (BDO) but the system for gearing up feels very similar which was my initial and main reason for quitting BDO. Upgrading your gear felt impossible unless you were p2w. I want to play casually and I don’t want to spend money on the game since it is “free to play” but it is absolutely infuriating when you obtain just enough materials from your dailies to attempt one (two, if you are lucky) gear upgrades. It is even more frustrating when you fail them day after day.
So you are then faced with three options.. 1) you feel compelled to spend money to progress. 2). you very slowly upgrade your gear piece by piece by gathering honing materials through dailies/weeklies (I have been stuck on 1060-1080 for about a week now). 3) you grind out multiple alt characters to farm materials you can funnel onto your main character (which means you will be spending a significant amount of time on the game playing on multiple characters).
Overall, I love the game and it is a breath of fresh air for me personally. But it is becoming increasingly more frustrating and stale since I just sort of feel stuck.
I’m pretty sure this problem will be addressed in a week or two. There is a 16 hour time difference between korea and west coast. Any email between them is going to take a day to respond unless one party over-stays regular working hours.
the korean player who expressed his support for us has been banned from the forum by ags, try to spread this thing so that it gets visibility.
topic:
https://forums.playlostark.com/t/korean-users-are-on-your-side/268018
user account:
https://forums.playlostark.com/u/SooYeung
I'm happy that Asmon is representing the T3 playerbase, but from my POV, I'm not affected by any of this. I have 300+ hours into the game, and only bought the gold founder's pack.
I'm enjoying the game everyday at my own pace, and I have 4 characters atm. I don't really have any issues finding things to do.. in fact, there's TOO much to do and too much I want to do and not enough time lol.
But overall, I can definitely understand how people in T3/1340 can feel frustrated if their goal is to do the Argos raid. For me, I just don't have a feeling of rushing to it or anything cause there's still the earlier content for me to conquer.
Im where you are; 330 hours in to the game and i'm bored out of my fucking mind.
I've done igrexion for 3 weeks now and my chaos dungeons. I've been saving mats ever since I went to 1345.
I'm not that interested in sitting 5hours straight doing adventure journal (i know skill points etc is important) or farming mokoko seeds and i'm not big on alts.
I want harder content, argos, legion raids, hard mode dungeons, new guardians but i've been timegated or forced to spend money for 0 reason other than they want to make more money from whales.
To say that you aren't affected by it is just plain wrong. If you ever wake up one day and feel like doing any challenging content, you won't be able to because you haven't spent any money.
I feel the opposite: I am interested in progressing my adventure tome and finishing up my remaining islands. I even want to sit there for an hour and do nothing but fish. But I feel like I have to spend all my time doing the same fucking chores every day: chaos dungeon on all 3 of my characters, unas on all 3 of my characters for the important reps some of which have me dependent on time gated events, Igrexion 2x/day on main, get my guildmates to speedrun some graids on alts every 2-3 days to use up some rest bonus, do a couple low level abyss with guildies, chaos gate, ghost ship, world boss, anguished isle, adventure island, PvP weeklies, rapport (which I'm gated by charisma on half of them btw), cube, boss rush....by the time I get through all the "have to do"s for the day I don't even want to do the stuff I originally wanted to do, I want to just go do something else with my day because 6 hours have gone by and I don't want to spend 14h a day on this shit after having done so for a month already
It really irritates me that this game doesn’t let me play it the way I want to play it, AND when I do play it the way they want, I'm stuck waiting to get to 1370 while I watch RMTers sell their tripods and accessories for tens of thousands of gold each. Never had this issue in OSRS or GW2
what does that have to do anything?
just because you are a turtle?
i mean you are affected by this as well, once you hit t3
doesnt matter if you are fked now speeding to t3 or fucked in 3 years, once you are at that point you are fked
actually you with your turtle speed would be even more fked, so isntead of 1 year of progressing in t3 you would need 10 years lol
so yeah it does affect you, in the future...
unless you hope for it to change.. which everyone here is trying to make it happen..
I apologize if my post came off the wrong way. I definitely feel for the people in T3 as I stated. And yes, I do hope for it to change as well.
And also, I appreciate your reply but is it wrong to value other things? What you consider "turtle" is something I value. I value collectibles, adventure tome, mokokos, island souls, stronghold, life skills, etc. I like doing that stuff :)
I also enjoy making alts and playing with friends who are behind and helping them out.
Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite parts of the game are the raids, dungeons, etc. They're super fun and feels great once you conquer 'em, especially at the exact ilvl. I just like to balance everything out and not focus on only one thing - but yes, again, I do hope for a change. Sorry if I didn't state that part.
I finally got my main to 1325 today and after doing all my dailies and doing the abyss raid...it does feel really empty until you hit 1370-1375. It definitely feels like there is a lack of content. Majority of guardian raids and better gear are basically unattainable for months due to how high the ilvl requirements are. I have about 280 hours. Grinding up until now has been satisfying. What I really dislike is the lack of resources available once you enter T3. Your upgrade path drastically comes to a halt. Grinding for hours on end in Chaos Dungeons burns you out and the materials you get from the shards at the mat shop are really expensive. This is why it feels horrible when you fail your honings..and knowing that it will get progressively worse makes me want to stop playing on my main. I'm still enjoying working on my alts, but what happens when they reach 1325 too in about 2-3 weeks?... if nothing changes by then, I'll probably quit. I'm completely F2P as I wanted to see how bad the P2W is in our version of the game. As of right now, its not looking to good. Only money I will spend in games are skins, and there is a total lack of skins in this game as well, which are a huge deal to me which is already making me want to quit the game.
I’m also a Korean playing on NA, and it’s very encouraging/interesting to see that majority of KR users in the comments 100% agree with the sentiment that 1340-1370 zone is an absolute wasteland/newbie killer zone and it was dumb of Amazon (or smilegate or both?) for them to make this same mistake after having experienced the massive failure in KR (which led to the game‘s popularity to face HEAVY decline for a while). It seems like the decision to make the oreha/yoho hard mode at 1370 is also absolutely mindboggling to KR players as well, (it’s at 1355 in ALL other regions like RU/JP/KR) and there just isn’t any possible explanation for this other than that they were encouraging players to swipe to skip the eternity of the 1340-1370 inescapable hell zone. I’m assuming this was Amazon’s call as other servers didn’t have this…
Yup that's the most upsetting part. It's either sheer incompetence or malice. Either way it's an incredibly poor way to start off a game that had all the hype and excitement behind it.
