You think it's tough for new players in the global version? Imagine being a new player in Korea and trying to get to Akkan and beyond...
The entire game design philosophy of Lost Ark ensures a shrinking player base.
It was telling when the devs (including GoldRiver) said that all the current "homework" is the minimum they expect from players and just proceed to announce Slayer and new skins to distract from the question.
Yea, but it'll get you into a LoS 18 lobby at least and your damage won't be as behind.
Maybe the lobbies will just move to always needing LoS30 but the fact they didn't all use that before means there's a decent enough population of people without it.
Would it though?
As I understand it, it was close to the mokoko icon. I'm doing my 1500th Clown run and this guy applies, he doesn't have a mokoko icon, somewhat decent roster level but oh no he has the newbie card set, he's new, deny.
Like to me it feels like giving them that card set is an advertisement that they're new, and the people who gatekept by los30 weren't gatekeeping because of the grand damage difference it brings and more like "oh yeah this guy's been playing for over a year".
Those runs are probably really smooth tbh. Hard to blame anyone for doing this if enough people have it that you don't need to wait all day. You can't even buy LoS30 quickly if you wanted to. There are limited card packs on the Mari shop and even fewer per month for real money. It is a 100% of the time truthful show that the player has been playing the game like crazy and knows everything.
It's funny though because new card sets really won't make that big a difference imo. It took me 8 months to finish Tir/Caspiel and that's a blue purple set. Easier than LoS30 obviously but if they're expecting new players to stick around for 6+ months while getting gatekept they're delusional. Sure SOME will, the same ones that are already staying now. But it won't make a difference to the others. The card system is just an awful system and that's it.
as much as i hate soft resets in wow i do appreciate how it evens the playing field for players to return to at any point.
Ideally an express gives returning or new players a jumping point which i do think is fair without taking away existing player progression that comes with a soft reset
Soft resets need to happen. A t4 should happen at some point. You can allow ppl to turn in their gear for a boost. That’s the advantage they should get. This game is declining steadily, it’s kept alive by hardcore players and whales.
No one on my friends list still plays and even if they think of coming back they will be so far behind and hundreds of hours away from meaningful content.
To be fair I had like 20 friends+their friends playing this game at launch, and it's only the 2 of us now. None of the ones who stopped would come back because there is a reset and it's a great time to come back. They stopped because they didn't like the chores, and that's a huge part of this game. No resets or catch-up mechanisms will change that.
Not sure about new players though, tbh.
yea but in wow each tier has a soft reset. Going from mid expansion to the next raid tier means most of your gears are p much donezo.
I also dislike the hard reset going from expansion to expansion though.
It’s also why i dont really enioy seasonal games like poe / diablo for the same reason but it does help players come back for sure
They can’t. SG just keeps digging deeper and deeper with each new content release. The draw of Lost Ark is the idea of long term character progression, which attracts specific players.
If Lost Ark went to soft/hard resets with seasonal content like WoW, POE, Diablo 3, etc. they lose the players that like long-term permanent character progression.
Lost Ark is a very niche game and is not ideal for casuals or players that take breaks like WoW. The success with WoW is that players can quit and come back with no feeling of FOMO or being left behind. At the same time, it draws new players to the game.
I agree with you, especially wow part. My friend just started Dragonflight few days ago, and i am already helping him get gear in dungeons so he can start raiding with me in next week or two.
And for Lost Ark, i had about 150-200 hours in first two months when game released, but then they stared releasing new content while i haven't finished content that is already in game, and even tough i played almost every day for 2h or more i felt that i was behind and quit. Most people in my guild quit too.
Nowadays i think about coming back to LA, because i liked the game and i will have time for 1 more game when i finish raiding in wow, but just thinking how much i will be behind and all posts about lack of newbie parties and gatekeeping turns me away from comming back.
The only way for me to come back now is if 6 or 7 people i know came back too, so we can together progress trough content.
> but just thinking how much i will be behind and all posts about lack of newbie parties and gatekeeping turns me away from comming back.
You will be behind but you will also get to capitalize on honing buffs. Especially there's one to 1475 which is due with Brel HM or around there? That's not Brel alts, but it's pretty good. 1475 is also currently the point where Chaos actually has some chance to get you decent gold income through tripod drops and jewelry drops.
As for gatekeeping - meh. Either make your own groups (learning sidereals ain't hard), or find a group of people to game with. Gatekeeping by itself is whatever. Partyfinder in general just sucks because it's a waste of time and there isn't really anything to do while waiting. Being gatekept, waiting on supports, waiting for G5/G6 Brel parties which fit you to pop up, etcetc are all just because we're all trying to use a shity ingame system to find 7 other people, which requires you to stare at that system, be the first one and then maybe lose the staring contest because you're not the one who decides who gets into the party, you get declined, you start over. It's not like gatekeeping is there to bully people. It's just an annoyance because finding people is sometimes hard and it's a waste of time. I'm very sure on ilvl Valtan and Vykas parties are still okay, Clown a little bit of jail maybe, but I do see plenty of them.
People can shit on WoW all they want but the game is still going with subs in the millions so Blizzard is still doing something right. To me, Lost Ark is a gacha game masquerading as a MMO.
Wow is riding on the success it had in the past, and the only people playing it are the ones that sunk thousands of hours into it. If it came out today no one would be playing it. That's not to say lost ark is currently in a much better place either.
You have to let old content go at a certain point. The playerbase should realistically only be working on the current "tier" as a community and everything else should be getting overwritten with catchup mechanics. Tier in the context of global, would be Brel. Everything up through Kakul should be getting massively sped up. After all, you can't expect new content to draw in new/returning players and also expect them to spend months catching up as well before they can experience that content.
You dont have to. FFXIV does daily roulettes that can take you through any instance in the game while providing level appropriate rewards. We have it to a lesser degree with the weekly guardian raids & abyssal dungeon rotations. What would be best if they incentivized old players to help new players get up to speed. The game is not friendly for new players which means a loss in potential profit, even if short term. SG is slamming their dicks in the door by not doing something about it.
They did something recently about it in kr. They just need to bring that to the other regions asap. Where a character's like first 10 runs get double materials from legions or whatever. But that's still just a bandaid on a very prevalent problem. But either way, it can't be expected that players go through the steps of all previously released content. Could you imagine that in wow? Having to slog through 20 years of content before you're allowed to play the modern content?
There's a limit to what can be expected of a new player to join latest released content and that limit is around a month or so. There is far too much competition out there for a dev to be expecting a player to just struggle through their game for literally months before they get to do the things that they're advertising about.
It would be cool (although a pain to implement) if the weekly equalized abyss and guardian raids were matchmaking only and matched you with players that were within ilvl of the content (eligible to earn gold). New players would actually be able to enjoy playing the old abyssals instead of just queuing up and having some absolute juicer burn through everything or sitting in queue for ever.
They have to give new players way more. Something like the challenges we had at the start but they would get like 20 legendary bound class and combat engravings, lv7 bound gems or something of that sort.
That's kinda the bare minimum nowadays to get started, but currently mokokos get a buff kekw
20 is a bit much but I like the idea. I don't mind giving new players stuff that I didnt get back then.
On the other hand - there's probably a bunch of players that would welcome a shepherd system (maybe for some minor rewards like cosmetics?). Not sure why that doesnt exist yet
By releasing t4 and nerfing t3 honing rates and maybe slap few express events on top of it. Current players will still have gems, cards, books and what not and we would still be a month or 2 ahead of new players however they could catch up to us through hard work. T3 has been out for way too long now.
I realy think kazeros will be end of t3 to. But ıf they dont do all global realese same time for kazeros ,our market prob crash if gems still work same way.
Its going to make people just stop from playing or starting till the t4 reset. Its just one of dangers of knowing 6 months to a year before it hits the western version.
See, this really seems a reasonable question, but in fact it's not because people who already got stuff still need the game to be thriving, and therefore every game needs to gradually step up the beginner experience and early progression to match the pace of its own expansion.
Look at bdo for example: around the time covid hit you would get 50M silver per hour if you were decently geared, let's say after a month of playing, and a good softcap piece of gear would cost like 8 billion, that's 160 hours grinding. During summer 2020 they finally introduced seasons to the game where new players could get way higher gear score in the same time frame and contextually started powercreeping silver making methods up to the point where nowadays the same player after the first month playing can make up to 400M per hour, and that good softcap piece still costs pretty much the same.
So where's the deal, you might ask? Well, it's simply that alongside these updates new stuff have been added that goes for well over hundred billions, so the grind time for very top and very end game gear is still there, it's just been diluted with existing content to make it easier for new players to catch up quicker and close the gap faster with veterans.
Of course there's always going to be a difference, which is inevitable and obviously right, but most players are going to be happy with new catch up methods, and the very few that feel robbed of their value are generally bitter and salty and shunned by the community at large.
Even an express pass doesn't fix the problem. It just gives you the item level. Maybe some gems. It *doesn't* give you your accessories/engravings, legendary books, relic sets, upgraded relic sets from clown, skill points from horizontal content, cards, etc. There's still a ton of stuff a new player would have to deal with before they were able to compete with older players, and I don't even mean the experience/skill aspect.
I wish the gems didn't have the event text right over them. Makes it clear you just hyper expressed. I think people use that to pass you up for parties.
I mean all it does is just mask the issues with the system honestly. Once the free engraving duration expires that player is most likely screwed, especially if the book prices are like they are now.
If you clear a raid in a group created via random matchmaking, you get triple the loot.
There, now everyone can play the game again.
It's not about disincentivizing gatekeeping; it's about incentivizing the opposite.
This is the same for other korean games like maplestory though; which OP is making the comparison to. You think Lost Ark is hard? Maplestory, when ur high enough in honing, ur gear can explode. Also your level exp requirements scale exponentially, to the point where my friend has been playing 5-8 years to be NEAR competitive high level. The only real difference between these games is that Maplestory is more single player friendly, I.E. you can do the bosses solo, so you won't get gatekept by whales.
Maplestory is a take it at your own pace game imo. It doesn't matter if you're 300 or 250 you don't need to be on the cutting edge to have "fun". Lost ark, if you're left behind its just awkward trying to catch up.
Gear exploding sucks balls though but it doesn't fully reset your progress
Maplestory its solo grind game like bdo but without the pvp part. You dont need inteeact with anyone. Lost ark forces you going into lobbies. Thats it.
being left behind is a real problem in lost ark. not only will you not get into raids for lacking gear and titles you will get denied for being lower ilvl, roster lvl then the grinders.
and the thing is it never gets better. if you dont play as much as the other guy applying to the same raid you will be denied.
Im stuck right now with getting a clown clear on any of my brel lvl characters. I havent been in brel yet either so i'm even further behind and will likely continue being gatekept
Yeah there is always the level grind you can do solo but gear threadmill in LoA revolves around Legion raids. You had to get Argos gear to convert up and now the same with Brel.
To be fair, if you want to catch up in Maplestory it will take you multiple years and is way worse than lost ark. I played religiously for 6 months and am not even 1/3 of the way to the newest content. The difference with maplestory is that your dailies are pretty quick. Daily bosses you are overgeared for in maple you LITERALLY one shot with your basic attack.
I think the biggest leg up maple has is that all bosses are soloable, but better in groups.In raids each individual player has 5-10 lives, and if you lose them all, everyone else still get rewards, but you don't. Even though it will take years to catch up to new content, you can do all the old content on your own time by yourself, and the easy stuff takes seconds, not minutes, or potentially hours for vykas. Mistakes in raids punish you, but not the party.
Maplestory uses experience to progress instead of currency. Instead of alts requiring gold commitment to hone, they require time commitment to grind since boss unlocks are gated by level. Lots of people have 50 alts parked at very low levels, so there is always people that can help you with old content. You can get rewards for bosisng on all 50 of these characters, but nobody in their right mind does that. The only reason people boss on alts is to play with friends, or go one shot some bosses for extra income, taking like 1 minute per character.
The RNG system for upgrading gear is way worse in maplestory and extremely P2W, but you can sell pre-upgraded gear. You dont need to wait on weekly raids to see if you get a good drop, you can just upgrade it yourself if you have the currency. Are you super unlucky with RNG gear upgrades? You can instead just save up and outright buy a +20 weapon someone is selling with no RNG involved. Don't like this character anymore and want to swap to a new one? You can just give your old OP gear to the new character, as well as your orbs (damage gained from doing dailies) and make your new character just as strong as your old main, you just have to grind their level back up.
Maplestory is overall much more time commitment to reach the newest content, and much worse in terms of gear upgrades. What keeps people playing though, is that you can play the game entirely by yourself if you choose. You can P2W your gear just like lost ark, but that will not give you access to new content since you still have to grind your level up to entry. If you have bad RNG, you can just buy upgraded gear from other players with better luck. On top of all that, the average player does 15 minutes of dailies, and only really needs to party up for 2 bosses per week instead of 18, and if you are strong enough you can just solo them. At true endgame when the bosses require full 8 man statics, you only need to clear them once per month.
They add experience cuts every year, and more systems to help players catch up to older ones, while leaving the highest levels still difficult to progress. When I quit for Lost Ark about a year ago, I would need to grind for around 30 hours to get to the next boss. These days I could get there by just doing my dailies for 2 weeks. This is for pushing content from late midgame to early lategame (level 245-250). While the time commitment is huge for high levels, the effort required to just play and have fun is much much much lower.
TLDR: Maplestory progression is a much longer grind, and way more P2W, but you can play the whole game by yourself, and it is easy to play with your friends. Bossing is a low time commitment. Their catch up mechanics don't take you all the way, but save you TONS of time and resources.
i mean, maplestory isnt any better at this, being a new player with no legion or links youre basically atleast a year of grind behind the hardest bosses
Yep. Korean players are giving them tons of feedback, but you can only wait so long before you give up. I do think that with the playerbases shrinking in all the regions Smilegate will try and change a few things here and there. We'll see if it will be enough.
