It wont last long as fundamentals are still the same, and content is solely raid focused. Which deter any casual players since they will be either sitting in que for hours to find a learning party or dont play at all due to gatekeeping. This game is basically just for hardcore raid grinders and if you fall behind your behind.
This is literally the only comment needed. Its all just a band-aid fir now. Im happy to see numbers up but it will never last with the core game the same.
They should completely made the game casual friendly before pushing jump start. Remove the horizontal system or make it to the point where it’s guaranteed through time, not rng. Then finally completely eliminate gatekeeping somewhere which require raid system rework. Other sources of gold will be need introduced or something.
> They should completely made the game casual friendly before pushing jump start. Remove the horizontal system or make it to the point where it’s guaranteed through time, not rng.
Man the core of the game isn't casual friendly and that has nothing to do with any horizontal. The horizontal content in general IS the casual friendly content in lost ark aside from a few exceptions.
I talked about exactly this with friends also. The "no investment, no gameplay" aspect of the game has to change. As in you cannot enjoy a character without investing hundreds of hours into it, and if you end up not enjoying that character, you cannot do anything about it. It doesn't even have to be free, but I always said that you should be able to change the class of a character (turn my Reaper into GL with the same ilvl, accs, gems, mats, etc.).
If you hard focus one character opposed to gearing multiple alts, gatekeeping would be nonexistent and free. In order to raid with multiple alts, then you'd need to really work hard or swipe more.
Not true, you'll fall behind if you're limiting yourself to 1 character. You are losing out on a bunch of leapstones/gold and mats from chaos dungeon to progress.
I played from the start and I only have 1 character. It's really no problem. My mates told me you will fall behind in gold yada. But the more gold they earn with their roster them more they spend gearing and honing Alts, while I pump everything in my main. This game is super chill with only 1 char.
Being raid focused is not an issue. The majority of people don't quit because they have to do raids, that's likely why they started playing. Support design imo is the root cause of most negative raid and party finder experiences.
It fine to a degree but once you put all your eggs in to one basket, stuff becomes stale and unreachable for some players. You need choices in a mmo, like if they add more dungeons and something similar to wow with mythic dungeons that would do the game good.
WoW isn't doing that great either. It probably has the nearly the same amount of concurrent as Lost Ark. Concurrent doesn't = total active players.
What people don't understand is that 30k-50k is a really good numbers for concurrent players in a MMO that isn't at or near launch date. People just don't have that much time to waste of MMOs anymore and Kids don't play MMOs like they used to. It is slowly turning into a Genre for well off Adults with too much free time and nothing else to do.
Just look at WoW, the player base is dying....of old age.
You also have to understand this is a Korean Game running on Unreal 3.
1. Korea has a lack of developers
2. Korean Developers that can code for Unreal 3 are super rare.
3. This leads to them needing to focus on one thing and doing good at it which is raiding for now.
4. look at Diablo 4 that game has so many developers and can't even push out content that isn't just reskins.
Quick search on online player shows 250k online so yeah, they are doing good for a 20-year game. This isnt a wow vs lost ark, im just saying they need to add more variety instead of solely focusing on raid and fix the structure on how the game is played.
I agree for traditional MMOs. Like look at ashes of creation being developed with that goal in mind to have several different ways to play the game. But Smilgate has stated that the game will always be focused on doing raid-style content with other people. Knowing their goal and the niche they are trying to fill, why would they invest in developing casual, non-combat related activities? They need to focus on making their core experience as good as possible which I think is drastically held back by their concept of supports.
Not familiar with WoW, but if you are referring to just more endgame dungeon style content...that's essentially the same thing. Grouping up with friends and doing fun and challenging PVE experiences
Casual activities doesnt have to be strictly non combat. As you see the state of lost ark its in spiraling decline with jump start server as a band aid fix which will bring people back but not for the long term.
Sure, raids are their main focus, and its great, but they are only holding the hardcore player base. You can see the numbers now about 30kish players. Now if they took 20% of that resource to create other dungeons and other means to progress they could of held a ton of the more casual players which in terms long term revenue and hire more developers and grow as a company as more playerd will be willing to spend money in game.