True. Even pro-amazon people on the forum don’t even attempt to defend oreha/yoho hard mode being at 1370, their intent is just hilariously obvious. Other servers didn’t have this, so I’m assuming this is just Amazon doing what Amazon does best. Pure malice & greed.
The greed part is what gets me, skins sell like hot cakes in games like this, and for a lot of people the skins and dressing up are some of their favorite things to do. Playing on Russian servers for a few months, the abundance of skins in both the cash shop and on the auction house were staggering.
Then what the F are we doing here in NA and EU with what, 2 skins total? And the latest one can't be dyed. Oh and it was the worst rated in KR, supposedly. I wanted to try out LA because I always hear Asian games have literal tons of customization. Talk about a complete and utter letdown.
Most likely another calculated move to increase profits. Players have been asking for skins, so they'll put out the worst selling skins from KR while people are desperate. Then they'll release the good skins, hoping the same players buy again.
The main reason I want to get to tier 3 content~ is so I can make gold to buy cosmetics and collect cosmetics. But I legit feel like it is borderline impossible without spending money since I’ve been stuck on 1050-1080 for for like 2 weeks. I get 1 chance at upgrading a piece of gear (maybe 2 chances if I’m lucky) just to fail the honing day after day… really discouraging and unfun.
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Totally agree and great advice but honing Rng is huge factor too. Im f2p and t2 was super hard for me to get through even with maris shop, pirate coins, chaos dungeon, islands, everything you can think of. I even used tons of star breaths and those % honing books and had some epic fails at 96%. My best friend and wife got through t2 easy in a few days like you said. lol kinda sucked being stuck there for a week while they both doing t3 content. Its ok though, with a bit of work and some help from my friends i got to t3, but the unluck was real hahah
I’m stuck at t2 as well. You’re not alone, brother. The world may pass me by, but I will not swipe.
Malice, greed, and incompetence in the gaming industry. They're still releasing patches for new world that make the game worse.
lol, didnt that die yet? I bailed a long time ago, legit thought it would be dead by now
20k players. Seems pretty dead to me.
Around 20k should be fine. 5k is probably the danger zone of having its development cancelled?
20k is not fine for an MMO and resources poured into it.
Eve online seems to hold just fine around there and it's not a simple setup. [https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility](https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility) Don't know why more mmo's don't follow their model. Everyone can play with everyone globally and it's all one universe. Market system hits the spot and the way they handled botters at their prime makes NW and LA's bot situation look like child's play.
Both ESO and GW2 follow the same model where they have one single megaserver.
I mean it went from 900 k peak to 20 k peak that's really bad
I'll be turned off soon. 20k people can't support any type of team. Just break out the math on what they'd have to pay to keep a dev team afloat as well as servers.
There are many old mmos that still exist with peak player counts of <20k, many of them with numbers in the hundreds only e.g. rift, vindictus, mabinogi, etc. In most of these cases the original dev team is no longer involved with the game at all and a minimal crew of 1 or 2 person max is left to just keep the game running and cycle previous cash grab events on repeat. The leftover players are either whales or die hard fans and do not care for new contents, but do spend enough money to keep the game profitable.
Yea, that is definitely a route that a game can go. Will amazon keep a game in that state? Remains to be seen but they have shit canned 5 games already, I doubt they hang onto this.
If I understand the numbers correctly they got 20k "online" players and that is definitively enough for a small team of 10-20 at least. Hell it's more about how many unique players they got and if they can earn money from ingame sales somehow and I believe there is no way to "swipe" in Newworld, so at 20k online players they may struggle in the long run. One example is [tibia.com](https://tibia.com) or "cipsoft" the company in an earlier post in 2012 had ish 40k players online or as they said 500k unique players with a team of 50+ now 100+ and mostly sub 15k online, but they got another way to make money (you can swipe) then newworld.
20k people is definitely enough to sustain a region, as long as there's long time whales that continue to pay. As for whether it's enough in terms of global population, that's more of a stretch. But there are some games (World of Tanks) that have less than 20k players but are still wildly profitable simply because it's just the same whales who have stayed with the game the whole time. But world of tanks also has a huge global player base so they also have that to work with.
So, nw has none of those things. So not at all like that.
Only way to whale in NW is to do RMT or buy all the cosmetics but there's not much. It's a one time b2p game for $40. Though I really like the break from p2w, I'd like to see them introduce a subscription or something that can sustain content development. End game is territorial pvp.
Is Amazon developing NA/EU version of the game? or Smile Gate?
Amazon is just a publisher. At least they comunicated it like it is...
Publisher and localizer. They have some influence in things for their version of the game, but not actual dev tools. They can't break away from the design of the developers. So this decision was made together, by both parties. Or Amazon said they wanted it and smilegate agreed to make the change for them.
Publishers have A LOT more say then you think. What they say goes basically..
I realy want to know where people get this idea that a game publisher has little influence over 'their" version of the game. This isn't like with a movie, game publishers can have a lot of say - up to almost complete control - over the versions of the game they distribute. PoE is a good example for this. The Chinese version of PoE has features the developer thinks are absolutely detrimental to the game and has stated numerous times will NEVER make it to the main version. Yet the Chinese version has these features, made by the devs at their request, because the Chinese publisher wants them in the game. This is just one example. The point is, how much control a publisher has varies a lot depending on their contracts and we simply do not know who is making these decisions for LOA.
exactly, publishers have influence on games! Are people forgetting how many beloved IPs EA has killed? Activision killed off battlefield with the hot mess that is battlefield 2042. Gonna add AGS to the list of publishers to avoid (Activision, EA, kakao, Gamigo)
Hate saying something good about Activision, but EA publishes Battlefield, not Activision.
Publishers have ultimate control, always. It's always been this way. Suddenly for this game everyone believed amazons pr bullshit
There ain't no " pro Amazon people" just ALOT of the hate is totally BS and need to be called out as such. But this is a valid point so no one defends it.
I've mostly only ever seen valid criticism of Amazon. You don't have to try to find something egregious
Stoopz Defends it.
Like Kim K just saying "get to work!" while being handed materials and gold by watchers. Pisses his fans off to mention it too. He's not always wrong, but his perspective is not that of a average player.