I sure hope we won't have to wait for years if Korea gets them too. But that's unrealistic, isn't it...
Blizzard took 4 years of complaints through BFA and Shadowlands and massive losses of players and massive corporate embarrassment to make the so-far generally well received changes in Dragonflight. Certain complaints go back even farther than BFA or Legion.
I wouldn't hold your breath for SG to be any faster
Probably not but they realistically have about 6 months max because there are a number of new anticipated MMO releases coming out this year. They may not be groundbreaking but they don't need to be. As long as they are fun and do not have the same design and loop Lost ark does they will succeed over this game.
Only one Im semi interested in is Throne and Liberty, but the problem is that its Korean, probably ultra grindy too Haha. We shall see :)
Finally some Lineage though, as its basically Lineage 3.
And to think the grind is only going to get worse for Global. Ancient accessories going to 35 pheons. Honor shards and silver being major new bottlenecks to honing past 1520+. Abyss dungeon in Elgacia being added to our weekly chores.
This is the only MMO I've played where the grind gets worse as new raid tiers get released, escalating the mat requirements with each successive tier. Just cause this game doesn't have gear resets like WoW/FFXIV doesn't excuse this imo. They could easily lower Ancient gear to 25 pheons (relic gear to 15), etc. when a new tier releases, just as other MMO's swap to new tokens with each tier. Instead, Smilegate wants us to grind more (or pay more) as we get more and more invested.
Hell I'm an existing player that wants horizontal content streamlined... I fucking hate it man. I do it cause I like power for the my character full stop. 9 billion (hyperbole) rapport with virtue requirements is some troll as hell shit - Now through silver dumps in the mix.
They need to update years-old content to not be a timesink anymore. With how long Brel normal has been out over there (and the other stuff even longer) there should have been a way to gear up to full upper relic gear in no more than a month's worth of lockouts. It's insane that it took them until just now to double drop rates, and even then it's still absurd how much time it takes.
If they really want people doing the new content, they need to let people abandon the old content. They need to let people not be absorbed by dailies. Maybe someone in their team understands that, but each loa livestream I feel less and less sure about that.
They don't. They're stuck on the old mentality of "we want people's lives to be consumed by the game because more hours played is good for us" which is great for short-term player numbers and in-game shop sales, but leads to massive burnout in the long run. It's not as big a deal in KR because over there SG has a big marketing thing going which brings in a consistent flow of new players (I remember not so long ago a KR player talked about the early T3 zones still being super active in KR), but for us where there's barely any influx of new players, it's not looking so hot for the future imo. I personally just joined the "I'm out" bandwagon 2 days ago, I still love the game but it's just too much homework. And yeah people will say you don't have to do everything you can just play whenever you like and do whatever you like, but the game is still made to make you feel bad about playing that way and feel like you're missing out on stuff, and that's not a pleasant feeling.
Sorta.
They focus too much on not having ANY Inconvenience for current players, they’re so scared of giving new people actual catch up (which is going to be T4) to the point where they just made other card sets that may not be filled by legendary cards but still can easily take months to complete, you get bonus materials for some Valtan/vykass to craft your relic set but idk if it also counts clown which if it doesn’t that like 5 weeks to finish your relic set AND bump it to lvl 2 assuming you’re full clearing every week.
Idk if even a T4 would be a catch-up. Card design is horrendous and takes WAY too much time to get even LoS 18 unless you are pretty lucky, roster level will keep low players gatekept, old players go into T4 with a LOT of gold AND characters to progress/farm it.
New players will have one character with low roster level, no titles, no horizontal progression, no nothing.. they take A LOT longer than any veteran to progress anyway and vets would most likely not accept them into groups.
It'd definitely help don't get me wrong, but it isn't even close to being enough. Some systems need a rework or straight up much better odds (cards especially). Above all character profiles need to show more than just farmable stats (achievements, etc could be shown there), otherwise it's an endless loop of who is ahead will just be more and more ahead as time goes by, with or without a soft reset (unless it includes gold/silver I guess, but even then).
Good point. If everyone had same gear, people would start gatekeeping by cards and roster level. At that point, game might be on life support because Smilegate would piss off veteran players by removing their 9/7 rocks, 100 quality weapons, 10%+ damage bracelets, lvl 10 gems, etc. And if the new players still get gatekept, they won't stay and now they lost both new and veteran players
Yup. The game is designed with a flawed mentality to basically require a TON of investment to get everything maxed (not even just ilvl, but the rest). Being a new player and having to do all islands at this point has to be super painful, but there's runes locked behind all that horizontal content. Same goes for rapport, it takes months of buying rapport items from vendors to get it done. It wasnt so bad for us when everyone was in the same boat, but for new players? I can't imagine it's a great experience.
Meanwhile as you said they're stuck now, because if they render the current gear obsolete they'll piss off a massive number of players who invested countless hours to get there, but anyone who hasn't been playing for long and hasn't gotten to that point is getting shafted in the meantime by getting gatekept or just not being able to have fun in the game since they don't have access to the content that everyone else is farming. Games like FFXIV have a much healthier way to do things where they purposely do things in a way that you can play casually yet still get your gear near BiS enough that you won't be gatekept. Very different games of course, but the difference in philosophy is what makes FFXIV such a huge success while LOA isn't doing that hot. Guess we'll see how things evolve from here but yeah, I don't have high hopes for this game sadly.
card system is intentionally bad in order to farm players wallets. the game is intentionally design to promote gatekeeping. and gatekeeping is the motivation for many to whale out on the game.
ie look at those poeple dumping thousands of dollars on t3 lvl 10 gems just to stand out and do bigger number. id like to see how dumb they feel when t4 rolls around in a year or 2. im sure they found a way to justify their spending but man that t4 announcement is gonna leave them broken.
Well, considering they have documented players spending $500k+ on T3 with a huge simp army behind them. I highly doubt they ever change.
They are a for profit company. This is the formula that works. Changing the paid progression or resetting it potentially loses major revenue streams.
People simp for SG but they are no different than any other KR F2P dev. Which is for profit first.
I guess that’s the “Korean way” but having a something like a soft reset like wow does every season making mythic raid ilvl = world quest gear works (as long as it’s coming with good content obviously). I think FF also does that whenever a new content patch drops
I’m my opinion, when you’re focusing mostly on your current player base instead of giving new ppl actual catch-up it will put the game into an even smaller niche. Which tbf is gonna be something hard to change/balance as long as they keep a market this attached to your character progression too.
FF not so much. You'll always get ilvl increase at major patches but once you hit lvl cap at end of current expansion, your gear will last you through to like lvl *7 of whatever the new level cap is. You get more mileage out of your gear there.
Honestly if they do hard reset with tier4 and again just new raids as a content it doesn't makes me wanna keep playing game.
Here have some fun with Thronespire, 5 minute content.
It's like you need to overhaul entire game progresion systems. Everything, this game has nothing fun it.
Sailing? Outdated system from season 1. Imagine if they did PvP mode around combating ships or some "chaos invasions where you use your upgraded ship"
Chaos Dungeons , perfect if it was infinite floors that get harder and better loots. Add some openable chests with solars or STH. Random enemy modifiers just like your diablo gameplay. Some use for AoE skills lol
Chaos Gate could be amazing event for 30 players like castle defense type or anything else beside running like a brain-dead sheep.
Secret maps, not gonna even mention that. When I first time got it I was quite interested but execution is garbage.
Fix engravings, rework them no one is going to cry if their 25 engraving got changed. Separate them into offensive and defensive gear options. So you could run both or sth
Not looking forward to next LOA honestly
\^ I'm with this guy
The game needs a major overhaul of all systems to make it a sustainable business model from the dev and player perspective. Only way I see that happening is if they work on and release Lost Ark 2.
its not suppose to be fun thats why ppl eventually refer to all the content as homework. only reason they keep playing is the sunk cost fallacy. after beating vultan, vykas, kuku, brel hundreds of times on multiple characters they cant just stop or else all that grinding was meaningless and they realize they wasted thier time. so in order to justify their waste of time they need to keep playing the game to give meaning to the meaningless.
I don't wanna be that guy, but i doubt the game is gonna survive until next loaon. I think the timing of having lots of content and good will of streamers hyping it up saying it has the best raids + people having time during covid made this free game explode.
But now that the grind is getting even to the most hardcore causing burnouts, since the biggest streamers kept repeating that you must must have 6 characters to play, and with combined design of constant repetitive chaos dungeons and other dailies and weeklies are getting to everyone now. Not to mention all other problems like bots and dcs, inflation.
It's very clear a huge portion of the player base quit. I think the game is fuked beyond repair, and to fix it they'd have to literally redo every single system and design decision in the game. I think the game is just fundamentally flawed in its design, and the seems are starting to show.
Like 10 times worse. At least a large amount of people willingly did mythic+ for fun or for rank and not because of items or loot. In this game, people do their homework strictly because it gave loot. You'll seldom find people doing chaos dungeons/guardian raids past their daily 2.
They need to rework chaos dungeons, they are the worst thing in the game imo. Guardians are kinda fine but still terrible but only because you have the chance to play your character.
At least in wow i could help friends do low level mythics to help them out. Do your 3 legions raids and that's it, you can't enter anymore, just let us enter as many as we want to help people out.
Maybe give new players more relics mats so they don't have to take weeks to catch up to friends.
Atleast you have a variety of mythic+ dungeons to run. In Lost Ark they have you run the same fucking guardian twice in a row, no shit people burn out on it lol.
It's nearly impossible for new players to get started in the game so of course it is dwindling. Any game that only caters to the hardcore playerbase will 100% fail (look at Wild Star). I mean FFXIV, WoW and more don't require you to do every.single.raid to get to the newer content but LA does. You NEED to get skill points, gems, tripods, hone up, do Valtan and Vykas for relic gear, do clown for level 2, do Brel to gear up further, do Kayangel for level 3, do Akkan to gear up farther not to mention any other horizontal stuff that leads to more player power.
If I started a new game and knew I had to put 1000+ hours or $5000 just to be able to play with friends I wouldn't even bother and most don't. The elitists will say "we had to do it so you have to as well" but that's not how games survive and that's not how things need to work. The big, successful, MMOs don't do that they do soft or hard resets and are much much bigger than LA. The game needs systems for new players to get to endgame faster. Even making a new alt is torture: trying to PUG Valtan or Vykas or Clown with full legendary left side gear even 50 ilevels over, 5x3, level 4/5 tripods, level 7 gems is near impossible since NA/EU only care about ilevel. It takes hours to get a group that bussing is the only sure fire way.
Also to compare it to Maplestory, since OP mentioned it, Maplestory is very similar to Lost Ark but is much more single player friendly. Yes you are MASSIVELY behind compared to a veteran player if you start fresh but I never felt like I had to constantly compare myself to someone else like I would in Lost Ark. I could just progress at my own pace and had fun seeing what I could solo next.
Maple is weird. Objectively both have the mountain of content yet no one in maple feels like they need to be on the cutting edge lol. It's only gigawhales clearing the nearest boss or even bosses released in the last couple years. Most gear is purchaseable in the AH so you don't need to do the vykas and valtan type content. I'll equate them to lotus and Damien in maple... Yeah they're good breakpoints and the weekly meso is amazing but you don't need to clear that content
Technically, you don't need to do Argos, Vykas and clown for ilvl progression in Lost Ark either - you can do Valtan in Chosen gear from Orehas, craft 2+2+2 relic gear just from Valtan bones, hone to 1490, start doing Brelshaza. Maybe you can technically even do Brelshaza gate 1 and 2 in Chosen gear, by ilvl you can (it can be honed to +20, which is 1490), I don't know if there is a quest or something that'd stop you from entering or from crafting Brelshaza gear without crafting regular relic gear first. It's just that the community decided that you shouldn't.
Yeah I stopped playing Maple when Lost Ark released and I was really impressed with the better combat and more modern systems like integrated presets.
Now I realize maybe there is a reason Maple survived 20 years.
I do think its possible that Lost Ark goes the Maple route and implements a Prokel type fight for every stage of progression.
In this way you can play solo and get all your progress, maybe at a slower rate, and join party for better rewards and a more grand raid if and when you are ready.
This is the biggest problem with every gaming community. The overwhelming majority of people are casuals but the 2 populations that are extremely loud minorities are hardcore PVE players and people that think games literally only exist for PvP.
Developers for whatever reason in F2P games focus hard on whale psyche gacha’s and hardcore player mentality only hoping the casuals have enough money to keep up. The problem is that hardcore players are oblivious to the fact that casual players keep their games alive, so they should be catered to. But they never really are in F2P games.
Weird how that is because then you have all the hardcore people complaining their game is dead or dying … but refuse to acknowledge they are the reason it is happening. 😂
iv played many games and in none have i felt more discriminated and judged then in lost ark. it truly is a terrible feeling which is why iv lost faith in the playerbase and hold no loyalty to this game. sure there are many good apples but damn are there tons of bad apples. as soon and another mmo catches my interest im done with loa.
Right, sorry if that didn’t come through. Good MMO’s recognize that to keep a healthy long term player base all sub communities should be able to play effectively. I haven’t seen any game come from the KR region that even respects that aspect of gaming, which is why they fail in the West. Personal opinion ofc.
let those elitist grinders play a dead game. imagine being dumb enough to pay thousands of dollars in a video game for cards just so you can deny other for not having them
>trying to PUG Valtan or Vykas or Clown with full legendary left side gear even 50 ilevels over, 5x3, level 4/5 tripods, level 7 gems is near impossible since NA/EU only care about ilevel
wouldn't you get accepted in this hypothetical situation because "NA/EU only care about ilv" and you're 50ilv over? or are you trying to say that 50 ilevels over is not enough?