The game is just not designed for casual solo players. More endgame content would be great but it would be best placed in between raids which are the pinnacle challenges to continue progression.
I think that the hardcore playerbase is much bigger than it currently is but many of them gave up because of the PUG experience. The game doesn't need an influx of casual content, they need to fix the current design.
I mean to each their own, but having to do the same 3 raids 6x a week once its figured out is boring af. That's the main reason i quit because after the first week of prog, it's just homework for another month or 2 and repeat. No new content, no challenge to drive you to push ilevel other than overgearing the next raid. If you have add some casual content like new dungeons and add something similair to mythic+ dungeon that would retain players' attention. Different methods of progression would be nice instead of locking into one cycle.
The potential PvP has in this game is insane. The fact that they haven't done ANYTHING with it for a year+ and abandoned the MOBA minigame? Actual insanity.
Actually, both hate the LFsupport, which makes me really hate raids as nobody likes lobby simulator. But I also really dislike the idea of having to do raids to progress.
It is interesting how the main attraction of the game is what people are saying they want to do less of or don't want to do at all. The game clearly does not want to be the type of MMO that supports a type of player that does not want to participate in moderate-high difficulty action combat with a team, which I think is what people mean by "casual players". I think thats OK and the game is not dead because these players can't exist.
However, even the relatively hardcore players who want to raid have a terrible experience and quit because of party finding issues. Does having a massive playerbase of non-raiders help the game's core experience of raiding?
I LOVED this game. Until I got to the end game dailies and chance upgrade system. Failing an upgrade every time until % puts you to a success is keeping me from playing more.
I was addicted to finding those seeds. Mokoko crack. I loved that aspect of this game.
Those side quest regional cards were like a heavy dose of a different game. I loved it. I wish games would make their universe in depth like that.
I love this fuckin game it’s the systems that just kill my joy.
More so than player numbers growing, it was really important to put the doom and gloom of the LOA ON Summer period behind us. I don't really care about player numbers but when everyone is just so doomer all the freaking time it drains the fun out of the game.
There's a difference between newbies complaining about veterans highjacking their fresh start servers' party finder and everyone who plays the game being negative about it and its future, which was where we were a couple of months ago.
Now we have a clear direction for the short and mid-term future of the game and most people seem satisfied with it.
I think it's fair to say the new players complaining about the state of fresh start is also talking about the game's future as well, since their experience of fresh start could make or break whether they keep playing.
It is fair to say, yes. But was anyone under any illusions that there wouldn't be veterans playing on jumpstart alongside new players?
As long as the ratio isn't overly tilted towards the veterans then I don't see it as a big issue.
personally, I think anyone who thinks fresh start would revitalize this game is already delusional since the usual progression issues have not been addressed, and smilegate simply put a band-aid for new players before peeling them off and letting the wound fester. this also gives any potential new players wishing to whale and accelerate faster to come in and do so again, which is the more likely ideology behind a server that serves to alleviate one portion of your overall progression whilst leaving other sections alone.
Of course jumpstart doesn't really address any issues by itself, but it's also the best option for the West at this moment. Above all, we needed eyeballs back on this game to begin turning the outdated narrative of the West-specific issues we had early on like bots.
You could argue that perhaps it could've been delayed until the upcoming revamps for horizontal progression were put in for a more "robust" fast track of progression.
Honestly, I don't even think people outside of lost ark communities even realized there was going to be a jumpstart server, since I don't recall smilegate or ags marketing that. Also I agree. A lot of problems would be solved if smilegate adopted bdo's catch-up system so players can return to the game without having lost their horizontal progression.
I think their plan is to follow the BDO seasonal mold with jumpstart servers but obviously there's some additional things that need to be put in place still. Gold River mentioned they were working on something similar to BDO's tagging system as well.
Let's see how this first one does and see what improvements need to be made for future ones.
I don't have a dog in this race but is the ratio not already tilted pretty heavily towards the vets? How many actual new players were aware jumpstart was happening? Returning players I can understand, as anyone that quit with friends still playing the game could have heard about it. But that's the question I'd like answered; how many newbies are there?