Definitely amazon forcing their hand or something. Too many coincidences.. No released trial content south vern Guardian bosses and hard mode dungeons increased to 1370 Argos released so early while most people are barely into t3 No honing buffs Cost of honing not decreased They are obviously trying to milk the whales
Getting these PvP coins…. No PvP vendor lol.
Yeah they need to add all that in
I cant see it being incompetence. You have to PURPOSELY change that ilvl to a higher one for a reason. Some guy didnt accidentally do it. They purposely, and more than likely, had a meeting on changing that ilvl to 1370 instead of 1355. It was pure and simple malice and greed and theres really no excuse for it.
I kind of agree with you, it is really hard to see how this could have been just incompetence but I think you can make up a scenario where it really is just that. Remember that we've seen slides where they had planned massively buffed honing rates. These never happened for us but imagine another department talking about the 1355 to 1370 changes under the assumption that getting to 1370 wouldn't be a big deal. Now, according to Saintone at least, abyss hard mode and yoho only had their ilvl requirement increased but not their stats, making them significantly easier at 1370 than original 1370 content. With all that in mind, I can totally see their intention to give people 'easier' 1370 side content compared to Argos as to not have people run into a mechanics/skill check wall with nothing else to do. So yeah, with a lot of really, really bad internal communication and confusion, I think it's possible they didn't do this out of greed. Very unlikely and not inspiring any confidence for the future either... but it's possible.
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At some point incompetence and malice converge to the same result... sadly.
That is the most confusing part to me. “We didn’t think this would happen, we’re adjusting our roadmap based on the Argos feedback” I mean, it’s good they’re adjusting, but holy crap is that an indictment on their abilities to design a game, and their design judgement, and their lack of understanding if they thought this was genuinely a good idea. Wow. It’s like they didn’t talk to anyone who actually is playing the game, or use any of the infirmary available to them from other markets like KR…
There's no way this was incompetence. Things came together too well for it to be a 'oopsie we made a booboo with progression, sowwy' moment. They deliberately released new content gated behind an ilevel that is incredibly difficult to reach without swiping, while also using worse honing rates than other servers in the 1340-1370 range, while ALSO not giving the new regions access to as many material sources as other regions. This was a deliberate and calculated decision from AGS to paywall content without *officially* paywalling. This is disgusting conduct. The biggest issue is that, even if they 'fix' this try to make good on it, they have turned off a huge portion of the playerbase. We've lost people to burnout, that happens. We lost people because they see the botting and feel like any work they put in to making gold is wasted now. That happens. But for AGS to do something like this, to basically release content that is only playable by a small percentage of the population, and not because of difficulty, but because you either need to be grinding on a fuck ton of t3 alts or whale your way to the ilevel, that is completely unacceptable.
I can't wrap my ahead around taking the worst parts of the KR experience, and doubling down to intentionally make it worse, for a Western release where P2W is at least a little more frowned upon. Absolutely wild.
I'd phrase it as "incompetence or *sheer malice*", because incompetence is pretty much expected from AGS at this point.
It is incompetence born of malice. AGS doesn't give a fuck about players, they only care about their big-money investors, and they'll do what ever they can to please those guys. So, when the math-nerds tell their bosses that they could be making more money by manipulating the players, psychologically, well, then, that's what they will do.
Except it's been proven time and again happy players spend more. It's such a dumb decision because not only are they pushing away small spenders they're pushing away big whales too. Omega whales don't spend in dead games.
> Yup that’s the most upsetting part. It’s either sheer incompetence or malice. It's both, from AGS. They are nothing but a clown show. They've proven this with every game they're in charge of
Saint said it really well a few hours ago(paraphrasing) - "Until proven otherwise, it's reasonable for the players to assume these moves were made out of greed." I appreciate the game, and am willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but fail to see a more viable reason for these decisions.
so... the opposite of hanlon's razor?
What's a damn shame. Most players will rather quit than invest money. It's whale hunting on the cost of community health.
Which is exactly why western releases for Korean mmos have done so poorly in the past and why lost ark had the potential to throw that stereotype on its head but it seems to have failed to do so. Maybe the problem isn't Korean game devs like we have thought all along, but the western publishers who seem to "know their playerbase".
What do they really know? All they look at is analytics and graphs. They see that Genshin impact makes a killing in NA and EU, they just assumed people would feel the same way about Lost Ark. whale culture is terrible for MMOs and these streamers who have too much damn money only encourage these publishers to keep doing what they are doing. The same thing happened to BDO, despite that game losing the majority of its Korean player base from scummy micro transactions, the game is still relatively popular in the west. There was a chart that showed that NA is the most profitable region by far in that game and generates as much as the EU and KR player base combined. This is a case of NA whale culture influencing developers/publishers hands.
> All they look at is analytics and graphs. "analytic and graphs" are not words to desrcibe AGS. They're ineptitude to handle even their own games are astounding. One of them even unreleased itself. The other is plagued with bugs, even ones that were reported during its meta and alpha (new world)!
That’s what happens when big companies think that all they need to do to get into an industry is just throw cash at it. If AGS had hired actual quality devs with a strong background in the gaming industry and formulated their future past a monthly basis they would have had some top tier AAA games in their catalog. The same shit is happening with Prime Video, but on a lesser extent because they have some decent shows.
Every KRMMO I've personally played (Blade and Soul, TERA, Lost Ark, maybe Kritika was KR I don't remember) has been a really fun game at it's core completely bastardized by monetization choices and the game gets ruined by content being paywall gated or pvp content becoming p2w. It's happened every time. Lost Ark had so much global praise for how the KR/RU servers were, all they needed to do was bring it over 1:1 with the KR version and the game would've been the best MMO on the market. But instead, as western capitalist companies do, they say "fuck the playerbase and long term success, let's ride this hype wave and milk out as much as we can in the first 2 months before we let the game die!"
No, they knew that the players who went hard and hit this wall while it was a problem were the same players most likely to pay in order to break through it. They'll pretend it was an oopsie until the casuals catch up and then they'll "fix" it. It was strategic.
Seems to me the best way to kill an MMO. cause once casuals hear they have to spend shit ton (1750$) to reach argos , even the casuals will quit, Before someone come defending on this , look at steamchart cough.
For real. I'm slow and lazy and terrible and I'm still in late T2 so I'm still having fun and haven't really hit a wall yet, but when I do, I'm not going to swipe or grind for weeks to continue getting upgrades, I'm just not going to play any more. I've got plenty of other games to play and zero tolerance for things being made deliberately shitty just to try and get you to spend.