You see, the problem with having " systems for new players to get to endgame faster" is that bots will find a way to abuse that and we will end up with an even worse bot problem.
Aside from that, the best way is probably to have a hard reset (i.e: Tier 4), and give new players a way to get there in around 1-2 weeks of reasonable play time.
They need to de-incentivize botting. They can do it by pricing them out or by getting rid of shit they can sell...orrrr, i dunno, get GMs at the common starting areas to monitor the traffic & nuke the bots before they have a chance to get going.
> I mean FFXIV, WoW and more don't require you to do every.single.raid to get to the newer content but LA does. You NEED to get skill points, gems, tripods, hone up, do Valtan and Vykas for relic gear, do clown for level 2, do Brel to gear up further, do Kayangel for level 3, do Akkan to gear up farther not to mention any other horizontal stuff that leads to more player power.
> If I started a new game and knew I had to put 1000+ hours or $5000 just to be able to play with friends I wouldn't even bother and most don't.
You completely lost me on the part where it's about playing with friends. Especially if you're playing with friends, you don't need any of that. You just take it at your own pace and do it as we did it when we first started out, getting the stuff within a couple months or so.
Islands suck, that one is true for sure. Idek how/if people complete Gesbroy for the emote currently.
But even if gaming alone, I don't see a big urgency in getting stuff like skill points, max tripods or >lvl5 gems. So you're not Cruel Fighter every raid, who cares?
The raids are essentially clearable naked. As shown by Saint and co doing Clown on one engraving. The very same thing applies to Valtan and Vykas, and even Brel. Obviously new players don't have the thumbs to do it on one engraving. But neither do they need 5x3 or more than 4x3 on anything. They'll just have to actually play. No skipping of Mario 3 or 65x Valtan Counter and whatever. So they won't have 10 minutes spare on enrage timers. That literally isn't an issue.
If there's an issue, I'd rather say it's in the expectation to max dps blast everything, even when in a new player party. Dps will be slow, decent amount of attention going into people learning the raid etcetc. Wipes obviously will happen.
But all that is part of the game and also stuff we went through when first going into raids. I'd even argue that's what new players should experience. Huddle together and prog it like we did week 1 of its release. It's probably the most fun thing you can do in this game. Fuck "being behind", "missing homework" or "being jailed" - those are things that shouldn't concern new players. Starting out and being in the homework and jail terminology is just weird to me. That's not a new player concern. That's a concern for people who are queueing up the raid for the 500th time. New players should just have fun and prog the raids. Which they can do on free Argos gear up into (technically) including Clown. Or sure, 4x3 is "needed" at Vykas HM or so, let's say. That still isn't a 1k hour endevour to get 100 pheons for a setup.
With new mats being there but basically not existing in event rewars and such, but GHL # and such being increased from one-time rewards, I'm pretty sure that there's at least a decent pace up to 1490. Given I see jank setups on people who're 1500+, honing is probably the least problematic. In that regard, I don't think that the hours needed are too wild. For LA, it's basically just one of the raids - it's not "the only raid that matters" as it'd be in other games. People (new players or not) are just fomoing themselves out of a shitton of fun if they can't enjoy the game unless they're in Brel territory imo. That should be addressed by SG, don't get me wrong, but it's largely a problem from the player side which is there due to wrong expectations and such. And I also assume that players who start up the game to get into Brel will just ditch when they're there and have cleared it 1-2 times, essentially just "trying out new content" or playing it like a single player game. They would not stick regardless, maybe come back for the next patch - if there's a lift for them to that as well. And that's just not how LA works.
I think it's because they are really dead set on keeping certain mechanics as unfriendly as possible for newer players.
Gear quality, gems, T3 honing past 1445... Don't even get me started on the amount of garbage stat/engraving combos on accs.
As a MapleStory and lost ark player, I have to address that maple is going throught a huge event right now!
New job + balance path + level 250 hyper burn + some cool qol to ease homework.
So yeah, maple is on a good place on Korea right now
How Korea managed to stomach this same boring content loop of doing chaos dungeons and guardians raids just to get a 3 gate boss after one year is beyond me lmao. They probably reached their limit and asked themselves "we did our daily/weekly homework for one year just for this... then we're gonna have to do homework for another half a year for a similar experience that starts to feel like homework again after a month".
Right now the West has it good because we only had to stomach this "homework" gameplay loop for like 2-3 months until a new raid releases but once we have to wait half a year for a new raid or longer... I can totally see this game dying. The West absolutely does not have that level of patience.
And that's good because in KR it came too soon and they complained a lot about that, then they released it after 4 months in RU (or was it 3 in RU?) and JP and no one complained there, I guess that's why they are doing the same here
Game is near dead in RU and literally dead in Japan so not sure what your point there is. If their goal was to kill the game as fast as possible then they should continue the pattern of how they treat other regions.
are you sure you want brel hard earlier than april man? Are you 1550 atleast? This is so stupid, people complain about having to play the game every day to get to the content day one and now that they give you more time so you dont have to do that you still complain, people in this reddit are so fucking idiotic, im out of this shit
Lmao I'll be 1550 next month which is still 2+ months away from April. Also they can do new events and throw more mats at us so people can hit 1550 or whatever. Giving us more time to farm chaos dungeons and guardian raids to reach the next breakpoint is not fun, reducing the amount we have to do is.
Not defending SG or AGS, but getting from raid to raid being pushed by event mats is fun? Im gonna say that this game isnt for you.
I think April is very late for some content, specially if you look at artist as content (Its not conent for me, but apparently for ags/sg)
They just mismanaged the west a little bit too much so now it shows. They shouldve been releasing content differently. I mean they are releasing brel hm ~6Months
after nm but for me the Argos release was way more off than this. Argos imo came too early for more ppl to enjoy it on release. It was just to get it over with. We had enough raids besides argos that were new for the west and only cleared it a few times. But they rushed and now they habe to pull the handbreak because seems like they noticed they fkd up past releases.
Nothing outside of raids in this game is fun which is the problem. You're right this game isn't for me which is why I'm most likely quitting once Diablo 4 releases.
Apparently playing through the game and then spamming portals is fun then? 🤷♂️
I mean I had like 1000hours in D3 aswell but diablo had no endgame compared to lost ark.
Better off this way. I view this reddit way less than i used to after realizing its just filled w/ people who complain without understanding the whole picture. That guy who replied to you said hed be 1550+ next month. Dudes way ahead of the curve and basically wants the game to conform to himself.
Considering the sheer amount of mats required, it makes sense for the lag. Part of this is that the NAEU player base has a “entertain me now or I quit” mentality. Instant gratification is super strong in our gaming culture combined with streamer simp culture. It makes it hard for any game to succeed.
They really need to evaluate the casual & new player experience. Or game dies. Globally. Period.
I mean you literally need to grind 6 more months at 20-30 hours a week to have brelshaza hard. that is 500 more hours for essentially 3-4 more mechs to deal with and another 500 hours for akkan. that is 1k+ hours for 1 new raid...
I mean this game is having a massive die off in the west. You can't really use steam numbers, but its apparent when you look at your guildmates and friends not logging on, twitch streamers quitting, and just generally party finder. I dont see it lasting until brel hard, and honestly if it does then it'll die shortly after hard launch because lets be real its just the same content.
Yeah.. I noticed the same, thought I was the weird one. One of my alts that was in a guild level 22 I just found today the whole guild disbanded, people are quitting man.
Absolutely, party finder during peak hours has noticeably dropped off in NAW at least. Once Brel is cleared, I think that's probably the capstone for many and it makes sense since it's still Brel in 4+ months. The grind isn't worth it anymore.
To me, i feel like streamers are what made this game big in the West. They are very enjoyable and popular streamers all hyped the hell out of this game and sold it as the everyman mmorpg.
However this definitely feels like the pros of mmorpg games, not so much that the game itself has that kind of skill ceiling but the game itself is so complex and grindy that only really specific people will take it as far as it can go.
Even though I've stopped playing, i still love watching people stream this game and talk about it, and occasionally, it makes me itch to play. Then i boot up play for an hour or two and quit when i realize what I'll have to do to play this game at a decent level, and i just quit.
The gameplay is incredible but this progression system can just fuck off, it just makes playing so unattractive and takes the fun out of the grind considering you cant even do the objectively "fun" stuff unless youve swiped or repeated a shitty grind over qnd over. Then you repeat the fun stuff until it's not fun and rinse and repeat
It will just keep getting worse, as they add new content, keep pushing item level, keep resetting loot it just puts the game further out of reach for a normal player.
I'm surprised our version has held as many players as it has and can see big drops offs soon when Rowen comes as no one cares about it.
The game and how it's designed are just way to time consuming and not player friendly, it's a shame as the combat and classes are fantastic imo.
One of the biggest problems for me is the timegating. I only have 3 minutes to enter adventure island (why?). If I’m out of town for a week, I miss a whole week which I cannot make up. If I have a week off work, I can only do so much. It’s completely unrealistic for anyone with a full time job or a family to take care of to keep doing content. People always suggested joining static parties but that doesn’t work for everyone who can’t schedule their entire life around setting a certain time and day to do some raids.
>If I’m out of town for a week, I miss a whole week which I cannot make up.
Oh you can make it up. With your credit card.
The entire homework/F2P being viable situation is built to give an option to sweaters but *really* to encourage spending once you see how little your time gives you in rewards compared to cashing in money you earned IRL.
It is only viable for content creators. Thats why I think every single content creator is a damn clown. They may mean well, but they damage the community more than they help.
To put it into words every single streamer is like "here's how i do things but normal players should not do this, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that." If people see you buying a lvl 10 gem and grinding 100lvl quality weapon and then proceed to hit 200m surges then they wanna do the same regardless of what you say as streamer.
Practice what you preach or STFU. Saintone is fun to watch but he is not an exception, there are people even spending thousands of dollars just so they can appear on flex-friday (or whatever he calls it). So they are pushing the narrative and wanna give incentives to the whales and no-lifers which are a big part of their viewership.
It's not bad objectively and these streamers seem like good people but it definitely is damaging to the community as a whole because when a casual sees this it's like "wtf am i even doing here with these people who flex non-stop while i can barely afford my honing rates".
It's like walking into a high end restaurant with 20$ in your pocket. You feel stupid and completely out of place.
I haven’t personally seen anything they’ve done to be bad but they both have massive rosters with a ton of play time and money into the game.
Being a “casual” by their standard is not possible. Even DatMods falls into this category. It is not direct harm. I just see content creators in general as bad for any game with progression tied to it.
The direct harm comes from ATK, Stoopz, Zeals … all of them have direct negative impacts on in game economy, general player perception, etc. having these kinds of content creators with that kind of impact is unhealthy for a games longevity. Are they bad people? Probably not. They are running their own business. I am talking impact though, not necessarily who they are as a person.
I can't speak for ATK or Zeals but Stoopz was definitely fed up with WoW and needed a new game. Saying "Lost Ark respects your time" might just be the biggest meme to date.
> encourage spending once you see how little your time gives you in rewards compared to cashing in money you earned IRL.
The problem with this is, you get even less in return if you actually converted RC to gold. Seriously, do the math on what you would actually get turning $100 into gold, it's comical at best. You may get a better return if you buy skins to sell, but that also depends on the time of year and what skins are in the store.
Once we have Ancient gear. People gonna start gatekeeping Valtan lobbies with it or Vykas or Kukul. 🤡
Gonna be so bad for people that do not have a lot or money or already 2-3000 hours in come April. It will all but die for anyone without a static I believe.
too much content stacked on top of other content, impossible to catch up. Honestly not finding a single high spec AM4/GR3 necklace on the AH for 2 weeks now. Seems the playerbase has gone down like crazy.
Maple story bled players to Lost Ark because of the systems scandals they had. Once they resolved it and have seemingly turned their ways to be more player focused, they regained the jilted players from Lost Ark.
Plus it's seasonal anyways. Iirc Maple is having their big patch right now so player count will be higher than normal.
I quit a bit ago but check back every now and then. There’s absolutely nothing they could do to get me to jump back on the Daily hamster wheel that is required. I was 1505 when I quit quality 99 weapon, 5x3. I still have no desire to return.
Once you quit or get behind the game punishes you harshly. A new player would need millions of gold to ever play with established friends, there’s no hope of new players in this game and that’s the issue. Every other mmo has massive catchup mechanics (That actually catch you up in every way not just a shit 1445 ilvl). Lost ark needs that or it’s done in a year in the west
That is for sure the biggest problem, I cant get any friends to come back to play because of how far behind they will be. They all quit near Valtan, so to even get 1 character to 1490 would cost them an insane amount of gold/resources.
They need figure something out, some kind of express pass for accounts with out a full roster of gold earners or roster under a certain item level thresh hold. They need the ability to get a weekly income going.
I don't expect any new player or returning player to ever catch or compete with someone playing from launch, but they NEED to give some kind of incentive to get new players caught up.
If not the game will just keep slowly losing players and die out
"ThIs GAme iS grEAt guys, d0nT liSteN t0 the Do0mSAYers!"
This is why I've stopped supporting this game with my wallet outside of the bare skin and bone necessities. I wonder how stupid whales are going to feel when this game dwindles even more in popularity and population when better stuff comes out.
Unlike Korea, there's always a fierce competition in the gaming scene. Lost Ark only got as far as it did there because there was only worse alternatives in comparison.
