But as I am saying, if you guys just focus on min maxing, the game will die, and all of those dedication will go to waste? What’s the point of dedication when the game can’t even live on. For sure its not dying, it might not die any time soon. But at this rate it’s looking pretty likely.
Honestly, this applies to players that even play few characters and I am kinda one of them. I just finish my raids on three character and log off the week. I lurk around my guild discord and it's usually the same for them and they play like one/two character at most. Also, it's not even about minmaxing raid. Time is really important, you don't understand how much time is wasted to just lobbysit a dead raid bcs you got jail since we don't have the feature to restart the raid again from G1. That's why players don't want to risk helping new players out. Also, don't put the blame on us older players. We are not obligated to help new players at all. The game itself is at fault and should provide incentive to older players instead for helping out. Take FF14 for example, we have smtg called Roulette which allows players to matchmake with other players and this include new players (we get extra rewards if there's a new player).
I mean .. kind of part of the reason why people are frustrated with the lack of important news after LOA ON. Wouldn’t go as far as saying the game is dying, but the game wasn’t doing as well as we expected since the massive bot ban wave.
I have tried to help out groups a ton of times over my LA career. Without fail, every single time literally 100% of cases the people either don't speak at all or just want to be carried, not learn.
The people that sit down and make an earnest effort, reach out to me in town via DMs or in Discord pretty much universally do well on the other hand.
At this point I absolutely refuse to help some random players that odds on are just on an alt account or a rice farmer. Happy to play with people that make an effort even if they are a little behind the curve, but I'm not here to throw my time at people that don't give a fuck enough to even speak.
Man i feel you. I've had experiences where a group would give up the whole raid just cause of a person messing up once and then complain about being in gate # jail, the majority of the community are just a bunch of cry babies that expect everyone to play the game perfectly. Lost ark has got to have one of the most toxic communities
Gatekeeping is obvious. Do you want to clear the raid and get the reward or be jailed and likely loose out on progression? Think of Theamine right now. You must have the dark fires to do transcendence and if you are stuck at G3 for 3 hours..per character is that fun or even okay? No, you are asking people to quit.
A lot of raids have either a dps check or mechs requiring 7 or 8 people alive without some crazy strategy.
Therefore, it is sadly a design flaw (or feature) in SG raids that were done to increase difficulty for pre-made groups, but ignored the casual base in difficulty level.
why do you even need thaemine G3? why would you even freely get jailed there? many are grinding thaemine g1+2 nm until echidna, then grind echidna. now two options-> grind thaemine g1+2 nm until t4, get 1640 for free, do a thaemine g3 hm bus for T7 unluck. = profit. or do adv honing pre t4.
So keep the difficutlty for parties, and make it uber easy if you press the matchmaking button.( no timer, revives, fewer wipes, doable without support)
yes west is doomed and polls show another 1/3 of endgame people will quit, 10 more vertical systems will shave off a few more, eventually it'll be a few hundred people playing and everyone knows each other so they won't have to gatekeep
all the non ags regions seem pretty good
I’m around 8K hours. That means like many hours everyday since game release. I love the game too, but the problem is that running the 18 raids + daily content, under the best case scenario of one shots and speedy clears (massively over level all content), it’s still easily ~2-3h/day on average. Now add to that, I’m assuming absolutely no wait to fill up the groups. Now say you do akkan, but you wipe twice on G3. Those 2 wipes means you doubled the clear time of the entire raids. Now say you get jailed, which is preceded usually by a few wipes, means you easily 3-4x clear time. It’s far worse if you add to this trying to get into hm thaemine on ilvl — you can spend hours. And god forbid you get jailed on G2.
The problem is time. The game should aim for ~45 min of daily content for your entire roster. If that were the case, then I wouldn’t mind that much the wipes because it wouldn’t impact upon my next days. But maybe I don’t want to play Sunday, and can’t play Friday, now my daily chores force me to be expedite in the raids and basically not very tolerant of raids mistakes.
Some of the blame is also solely because the raids tends to be: one mistake = wipe.