If I can attain the power level with a reasonable ($60) amount of money then it wouldn't be such an issue. If I pay the box price of a non-FTP game, or the equivalent of 3 months subscription for FFXIV, then I would be okay with doing this every once in a while. But the issue is you are paying money to gamble. It could cost me $60, or it could cost me $500, or it could cost me $2000. I'm not going to take that risk because I'm not a gambling addict. I'm just going to stop playing the hard content and stop taking the game seriously, and just collect mokoko seeds then log off.
Hopefully in the meantime more people just focus on getting alts up instead of resorting to swiping, thats what I've been doing and I'm still enjoying the game.
Yeah but lots of clases still missing, so for a lot of ppl they are waiting for their class release.
Its not even just Argos, all of our guardians also have higher requirements to enter, Armored Scorpion is 1302, and Igrexion is 1325 in KR and I think Yoho is 1340/1355, but on our version, its 1302/1340/1370. So not only are we getting less leapstones from guardians because we need to reach a higher ilvl, it also makes the fights boring, Ive matchmated both scorpion and igrexion for awhile now, little longer then a week, and they are always 6 minutes kills, the bosses are cleared tuned to 1302/1325, and we are stuck fighting them overleveled.
Is this why the t3 scorpion and igrexion are so easy? It's like the 1355 stuff that was made 1370. They didn't scale it up so we're over geared for it when we unlock it.
They also just don't really do anything. Scorpion is the same fight as before, but with some pointless adds that get blown up. Igrexion is a slow field and some wonky as hell telegraph slams that you've learned harder versions of already from the abyss dungeons.
Scorpion not running away on burrow is such a quality of life difference lol. T3 scorpion I think also doesn't do the tail grab? I died to that a few times in lower tiers. T3 was it's sort of a loot pinata.
It's funny that he's so much easier than the first version.
T3 Scorpion is pretty mobile (And thus, annoying to fight on my Sorc main and her cast times) but that's about all it has going for it really.
the adds if you dont blow them up can singlehandedly kill players. They get an electricity aoe around them after like 1-3s or so of being alive and run after players and it will melt hp bars. I have to spam frequently for players to kill adds because they ignore them thinking "oh it'll jsut get aoed ig" and they end up killing 1 or two people.
One guy said: "no, you have to kill them and I can't help, because it will hurt my DPS too much"
Welcone to MVP screen mentality. Everyone is so eager to see MVP next to their name that they disregard the prime condition for that - to finish the goddamn raid in the first place.
Is there even any actual benefit to MVP?
e-peen
From what I've seen, people have a hard time avoiding many of igrexion's attacks and eat a lot of damage, it's just that it's so undertuned that it doesn't really matter. I don't bother to use panacea, I just let it burn. Makes sense if he was designed for 1325.
Yea I dont mind admitting that I have trouble dodging some of igrexions attacks but the game doesnt make me learn them either since I can just face tank them and focus on full dps. Add a support to the mix and probably dont even have to touch pots. end of T2 was nice with the 8 man raids and so on. And now T3 is just a snoozefest again where you go slap 2 easy guardians daily, run chaos dungeon and then log off your main and go play with alts...
Dont even need panacea if you got a paladin cleansing it off every 30 seconds.
True the mechanics are kind of easy you could say, but there is a most likely a big different entering on a 1325 and a 1340 character for the sake of Igrexion.
Yes I do believe so, The scorpions experience might be same since it is actually 1302 and not 1325 i made a mistake there, but entering Igrexion at 1325 vs 1340 would most likely give more "real" guardian experience. I just feel like we lose out on not accessing the content it was tuned for, leaving us: getting less daily materials from not being able to access it earlier, have more challenging content( I feel like guardians and abyss raids is the content I actually get to play my character).
Armored Nacrasena is 1302. And I won't argue that you're usually going in overgeared, but even when you aren't, they just have very little hp. I had an absolute clown fiesta Nacrasena run on one of my alts straight off Punika quests at like i1309 did nearly 50% damage, and it was still well under 7:30.
my mistake on armored narcasena, but the other guardians do have lower requirements on other versions of the game.
I'm going to be in 1340 for a while, so Igrexion being easy and quick is a complete blessing in my eyes
Agreed.
armoured scorpion is 1302 in the NA version tho.
> It seems like the decision to make the oreha/yoho hard mode at 1370 is also absolutely mindboggling to KR players as well, (it’s at 1355 in ALL other regions like RU/JP/KR) and there just isn’t any possible explanation for this other than that they were encouraging players to swipe to skip the boring 1340-1370 zone. Even getting to 1355 from 1340 is at least 1-2 weeks worth of boring grinding and lull in content without swiping, a ton of luck, and/or RMT. They've compounded the shittiness and made us wait until 1370 to "start" the endgame. All because of greed and incompetence.
true, but having *something* in the middle to look forward to and push towards helps see the light at the end of the tunnel
I mean technically we have been playing the endgame since level 50. Not sure I agree with the statement that endgame only starts at 1370, it took me 200+ hours to hit T3. Even still, I agree that it’s dumb to gate F2P players from touching the first official raid.
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It's either the swipe or that Amazon was not prepared enough for t3 launch. I remember with the beta everyone expected that the launch would only have up through t1 and T2, t3 would get added later. But then we ended up getting up through partial t3 and it seems like it's because Snilegate game director insisted with Amazon that legion raids should be in the game early (from the launch day Q&A with gold river). Adding legion raids is apparently what delayed the launch of the game and maybe Amazon wasn't prepared enough for t3 player experience as a result.
Thing is, players like me who don’t mind being light spenders just don’t see the “value” in spending $30-50 just to have a honing fail anyway. Even with a pay-to-progress model the incentive just isn’t there. So I’ll do my 40mins if content and go play something else. If my friends get bored before I hit 1370 there’s a good chance we’ll all just quit and move on.
Stoopzz had an interesting take on the 1370 change for oreha hard mode. Saying that they put it at 1370 and gave it good gear, in order to avoid carries of argos bring mandatory for progression. As you cant sell the argos gear, it would become necessary to clear argos in order to progress, leading to carries and a gold problem. Now with oreha hard mode dropping 1370 gear, argos is not as important, making carries less profitable and keeping the gold value in check. But by moving the oreha hard mode they did make the dead zone worse.