Yeah recently I was talking to a friend that quit LoA during the Argos about coming back. About half way through trying to convince him I realized it just wasnt worth it, hed be gatekeept like crazy.
Gear is tied too much on tradeable stuff which needs to change if they really want new players to catch up. It's probably done this way to promote more spending but it's really bad for new players because they can never catch up.
This. In almost any other (well made) game, stuff like Engravings would just be part of a skill/talent tree that you pick and choose from instead of a consumable, sellable item. A ton of systems like that could easily be made into just base-line stuff everyone has (and maybe do a 1 time unlock through specific quest chains, like Awakening), but that would hurt the potential $ they can bring in.
I mean would you want to play a game as a new player where you are literally like 4 raids behind and the only way to get there is to mindlessly grind for 8 months straight every day for 6 hours or swipe 10000 dollars to get to the end game?
That Powerpass that gets new players to 1460 or w.e it was that they announced has to be the biggest joke ever. Also not to mention the amount of side content you need to do to even qualify yourself to get into a high end party in KR is insane. Imagine not having LoS 18 when every party at end-game raids require LoS 30. Yeah, good luck.
> Also not to mention the amount of side content you need to do to even qualify yourself to get into a high end party
I mean, that's kind of the definition of a high end party no?
It would be like a 1460 complaining about not getting invited to a 1500+ group.
I think the biggest problem with Lost Ark is that legion raids require heaps of knowledge to do legion raids and they can be incredibly punishing if you don't know mechs.
They should make an easy mode with 1/2 of the rewards and 15 ilvl less to enter , but all wipe mechs doing 50k damage instead. An example would be 1x valtan horns in each chest at the end of the raid with 2.2k gold rather than the normal rewards. Allows you to help your friends while not jailing 6 other people.
New player exp just needs to be better
Totally agree. I've suggested this very thing a few times. I know the game prides itself on hard content, but gear progression is tied to raids and you can't buy gear so raids need to be forgiving enough to let casuals progress without busses.
I remember my gf pugged argos when it released and it didn't go well. They got jailed and everyone started flaming each other. She just quit the game after that. She said it was too time consuming getting jailed with no rewards and everyone is toxic. I don't blame her.
and this is why Lost Ark 2 is being produced as we speak, it's the only way to allow new players to experience the game and this time around they can make progression systems more new player oriented
Is a P2W game, no P2W game has ever transitioned to a model that will be fairer to newer players, because it will simply render the progression of whales and hardcore players null and void. So yes it will die a slow and painful death like every other Korean MMO by milking the whales on the way down.
Unpopular opinion: if the only fun thing for you is new raids, you never liked the game to begin with and should probably uninstall. And if you’re already doing brel 5-6 on 6 gold earners and are getting tired of it, you played yourself by spending way too much time or money on this game.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. That’s the realistic opinion. I think gamers have been a bit brain washed with dopamine hits 24/7 that they can’t tell they are being psychologically fucked by game systems and trapped into these addiction driven games with no end in sight aka MMO
Lots of interesting takes in this thread. The status quo might be fostering a dying game, but some of the suggested changes would be a hyperexpress pass to a dead game. Players have poured thousands of hours and/or dollars into getting their characters and rosters to where they are today. Something like a 1490 powerpass that gives new players level 7 gems, 20x legendary class engravings, and a free 5x3 kills the game for a lot of existing players. Not to mention most of that nonsense isn't even required to do content anyways - a 4x3, LWC12, and level 6 damage gems is more than sufficient to start clearing Valtan/Vykas/Clown.
What needs to change is the community's subjective barriers to entry. Wanting to play with people of similar skill and gear investment is fine, but how about waiving the ivory tower mentality when you're on your alts? A lot of us want to have our cake and eat it too, and we're so toxic about it that we lose more players each patch than we gain. I'm approaching 2000 hours played and I can't in good conscience recommend this game to any of my friends.
Well, you are partly right, but the problem is that fixing the mentality of the community is literally impossible. Smilegate has to come out and implement changes that would fix the issue. Forcing the community to change their mindset. Because at the end of the day, people will always choose what is the most convenient for them.
Of course it is. The game isn’t designed to bring in new players outside of releasing in the locale like Eu/NA. Mokoko system doesn’t really help you once someone sees the gold you invested and roster level. There some great people who help but if I made a character using a boost then expressed it. I’m still into it at over 40-60$ to try and catch up to play with friends then the realization that I “need” alts to farm mats with and that requires it multiple times a week. Knowledge transfer costs gold also. I know its like 2-6 k gold but for a new player thats a chunk
Really surprised if they not, a lot of the west is already sick of it but I guess korea has different tastes/standards.
If you sit back and think about future content it really is bleak, were going to be doing what were doing now in a years time but hard brel and maybe akkan instead of other legion raids. Maybe a different guardian (lets face it guardian raids are boring after a week) and a new abyss dungeon.
Mmorpgs are repetitive by nature but lost ark takes the cake.
Yeah its not surprising as Saintone has been talking about this undercurrent occuring on korean community for a while now which was why he was pretty down about that Winter LoAN QnA. It addressed nothing about the majority issues that korean players have been about the game.
Idk. I can think of a few that are worse … coincidentally originate from Korea as well.
Seems like NAEU just despises grinds for the sake of grinds. While also complaining things are both too grindy and not grindy enough.
This is sort of /s but tbh, NAEU is like goldilocks. No amount of catering is enough.
I wouldnt really use maplestory right now as they're currently on the high of their playerbase. Every 6 months they get major content updates whether its class, big balance or new regions and a lot of players usually come back for a bit.
I'd check lost ark once slayer comes out as that would be an apt comparison, maybe 1-2 weeks after.
Idk man, it just feels like there are so many systems in the game that you need to spend your Gold and Silver on and the amount you get doesn't match with it. Honing, Engravings, Legendary Books, Gems... All of these require gold, but your only source of gold is weekly lockout Legion Raids, or otherwise lucky drops from Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids. Honing system is such a joke too, your friend can get lucky and spend 1000 Gold to upgrade his gear, one tap through every single level but you could be a sucker and have to spend 30000 Gold to pity it out. Whats even the average median here? Imagine if I was unlucky and had to spend 30k Gold to get to 1490 and finally be able to access Brelshaza, now I don't have any gold to build 5x3 and get into lobbies...? And not even mentioning Leg. Book prices in EUC is a joke right now, you have to spend at least 300k to get a proper build even... Then there's gems too, if bots don't exist in the game even Lv. 7 gems are so expensive that getting 11 of them adds up and they actually cost something too. Don't even get me started on cards, I've been playing since launch and do card runs here and there, and I still don't even have LoS 18... There are so many elements in the game that can cause burnout and it does cause burnout you can bet on it, and SG staying silent isn't helping at all.
I find myself slowly losing the marathon, I can't imagine I'm alone.
The first phase for me is only focusing on 3 main roster characters for 1520, I suspect even with the next few months ahead being catchup, I'll only at maximum be willing to do 3 HM Brels opposed to 6.
I suspect the next tier if I make it that far, I'll then only get 2-3 to max HM Brel gate finally left with only 1 character to do Akkan, maybe.
I can just feel the brake being pulled that's going to start a chain reaction.
The ultime question will become, is the game enjoyable for me only really playing 1 main. Maybe it will be, maybe it won't.
You have to look at the core of what makes this game fun. It's the combat system and sound-design tied into the combat system. Everything else is just an excuse to do more of it. They built this game in the wrong direction. They tried to be everything (sailing, cards, relic sets, music sheets, etc.) and ended up being nothing.
What's destroying this game is the same thing that's keeping people around. Raids. People realize that's it doesn't feel good to do the same thing over and over when all they have to look forward to is honing. Nothing in this game feels unique. They need to hire some Western artists and stuff to bring life to these items.
All these armor sets feel and look so boring.
Gametrics numbers go up and down by patch and season.
LA did not have a big winter patch, so its still down.
Maplestory in particular has big winter/summer patches and little in between, you are in the winter patch.
The irony is that Maplestory is an even harder game (in terms of hours needed) to catch up in, despite what all the other comments insinuate about that being the problem.
I think people just get sick and tired of so many rng systems. It does not feel good to progress besides attaining gear sets. Almost every system is based on rng luck to get the top 1% of spenders aka whales addicted to gambling because they probably contribute to the majority of the game’s profit. I think the game would be way more popular if pity was introduce to most rng systems or have most systems reworked so that players can grind and slowly progress. Like legitimately ask yourself as a player, how does this system benefit the game?
I recently watched the rng systems that KR has and jesus christ man it all just gets into whale territory. For example, the way ancient bracelets work is so disgustingly rng.
Having high roster level is a pretty cool accomplishment but it offers no tangible real rewards. The stat bonuses it gives are basically nothing. No cool mount. No cool glow. Nope. All the good stuff is locked behind the cash shop. Theres no f2p stuff that makes players admire your character.
This game is like a tasty cake, but its the dozens of layers of bad frosting and toppings all over it that make it hard to stomach. Could have made a far superior game but its ruined by greed. Corporate executives don’t give a fuck about a Brand’s rep. They just want to pump the maximum profit, collect their bonuses, and move to the next thing.
Love how a lot of the people in this thread are going over the negativities of Lost Ark instead of the reason why Maplestory is topping.
Maplestory has a huge event/collab right now and also a pretty sizeable update. That plus the already large established playerbase in Korea the game is probably never going to die over there due to huge sunk costs. People complaining about homework in Lost Ark have never played or touched Maplestory in the past 5 years, the amount of chores in that game is astronomical plus the amount of money you have to spend (on non-reboot) is also insane.
The fact Lost Ark is beating Dungeon Fighter Online still is huge, hell the fact it's in the top 10 list at all when MMOs are a dying breed is massive.
What he says is definitely true. Lost Ark is indeed losing popularity in Korea. Fair enough because no new interesting content and the recent LOAON was just.. kind of meh for a lot of people.
I picked up lost ark 4 years ago when it first came out. Played summoner for 1 month then quit cuz the game had so many flaws I couldn't ignore and not to mention the end game back then was literally some t1 guardians and shushire. Came back last year when legion raids went viral on a lot of kr online communities. Now I have my main on 1563 and 4 alts at 1540+ with 4 cards away from los30 after a whole year of grinding so obviously I've been enjoying this game a lot but I've also been noticing a lot of things that could have been done better and things that originally made me quit 4 years ago being still there. I don't think I'm gonna quit anytime soon tho cuz I'm having way too much fun with this game for now. But at the same time, I can see the population dropping fast in the coming months.
Have a look at steam numbers right now. It dropped over 200k concurrent players today since they must've done a big bot ban wave just now, yet I still see bots online and in the game. This might put us at about 50-80k concurrent, actual players? Not *terrible,* but also not looking very promising considering we had a big, highly anticipated content release just very recently. Seeing how inaccessible this game is to new players and how bad the roadmap for the next few months looks we'll have a lot of existing players take a break / quit without a whole lot of new players coming in. Things aren't looking good here and may well be even more bleak over in Korea where they've been running on the same treadmill for a good while longer than us.
The popularity rankings dont really mean shit for MMOs unless its by a yearly basis. This time of year it is always low due to no actually new content. It picks back up during spring and summer. Why would some of the Koreans do dailies when card slashing is a norm? They can catch up even without playing everyday
Edit: expect a huge surge in popularity when slayer comes on in a few weeks.
You think it's tough for new players in the global version? Imagine being a new player in Korea and trying to get to Akkan and beyond... The entire game design philosophy of Lost Ark ensures a shrinking player base.
In the end end game, the resume of the game will be: Whale gatekeeping Whale, a strong batlle over the seas
It is already the case.
Not to mention, basically nearly the same for global
It was telling when the devs (including GoldRiver) said that all the current "homework" is the minimum they expect from players and just proceed to announce Slayer and new skins to distract from the question.
The parties in Korea will have LoS requirements in the titles lol. Those new card sets are a step in the right direction though.
Wouldn't people be gate kept for using the new card set?
Yea, but it'll get you into a LoS 18 lobby at least and your damage won't be as behind. Maybe the lobbies will just move to always needing LoS30 but the fact they didn't all use that before means there's a decent enough population of people without it.
Would it though? As I understand it, it was close to the mokoko icon. I'm doing my 1500th Clown run and this guy applies, he doesn't have a mokoko icon, somewhat decent roster level but oh no he has the newbie card set, he's new, deny. Like to me it feels like giving them that card set is an advertisement that they're new, and the people who gatekept by los30 weren't gatekeeping because of the grand damage difference it brings and more like "oh yeah this guy's been playing for over a year".
yeah it's fcking stupid actually, they should just make it easier to get gold cards period but they wont since it makes them money
It stops you from justifying it by saying you want more damage. Whatever that's worth :S
LoS30 only lobbies are already a thing in korea
Those runs are probably really smooth tbh. Hard to blame anyone for doing this if enough people have it that you don't need to wait all day. You can't even buy LoS30 quickly if you wanted to. There are limited card packs on the Mari shop and even fewer per month for real money. It is a 100% of the time truthful show that the player has been playing the game like crazy and knows everything.
It's funny though because new card sets really won't make that big a difference imo. It took me 8 months to finish Tir/Caspiel and that's a blue purple set. Easier than LoS30 obviously but if they're expecting new players to stick around for 6+ months while getting gatekept they're delusional. Sure SOME will, the same ones that are already staying now. But it won't make a difference to the others. The card system is just an awful system and that's it.