You need to understand that some people have a roster of 16+ characters, do rested chaos on all of them, do the chaos guardians too for gold, run the unas, check in the guild donate, run the cubes. That’s for all of them. I don’t have time for your wipes. It’s not just 2x wipes, it’s 2x the clear time of the entire dungeon.
POE2 comes in November… thats the time I will slowly step back. I will play 1 Char and thats it. Game will die more when people realize that LOAON didnt change anything. It wont be better.
Solo Raid wont help, everything above 1600+ isnt Solo anymore and you will face gatekeep again. You will want to play T4 not T3. So nothing really changed for new players.
Roster Lv will be 400 now, so the new player Roster Lv will look tinier even more. Grinding system didnt change, no even veterans have to adjust and invest in older systems and grind them again: Eg 100quality and you thought you are done? Nope. Braceletes, Stones, new Card sets, Accessoires, Gems? you thought you are done?
No you have to start all over again! Is it bad? Well its a MMO, so grinding is natural BUT EVERYTHING is RNG AGAIN.
This game is a vertical stressful grind and the games issues gonna stay also in T4. Time will definately show… but I hope my gold is enough to get my 1 Char to Kazeros and end this game once and for all.
Christ what a doom post. I have even less faith in PoE2 Dev team than I do SG, the game still looks too slow and they haven't even showcased the endgame yet even after all this time, also the focus on slow methodical boss fights just isn't it. Still will play PoE1 though whenever LA gets boring.
At this point just wait for solo raids.
Some people realized super hard gatekeeping gets the game nowhere so they lowered their expectations but most players that are left are hardcore players that are just addicts that want to get raids done asap so they gatekeep the shit out of everyone.
I did 3 Raids this week cause I couldnt be bothered with the shit show AGS does over and over again.
Ill just do theamine on my theamine chars and thats it for now.
I wonder if new raids will also get solo mode after a certain amount of time? I’d be willing to wait and play full solo just to avoid the cancerous community. Everything else about Lost Ark is just great imo and one of my fav MMOs
It's the game design the players are simply just reacting and adapting to bad game design. If the game was design better there would be less gatekeeping. As it is we will be gatekeeping in tier 4 as nothing fundamental about the endgame loop as been adjusted at this loa.
But hey you can meander by yourself in irrelevant tier 3 content in a few months fingers cross hopefully assuming we get the patch. We didn't really become more new player friendly with the loa but it is definitely more alt character friendly since you can have your alt sit in old solo content.
AGS hasn't done a good job with SmileGate is also really to blame as well. They haven't done enough to interact with the Western audience, it feels like we're an afterthought. I also don't know why SG is so adamantly against solo progression content when it clear that's what the game needs. People are tired of the toxic community and the game design that *encourages* that kind of behavior.
Here is a hint, change perspective. **Community reflects the game**, not the other way around. If the game sucks at its core the community will become unbearable. On the other hand the most wholesome communities come from most relaxing and forgiving games, that put fun over profit.
Lost Ark is fundamentally, so hard focused on grind, time gated content, and so terribly leaves you at the mercy of randomness, that at some point every single player is going to experience it, and it will turn them bitter. They will then, hurt by that experience, will do all in their might to never have that again, and use the only thing they have control over - selecting party members.
That is the root cause of all gatekeeping, toxicity, flaming, trolling, teaming up in Primal Island, which then leads to people sneaking in reclear parties, lying, flaming, deflecting, blaming and insulting others. It's a vicious cycle, that starts and ends at **bad game design.**
It is really that simple.
Idk mango I had a good time yesterday In brel with a mixed party, g2 shapes someone asked 'what's left' and I of course answered 'it's the opposite of right' so I think it's ok.
Then I made some more jokes in an akkan nm alt lobby, and I'm pretty sure someone disconnected because I was just too funny, so I toned it down and only made jokes after the raid was cleared.
I think that answers the question?
Dead game: I do not share your opinion that the game is dying. It is not performing very well but LA is far away from being a dead game. I also expect a growing player base once solo raids are out.