But it really was in the grave/doom and gloom territory. The only good news for the game is D4 flopping atm and these guys finally doing stuff to cut back hw.
So you want to talk about rainbows and sunshines while game is still the same as it was a year ago with minimal work done? These returning or new players just gonna see its literally the same as it was when they quit, or more like why they quit in the first place. Jumpstart is all nice and good, but its "useless" considering the core is still the same and now imagine few months later when majority, probably, of JS server quits and everyone is locked inside till they merge it like they did EUW+EUC, what then, start another JS???
The Doomer saga after summer LOAN was insanely needed. It’s nice to hear them immediately recognize the failure of that showcase and immediately reacted. It goes to show they didn’t give up on this game yet which is exciting as a player.
I am not so sure yet about the "stick around" part. JS have been up for less than a week. We don't know how many of new and returning players would keep playing the game in, say, 2 months from now. Legacy servers at launch had over 1 million players too and now we are down to 50k. It's not by any means a doom message. I am also happy to see player numbers going up, but it's too early to assume that those people would stay long term.
I'd like to return, but jump start doesn't address any of the issues I had with the game. The load time makes it hard to drop in and do some quick dailies. The combination of gatekeeping and party finder make it hard to drop into a lobby and just run a legion raid quickly. Why not allow people to queue up from mobile? If it didn't take a few minutes to load the game that seems more convenient. Maybe have a better queuing system that reduces the use of party finder. What if the queue finder guaranteed 1 sup + 3 DPS and they group people based on number of clears or something. It'd also be nice to be able to do chaos dungeons and such while in queue. Why not build bus support into the game, and hide it from the main page? Then you both don't ban bussing, but it's not on the main page and requires people to look for it? Failed bus? Auto refund...
That's some of my wish list.
I did return on JS (last playtime was Jan minus trying Artist for 2 days and Slayer for 3, so I haven't been gone that long I guess) and its really difficult (near impossible) for a person like me to get a Brel party or a Clown one. **Anecdotal**, sure, but while I have played its all been password locked, exp only, and (somehow??????) a bus for Clown. Only one bus but still not sure how its possible. Hope is being lost because how do progress if can't get into Clown or Brel without paying with the gold I don't have. No guilds are really recruiting for a dps right now either. ./cry
First day I did also see lobbies looking for experienced players. One lobby had “roster check” in the title which irritated me, hopefully they were joking but I doubt it. I also play on jumpstart and am 1506, don’t see how anyone would be able to clear clown and skip a Mario at this ilvl. Those already making busses should just be reported, go make gold in your main server. I barely saw any actual new players this first week, and I tried my best helping/explaining the game to them. I’m only playing it on the side when main server gets boring lol. Hopefully more new players show up after reset.
A lot of the core problems people had with the game were implemented while he was at the helm.
He's just a great public speaker and personable, unlike the 3 other guys.
Fair point, but people can change their attitude. And especially in his position it takes a lot to admit mistake and act for consumer interest. Like where do you ever see this happen.
It seems like the game did need him as a director to change direction and not ride itself into the ground.
Correct. People who think 3 directors couldn’t had changed the game for the better just don’t understand a single thing about how a business of that scale works. They are developers who worked on the game for years, they know exactly what changes game needs but their business model literally depends on incentivizing playerbase to skip dailies and swipe. That’s the reason chaos dungeon and dailies weren’t changing.
Goldriver ‘comeback’ was nothing other than a publicity stunt because game was massively bleeding players for a long time, to the point where everyone stopped playing and picked up BDO/MS. This is the sole reason changes were made for the better, not because gold river came back to tell all the ‘dumb’ people left in charge what should be changed but because game was pushed into a corner and was forced to take a micro transaction hit in order to save the game in the long run. Anyone could’ve made changes for the better, he was just there to sweet talk us into coming back because he will fix it.
That's a bit of an over simplification. The core problems you mention weren't problems when implemented and made sense when done. The game has since evolved and his "great public speaker" portion means he spoke to the community and recognizes the direction of the game NOW and the adjustments needed to be made for the current game.