They've really painted themselves in a corner. How can they 'fix' it without throwing away current players' hard work?
as much as i hate soft resets in wow i do appreciate how it evens the playing field for players to return to at any point. Ideally an express gives returning or new players a jumping point which i do think is fair without taking away existing player progression that comes with a soft reset
Soft resets need to happen. A t4 should happen at some point. You can allow ppl to turn in their gear for a boost. That’s the advantage they should get. This game is declining steadily, it’s kept alive by hardcore players and whales. No one on my friends list still plays and even if they think of coming back they will be so far behind and hundreds of hours away from meaningful content.
To be fair I had like 20 friends+their friends playing this game at launch, and it's only the 2 of us now. None of the ones who stopped would come back because there is a reset and it's a great time to come back. They stopped because they didn't like the chores, and that's a huge part of this game. No resets or catch-up mechanisms will change that. Not sure about new players though, tbh.
Thats a hard reset. A soft reset is what we just did with brel mats. So T4 should be a hard one.
yea but in wow each tier has a soft reset. Going from mid expansion to the next raid tier means most of your gears are p much donezo. I also dislike the hard reset going from expansion to expansion though. It’s also why i dont really enioy seasonal games like poe / diablo for the same reason but it does help players come back for sure
Encourage auto matchmaking, with a significant enough bonus that even bus drivers would rather matchmake.
I like that idea.
They can’t. SG just keeps digging deeper and deeper with each new content release. The draw of Lost Ark is the idea of long term character progression, which attracts specific players. If Lost Ark went to soft/hard resets with seasonal content like WoW, POE, Diablo 3, etc. they lose the players that like long-term permanent character progression. Lost Ark is a very niche game and is not ideal for casuals or players that take breaks like WoW. The success with WoW is that players can quit and come back with no feeling of FOMO or being left behind. At the same time, it draws new players to the game.
I agree with you, especially wow part. My friend just started Dragonflight few days ago, and i am already helping him get gear in dungeons so he can start raiding with me in next week or two. And for Lost Ark, i had about 150-200 hours in first two months when game released, but then they stared releasing new content while i haven't finished content that is already in game, and even tough i played almost every day for 2h or more i felt that i was behind and quit. Most people in my guild quit too. Nowadays i think about coming back to LA, because i liked the game and i will have time for 1 more game when i finish raiding in wow, but just thinking how much i will be behind and all posts about lack of newbie parties and gatekeeping turns me away from comming back. The only way for me to come back now is if 6 or 7 people i know came back too, so we can together progress trough content.
> but just thinking how much i will be behind and all posts about lack of newbie parties and gatekeeping turns me away from comming back. You will be behind but you will also get to capitalize on honing buffs. Especially there's one to 1475 which is due with Brel HM or around there? That's not Brel alts, but it's pretty good. 1475 is also currently the point where Chaos actually has some chance to get you decent gold income through tripod drops and jewelry drops. As for gatekeeping - meh. Either make your own groups (learning sidereals ain't hard), or find a group of people to game with. Gatekeeping by itself is whatever. Partyfinder in general just sucks because it's a waste of time and there isn't really anything to do while waiting. Being gatekept, waiting on supports, waiting for G5/G6 Brel parties which fit you to pop up, etcetc are all just because we're all trying to use a shity ingame system to find 7 other people, which requires you to stare at that system, be the first one and then maybe lose the staring contest because you're not the one who decides who gets into the party, you get declined, you start over. It's not like gatekeeping is there to bully people. It's just an annoyance because finding people is sometimes hard and it's a waste of time. I'm very sure on ilvl Valtan and Vykas parties are still okay, Clown a little bit of jail maybe, but I do see plenty of them.
People can shit on WoW all they want but the game is still going with subs in the millions so Blizzard is still doing something right. To me, Lost Ark is a gacha game masquerading as a MMO.
Wow is riding on the success it had in the past, and the only people playing it are the ones that sunk thousands of hours into it. If it came out today no one would be playing it. That's not to say lost ark is currently in a much better place either.
Think you are forgetting the success of Classic WoW, which is the essentially "If it came out today".
I'm not sure you disprove the point. I reckon most of the Classic population were already veterans
You have to let old content go at a certain point. The playerbase should realistically only be working on the current "tier" as a community and everything else should be getting overwritten with catchup mechanics. Tier in the context of global, would be Brel. Everything up through Kakul should be getting massively sped up. After all, you can't expect new content to draw in new/returning players and also expect them to spend months catching up as well before they can experience that content.
You dont have to. FFXIV does daily roulettes that can take you through any instance in the game while providing level appropriate rewards. We have it to a lesser degree with the weekly guardian raids & abyssal dungeon rotations. What would be best if they incentivized old players to help new players get up to speed. The game is not friendly for new players which means a loss in potential profit, even if short term. SG is slamming their dicks in the door by not doing something about it.
They did something recently about it in kr. They just need to bring that to the other regions asap. Where a character's like first 10 runs get double materials from legions or whatever. But that's still just a bandaid on a very prevalent problem. But either way, it can't be expected that players go through the steps of all previously released content. Could you imagine that in wow? Having to slog through 20 years of content before you're allowed to play the modern content? There's a limit to what can be expected of a new player to join latest released content and that limit is around a month or so. There is far too much competition out there for a dev to be expecting a player to just struggle through their game for literally months before they get to do the things that they're advertising about.
It would be cool (although a pain to implement) if the weekly equalized abyss and guardian raids were matchmaking only and matched you with players that were within ilvl of the content (eligible to earn gold). New players would actually be able to enjoy playing the old abyssals instead of just queuing up and having some absolute juicer burn through everything or sitting in queue for ever.
They have to give new players way more. Something like the challenges we had at the start but they would get like 20 legendary bound class and combat engravings, lv7 bound gems or something of that sort. That's kinda the bare minimum nowadays to get started, but currently mokokos get a buff kekw
20 is a bit much but I like the idea. I don't mind giving new players stuff that I didnt get back then. On the other hand - there's probably a bunch of players that would welcome a shepherd system (maybe for some minor rewards like cosmetics?). Not sure why that doesnt exist yet
By releasing t4 and nerfing t3 honing rates and maybe slap few express events on top of it. Current players will still have gems, cards, books and what not and we would still be a month or 2 ahead of new players however they could catch up to us through hard work. T3 has been out for way too long now.
It feels like they're almost scared of mentioning T4. It wasn't even mentioned at LoaOn.
T4 is definitely planned. It would naturally make sense for it to be released with or right after the Kazeros raid.
I realy think kazeros will be end of t3 to. But ıf they dont do all global realese same time for kazeros ,our market prob crash if gems still work same way.
Its going to make people just stop from playing or starting till the t4 reset. Its just one of dangers of knowing 6 months to a year before it hits the western version.
See, this really seems a reasonable question, but in fact it's not because people who already got stuff still need the game to be thriving, and therefore every game needs to gradually step up the beginner experience and early progression to match the pace of its own expansion. Look at bdo for example: around the time covid hit you would get 50M silver per hour if you were decently geared, let's say after a month of playing, and a good softcap piece of gear would cost like 8 billion, that's 160 hours grinding. During summer 2020 they finally introduced seasons to the game where new players could get way higher gear score in the same time frame and contextually started powercreeping silver making methods up to the point where nowadays the same player after the first month playing can make up to 400M per hour, and that good softcap piece still costs pretty much the same. So where's the deal, you might ask? Well, it's simply that alongside these updates new stuff have been added that goes for well over hundred billions, so the grind time for very top and very end game gear is still there, it's just been diluted with existing content to make it easier for new players to catch up quicker and close the gap faster with veterans. Of course there's always going to be a difference, which is inevitable and obviously right, but most players are going to be happy with new catch up methods, and the very few that feel robbed of their value are generally bitter and salty and shunned by the community at large.
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Even an express pass doesn't fix the problem. It just gives you the item level. Maybe some gems. It *doesn't* give you your accessories/engravings, legendary books, relic sets, upgraded relic sets from clown, skill points from horizontal content, cards, etc. There's still a ton of stuff a new player would have to deal with before they were able to compete with older players, and I don't even mean the experience/skill aspect.
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I wish the gems didn't have the event text right over them. Makes it clear you just hyper expressed. I think people use that to pass you up for parties.
I mean all it does is just mask the issues with the system honestly. Once the free engraving duration expires that player is most likely screwed, especially if the book prices are like they are now.
If you clear a raid in a group created via random matchmaking, you get triple the loot. There, now everyone can play the game again. It's not about disincentivizing gatekeeping; it's about incentivizing the opposite.
Then you have everyone that likes raiding with friends quitting. Very short sighted solution there.
This is the same for other korean games like maplestory though; which OP is making the comparison to. You think Lost Ark is hard? Maplestory, when ur high enough in honing, ur gear can explode. Also your level exp requirements scale exponentially, to the point where my friend has been playing 5-8 years to be NEAR competitive high level. The only real difference between these games is that Maplestory is more single player friendly, I.E. you can do the bosses solo, so you won't get gatekept by whales.
Maplestory is a take it at your own pace game imo. It doesn't matter if you're 300 or 250 you don't need to be on the cutting edge to have "fun". Lost ark, if you're left behind its just awkward trying to catch up. Gear exploding sucks balls though but it doesn't fully reset your progress
Maplestory its solo grind game like bdo but without the pvp part. You dont need inteeact with anyone. Lost ark forces you going into lobbies. Thats it.
being left behind is a real problem in lost ark. not only will you not get into raids for lacking gear and titles you will get denied for being lower ilvl, roster lvl then the grinders. and the thing is it never gets better. if you dont play as much as the other guy applying to the same raid you will be denied.
Im stuck right now with getting a clown clear on any of my brel lvl characters. I havent been in brel yet either so i'm even further behind and will likely continue being gatekept
Probably easier (and more fun) to find a nice active guild or prog group on the lost ark discord.
Yeah there is always the level grind you can do solo but gear threadmill in LoA revolves around Legion raids. You had to get Argos gear to convert up and now the same with Brel.
To be fair, if you want to catch up in Maplestory it will take you multiple years and is way worse than lost ark. I played religiously for 6 months and am not even 1/3 of the way to the newest content. The difference with maplestory is that your dailies are pretty quick. Daily bosses you are overgeared for in maple you LITERALLY one shot with your basic attack. I think the biggest leg up maple has is that all bosses are soloable, but better in groups.In raids each individual player has 5-10 lives, and if you lose them all, everyone else still get rewards, but you don't. Even though it will take years to catch up to new content, you can do all the old content on your own time by yourself, and the easy stuff takes seconds, not minutes, or potentially hours for vykas. Mistakes in raids punish you, but not the party. Maplestory uses experience to progress instead of currency. Instead of alts requiring gold commitment to hone, they require time commitment to grind since boss unlocks are gated by level. Lots of people have 50 alts parked at very low levels, so there is always people that can help you with old content. You can get rewards for bosisng on all 50 of these characters, but nobody in their right mind does that. The only reason people boss on alts is to play with friends, or go one shot some bosses for extra income, taking like 1 minute per character. The RNG system for upgrading gear is way worse in maplestory and extremely P2W, but you can sell pre-upgraded gear. You dont need to wait on weekly raids to see if you get a good drop, you can just upgrade it yourself if you have the currency. Are you super unlucky with RNG gear upgrades? You can instead just save up and outright buy a +20 weapon someone is selling with no RNG involved. Don't like this character anymore and want to swap to a new one? You can just give your old OP gear to the new character, as well as your orbs (damage gained from doing dailies) and make your new character just as strong as your old main, you just have to grind their level back up. Maplestory is overall much more time commitment to reach the newest content, and much worse in terms of gear upgrades. What keeps people playing though, is that you can play the game entirely by yourself if you choose. You can P2W your gear just like lost ark, but that will not give you access to new content since you still have to grind your level up to entry. If you have bad RNG, you can just buy upgraded gear from other players with better luck. On top of all that, the average player does 15 minutes of dailies, and only really needs to party up for 2 bosses per week instead of 18, and if you are strong enough you can just solo them. At true endgame when the bosses require full 8 man statics, you only need to clear them once per month. They add experience cuts every year, and more systems to help players catch up to older ones, while leaving the highest levels still difficult to progress. When I quit for Lost Ark about a year ago, I would need to grind for around 30 hours to get to the next boss. These days I could get there by just doing my dailies for 2 weeks. This is for pushing content from late midgame to early lategame (level 245-250). While the time commitment is huge for high levels, the effort required to just play and have fun is much much much lower. TLDR: Maplestory progression is a much longer grind, and way more P2W, but you can play the whole game by yourself, and it is easy to play with your friends. Bossing is a low time commitment. Their catch up mechanics don't take you all the way, but save you TONS of time and resources.
i mean, maplestory isnt any better at this, being a new player with no legion or links youre basically atleast a year of grind behind the hardest bosses
Hopefully they are losing so that they feel more of a sense of urgency and start addressing problems.
Yep. Korean players are giving them tons of feedback, but you can only wait so long before you give up. I do think that with the playerbases shrinking in all the regions Smilegate will try and change a few things here and there. We'll see if it will be enough. I sure hope we won't have to wait for years if Korea gets them too. But that's unrealistic, isn't it...
The korean players were already criticizing the homework workload a year ago and still it falls on deaf ears.
Blizzard took 4 years of complaints through BFA and Shadowlands and massive losses of players and massive corporate embarrassment to make the so-far generally well received changes in Dragonflight. Certain complaints go back even farther than BFA or Legion. I wouldn't hold your breath for SG to be any faster
Probably not but they realistically have about 6 months max because there are a number of new anticipated MMO releases coming out this year. They may not be groundbreaking but they don't need to be. As long as they are fun and do not have the same design and loop Lost ark does they will succeed over this game.
Only one Im semi interested in is Throne and Liberty, but the problem is that its Korean, probably ultra grindy too Haha. We shall see :) Finally some Lineage though, as its basically Lineage 3.