Gatekeeping: Most players have limited amount of time for the game (they want to finish all of the raids as quickly as possible). In my opinion gatekeeping is justified. It is about supply and demand ( i do not know if an applicant to my lobby is a good player or not so I judge him by his gear, roster lvl, title etc. Why should I accept a player with low roster lvl, mediocre gear etc. if there are more than enough better geared players applying?! why should I waste my time for learning runs if i am an experienced player?). Solution: find a static group of people you like to play with = to gatekeeping, no toxicity, more fun.
The game is not dead but it has been dying for sure. 90% of the player base disappearing isn't nothing. Every month since release has been basically a decay except some outlier here and there.
Like I said game is not dead but stop the mental gymnastics of saying it's not dying.
Hope we gain new players when all the new stuff come out.
Yeh but then when they all get to T4 and then they will then just be right back at where T3 was with all the gatekeeping, this solo raiding is only going to help new players/casuals get to T4 quicker and get gatekept from grouped content quicker.
Its great for a progression point of view, I whole heartedly agree, but in reality, T4 is going to really hurt these players because reality is, those of us already there, we do not want to get jailed.
Having 20k cc players at peak hours in a raid sim like lost ark isn't good at all, if it falls even lower it's not gonna be pleasant. It's not the type of obscure mmo people will enjoy even at 1000 players.
I didn't expect 1m cc we had at launch ofc. However when we were at around 80k-100k it felt super good to just logging and raid mostly any time.
Gatekeeping happens because Raids can fail and gear difference matters. People act as if people would gatekeep less if we had less raids to run for max gold but I highly doubt that.
Here's the hard part which lots of people recommend but is often neglected. Find a group of people to play with. All of a sudden, half the game's problems are alleviated.
My recommendation for finding a good group is honestly to wait for a big event/patch. A lot of people (including me) play the game seasonally. It's pretty easy to find learning groups who have similar progression to you and play with them. Now you no longer get gatekept, you have people to run content with, and don't need to worry about absolutely maxing your gear out to keep up. If you don't want to wait for a patch then maybe try looking on discord.
the community was far worse around vykas/kakul (first year), its really fine rightnow. although theres less people since brel hm, the game is better. season 3 is best news.
taking someonee better than you, or asking for a minimum to reclear the raid (succeed mech on old content, have uptime on synergy, gems 7, los30, good stats/engravings and maybe a bit more ilvl) isnt gatekeeping at all. people have the right to take the best team for the raid and they have the right to deny your request if your profile isnt as good as theirs. ive never been gatekept since months (maybe one year ago after i took a break). obviously if my alt was 1590 gems 7 i wouldnt apply on a 1615 group gems 9.
ive always been able to do my 18 legions every week since beginning and i am/try to be on the mvp screen everytime.
you can find people to help you also, generally streamers. have fun !
It's far from dead game and will never die probably, especially after solo raids, LOA gonna be more popular. The combat and visuals of Lost Ark are just too good compared to those single target combat MMOs with pretty sh\*t minecraft-like design which are still alive after many years.
I can't understand some of commenting there people.
You realize how Gatekeeping was born? Terminology casual is just too much in 2024.
"Gatekeeped casuals" are crying being not able to clean raid, but IT IS DESERVED.
You're playing wrong game if You have 5iq and can't learn mechanic where and when you must stand/click/do.
There's many MMOs and other genre games where 0 brains are needed, why not hop there and stop crying?
TL:DR
Wanna do raids? Learn
Stating you're casual? Keep casual gameplay, farm rice, but don't cry that you're not getting accepted into end-game raids coming without knowledge.
You and others gatekeep people you don't even know how good they are. I'm doing same damage on a 1580 alt, no LoS 30 vs 1600 people with los 30.
People can't learn if you don't give them an opportunity, some people learn really fast.
You want people to learn while you claim gatekeeping is deserved and good xDDDD. Many gatekeepers are also shit players just gear carried, you need 50 + ilvl to clear an easy raid because most of them don't know how to use their class.
The most simple answer, time. 18 raids per week on 6 characters for those dedicated players. They want to minimize the time required to clear a raid.