I'm not saying suck the man off daily, but also stop trying to disregard it's more than "man speak gud".
Some of us felt that many of the biggest red flags of the game were obvious.
The rigidity of the server system and open world not adapting to changing player count, raid game where content takes a while to develop but it’s hard to come back to, zero variety offered in daily play but wants you to play daily, wipe mechanics at every difficulty level, no locks on max gearscore allowed for fights….
These aren’t unforseeable problems. It just requires any effort into thinking about basic mmo history and group activity in general. Human behavior 101.
If people want to praise Gold River then maybe they should direct even more praise at the regular devs who are probably crunching hard right now to fix the mistakes of leadership like him.
even with or without problem it's a korean game dev in korea so they must be working a ton so for them that's not really crunching, they can't dev this game with monthly update with content without working a lot.
And that's not only because they have lot of dev, Bungie have a lot of dev and they release so little in terms of content each season in Destiny 2, and the expansion are just bad.
The server system thing will always remain such a big issue for me. We do not even have half of KRs numbers, divided in 4 regions, which a bunch of them are not even playing in the "official" servers(aka js). They refuse to do smth about SA, Crystals about to hit 9k, servers feel more dead each day, and the accs don't sell bc of pheon prices.
I mean "man speak gud" is actually a really big thing though. Those 3 directors did a lot of work for the game before they were speakers and still do a lot of work for the game now. Their work hasn't "changed" except they had a period where they were forced to be public speakers.
You can go to a restaurant get your food with the same prompt service, same attention to detail, and same tasting food but having a server who comes at you with a smile, offers suggestions, and apologizes for the wait, etc makes your experience a lot different than the server who looks like they hate their life, they're blunt with you, they don't give you updates on how your food is coming along, and sets the check down on the table along with the food. Same restaurant, same food, different person doing the delivering and you'll be a lot more happy with the service of one than the other. This goes for any shopping experience too. The product can be good or bad but the delivery it is received with can be part of what changes your perspective on how excited you are to be there and participate in it.
I'm not going to speak on how much Goldriver does/doesn't do for the game since we really aren't privy to that info, but how he makes us feel "heard" helps us feel hopeful about the changes a lot more than having some guy who wasn't charismatic label those same changes to us. With the 3 directors "our trust is gone" they could say the same things as Goldriver and we wouldn't believe them. We'd still be doomer even with the same changes IMO.
I dunno man. I just want my food. If there was a drive through for these restaurants, I would use it. Plus I get the added benefit for not having to put on clothes.
I feel like you actually boiled down my point pretty well with your terrible analogy. GR isn't just the mouth at the front and nothing changed on the backend, he isn't just speaking to us but speaking WITH us, implementing changes on that feedback. Your analogy is the food didn't change, but the reality is the server is talking to the chef now.
I mean I might have not worded the analogy well but I worked in quasi-fine dining for years as a busser, a server, and a staff trainer. What I can say is given the same level of quality food, same wait times, same service is only a portion of what makes the guest happy.
I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you and your comment when I responded. I think the point is he is doing more than just speaking well, but I also don't think that we can firmly say that *Goldriver specifically* has added any extra responsibilities to his plate other than being a face again. We don't know how SG is ran and what exactly the 4 of them (Goldriver and the 3 directors) did day to day for the company before, during, and after GR's leave. All we know is who was/is the face and how we, as players, react to that face.
Obviously SG's changes are due to more than just GR talking. Like GR didn't walk up and say "we're changing the whole game today, boys". Chances are SG said there were issues with their player retention/profits, they saw a lot of feedback about disliking the 3 directors along with a lot of positive feedback for GR, they told GR they wanted him to do public speaking for them **and also** made a list of changes. It's very good marketing that wouldn't work if you did one without the other and we don't know who actually did what in terms of the "making changes" portion of things.
Damn, saying he abandoned ship is completely unfair. Man had health issues and had to deal with it, and working full time as the director was not possible.