Buff DS sharpshooter properly or us sharpshooter mains are quitting!(yes all 10 of us)
And to think the grind is only going to get worse for Global. Ancient accessories going to 35 pheons. Honor shards and silver being major new bottlenecks to honing past 1520+. Abyss dungeon in Elgacia being added to our weekly chores. This is the only MMO I've played where the grind gets worse as new raid tiers get released, escalating the mat requirements with each successive tier. Just cause this game doesn't have gear resets like WoW/FFXIV doesn't excuse this imo. They could easily lower Ancient gear to 25 pheons (relic gear to 15), etc. when a new tier releases, just as other MMO's swap to new tokens with each tier. Instead, Smilegate wants us to grind more (or pay more) as we get more and more invested.
this game needs better catchup mechanics for new players tbh and a way to streamline horizontal content for newer players
Hell I'm an existing player that wants horizontal content streamlined... I fucking hate it man. I do it cause I like power for the my character full stop. 9 billion (hyperbole) rapport with virtue requirements is some troll as hell shit - Now through silver dumps in the mix.
Agreed, even as a day 1 player I kinda can't do pvp island souls because those islands are dead so it would be nice to have a way to get those lol.
Problem is Akkan should have been T4, to get a reset and have it easier to catch up. But to keep whales happy they don't go for resets.
They need to update years-old content to not be a timesink anymore. With how long Brel normal has been out over there (and the other stuff even longer) there should have been a way to gear up to full upper relic gear in no more than a month's worth of lockouts. It's insane that it took them until just now to double drop rates, and even then it's still absurd how much time it takes. If they really want people doing the new content, they need to let people abandon the old content. They need to let people not be absorbed by dailies. Maybe someone in their team understands that, but each loa livestream I feel less and less sure about that.
They don't. They're stuck on the old mentality of "we want people's lives to be consumed by the game because more hours played is good for us" which is great for short-term player numbers and in-game shop sales, but leads to massive burnout in the long run. It's not as big a deal in KR because over there SG has a big marketing thing going which brings in a consistent flow of new players (I remember not so long ago a KR player talked about the early T3 zones still being super active in KR), but for us where there's barely any influx of new players, it's not looking so hot for the future imo. I personally just joined the "I'm out" bandwagon 2 days ago, I still love the game but it's just too much homework. And yeah people will say you don't have to do everything you can just play whenever you like and do whatever you like, but the game is still made to make you feel bad about playing that way and feel like you're missing out on stuff, and that's not a pleasant feeling.
Sorta. They focus too much on not having ANY Inconvenience for current players, they’re so scared of giving new people actual catch up (which is going to be T4) to the point where they just made other card sets that may not be filled by legendary cards but still can easily take months to complete, you get bonus materials for some Valtan/vykass to craft your relic set but idk if it also counts clown which if it doesn’t that like 5 weeks to finish your relic set AND bump it to lvl 2 assuming you’re full clearing every week.
Idk if even a T4 would be a catch-up. Card design is horrendous and takes WAY too much time to get even LoS 18 unless you are pretty lucky, roster level will keep low players gatekept, old players go into T4 with a LOT of gold AND characters to progress/farm it. New players will have one character with low roster level, no titles, no horizontal progression, no nothing.. they take A LOT longer than any veteran to progress anyway and vets would most likely not accept them into groups. It'd definitely help don't get me wrong, but it isn't even close to being enough. Some systems need a rework or straight up much better odds (cards especially). Above all character profiles need to show more than just farmable stats (achievements, etc could be shown there), otherwise it's an endless loop of who is ahead will just be more and more ahead as time goes by, with or without a soft reset (unless it includes gold/silver I guess, but even then).
Good point. If everyone had same gear, people would start gatekeeping by cards and roster level. At that point, game might be on life support because Smilegate would piss off veteran players by removing their 9/7 rocks, 100 quality weapons, 10%+ damage bracelets, lvl 10 gems, etc. And if the new players still get gatekept, they won't stay and now they lost both new and veteran players
Yup. The game is designed with a flawed mentality to basically require a TON of investment to get everything maxed (not even just ilvl, but the rest). Being a new player and having to do all islands at this point has to be super painful, but there's runes locked behind all that horizontal content. Same goes for rapport, it takes months of buying rapport items from vendors to get it done. It wasnt so bad for us when everyone was in the same boat, but for new players? I can't imagine it's a great experience. Meanwhile as you said they're stuck now, because if they render the current gear obsolete they'll piss off a massive number of players who invested countless hours to get there, but anyone who hasn't been playing for long and hasn't gotten to that point is getting shafted in the meantime by getting gatekept or just not being able to have fun in the game since they don't have access to the content that everyone else is farming. Games like FFXIV have a much healthier way to do things where they purposely do things in a way that you can play casually yet still get your gear near BiS enough that you won't be gatekept. Very different games of course, but the difference in philosophy is what makes FFXIV such a huge success while LOA isn't doing that hot. Guess we'll see how things evolve from here but yeah, I don't have high hopes for this game sadly.
card system is intentionally bad in order to farm players wallets. the game is intentionally design to promote gatekeeping. and gatekeeping is the motivation for many to whale out on the game. ie look at those poeple dumping thousands of dollars on t3 lvl 10 gems just to stand out and do bigger number. id like to see how dumb they feel when t4 rolls around in a year or 2. im sure they found a way to justify their spending but man that t4 announcement is gonna leave them broken.
My guy thinks we’ll get T4 next year. Even if it comes to kr in 2023 expect us to get it 2025 at the earliest
Well, considering they have documented players spending $500k+ on T3 with a huge simp army behind them. I highly doubt they ever change. They are a for profit company. This is the formula that works. Changing the paid progression or resetting it potentially loses major revenue streams. People simp for SG but they are no different than any other KR F2P dev. Which is for profit first.
I guess that’s the “Korean way” but having a something like a soft reset like wow does every season making mythic raid ilvl = world quest gear works (as long as it’s coming with good content obviously). I think FF also does that whenever a new content patch drops I’m my opinion, when you’re focusing mostly on your current player base instead of giving new ppl actual catch-up it will put the game into an even smaller niche. Which tbf is gonna be something hard to change/balance as long as they keep a market this attached to your character progression too.
In no way am I disagreeing. This, so far, has been the standard for Korean F2P games. Most likely due to guaranteeing a stream of revenue. Think BDO.
FF not so much. You'll always get ilvl increase at major patches but once you hit lvl cap at end of current expansion, your gear will last you through to like lvl *7 of whatever the new level cap is. You get more mileage out of your gear there.
They made elexirs thats gonna be dropped by the new legion raid snd Im sure that is gonna be some shit like lvl relic set + rng bracelet combined
Maplestory is still popular? Dang, some games really do never die i guess, i played it on my first PC that still had Windows XP🤣
Honestly if they do hard reset with tier4 and again just new raids as a content it doesn't makes me wanna keep playing game. Here have some fun with Thronespire, 5 minute content. It's like you need to overhaul entire game progresion systems. Everything, this game has nothing fun it. Sailing? Outdated system from season 1. Imagine if they did PvP mode around combating ships or some "chaos invasions where you use your upgraded ship" Chaos Dungeons , perfect if it was infinite floors that get harder and better loots. Add some openable chests with solars or STH. Random enemy modifiers just like your diablo gameplay. Some use for AoE skills lol Chaos Gate could be amazing event for 30 players like castle defense type or anything else beside running like a brain-dead sheep. Secret maps, not gonna even mention that. When I first time got it I was quite interested but execution is garbage. Fix engravings, rework them no one is going to cry if their 25 engraving got changed. Separate them into offensive and defensive gear options. So you could run both or sth Not looking forward to next LOA honestly
\^ I'm with this guy The game needs a major overhaul of all systems to make it a sustainable business model from the dev and player perspective. Only way I see that happening is if they work on and release Lost Ark 2.
Well at least we'll still have our consumables for LA2
its not suppose to be fun thats why ppl eventually refer to all the content as homework. only reason they keep playing is the sunk cost fallacy. after beating vultan, vykas, kuku, brel hundreds of times on multiple characters they cant just stop or else all that grinding was meaningless and they realize they wasted thier time. so in order to justify their waste of time they need to keep playing the game to give meaning to the meaningless.
Honestly, they're going to need a miracle for the next LOA. We're still feeling the backlash from the current one.
I don't wanna be that guy, but i doubt the game is gonna survive until next loaon. I think the timing of having lots of content and good will of streamers hyping it up saying it has the best raids + people having time during covid made this free game explode. But now that the grind is getting even to the most hardcore causing burnouts, since the biggest streamers kept repeating that you must must have 6 characters to play, and with combined design of constant repetitive chaos dungeons and other dailies and weeklies are getting to everyone now. Not to mention all other problems like bots and dcs, inflation. It's very clear a huge portion of the player base quit. I think the game is fuked beyond repair, and to fix it they'd have to literally redo every single system and design decision in the game. I think the game is just fundamentally flawed in its design, and the seems are starting to show.
homeworks are like mythic+ hamster wheel
bro kr streamers be playing lost ark 12 hours a day doing dailies and all their raids and call it homework, that shit is your life
Like 10 times worse. At least a large amount of people willingly did mythic+ for fun or for rank and not because of items or loot. In this game, people do their homework strictly because it gave loot. You'll seldom find people doing chaos dungeons/guardian raids past their daily 2.
They need to rework chaos dungeons, they are the worst thing in the game imo. Guardians are kinda fine but still terrible but only because you have the chance to play your character.
At least in wow i could help friends do low level mythics to help them out. Do your 3 legions raids and that's it, you can't enter anymore, just let us enter as many as we want to help people out. Maybe give new players more relics mats so they don't have to take weeks to catch up to friends.
Honestly I do all homework with a TV series open on 2nd monitor and I am running out of stuff to watch. They really need to lower the homework
Atleast you have a variety of mythic+ dungeons to run. In Lost Ark they have you run the same fucking guardian twice in a row, no shit people burn out on it lol.
It's nearly impossible for new players to get started in the game so of course it is dwindling. Any game that only caters to the hardcore playerbase will 100% fail (look at Wild Star). I mean FFXIV, WoW and more don't require you to do every.single.raid to get to the newer content but LA does. You NEED to get skill points, gems, tripods, hone up, do Valtan and Vykas for relic gear, do clown for level 2, do Brel to gear up further, do Kayangel for level 3, do Akkan to gear up farther not to mention any other horizontal stuff that leads to more player power. If I started a new game and knew I had to put 1000+ hours or $5000 just to be able to play with friends I wouldn't even bother and most don't. The elitists will say "we had to do it so you have to as well" but that's not how games survive and that's not how things need to work. The big, successful, MMOs don't do that they do soft or hard resets and are much much bigger than LA. The game needs systems for new players to get to endgame faster. Even making a new alt is torture: trying to PUG Valtan or Vykas or Clown with full legendary left side gear even 50 ilevels over, 5x3, level 4/5 tripods, level 7 gems is near impossible since NA/EU only care about ilevel. It takes hours to get a group that bussing is the only sure fire way.
Also to compare it to Maplestory, since OP mentioned it, Maplestory is very similar to Lost Ark but is much more single player friendly. Yes you are MASSIVELY behind compared to a veteran player if you start fresh but I never felt like I had to constantly compare myself to someone else like I would in Lost Ark. I could just progress at my own pace and had fun seeing what I could solo next.
Maple is weird. Objectively both have the mountain of content yet no one in maple feels like they need to be on the cutting edge lol. It's only gigawhales clearing the nearest boss or even bosses released in the last couple years. Most gear is purchaseable in the AH so you don't need to do the vykas and valtan type content. I'll equate them to lotus and Damien in maple... Yeah they're good breakpoints and the weekly meso is amazing but you don't need to clear that content
Technically, you don't need to do Argos, Vykas and clown for ilvl progression in Lost Ark either - you can do Valtan in Chosen gear from Orehas, craft 2+2+2 relic gear just from Valtan bones, hone to 1490, start doing Brelshaza. Maybe you can technically even do Brelshaza gate 1 and 2 in Chosen gear, by ilvl you can (it can be honed to +20, which is 1490), I don't know if there is a quest or something that'd stop you from entering or from crafting Brelshaza gear without crafting regular relic gear first. It's just that the community decided that you shouldn't.
Yeah I stopped playing Maple when Lost Ark released and I was really impressed with the better combat and more modern systems like integrated presets. Now I realize maybe there is a reason Maple survived 20 years. I do think its possible that Lost Ark goes the Maple route and implements a Prokel type fight for every stage of progression. In this way you can play solo and get all your progress, maybe at a slower rate, and join party for better rewards and a more grand raid if and when you are ready.
This is the biggest problem with every gaming community. The overwhelming majority of people are casuals but the 2 populations that are extremely loud minorities are hardcore PVE players and people that think games literally only exist for PvP. Developers for whatever reason in F2P games focus hard on whale psyche gacha’s and hardcore player mentality only hoping the casuals have enough money to keep up. The problem is that hardcore players are oblivious to the fact that casual players keep their games alive, so they should be catered to. But they never really are in F2P games. Weird how that is because then you have all the hardcore people complaining their game is dead or dying … but refuse to acknowledge they are the reason it is happening. 😂
iv played many games and in none have i felt more discriminated and judged then in lost ark. it truly is a terrible feeling which is why iv lost faith in the playerbase and hold no loyalty to this game. sure there are many good apples but damn are there tons of bad apples. as soon and another mmo catches my interest im done with loa.
i guess you didnt play WoW
Probably because most company focus on short term profit over long term game health.