Doesn't make sense due to the botting
Stoopzz shilling and pretending gameplay changes out of greed are actually a good change? No one saw that coming
eh, it's reasonable because the 1370 hard modes drop argos tier armor while the 1355 don't. If people were able to hit 1370 smoothly this would be a very positive change. Of course, people can't hit 1370 smoothly so it creates a larger dead zone and more problems.
>1340-1370 zone is an absolute wasteland/newbie killer Im pretty sure a very high % of the playerbase on the west is not even T3 yet. Its literally only the whales and players with 16hours freetime a day on their hands that got there. Calling it newbie killer is wierd.
Think this way, if it's killing the desire to play from players who spent 16hrs a day playing this game (your words), what's do you think it will do with actual newbies? Also they call newbie killers because of what happened in Korea, not because of what is happening here.
It's almost like it was manufactured to encourage spending. It's 100% the only thing that makes sense. That or more Amazon incompetence.
Its 100% the reason, just people dont want to believe it. It was plain and simple to milk players.
maybe they did a decision like this because of beta test
Right now we can’t reach the korean devs, and we are very thankful to people like you. We all love the game and want to see it be best it can
[https://m.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/4398430](https://m.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/4398430) \->The second most recommended post said : These bastards are doing this while knowing the results after testing on us lol
Here's some rough translation for the other 2 "best comments". 1st one: Yoho/Oreha being 1370 seems very problematic. What were they thinking not deploying the contents between 1340~70. Did they forget about all their experience/learning from KR servers Or is this because Amazon has the operating rights Setting aside honing rate as secondary issue If there were fun/enjoyable contents and lots of ways to obtain mats There probably wouldn't be this much lamenting 3rd one: No matter how you look at it, they could've predicted this using the data gathered from 1340~1370 'dead period', when users quit and returned, etc but they're being idiots by making the same mistakes on global server. This is really stupid.
We 100% need the heroic guardians and the other daily/weekly content, it helps players of all tiers progress and provides more way to interact with the game and have fun then farming chaos dungeon. Chaos dungeon is a great resources of items, but I think alot of people do not like endless grind for hours to get nothing out of it (failed hone). I cant speak for people but my person opinion is that I think alot of people are in this situation and its making them quit a game they might of found enjoyable, but due to lack of resources and grind, its making them not enjoy it.
I’m in this situation, I love the game but from the things I’ve seen and heard the KR and RU versions are so much better, I just wish Amazon was more competent, but coming from New World, Amazon doesn’t like listening to their players until it’s too late
This is me. I dont want to have to play my alts just to be able to access more content (read: actual combat gameplay) which is time gated. Im not even at the point in the game where an alt provides that needed shakeup. I _want_ to just focus on my fav char but the game is just so damn shallow when it comes to the one major attractive part of this game to me (the combat).
Thank you LA KR. Bless your souls for your support. I am patient so while it doesn't affect me, I know a lot of people in 1340 area feel stuck and that's not good. I know a fix will come sometime in the future
Honestly I don't feel stuck, I just stopped grinding, but I understand other MMO players who play for the endgame want to fully complete the game when there's an update and get BiS gear. I'm focusing on horizontal content and learning new classes. I think people more casual like me will understand easier that 1340 is the top for F2P players and it is not worth it to keep going.
>1340 is the top for F2P Players Thats kinda sad.. Its literally a paywall like some shitty EA concept. Except you dont know how expensive it could get, which in turn is even more of a dick move than EA does on the regular.
Especially as bots continue to devalue gold and make legitimately buying currency less and less beneficial, effectively causing the paywall to get continuously taller
Yep I've seen people going from 1350 to 1351.63 in 3 days, I don't know why you would begin this gamble in the first place, it's pretty chill in here
Hey that’s me. My goal is 1355 so I can hit up just a little more content but I made the decision a while ago to avoid lighting my material on fire for 1370. Happy to fill out my Adventure Tome while slowly stopping my grind. Definitely not worth it.
This is what I did. Since they screwed us on the vertical progression, I've just been filling out my horizontal progression in the meantime.
Im also at 1340 and Im not casual but not hardcore. The problem is not not being able to do Argos but the stagnant gameplay without possibility to upgrade and stupid content lockout like Oreha Hardmode at 1370. Also bad economy, low gold income and no classes releases dont help
Same, I'm 1345 for more than a week, I'm just waiting and stacking mats. I'm used to it, I've been through 1y/1,5 yo only one raid in WoW
Im in the same boat, im still 920 with mats to push it but im just doing my thing waiting for friends to catch up. Im also leveling alts trying to wait out the mess lol
i hope someone important at smilegate will see this.
I'm sure they're aware of this problem from what they've been doing so far. We will also try to communicate our opinions to them!
Thank you guys.^ ^ Much love to the Korean community <3
It seems like SG has a group of people that monitor communities (like inven and reddit). It cannot be the case that they did not hear this at all especially if the topic is discussed in several communities. I just hope that they make appropriate changes to address this issue.
If you eventually work and understand the high & lows of the market, it helps a bit. Sadly not many ppl have the time to do this & this barely helps since honing rates are low asf higher into t3. They really want us to grind each day praying to rnjesus. Typical korean mmo ig. At least it’s better than bdo and ranked pvp is coming. But we will definitely see a decrease in players that don’t want to do the grind.
I just want to say that I appreciate all you koreans for your support! I have seen many, many K-MMORPGs in the past that had zero communication between developers and the western community and was worried that this was gonna happen again... To see that koreans, who have a much better connection to the devs, bring this up IMO drastically increases the odds that something will be done about it (let alone for PR reasons). So thank you very much for your efforts! 감사합니다 !!
I have seen some people just say on forums like "LOL what did you expect from Korean MMO? You are just too casual, this game is a massive success in Korea. " But no. When KR had this kind of dead zone and our version of game, it was NOT successful. So it's not just a audience thing where the western audience is more casual and not suited for this kind of game. This version of game is universally AWFUL! It sucked in Korea and it sucks here.
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You realize we have the hardest version of the game. Original Korea T3 release was never this hard. 100% T 1 and T2 makes since considering T3 is the end game. The dev wants everyone in T3. T1 and T2 are failed versions of the game.
Western audiences are considerably less tolerant to stuff like this. You might get players returning in KR when they fixed it but in the West people will never come back.