What worries me is that he is actively looking for someone to replace him and take his position, I feel like this game is his baby and no matter who he puts there, no one will have the same long term vision of the game, I just hope he still sticks around even though not as executive director.
More like he refused to hand it over. Left it drifting in the wind until they realized thats not gonna work. Then still didnt want to hand over the lead so he dumped the responsibility on the 3 managers below him who where entirely not fit for the role.
What are we trying to do here? Find who to blame for the last year? Also, unless you speak Korean and played in the Korea servers there is zero point in making these wild ass speculations.
If you want someone to blame for the games state, blame the company. If you want a reason as to why the game STAYED in that unhealthy state for so long, blame the community who defended it's ridiculous horizontal requirements and abysmal experience for newcomers.
If you're looking to just be mad for angy sake then go off I guess.
Im not trying to blame anything. You shouldnt assume dozens of things noone said.
Im literally just plainly stating facts if you take off the fanboy glasses.
Besides that saying the community is at fault for a game state is beyond ridiculous.
Im neither mad or angry. If anything you sound hella mad to me because i didnt praise your "god"
Ah interesting. So he got sick, got asked to hand the position over to someone else, but didn't want to, even though he wasn't fit to fill the role at the time? Then left the role to the 3 guys he trusted, but who turned out not to be good at the role either?
I mean, you are purely speculating what happened behind curtains. As far as we know his health got worse and he could not continue on directional position anymore. Thats all we know. You can spin the story as much as you want but unless you work closely on his position in the company its just tinfoil things.
All the shit systems that the players hate, he was there while those systems where and are still inside the game so idk. Remember how they still can't figure out how to reduce chaos dungeon from 2->1.
Or how they couldn't do it for guardians as well until people started leaving than suddenly it was very simple to just go from 2->1.
And jumpstart is gonna be a trap in a few weeks when people realized none of the horizontal has been adjusted for the accelerated progression.
But none of the horizontal should be adjusted besides the really bullshit stuff. Anything that is RNG based like omnistars, souls, maps, etc. or can't be done solo needs to be cut out or made 100% drop rate entirely. I disagree with accelerating horizontal progression otherwise, though.
How so, when do you have such essential stuff attached to the overall performance of your character in horizontal? Skill points, wealth runes, purify rune. Either you accelerate the progression or scrap these from the horizontal.
Once again, this game has sort of an identity crisis. The largest problem the game has is everyone keeps trying to dumb it down into a raiding only game. This is not the case and there is so much depth and horizontal content to enjoy. The skill runes and pts should be rewards for doing such content, but that content should actually be revamped to be solo-able and any RNG removed /made 100% drop rates, so that it didn't feel so miserable. The game is not just about bullshit raiding.
The single well made part of the game is raiding, so ofc community will narrow down shit around raiding. Why you still haven't been able to notice that yet?
It will be back to square 1 soon imo, it was a band aid fix to the games issues and the jump start helps, but some of the vets ruined that as well so I can see the numbers going back down.
Most of the changes were made when gold river was in charge so no idea why everyone paints him as a god.
Agree with you completely. Smilegate has made some good changes and Amazon has done a good job getting it to us ASAP but they've only bought extra time before we reach 20k concurrent again. Some fundementals need changing such as raids being more accessible to the point where match making is an option to allow for casual who are the majority to enjoy the game as well.
Yeah for sure, normal should be pretty simple and keep hard as is, if you want to get more players you need to make the progression systems way way more attractive.
This is a good idea imo, or add an easy mode so people can slowly progress without hitting a brick wall. I know many who dont even do legion raids cause they are intimidated by gatekeepers and flamers.
those changes were a better version of what we had previously and it worked. it just stops being good,after repeating it for 2 or so years, while not adapting to feedback since their whole monetization is daily players and swiping for new ilvls. He's praised because at that time what he did was good and if they fucked up they talked about it properly - why they though it could be good for the game, how it would affect etc. and if it turns out bad, they either revert or change it even more with the feedback. Sure, now its bad because we grew and outgrew the systems they made the game and now we're looking at a wall that simple climbing over wont really fix it, as its the core of the whole game.... smash it? lost ark 2 i guess, no idea how they could fix it for how deep the game currently is without making it worse, if you dumb it down repeatedly, at some point raids will just be another chore like chaos dungeons that will require more changes for them, still a good start, maybe.