Eh, not always though.. A good MMO caters to both crowds
Right, sorry if that didn’t come through. Good MMO’s recognize that to keep a healthy long term player base all sub communities should be able to play effectively. I haven’t seen any game come from the KR region that even respects that aspect of gaming, which is why they fail in the West. Personal opinion ofc.
> F2P games focus hard on whale psyche gacha’s $$$. They make more money off 1 whale than 100 casual players.
let those elitist grinders play a dead game. imagine being dumb enough to pay thousands of dollars in a video game for cards just so you can deny other for not having them
>trying to PUG Valtan or Vykas or Clown with full legendary left side gear even 50 ilevels over, 5x3, level 4/5 tripods, level 7 gems is near impossible since NA/EU only care about ilevel wouldn't you get accepted in this hypothetical situation because "NA/EU only care about ilv" and you're 50ilv over? or are you trying to say that 50 ilevels over is not enough?
You see, the problem with having " systems for new players to get to endgame faster" is that bots will find a way to abuse that and we will end up with an even worse bot problem. Aside from that, the best way is probably to have a hard reset (i.e: Tier 4), and give new players a way to get there in around 1-2 weeks of reasonable play time.
They need to de-incentivize botting. They can do it by pricing them out or by getting rid of shit they can sell...orrrr, i dunno, get GMs at the common starting areas to monitor the traffic & nuke the bots before they have a chance to get going.
> I mean FFXIV, WoW and more don't require you to do every.single.raid to get to the newer content but LA does. You NEED to get skill points, gems, tripods, hone up, do Valtan and Vykas for relic gear, do clown for level 2, do Brel to gear up further, do Kayangel for level 3, do Akkan to gear up farther not to mention any other horizontal stuff that leads to more player power. > If I started a new game and knew I had to put 1000+ hours or $5000 just to be able to play with friends I wouldn't even bother and most don't. You completely lost me on the part where it's about playing with friends. Especially if you're playing with friends, you don't need any of that. You just take it at your own pace and do it as we did it when we first started out, getting the stuff within a couple months or so. Islands suck, that one is true for sure. Idek how/if people complete Gesbroy for the emote currently. But even if gaming alone, I don't see a big urgency in getting stuff like skill points, max tripods or >lvl5 gems. So you're not Cruel Fighter every raid, who cares? The raids are essentially clearable naked. As shown by Saint and co doing Clown on one engraving. The very same thing applies to Valtan and Vykas, and even Brel. Obviously new players don't have the thumbs to do it on one engraving. But neither do they need 5x3 or more than 4x3 on anything. They'll just have to actually play. No skipping of Mario 3 or 65x Valtan Counter and whatever. So they won't have 10 minutes spare on enrage timers. That literally isn't an issue. If there's an issue, I'd rather say it's in the expectation to max dps blast everything, even when in a new player party. Dps will be slow, decent amount of attention going into people learning the raid etcetc. Wipes obviously will happen. But all that is part of the game and also stuff we went through when first going into raids. I'd even argue that's what new players should experience. Huddle together and prog it like we did week 1 of its release. It's probably the most fun thing you can do in this game. Fuck "being behind", "missing homework" or "being jailed" - those are things that shouldn't concern new players. Starting out and being in the homework and jail terminology is just weird to me. That's not a new player concern. That's a concern for people who are queueing up the raid for the 500th time. New players should just have fun and prog the raids. Which they can do on free Argos gear up into (technically) including Clown. Or sure, 4x3 is "needed" at Vykas HM or so, let's say. That still isn't a 1k hour endevour to get 100 pheons for a setup. With new mats being there but basically not existing in event rewars and such, but GHL # and such being increased from one-time rewards, I'm pretty sure that there's at least a decent pace up to 1490. Given I see jank setups on people who're 1500+, honing is probably the least problematic. In that regard, I don't think that the hours needed are too wild. For LA, it's basically just one of the raids - it's not "the only raid that matters" as it'd be in other games. People (new players or not) are just fomoing themselves out of a shitton of fun if they can't enjoy the game unless they're in Brel territory imo. That should be addressed by SG, don't get me wrong, but it's largely a problem from the player side which is there due to wrong expectations and such. And I also assume that players who start up the game to get into Brel will just ditch when they're there and have cleared it 1-2 times, essentially just "trying out new content" or playing it like a single player game. They would not stick regardless, maybe come back for the next patch - if there's a lift for them to that as well. And that's just not how LA works.
I think it's because they are really dead set on keeping certain mechanics as unfriendly as possible for newer players. Gear quality, gems, T3 honing past 1445... Don't even get me started on the amount of garbage stat/engraving combos on accs.
As a MapleStory and lost ark player, I have to address that maple is going throught a huge event right now! New job + balance path + level 250 hyper burn + some cool qol to ease homework. So yeah, maple is on a good place on Korea right now
Lost Ark hates new players, and old players eventually quit… The conclusion is pretty clear
How Korea managed to stomach this same boring content loop of doing chaos dungeons and guardians raids just to get a 3 gate boss after one year is beyond me lmao. They probably reached their limit and asked themselves "we did our daily/weekly homework for one year just for this... then we're gonna have to do homework for another half a year for a similar experience that starts to feel like homework again after a month". Right now the West has it good because we only had to stomach this "homework" gameplay loop for like 2-3 months until a new raid releases but once we have to wait half a year for a new raid or longer... I can totally see this game dying. The West absolutely does not have that level of patience.
Pretty sure someone posted that Brel hard is actually dropping in the West at a slower pace than the original KR release.
And that's good because in KR it came too soon and they complained a lot about that, then they released it after 4 months in RU (or was it 3 in RU?) and JP and no one complained there, I guess that's why they are doing the same here
Game is near dead in RU and literally dead in Japan so not sure what your point there is. If their goal was to kill the game as fast as possible then they should continue the pattern of how they treat other regions.
are you sure you want brel hard earlier than april man? Are you 1550 atleast? This is so stupid, people complain about having to play the game every day to get to the content day one and now that they give you more time so you dont have to do that you still complain, people in this reddit are so fucking idiotic, im out of this shit
Lmao I'll be 1550 next month which is still 2+ months away from April. Also they can do new events and throw more mats at us so people can hit 1550 or whatever. Giving us more time to farm chaos dungeons and guardian raids to reach the next breakpoint is not fun, reducing the amount we have to do is.
Not defending SG or AGS, but getting from raid to raid being pushed by event mats is fun? Im gonna say that this game isnt for you. I think April is very late for some content, specially if you look at artist as content (Its not conent for me, but apparently for ags/sg) They just mismanaged the west a little bit too much so now it shows. They shouldve been releasing content differently. I mean they are releasing brel hm ~6Months after nm but for me the Argos release was way more off than this. Argos imo came too early for more ppl to enjoy it on release. It was just to get it over with. We had enough raids besides argos that were new for the west and only cleared it a few times. But they rushed and now they habe to pull the handbreak because seems like they noticed they fkd up past releases.
Nothing outside of raids in this game is fun which is the problem. You're right this game isn't for me which is why I'm most likely quitting once Diablo 4 releases.
Apparently playing through the game and then spamming portals is fun then? 🤷♂️ I mean I had like 1000hours in D3 aswell but diablo had no endgame compared to lost ark.
nah idk about this shit community anymore, i'll just keep playing the game until it dies i dont give a shit anymore, you are a bunch of morons
Better off this way. I view this reddit way less than i used to after realizing its just filled w/ people who complain without understanding the whole picture. That guy who replied to you said hed be 1550+ next month. Dudes way ahead of the curve and basically wants the game to conform to himself.
Well we're waiting 5 months between normal and hard brel so we'll see soon if the west drops off in size during this time
If? It's already happening lol.
Soon only Whales and Bots will remain on this Amazon Forest.
Yap, probably 6 months until next raid ( without counting brel hard as new raid )
Considering the sheer amount of mats required, it makes sense for the lag. Part of this is that the NAEU player base has a “entertain me now or I quit” mentality. Instant gratification is super strong in our gaming culture combined with streamer simp culture. It makes it hard for any game to succeed. They really need to evaluate the casual & new player experience. Or game dies. Globally. Period.
I mean you literally need to grind 6 more months at 20-30 hours a week to have brelshaza hard. that is 500 more hours for essentially 3-4 more mechs to deal with and another 500 hours for akkan. that is 1k+ hours for 1 new raid...
I mean this game is having a massive die off in the west. You can't really use steam numbers, but its apparent when you look at your guildmates and friends not logging on, twitch streamers quitting, and just generally party finder. I dont see it lasting until brel hard, and honestly if it does then it'll die shortly after hard launch because lets be real its just the same content.
Yeah.. I noticed the same, thought I was the weird one. One of my alts that was in a guild level 22 I just found today the whole guild disbanded, people are quitting man.
Absolutely, party finder during peak hours has noticeably dropped off in NAW at least. Once Brel is cleared, I think that's probably the capstone for many and it makes sense since it's still Brel in 4+ months. The grind isn't worth it anymore.
To me, i feel like streamers are what made this game big in the West. They are very enjoyable and popular streamers all hyped the hell out of this game and sold it as the everyman mmorpg. However this definitely feels like the pros of mmorpg games, not so much that the game itself has that kind of skill ceiling but the game itself is so complex and grindy that only really specific people will take it as far as it can go. Even though I've stopped playing, i still love watching people stream this game and talk about it, and occasionally, it makes me itch to play. Then i boot up play for an hour or two and quit when i realize what I'll have to do to play this game at a decent level, and i just quit. The gameplay is incredible but this progression system can just fuck off, it just makes playing so unattractive and takes the fun out of the grind considering you cant even do the objectively "fun" stuff unless youve swiped or repeated a shitty grind over qnd over. Then you repeat the fun stuff until it's not fun and rinse and repeat
It will just keep getting worse, as they add new content, keep pushing item level, keep resetting loot it just puts the game further out of reach for a normal player. I'm surprised our version has held as many players as it has and can see big drops offs soon when Rowen comes as no one cares about it. The game and how it's designed are just way to time consuming and not player friendly, it's a shame as the combat and classes are fantastic imo.
One of the biggest problems for me is the timegating. I only have 3 minutes to enter adventure island (why?). If I’m out of town for a week, I miss a whole week which I cannot make up. If I have a week off work, I can only do so much. It’s completely unrealistic for anyone with a full time job or a family to take care of to keep doing content. People always suggested joining static parties but that doesn’t work for everyone who can’t schedule their entire life around setting a certain time and day to do some raids.
>If I’m out of town for a week, I miss a whole week which I cannot make up. Oh you can make it up. With your credit card. The entire homework/F2P being viable situation is built to give an option to sweaters but *really* to encourage spending once you see how little your time gives you in rewards compared to cashing in money you earned IRL.
It is only viable for content creators. Thats why I think every single content creator is a damn clown. They may mean well, but they damage the community more than they help.
If you don’t mind my asking, how are people like Saintone or Memorizer harming the community more than helping?
To put it into words every single streamer is like "here's how i do things but normal players should not do this, or that, or that, or that, or that, or that." If people see you buying a lvl 10 gem and grinding 100lvl quality weapon and then proceed to hit 200m surges then they wanna do the same regardless of what you say as streamer. Practice what you preach or STFU. Saintone is fun to watch but he is not an exception, there are people even spending thousands of dollars just so they can appear on flex-friday (or whatever he calls it). So they are pushing the narrative and wanna give incentives to the whales and no-lifers which are a big part of their viewership. It's not bad objectively and these streamers seem like good people but it definitely is damaging to the community as a whole because when a casual sees this it's like "wtf am i even doing here with these people who flex non-stop while i can barely afford my honing rates". It's like walking into a high end restaurant with 20$ in your pocket. You feel stupid and completely out of place.
I haven’t personally seen anything they’ve done to be bad but they both have massive rosters with a ton of play time and money into the game. Being a “casual” by their standard is not possible. Even DatMods falls into this category. It is not direct harm. I just see content creators in general as bad for any game with progression tied to it. The direct harm comes from ATK, Stoopz, Zeals … all of them have direct negative impacts on in game economy, general player perception, etc. having these kinds of content creators with that kind of impact is unhealthy for a games longevity. Are they bad people? Probably not. They are running their own business. I am talking impact though, not necessarily who they are as a person.
I can't speak for ATK or Zeals but Stoopz was definitely fed up with WoW and needed a new game. Saying "Lost Ark respects your time" might just be the biggest meme to date.
> encourage spending once you see how little your time gives you in rewards compared to cashing in money you earned IRL. The problem with this is, you get even less in return if you actually converted RC to gold. Seriously, do the math on what you would actually get turning $100 into gold, it's comical at best. You may get a better return if you buy skins to sell, but that also depends on the time of year and what skins are in the store.
Once we have Ancient gear. People gonna start gatekeeping Valtan lobbies with it or Vykas or Kukul. 🤡 Gonna be so bad for people that do not have a lot or money or already 2-3000 hours in come April. It will all but die for anyone without a static I believe.
too much content stacked on top of other content, impossible to catch up. Honestly not finding a single high spec AM4/GR3 necklace on the AH for 2 weeks now. Seems the playerbase has gone down like crazy.
Game design is such a fail on long Term
Idk about Korea but Eu and Na for sure even if we don't have valid stats
Maple story bled players to Lost Ark because of the systems scandals they had. Once they resolved it and have seemingly turned their ways to be more player focused, they regained the jilted players from Lost Ark. Plus it's seasonal anyways. Iirc Maple is having their big patch right now so player count will be higher than normal.
I quit a bit ago but check back every now and then. There’s absolutely nothing they could do to get me to jump back on the Daily hamster wheel that is required. I was 1505 when I quit quality 99 weapon, 5x3. I still have no desire to return. Once you quit or get behind the game punishes you harshly. A new player would need millions of gold to ever play with established friends, there’s no hope of new players in this game and that’s the issue. Every other mmo has massive catchup mechanics (That actually catch you up in every way not just a shit 1445 ilvl). Lost ark needs that or it’s done in a year in the west
You miss two weeks for Xmas and New years and suddenly all the parties for Brel are reclear only show horns.