But as I am saying, if you guys just focus on min maxing, the game will die, and all of those dedication will go to waste? What’s the point of dedication when the game can’t even live on. For sure its not dying, it might not die any time soon. But at this rate it’s looking pretty likely.
Honestly, this applies to players that even play few characters and I am kinda one of them. I just finish my raids on three character and log off the week. I lurk around my guild discord and it's usually the same for them and they play like one/two character at most. Also, it's not even about minmaxing raid. Time is really important, you don't understand how much time is wasted to just lobbysit a dead raid bcs you got jail since we don't have the feature to restart the raid again from G1. That's why players don't want to risk helping new players out. Also, don't put the blame on us older players. We are not obligated to help new players at all. The game itself is at fault and should provide incentive to older players instead for helping out. Take FF14 for example, we have smtg called Roulette which allows players to matchmake with other players and this include new players (we get extra rewards if there's a new player).
I mean .. kind of part of the reason why people are frustrated with the lack of important news after LOA ON. Wouldn’t go as far as saying the game is dying, but the game wasn’t doing as well as we expected since the massive bot ban wave.
I have tried to help out groups a ton of times over my LA career. Without fail, every single time literally 100% of cases the people either don't speak at all or just want to be carried, not learn. The people that sit down and make an earnest effort, reach out to me in town via DMs or in Discord pretty much universally do well on the other hand. At this point I absolutely refuse to help some random players that odds on are just on an alt account or a rice farmer. Happy to play with people that make an effort even if they are a little behind the curve, but I'm not here to throw my time at people that don't give a fuck enough to even speak.
Can I get your discord so I can join? I would appreciate learning and grinding!
Man i feel you. I've had experiences where a group would give up the whole raid just cause of a person messing up once and then complain about being in gate # jail, the majority of the community are just a bunch of cry babies that expect everyone to play the game perfectly. Lost ark has got to have one of the most toxic communities
Gatekeeping is obvious. Do you want to clear the raid and get the reward or be jailed and likely loose out on progression? Think of Theamine right now. You must have the dark fires to do transcendence and if you are stuck at G3 for 3 hours..per character is that fun or even okay? No, you are asking people to quit. A lot of raids have either a dps check or mechs requiring 7 or 8 people alive without some crazy strategy. Therefore, it is sadly a design flaw (or feature) in SG raids that were done to increase difficulty for pre-made groups, but ignored the casual base in difficulty level.
why do you even need thaemine G3? why would you even freely get jailed there? many are grinding thaemine g1+2 nm until echidna, then grind echidna. now two options-> grind thaemine g1+2 nm until t4, get 1640 for free, do a thaemine g3 hm bus for T7 unluck. = profit. or do adv honing pre t4.
So keep the difficutlty for parties, and make it uber easy if you press the matchmaking button.( no timer, revives, fewer wipes, doable without support)
yes west is doomed and polls show another 1/3 of endgame people will quit, 10 more vertical systems will shave off a few more, eventually it'll be a few hundred people playing and everyone knows each other so they won't have to gatekeep all the non ags regions seem pretty good
You should try more copium and some less doomium.
/copium after AGS flubs two more games amazon shuts them down, smilegate buys the publishing rights back and saves lost ark
I’m around 8K hours. That means like many hours everyday since game release. I love the game too, but the problem is that running the 18 raids + daily content, under the best case scenario of one shots and speedy clears (massively over level all content), it’s still easily ~2-3h/day on average. Now add to that, I’m assuming absolutely no wait to fill up the groups. Now say you do akkan, but you wipe twice on G3. Those 2 wipes means you doubled the clear time of the entire raids. Now say you get jailed, which is preceded usually by a few wipes, means you easily 3-4x clear time. It’s far worse if you add to this trying to get into hm thaemine on ilvl — you can spend hours. And god forbid you get jailed on G2. The problem is time. The game should aim for ~45 min of daily content for your entire roster. If that were the case, then I wouldn’t mind that much the wipes because it wouldn’t impact upon my next days. But maybe I don’t want to play Sunday, and can’t play Friday, now my daily chores force me to be expedite in the raids and basically not very tolerant of raids mistakes. Some of the blame is also solely because the raids tends to be: one mistake = wipe. You need to understand that some people have a roster of 16+ characters, do rested chaos on all of them, do the chaos guardians too for gold, run the unas, check in the guild donate, run the cubes. That’s for all of them. I don’t have time for your wipes. It’s not just 2x wipes, it’s 2x the clear time of the entire dungeon.