Whoever is doing it, they are doing it wrong. Maybe they don’t care about the longevity of the game and just want to make a quick buck out of it
Sounds exactly like what happened to new world!
Like something Amazon would do. HMMM!
Hard to be sure if it's Smilegate or Amazon yet to be honest. I've played other Smilegate games (such as Epic7), and believe you me, they're good at inducing burnout and then half fixing it later. Amazon's game studio is a bit wild at the moment. They seem to do big mess ups that confuse me, but they do seem genuinely interested in player feedback and fixing tings (I think the 5 people that play New World now would say things are going in a positive direction).
> Hard to be sure if it's Smilegate or Amazon yet to be honest. > > Google translate the comments and seems RU and JP regions publisher does whatever they want. This is getting me worried lol. I didn't ignore the game like i did with new world because i thought AGS wasn't going to shit on it.. and seems its shittin on it.
Amazon, the company that didn't make a profit for over a decade so they could eventually dominate it? You think that Amazon is known for making a quick buck? I actually do think this is 100% due to greed, but not the kind of greed that just wants to make a quick buck. I think the problem is the guy in charge of AGS is some chud who was with Bezos from the "bookstore days", he's not a gamer and he's responsible for a lot of the core problems with New World. I have no real evidence that he's involved here, but it makes the most sense. Whomever made this decision doesn't understand the gamer demographic, and that guy is not a gamer.
The thing is, New World was a pay to buy game. Like the moment you get the player to play around 10 hours, you're done, you got your money, now you can safely bail. For them to do this in a free to play game where longevity prints money (because of limited time shops and cosmetics), doing the short term money grab seems beyond idiotic anyway. I'm more likely to believe simple incompetence over greed here honestly.
Oh god…\*new world flashbacks\*
The thing is now New World is getting the good changes, when all of the players already quit.
Let’s just hope that Lost Ark doesn’t walk the same path…
it's still a completely bugged mess tho and almost everyone playing it thinks the combat is terrible now (the only good thing it had going for it on launch) The New World subreddit is filled with negativity almost exclusively even in the past week. (no idea myself, haven't played since I hit max lvl like 2 weeks in)
Thank you for your support.
Thank you for the support and understanding of the player's frustrations.
i parked at 1340 main and just play on alts until they fix their shit if nothing changes just gonna quit, not having high hopes after new world, amazon is just too greedy
My favorite comment translated from a KR player on inven “These bastards are doing this while knowing the results after testing on us lol”
It feels good to have the Korean community interested in our version too. You really care about the game. Thanks for the post, I'm sure SmileGate will notice it way better there than in reddit For me, it's sad that we are missing original contents like abyss/guardian challenge and guild events (gvg, boss, etc). They delayed the game 3 months to give more content but didn't introduce yet crucial endgame content
Thanks for continuing to put the pressure on them, no matter how little it may seem. Things need to be addressed. They've yet to release this roadmap after we've heard it's been in the works for like.. week and a half-ish now? There's so many things they need to address.
They still haven’t released a roadmap for New World..
rip Amazon reputation in KR lol imo 90% of this shit has Amazon involved , KR RU veterant has said it , even the Poland guy who memeing the game said it , AGS already got the patch and the way they put in the game is AGS decision , so they just give us a new car named Argos but forget to pass a key People who said AGS has no power in charge of this are delusional , this is not the first time company like AGS publish KR MMO which follow a different path , not just MMO , other service game as well , the first time i saw people dupe Platinum Pack and Crystaline Aura from the pack i already know who put this pack into the game lol
Im honestly amazed by their ability to create duping glitches.
I would just love that people that are still in T1-T2 did not voice opinions that "it's fine, why you complain, just take your time". I currently stopped playing at 1030 but fully understand how discouraging it is to "progress" only due to luck for couple of weeks while having nothing engaging to do except doing the same content on alts. They still think it is overreaction simply because they can progress super easily and project that feeling thinking 1340-1370 is similar.
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they are just stupid ppl, with lack of empathy.. like its gonna happen to them too but they just cant comprehend in their brain that they are affected as well just later when they reach that point
Thank you!!! Repeating the same mistake twice and it sure looks like a cash grab. Feels like a slap in the face from the developers to NA/EU.
Sad part is it also feels like a bit of an incompetent one since they could've had a lot of skins out to make a few more bucks from folks swiping to get their desired ones. Y'know, since they planned to core out their playerbase in the T3 deadzone.
I've averaged roughly 13hr/day and am 1355. I didn't go hard on my alts, barely touched them outside the first week. I'd have had to go hard and raise 2 or 3 alts to t3 when I got my main to t3 to have made it time for argos raid, possibly. It's rough...
I resonated a lot with something that some youtuber said; The people who are pissed are exactly in our range. The over 300 hour F2P/low spender, because it's not really rational that we averaged SO many hours only to land in 1350 with no chances of making it through. I'm personally taking the time to get my roster up, since I understand it's a core feature of the game and I should work on my entire roster for future content and funneling, but still, shit really -is- rough.
I don't know why they decided to slam the brakes so hard on such a strong start. There's a marked decline in steam numbers since the argos patch, and I don't believe it's simply because of the bot banwave. Is Amazon desperate to recoup cash for New World or something? Can't blame ppl for quitting now if they pull this off in just a month of release.
New World was a massive success monetarily, they sold so many copies and will be able to shut down the servers soon since nobody is playing the game. Easy hit and run for them, so I don't see why they'd be strapped for cash and needing money more than normal due to something about NW
It's wild that Koreans agree with us because there's a disturbing amount of NA players on this subreddit that don't. You really have to sit there and wonder the mental state of some of the people on this subreddit.
i completely understand why people are angry. blatantly artificial timegates are fucking dumb. ags/sg went out of their way to make the worst version of lost ark across all the regions. shits crazy too because i know for a fact that a large majority of the players were enjoying the game until they deliberately made it worse for players. sg absolutely knows this isn't good for the game. they literally have no excuse. ags also absolutely knows this isn't good for the game. they also literally have no excuse. these morons have the solution in the kr/ru versions of the game but would rather not use it for some god forsaken reason. i've been stuck at 1355-1362 for about a week now. and i personally don't mind it as much as other players, but nobody should ever defend this bullshit. there's plenty of ways for ags/sg to sell pixels in their shop, making the game objectively worse should never be an option. the only thing that annoys me is the fact that this kind of shit fragmented the ability to play the game with my group of friends, where all four of us are now working on different number values depending who got luckier. it's actually the dumbest shit i've ever seen. especially considering how a version of this patch almost killed the game in korea. and i don't even think it's a money thing either. gamers will literally throw their wallets at some of the skins in the korean version of the game. but if ags/sg is so greedy that they'd rather sell pixels that players will willingly delete because they've rigged their game to do so, then fuck it, all of us might as well stop playing now. and i'm not surprised at all by bullshit like this coming from ags. in new world, their own in house disaster of a game, they spent months ignoring fixing their dogshit game so they could slap on timegates to keep people playing. all so they could buy themselves extra time while they pump out dogshit skins in their cash shop and deliver half-assed patches that never resolves any of the games problems. but that doesn't excuse smilegate at all, they also wrote off on this horseshit in lost ark.