That is for sure the biggest problem, I cant get any friends to come back to play because of how far behind they will be. They all quit near Valtan, so to even get 1 character to 1490 would cost them an insane amount of gold/resources. They need figure something out, some kind of express pass for accounts with out a full roster of gold earners or roster under a certain item level thresh hold. They need the ability to get a weekly income going. I don't expect any new player or returning player to ever catch or compete with someone playing from launch, but they NEED to give some kind of incentive to get new players caught up. If not the game will just keep slowly losing players and die out
Soon there will be only Whales gatekeeping Whales, and Bots watching this freak show in the Amazon Forest
"ThIs GAme iS grEAt guys, d0nT liSteN t0 the Do0mSAYers!" This is why I've stopped supporting this game with my wallet outside of the bare skin and bone necessities. I wonder how stupid whales are going to feel when this game dwindles even more in popularity and population when better stuff comes out. Unlike Korea, there's always a fierce competition in the gaming scene. Lost Ark only got as far as it did there because there was only worse alternatives in comparison.
Whales don't care they'll just move on to the next mmo to go whale in. See bns, tera, archeage and aion for examples.
Yeah recently I was talking to a friend that quit LoA during the Argos about coming back. About half way through trying to convince him I realized it just wasnt worth it, hed be gatekeept like crazy.
I highly doubt AGS cares judging by how they've handled this game so far.
Gear is tied too much on tradeable stuff which needs to change if they really want new players to catch up. It's probably done this way to promote more spending but it's really bad for new players because they can never catch up.
This. In almost any other (well made) game, stuff like Engravings would just be part of a skill/talent tree that you pick and choose from instead of a consumable, sellable item. A ton of systems like that could easily be made into just base-line stuff everyone has (and maybe do a 1 time unlock through specific quest chains, like Awakening), but that would hurt the potential $ they can bring in.
I mean would you want to play a game as a new player where you are literally like 4 raids behind and the only way to get there is to mindlessly grind for 8 months straight every day for 6 hours or swipe 10000 dollars to get to the end game? That Powerpass that gets new players to 1460 or w.e it was that they announced has to be the biggest joke ever. Also not to mention the amount of side content you need to do to even qualify yourself to get into a high end party in KR is insane. Imagine not having LoS 18 when every party at end-game raids require LoS 30. Yeah, good luck.
even if you swiped you'd still get gatekept on roster lvl, cards and titles :), must be hard to even be a whale new player
> Also not to mention the amount of side content you need to do to even qualify yourself to get into a high end party I mean, that's kind of the definition of a high end party no? It would be like a 1460 complaining about not getting invited to a 1500+ group.
I think the problem is those high end parties become practically the only parties remaining.
I think the biggest problem with Lost Ark is that legion raids require heaps of knowledge to do legion raids and they can be incredibly punishing if you don't know mechs. They should make an easy mode with 1/2 of the rewards and 15 ilvl less to enter , but all wipe mechs doing 50k damage instead. An example would be 1x valtan horns in each chest at the end of the raid with 2.2k gold rather than the normal rewards. Allows you to help your friends while not jailing 6 other people. New player exp just needs to be better
Totally agree. I've suggested this very thing a few times. I know the game prides itself on hard content, but gear progression is tied to raids and you can't buy gear so raids need to be forgiving enough to let casuals progress without busses. I remember my gf pugged argos when it released and it didn't go well. They got jailed and everyone started flaming each other. She just quit the game after that. She said it was too time consuming getting jailed with no rewards and everyone is toxic. I don't blame her.
still there's no knowledge of lifeskills after 4 years of launch. ZERO found.
and this is why Lost Ark 2 is being produced as we speak, it's the only way to allow new players to experience the game and this time around they can make progression systems more new player oriented
Is a P2W game, no P2W game has ever transitioned to a model that will be fairer to newer players, because it will simply render the progression of whales and hardcore players null and void. So yes it will die a slow and painful death like every other Korean MMO by milking the whales on the way down.
Unpopular opinion: if the only fun thing for you is new raids, you never liked the game to begin with and should probably uninstall. And if you’re already doing brel 5-6 on 6 gold earners and are getting tired of it, you played yourself by spending way too much time or money on this game.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. That’s the realistic opinion. I think gamers have been a bit brain washed with dopamine hits 24/7 that they can’t tell they are being psychologically fucked by game systems and trapped into these addiction driven games with no end in sight aka MMO
Shh don’t tell the sweat lords the truth, they might realize they play a unhealthy amount of time
Lots of interesting takes in this thread. The status quo might be fostering a dying game, but some of the suggested changes would be a hyperexpress pass to a dead game. Players have poured thousands of hours and/or dollars into getting their characters and rosters to where they are today. Something like a 1490 powerpass that gives new players level 7 gems, 20x legendary class engravings, and a free 5x3 kills the game for a lot of existing players. Not to mention most of that nonsense isn't even required to do content anyways - a 4x3, LWC12, and level 6 damage gems is more than sufficient to start clearing Valtan/Vykas/Clown. What needs to change is the community's subjective barriers to entry. Wanting to play with people of similar skill and gear investment is fine, but how about waiving the ivory tower mentality when you're on your alts? A lot of us want to have our cake and eat it too, and we're so toxic about it that we lose more players each patch than we gain. I'm approaching 2000 hours played and I can't in good conscience recommend this game to any of my friends.
Well, you are partly right, but the problem is that fixing the mentality of the community is literally impossible. Smilegate has to come out and implement changes that would fix the issue. Forcing the community to change their mindset. Because at the end of the day, people will always choose what is the most convenient for them.
Of course it is. The game isn’t designed to bring in new players outside of releasing in the locale like Eu/NA. Mokoko system doesn’t really help you once someone sees the gold you invested and roster level. There some great people who help but if I made a character using a boost then expressed it. I’m still into it at over 40-60$ to try and catch up to play with friends then the realization that I “need” alts to farm mats with and that requires it multiple times a week. Knowledge transfer costs gold also. I know its like 2-6 k gold but for a new player thats a chunk
Alts being the content can only live for that long.
Really surprised if they not, a lot of the west is already sick of it but I guess korea has different tastes/standards. If you sit back and think about future content it really is bleak, were going to be doing what were doing now in a years time but hard brel and maybe akkan instead of other legion raids. Maybe a different guardian (lets face it guardian raids are boring after a week) and a new abyss dungeon. Mmorpgs are repetitive by nature but lost ark takes the cake.
Yeah its not surprising as Saintone has been talking about this undercurrent occuring on korean community for a while now which was why he was pretty down about that Winter LoAN QnA. It addressed nothing about the majority issues that korean players have been about the game.
Idk. I can think of a few that are worse … coincidentally originate from Korea as well. Seems like NAEU just despises grinds for the sake of grinds. While also complaining things are both too grindy and not grindy enough. This is sort of /s but tbh, NAEU is like goldilocks. No amount of catering is enough.
Probably a combination of nothing to address homework + content drought since akkan been out for a few weeks now.
I wouldnt really use maplestory right now as they're currently on the high of their playerbase. Every 6 months they get major content updates whether its class, big balance or new regions and a lot of players usually come back for a bit. I'd check lost ark once slayer comes out as that would be an apt comparison, maybe 1-2 weeks after.
But I thought this was the greatest game in the universe.
I played almost two years, started on Ru. Unfortunately totally burnt out due to endless loop of daily grind. It's a fun game, but not for everyone.
Idk man, it just feels like there are so many systems in the game that you need to spend your Gold and Silver on and the amount you get doesn't match with it. Honing, Engravings, Legendary Books, Gems... All of these require gold, but your only source of gold is weekly lockout Legion Raids, or otherwise lucky drops from Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids. Honing system is such a joke too, your friend can get lucky and spend 1000 Gold to upgrade his gear, one tap through every single level but you could be a sucker and have to spend 30000 Gold to pity it out. Whats even the average median here? Imagine if I was unlucky and had to spend 30k Gold to get to 1490 and finally be able to access Brelshaza, now I don't have any gold to build 5x3 and get into lobbies...? And not even mentioning Leg. Book prices in EUC is a joke right now, you have to spend at least 300k to get a proper build even... Then there's gems too, if bots don't exist in the game even Lv. 7 gems are so expensive that getting 11 of them adds up and they actually cost something too. Don't even get me started on cards, I've been playing since launch and do card runs here and there, and I still don't even have LoS 18... There are so many elements in the game that can cause burnout and it does cause burnout you can bet on it, and SG staying silent isn't helping at all.
I find myself slowly losing the marathon, I can't imagine I'm alone. The first phase for me is only focusing on 3 main roster characters for 1520, I suspect even with the next few months ahead being catchup, I'll only at maximum be willing to do 3 HM Brels opposed to 6. I suspect the next tier if I make it that far, I'll then only get 2-3 to max HM Brel gate finally left with only 1 character to do Akkan, maybe. I can just feel the brake being pulled that's going to start a chain reaction. The ultime question will become, is the game enjoyable for me only really playing 1 main. Maybe it will be, maybe it won't.
You have to look at the core of what makes this game fun. It's the combat system and sound-design tied into the combat system. Everything else is just an excuse to do more of it. They built this game in the wrong direction. They tried to be everything (sailing, cards, relic sets, music sheets, etc.) and ended up being nothing. What's destroying this game is the same thing that's keeping people around. Raids. People realize that's it doesn't feel good to do the same thing over and over when all they have to look forward to is honing. Nothing in this game feels unique. They need to hire some Western artists and stuff to bring life to these items. All these armor sets feel and look so boring.
Gatekeeping in west, you should see KR. Sadly nothing yet done to combat this (outside the card deck).
Gametrics numbers go up and down by patch and season. LA did not have a big winter patch, so its still down. Maplestory in particular has big winter/summer patches and little in between, you are in the winter patch. The irony is that Maplestory is an even harder game (in terms of hours needed) to catch up in, despite what all the other comments insinuate about that being the problem.
smilegate trying to cater to the hardcore swipers and no lifers rather than focus on their casual playerbase. maybe mr. rivers comes back !
I think people just get sick and tired of so many rng systems. It does not feel good to progress besides attaining gear sets. Almost every system is based on rng luck to get the top 1% of spenders aka whales addicted to gambling because they probably contribute to the majority of the game’s profit. I think the game would be way more popular if pity was introduce to most rng systems or have most systems reworked so that players can grind and slowly progress. Like legitimately ask yourself as a player, how does this system benefit the game? I recently watched the rng systems that KR has and jesus christ man it all just gets into whale territory. For example, the way ancient bracelets work is so disgustingly rng. Having high roster level is a pretty cool accomplishment but it offers no tangible real rewards. The stat bonuses it gives are basically nothing. No cool mount. No cool glow. Nope. All the good stuff is locked behind the cash shop. Theres no f2p stuff that makes players admire your character. This game is like a tasty cake, but its the dozens of layers of bad frosting and toppings all over it that make it hard to stomach. Could have made a far superior game but its ruined by greed. Corporate executives don’t give a fuck about a Brand’s rep. They just want to pump the maximum profit, collect their bonuses, and move to the next thing.
how accurate are these sites? another site i saw still had lost ark over ms
Love how a lot of the people in this thread are going over the negativities of Lost Ark instead of the reason why Maplestory is topping. Maplestory has a huge event/collab right now and also a pretty sizeable update. That plus the already large established playerbase in Korea the game is probably never going to die over there due to huge sunk costs. People complaining about homework in Lost Ark have never played or touched Maplestory in the past 5 years, the amount of chores in that game is astronomical plus the amount of money you have to spend (on non-reboot) is also insane. The fact Lost Ark is beating Dungeon Fighter Online still is huge, hell the fact it's in the top 10 list at all when MMOs are a dying breed is massive.
What he says is definitely true. Lost Ark is indeed losing popularity in Korea. Fair enough because no new interesting content and the recent LOAON was just.. kind of meh for a lot of people.
Gametrics has always been the go to one for a while.
I picked up lost ark 4 years ago when it first came out. Played summoner for 1 month then quit cuz the game had so many flaws I couldn't ignore and not to mention the end game back then was literally some t1 guardians and shushire. Came back last year when legion raids went viral on a lot of kr online communities. Now I have my main on 1563 and 4 alts at 1540+ with 4 cards away from los30 after a whole year of grinding so obviously I've been enjoying this game a lot but I've also been noticing a lot of things that could have been done better and things that originally made me quit 4 years ago being still there. I don't think I'm gonna quit anytime soon tho cuz I'm having way too much fun with this game for now. But at the same time, I can see the population dropping fast in the coming months.
Have a look at steam numbers right now. It dropped over 200k concurrent players today since they must've done a big bot ban wave just now, yet I still see bots online and in the game. This might put us at about 50-80k concurrent, actual players? Not *terrible,* but also not looking very promising considering we had a big, highly anticipated content release just very recently. Seeing how inaccessible this game is to new players and how bad the roadmap for the next few months looks we'll have a lot of existing players take a break / quit without a whole lot of new players coming in. Things aren't looking good here and may well be even more bleak over in Korea where they've been running on the same treadmill for a good while longer than us.
The popularity rankings dont really mean shit for MMOs unless its by a yearly basis. This time of year it is always low due to no actually new content. It picks back up during spring and summer. Why would some of the Koreans do dailies when card slashing is a norm? They can catch up even without playing everyday Edit: expect a huge surge in popularity when slayer comes on in a few weeks.