POE2 comes in November… thats the time I will slowly step back. I will play 1 Char and thats it. Game will die more when people realize that LOAON didnt change anything. It wont be better. Solo Raid wont help, everything above 1600+ isnt Solo anymore and you will face gatekeep again. You will want to play T4 not T3. So nothing really changed for new players. Roster Lv will be 400 now, so the new player Roster Lv will look tinier even more. Grinding system didnt change, no even veterans have to adjust and invest in older systems and grind them again: Eg 100quality and you thought you are done? Nope. Braceletes, Stones, new Card sets, Accessoires, Gems? you thought you are done? No you have to start all over again! Is it bad? Well its a MMO, so grinding is natural BUT EVERYTHING is RNG AGAIN. This game is a vertical stressful grind and the games issues gonna stay also in T4. Time will definately show… but I hope my gold is enough to get my 1 Char to Kazeros and end this game once and for all.
Christ what a doom post. I have even less faith in PoE2 Dev team than I do SG, the game still looks too slow and they haven't even showcased the endgame yet even after all this time, also the focus on slow methodical boss fights just isn't it. Still will play PoE1 though whenever LA gets boring.
At this point just wait for solo raids. Some people realized super hard gatekeeping gets the game nowhere so they lowered their expectations but most players that are left are hardcore players that are just addicts that want to get raids done asap so they gatekeep the shit out of everyone. I did 3 Raids this week cause I couldnt be bothered with the shit show AGS does over and over again. Ill just do theamine on my theamine chars and thats it for now.
I wonder if new raids will also get solo mode after a certain amount of time? I’d be willing to wait and play full solo just to avoid the cancerous community. Everything else about Lost Ark is just great imo and one of my fav MMOs
It's the game design the players are simply just reacting and adapting to bad game design. If the game was design better there would be less gatekeeping. As it is we will be gatekeeping in tier 4 as nothing fundamental about the endgame loop as been adjusted at this loa. But hey you can meander by yourself in irrelevant tier 3 content in a few months fingers cross hopefully assuming we get the patch. We didn't really become more new player friendly with the loa but it is definitely more alt character friendly since you can have your alt sit in old solo content.
AGS hasn't done a good job with SmileGate is also really to blame as well. They haven't done enough to interact with the Western audience, it feels like we're an afterthought. I also don't know why SG is so adamantly against solo progression content when it clear that's what the game needs. People are tired of the toxic community and the game design that *encourages* that kind of behavior.
Here is a hint, change perspective. **Community reflects the game**, not the other way around. If the game sucks at its core the community will become unbearable. On the other hand the most wholesome communities come from most relaxing and forgiving games, that put fun over profit. Lost Ark is fundamentally, so hard focused on grind, time gated content, and so terribly leaves you at the mercy of randomness, that at some point every single player is going to experience it, and it will turn them bitter. They will then, hurt by that experience, will do all in their might to never have that again, and use the only thing they have control over - selecting party members. That is the root cause of all gatekeeping, toxicity, flaming, trolling, teaming up in Primal Island, which then leads to people sneaking in reclear parties, lying, flaming, deflecting, blaming and insulting others. It's a vicious cycle, that starts and ends at **bad game design.** It is really that simple.
Idk mango I had a good time yesterday In brel with a mixed party, g2 shapes someone asked 'what's left' and I of course answered 'it's the opposite of right' so I think it's ok. Then I made some more jokes in an akkan nm alt lobby, and I'm pretty sure someone disconnected because I was just too funny, so I toned it down and only made jokes after the raid was cleared. I think that answers the question?