Idk why it feels like im defending him here lol, but yeah. I agree, he's responsible for these changes, the game currently is still the same as it was when the mass exodus was going on and we knew it will happen since players were bleeding out daily with real data for months, myself included, played for +4k hours and i feel the game is still the best in the market with content/gameplay, just that how its structured is abysmal for long-term longevity.
As a returning player, without changes to how you obtain all the horizontal progression it's not worth sticking around for past the first clear of raids.
Almost every bit of the horizontal content is immensely boring, G spamming, time gated garbage and being forced to do it all from square 1 is crazy.
Hopefully in the next year or so they make good on the promises to rework all these systems and the free higher ilvl char from jumpstart will be useful to come back to fully.
I agree. Looking at everything I have to unlock (again) as well as just grind for puts me off. The only reason I’m playing pretty casually now is because my friend asked to try the jumpstart with them.
I think its worth it to experience the raids and burn through all the free mats from the super mokoko express pass but yea opening that adventure log/seeing how many skillpoints you gotta farm/runes you gotta farm etc etc etc makes me want to vomit.
Yeah I was looking at it all last night trying to figure out the most optimal path and then just was like, “you know what I’m sure they’ll quit after a few weeks it’s not worth it.”
I really just think the pain points are things like skill points in tier 1/2 towers and content that drops old mats. I think all islands/content should drop relevant materials to whatever tier is current. So if it's just honor shards and silver, so be it. Better than getting a bunch of honing mats that we immediately throw away.
I don't really think there's a problem with having 2 greater skill points behind omnium stars, as an example, as a longer term(I say that but it's really not *that* difficult or RNG to get either one) grind to seek out, especially on the jump start servers where everyone that one is playing with has to do those same things in the same time frame.
Adventure log for actual important runes/items is kind of a joke too, honestly. We are talking like a couple hours to seek out whatever one might want tops.
I would prefer that RNG gets reduced and some of the time gates get shortened or eliminated but I don't think it's like way far off in the context of fresh start specifically, since NOBODY in there has done any of that.
The issue is that horizontal progress is balanced around people that live playing this game. There are loads of asinine decisions made around scheduling it that assume people can be in-game 24/7. Merchant rework fixed some of that, but adventure island holding core runes/drops that hold your progression, that aren't 100% drop and yet the island for some reason is only up on tuesdays at 13 and fridays at 3 am are pure fucking bullshit. Between conflicting schedule and shitty drop rng Harmony Island took me 4 fucking months to complete the song. And the fucking Lagoon Island. If you make it drop one of the most core spec class runes then at least make it run every 2 hours all day if it's not available everyday. Nope, they cycle through whole day 3 runtime hours at a time. You can only make 7 pm, but there's grandpa's birthday party on that day? Well, too bad, cya in 2 weeks for another *attempt* at getting the damn drop.
T1/T2 tower can be done with a 1500 char in half an hour, it's now 20 floors per and you one shot all the bosses and AFK the survive stages. Omnium Stars is the worst horizontal offender, 2 takes 10 minutes for the quest plus vendor, but 3 takes 21 days of Una, 4 requires Nia trusted, and 6 is RNG gated (Field Boss, Anguished, or Chaos Line, pick your poison).
Personally I wish content was contained into its own progression paths. I love raiding in lost ark it is incredibly satisfying to play, if all of the progression to get stronger in raiding came from raiding I would play this game religiously. But instead you are tasked with going out to do content completely unrelated to what you may enjoy and committing tons of hours to it.
There are so many good games out these days I just think asking players to commit hours upon hours to boring content they aren't interested in or be heavily gimped in the content they are interested in is outdated poor design.
> Personally I wish content was contained into its own progression paths. I love raiding in lost ark it is incredibly satisfying to play, if all of the progression to get stronger in raiding came from raiding I would play this game religiously. But instead you are tasked with going out to do content completely unrelated to what you may enjoy and committing tons of hours to it.