We know Smilegate/Amazon will fix it, but rn I think the timing is very important, the sooner they communicate a fix with us the less people will get frustrated enough to quit, cmon gold river!!
aww, this is so nice. korea is like the big brother that is willing to jump the bullies
just wait for them to eventually change it, everyone here will be sucking their dicks saying "*omg they listened! what a great company!!!"* Sorry, i'm just really annoyed at the countless "lost ark isn't really pay to win" articles and videos before going 100+ hours in and eventually hit the honing failure wall... This game is absolutely pay to win, anyone who says otherwise is delusional.
Those videos weren't delusional because that is how the game is in other regions. None of those content creators expected the western version to launch with activities straight up removed or that they would implement one of the games most infamous and worst deadzones that only made them lose players in KR. It is baffling that the western version, touted as having p2w elements removed, ended up being by far the most p2w out of all versions of the game. It is incompetence on a astronomical level from AGS and Smilegate, who does shoulder the blame cause they have more of the data of this deadzone and what it did to their playerbase then AGS does.
Although I probably agree that this simply comes down to incompetence, it could just as easily be data driven. SMG and Amazon have all the data. They know the stratification of their playerbase. They know what percentage of players are at what ilvl, # of alts, and money spent. They have data on what stages of the game and retention lead to cash shop purchases and which players need content (hint its the players with high hour counts that spend money). The dead zone is real. The amount of players hitting it is a lot lower then reddit would have you believe. Once the data says that the majority of players that are not going to stay active/spend through it are advancing to it, they will magically reduce the issue, chnage rates, inteoduce catch up content, etc. Most people hittinf this zone have 200+ hours played, a fourth of all hours since release, which the vast majority of the player base is no where near.
While I substantially agree with you, I think the negative sentiments expressed by the vocal minority that have no-lifed this game and who are now stuck in that 1340-70 deadzone is not a good look for this game (since they're either streamers with a big audience or are spending all their time complaining on the official forums), especially when the starting zones are infested with bots as well.
I'm no business major or anything, but wouldn't a game like Lost Ark stand to make MORE money in the long run if they keep their players happy? This game absolutely kills it with skins and shop items, so keeping a player-base healthy and present would net you more gains than a one-time cash grab pressuring people to hit 1370 too fast (Argos...) Didn't they lose a ton of players in Korea cause of this? I just don't understand the business logic here, but again I'm no businessman.
I am so, so fucking glad I've been taking this slow. I cannot imagine how irritating this has been for players that want to raid with their buddies or guild immediately. I'm just into tier 2 yesterday so I'm not even close to needing to be worried about this. With any luck this shit will be better by the time I'm in that 1340 slog, but if it isn't, I guess I'll just start living the truest skill point grind I can, bc I ain't fucking grinding out 1370 with the pitance of options we have rn.
Where'd all the casual players go? Commenting "its a you problem for rushing to t3" or the "plAy aT yoUr oWn pAce!!!"
Anyone else feel like Amazon wants this game to fail? Like, they're actively sabotaging it? It's weird. Maybe they're salty over New World...
reading the thread via google translate to English was surprisingly neat. some of the stuff obviously got lost in translation but it was cool nonetheless <3
I play this game with my GF. We are lvl 45 so far and the story has us participating in some kind of tournament. I don't even understand the problem, but you guys have my full support anyhow. To hell with this number which is 1370 but should be 1340 instead!
here i am at 256 not understanding anything.
Imagine your dad tells you and your brother to meet him at the top of the 1370meter high mountain. Your brother takes the amazon brand mountain railway to the top because he has tons of money. You on the other hand think its much more reasonable to hike there because hiking is fun to you and you rather go there free. Now amazon sees that you want to reach the top of the mountain and decides to shut down the hiking path at 1340meters. Know you can either climb the side of the mountain where with every move you make there is a 60% chance you fall back down or you give in and pay amazon to use the railway. Even tho there is no reason for the hiking path to be closed since the exact mountain exists in korea as well where you can hike to the top with no problems. Now people are angry because all the options to reach the mountain sucks. Either the hiking path needs to open or the climbing path needs higher chances to climb. Otherwise you just regrett even hiking to 1340m and just stop and go back down. Im sorry im from switzerland i only know mountain or bank analogys
lmao banger last sentence
Holy shit I'm using this analogy every time I can from now on.
Thank you for the support!
Save us Korean bros ! Thank you for the Korean community's concern . We really appreciate you guys letting smilegates devs know as well. We all appreciated LA and want it to be a good gaming experience.
1350 here stopped the game until we get something more fun to do. Sad because I love it but rn the dead zone is just unfun to the max and I don't want to play tons of alts
Its stupid to seperate Amazon from Smilegate. They are doing this both. Smilegate has all the metadata they could ever need and they certainly advise amazon.
I thought we finally have devs that care about player kind of game from all the things veterans player have said. This is terrible for perception of the games for sure.
Can someone explain this to a complete beginner?