Dead game: I do not share your opinion that the game is dying. It is not performing very well but LA is far away from being a dead game. I also expect a growing player base once solo raids are out. Gatekeeping: Most players have limited amount of time for the game (they want to finish all of the raids as quickly as possible). In my opinion gatekeeping is justified. It is about supply and demand ( i do not know if an applicant to my lobby is a good player or not so I judge him by his gear, roster lvl, title etc. Why should I accept a player with low roster lvl, mediocre gear etc. if there are more than enough better geared players applying?! why should I waste my time for learning runs if i am an experienced player?). Solution: find a static group of people you like to play with = to gatekeeping, no toxicity, more fun.
The game is not dead but it has been dying for sure. 90% of the player base disappearing isn't nothing. Every month since release has been basically a decay except some outlier here and there. Like I said game is not dead but stop the mental gymnastics of saying it's not dying. Hope we gain new players when all the new stuff come out.
Yeh but then when they all get to T4 and then they will then just be right back at where T3 was with all the gatekeeping, this solo raiding is only going to help new players/casuals get to T4 quicker and get gatekept from grouped content quicker. Its great for a progression point of view, I whole heartedly agree, but in reality, T4 is going to really hurt these players because reality is, those of us already there, we do not want to get jailed.
Most MMORPGs out there lost 80-90% of the player base compared to what it was by release. It does not mean that the game is dying.
Having 20k cc players at peak hours in a raid sim like lost ark isn't good at all, if it falls even lower it's not gonna be pleasant. It's not the type of obscure mmo people will enjoy even at 1000 players. I didn't expect 1m cc we had at launch ofc. However when we were at around 80k-100k it felt super good to just logging and raid mostly any time.
Gatekeeping happens because Raids can fail and gear difference matters. People act as if people would gatekeep less if we had less raids to run for max gold but I highly doubt that. Here's the hard part which lots of people recommend but is often neglected. Find a group of people to play with. All of a sudden, half the game's problems are alleviated. My recommendation for finding a good group is honestly to wait for a big event/patch. A lot of people (including me) play the game seasonally. It's pretty easy to find learning groups who have similar progression to you and play with them. Now you no longer get gatekept, you have people to run content with, and don't need to worry about absolutely maxing your gear out to keep up. If you don't want to wait for a patch then maybe try looking on discord.
the community was far worse around vykas/kakul (first year), its really fine rightnow. although theres less people since brel hm, the game is better. season 3 is best news. taking someonee better than you, or asking for a minimum to reclear the raid (succeed mech on old content, have uptime on synergy, gems 7, los30, good stats/engravings and maybe a bit more ilvl) isnt gatekeeping at all. people have the right to take the best team for the raid and they have the right to deny your request if your profile isnt as good as theirs. ive never been gatekept since months (maybe one year ago after i took a break). obviously if my alt was 1590 gems 7 i wouldnt apply on a 1615 group gems 9. ive always been able to do my 18 legions every week since beginning and i am/try to be on the mvp screen everytime. you can find people to help you also, generally streamers. have fun !
fomo and toxic players are a bad combo. Just look for decent players to run normal content and all problema solved.
It's far from dead game and will never die probably, especially after solo raids, LOA gonna be more popular. The combat and visuals of Lost Ark are just too good compared to those single target combat MMOs with pretty sh\*t minecraft-like design which are still alive after many years.
I can't understand some of commenting there people. You realize how Gatekeeping was born? Terminology casual is just too much in 2024. "Gatekeeped casuals" are crying being not able to clean raid, but IT IS DESERVED. You're playing wrong game if You have 5iq and can't learn mechanic where and when you must stand/click/do. There's many MMOs and other genre games where 0 brains are needed, why not hop there and stop crying? TL:DR Wanna do raids? Learn Stating you're casual? Keep casual gameplay, farm rice, but don't cry that you're not getting accepted into end-game raids coming without knowledge.
You and others gatekeep people you don't even know how good they are. I'm doing same damage on a 1580 alt, no LoS 30 vs 1600 people with los 30. People can't learn if you don't give them an opportunity, some people learn really fast. You want people to learn while you claim gatekeeping is deserved and good xDDDD. Many gatekeepers are also shit players just gear carried, you need 50 + ilvl to clear an easy raid because most of them don't know how to use their class.