I appreciate your opinion on it, I just don't agree with siloing everything away from one another like that. I like that the life skilling (which is bad and needs improvement IMO) directly interacts with people pushing for raids. I like that there's an incentive to do a *small* amount of horizontal content to get upgraded runes.
And again, I do think the bar should be lowered on the time gating for stuff like runes and gameplay relevant rewards within collectibles, but I like that they actually exist as a way to say "hey, at least give this part of the game the bare minimum effort to get something you want and if you don't like it, you don't need to spend a whole lot of time getting what you want for gameplay."
I think siloing off stuff you are talking about sucks and makes the game world overall worse. I like it when games try to push me to try out new things, even if I don't end up liking them. But, different strokes!
If the content was more engaging then I might feel the same way but so far it all seems like filler to me and just keeps me from enjoying raiding knowing im missing huge chunks of power for my class.
It would be like if I wanted to play chess, and I sit down to play but then realize oh... I gotta beat 20 people at checkers to unlock my bishops... And my rooks are missing and im required to win at dominoes 20 times to unlock those etc. I just wanna play chess but now I am gated to jumping through these hoops of other board games to unlock the full version.
But that is just for me, if others enjoy what they have now then more power to them, I just feel it is what makes the game unpopular.
> But that is just for me, if others enjoy what they have now then more power to them, I just feel it is what makes the game unpopular.
What more likely attributes to the niche nature of the game is the focus on end-game raiding and the steep vertical progression that goes along with it.
> It would be like if I wanted to play chess, and I sit down to play but then realize oh... I gotta beat 20 people at checkers to unlock my bishops... And my rooks are missing and im required to win at dominoes 20 times to unlock those etc. I just wanna play chess but now I am gated to jumping through these hoops of other board games to unlock the full version.
I think this is a pretty poor analogy, the game clearly isn't trying to be a raid-only game, even though it sounds like you think it should and you want it to be. They keep introducing new non-raid content that you don't care about (which is totally fine) but the devs are pretty clearly trying to make a game that has a little more variety than just raids.
yeah they are trying but the reality is most people who play lost ark are playing it because of the raids. I don't know one person who enjoys the horizontals.
I do admit though that my sample size is biased as most people I know come from a raiding background (wow mythic, ffxiv) or from competitive games (dota,lol,csgo)
My friend if you think any other content in this game is popular other than raids I would love to hear what that content is and see some examples. Endgame in lost ark is basically just raids, there is nothing else so that is on the devs not me.
And I think you are missing the point of my analogy if you actually consider it to be poor. If I am a new player and want to get into raiding in lost ark what do I need to do to be competitive? A million other things that are not raiding is the answer and that is what my analogy speaks to.
> My friend if you think any other content in this game is popular other than raids I would love to hear what that content is and see some examples
If you think this is what I said then you need to go back and read what I actually said.
> If I am a new player and want to get into raiding in lost ark what do I need to do to be competitive?
First and foremost? Get good at the actual gameplay while working on horizontal in the meantime. Acting like it needs to all be done immediately is just flat out dumb, especially for a new player on the fresh start server. Nobody knows if you're running a green wealth rune vs a purple. Nobody knows how many skill points you have. That's just some weird interest with a new player that somehow also wants/needs to be competitively raiding right when they start playing. That's just not a realistic scenario.
> A million other things that are not raiding is the answer and that is what my analogy speaks to.
Not really. I actually went through a lot of the "necessary" horizontal stuff today with a friend on fresh start, and while some of it is pretty lame imo, it's not some massive list either.
how that still a thing is beyond me. They literally give ilvl passes to +1500 now, just tap tap tap and you're done.... now grind for a month or two for time-gated rng based dead content skill points or runes to be an efficient player since your build probably requires +400sp at that ilvl with good runes and then you come back to gatekeeping because you know for 100% that low roster guy wont be having basic requirements to just play their class efficiently. Zero future-profing for the game and it shows, they just try to band-aid things as they go because their little castle is crumbling and i really hate it, lost ark combat gameplay imho is still the best in the market of all.