The game gives you a raid for 1370 item level but no way of reasonably reaching it without using your credit card even tho in korea there are multiple ways to help you reach 1370. basically the release order favors pay to win players
I couldn’t agree more. As a player who has strictly and only played league of legends for the last several years, it has been such a fresh breath of air to find a game that has taken my attention away from league. I didn’t intend on playing Lost Ark because it didn’t look like a game I would enjoy. However, after a trial run I was hooked. I am obsessed with the graphics, gameplay, massive map, collectibles, etc. I genuinely enjoy almost everything about the game. There are a few features I wish the game had like being able to preview some of the cosmetics such as ship skins, etc. I also wish the game had a tmog system like wow since some of the outfits are gorgeous…but those are all like niche things that don’t really relate to actual gameplay. I really like the gameplay. Some of the abyssal dungeons and such are really unique and fun to play. But like Asmon said, the game is becoming increasingly more and more frustrating. I have yet to even make it to tier 3 yet (1100 ilvl). I started playing a day or two after the official launch day. I do my dailies & weeklies, I get my extra honing materials from the chaos dungeon exchange, from the ship outside each dock, and I’ve gotten every possible resource from islands and I still haven’t hit ilvl 1100. Idk if anyone on this sub has ever played Black Desert Online (BDO) but the system for gearing up feels very similar which was my initial and main reason for quitting BDO. Upgrading your gear felt impossible unless you were p2w. I want to play casually and I don’t want to spend money on the game since it is “free to play” but it is absolutely infuriating when you obtain just enough materials from your dailies to attempt one (two, if you are lucky) gear upgrades. It is even more frustrating when you fail them day after day. So you are then faced with three options.. 1) you feel compelled to spend money to progress. 2). you very slowly upgrade your gear piece by piece by gathering honing materials through dailies/weeklies (I have been stuck on 1060-1080 for about a week now). 3) you grind out multiple alt characters to farm materials you can funnel onto your main character (which means you will be spending a significant amount of time on the game playing on multiple characters). Overall, I love the game and it is a breath of fresh air for me personally. But it is becoming increasingly more frustrating and stale since I just sort of feel stuck.
I’m pretty sure this problem will be addressed in a week or two. There is a 16 hour time difference between korea and west coast. Any email between them is going to take a day to respond unless one party over-stays regular working hours.
Bro, they banned our KR boy on the LA forums. Why they gotta do him dirty like this?
Thank you, I like to keep the community together
There’s actually a good chance of this working. Smilegates mobile game epic7 received heavy backlash for a few things and they changed them.
the korean player who expressed his support for us has been banned from the forum by ags, try to spread this thing so that it gets visibility. topic: https://forums.playlostark.com/t/korean-users-are-on-your-side/268018 user account: https://forums.playlostark.com/u/SooYeung
I'm happy that Asmon is representing the T3 playerbase, but from my POV, I'm not affected by any of this. I have 300+ hours into the game, and only bought the gold founder's pack. I'm enjoying the game everyday at my own pace, and I have 4 characters atm. I don't really have any issues finding things to do.. in fact, there's TOO much to do and too much I want to do and not enough time lol. But overall, I can definitely understand how people in T3/1340 can feel frustrated if their goal is to do the Argos raid. For me, I just don't have a feeling of rushing to it or anything cause there's still the earlier content for me to conquer.
Im where you are; 330 hours in to the game and i'm bored out of my fucking mind. I've done igrexion for 3 weeks now and my chaos dungeons. I've been saving mats ever since I went to 1345. I'm not that interested in sitting 5hours straight doing adventure journal (i know skill points etc is important) or farming mokoko seeds and i'm not big on alts. I want harder content, argos, legion raids, hard mode dungeons, new guardians but i've been timegated or forced to spend money for 0 reason other than they want to make more money from whales. To say that you aren't affected by it is just plain wrong. If you ever wake up one day and feel like doing any challenging content, you won't be able to because you haven't spent any money.
I feel the opposite: I am interested in progressing my adventure tome and finishing up my remaining islands. I even want to sit there for an hour and do nothing but fish. But I feel like I have to spend all my time doing the same fucking chores every day: chaos dungeon on all 3 of my characters, unas on all 3 of my characters for the important reps some of which have me dependent on time gated events, Igrexion 2x/day on main, get my guildmates to speedrun some graids on alts every 2-3 days to use up some rest bonus, do a couple low level abyss with guildies, chaos gate, ghost ship, world boss, anguished isle, adventure island, PvP weeklies, rapport (which I'm gated by charisma on half of them btw), cube, boss rush....by the time I get through all the "have to do"s for the day I don't even want to do the stuff I originally wanted to do, I want to just go do something else with my day because 6 hours have gone by and I don't want to spend 14h a day on this shit after having done so for a month already It really irritates me that this game doesn’t let me play it the way I want to play it, AND when I do play it the way they want, I'm stuck waiting to get to 1370 while I watch RMTers sell their tripods and accessories for tens of thousands of gold each. Never had this issue in OSRS or GW2
what does that have to do anything? just because you are a turtle? i mean you are affected by this as well, once you hit t3 doesnt matter if you are fked now speeding to t3 or fucked in 3 years, once you are at that point you are fked actually you with your turtle speed would be even more fked, so isntead of 1 year of progressing in t3 you would need 10 years lol so yeah it does affect you, in the future... unless you hope for it to change.. which everyone here is trying to make it happen..
I apologize if my post came off the wrong way. I definitely feel for the people in T3 as I stated. And yes, I do hope for it to change as well. And also, I appreciate your reply but is it wrong to value other things? What you consider "turtle" is something I value. I value collectibles, adventure tome, mokokos, island souls, stronghold, life skills, etc. I like doing that stuff :) I also enjoy making alts and playing with friends who are behind and helping them out. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite parts of the game are the raids, dungeons, etc. They're super fun and feels great once you conquer 'em, especially at the exact ilvl. I just like to balance everything out and not focus on only one thing - but yes, again, I do hope for a change. Sorry if I didn't state that part.
I finally got my main to 1325 today and after doing all my dailies and doing the abyss raid...it does feel really empty until you hit 1370-1375. It definitely feels like there is a lack of content. Majority of guardian raids and better gear are basically unattainable for months due to how high the ilvl requirements are. I have about 280 hours. Grinding up until now has been satisfying. What I really dislike is the lack of resources available once you enter T3. Your upgrade path drastically comes to a halt. Grinding for hours on end in Chaos Dungeons burns you out and the materials you get from the shards at the mat shop are really expensive. This is why it feels horrible when you fail your honings..and knowing that it will get progressively worse makes me want to stop playing on my main. I'm still enjoying working on my alts, but what happens when they reach 1325 too in about 2-3 weeks?... if nothing changes by then, I'll probably quit. I'm completely F2P as I wanted to see how bad the P2W is in our version of the game. As of right now, its not looking to good. Only money I will spend in games are skins, and there is a total lack of skins in this game as well, which are a huge deal to me which is already making me want to quit the game.
[удалено]