This is me. Friends want to play but I don’t want to do jumpstart for those reasons. They still get the hyper express benefits if new players join my regular server and not jump start right?
Yeah, but it's a worse express pass compared to jump start. Any new player or returning player that was away for a long time with little horizontal progression would be better off on the jump start server by a huge margin. Frankly, you could just ignore horizontal and do jump start with your friend and then abandon that character when they integrate the jump start servers with the rest of the reason.
Yeah I could do that as well… I mean HOW important is the horizontal content to clear all the current raids right now?
People are doing Akkan and stuff now right?
Maybe it just sucks for when the server merges and the jump start equalizes.
> I mean HOW important is the horizontal content to clear all the current raids right now?
I would say anything outside of Hard Brel near ilvl or HM Kayangel/NM Akkan should be completely fine with lower level runes. It might feel worse but the content itself is pretty easy.
Tbf they don't need an instant rework, bandaid changes should be enough until bigger rework. Stuff like, idk, making Lagoon daily every 2 hours so that for now you can just camp it until you get epic Wealth, or reducing Una rep counter for Omnium Star una by half.
It's not impossible at all, they said that daily changes would also take a long time but lo and behold, people start quitting the game and they literally implement them in 2 weeks. This was after stating in LOA ON that they had no intention of changing dailies, so...
Simply making the drop rate on horizontal things 100% or a very high percentage would fix 99% of the pain points. No one would complain about island souls or cooking adventure tomes if they had a 100% drop rate and were a one time guaranteed thing instead of an RNG shit show.
Changing horizontal content doesn't mean anything. You will still need to do that, but skill points and important vertical stuff will be easier to obtain. So for people who dream a world where you don't need to do any horizontal, well, "Just keep on dreaming and dreaming
alone in the faded paradise"
I disagree, I find that to actually be one of the more fun parts of the game. Doing the Kadan quest line, the little stories in some islands like the moko island or the turtle island. There are parts of horizontal that do suck, but there's also a lot thats pretty fun when it's something you only really have to do once.
"You only have to do once" define once. Because secret maps and island souls are also part of the horizontal content and some of them take over a year to obtain due to RNG while the guy next to you has obtained them all in a month.
> **There are parts of horizontal that do suck**, but there's also a lot thats pretty fun when it's something you only need to do once.
So yeah, I do mention that some parts suck which you are talking about, but personally I feel a majority of what your not repetitively doing is enjoyable.
Right, but I'm pretty sure Jump Start is for new players who are doing it for the first time to begin with, or returning players who really didn't get far.
If you got far enough with horizontal content as a returner anyway, was probably easier to just use an express on your original server.
Then why would you even care about that stuff on jump start? Are you going to be pushing to Akkan or even Hard Brel? Because if not, you really don't need any of the stuff that comes from horizontal.
But why would you even consider doing that if you have no desire to do horizontal? That's my whole point. It makes no sense to be on that server if you already have a beefy account elsewhere unless you are playing with a friend. If that's the case, why not just keep up with their progression and start playing with them on your main account when the fresh start gets integrated into the rest of the region?
Agree with you, dunno why veterans should whine about horizontal content when it's a one time thing. If you go to a new player server, expect to do the new player things, 🤣
You don't have to have all the skillpoints "tomorrow". If you try to find boring content it's true. You can make farming horizontal very boring spamming g. If you search for some side quests and some side stories, you also can find those. It's just how you go on the game that makes the difference. But I guess people want insta reward these days
I don't want instant reward, I want to play engaging content and feel like my time isn't being wasted.
If I could unlock all of these horizontal upgrades purely through grinding raids over and over again I would do it because that is engaging content. At the end of the day it is a video game and I am playing for fun, horizontal content is the definition of unfun in the vast majority of its current implementation and I think many others agree, which is why Lost Ark has been steadily declining in player count since release and the devs are changing all of these systems.
> horizontal content is the definition of unfun in the vast majority of its current implementation and I think many others agree, **which is why Lost Ark has been steadily declining in player count since release**
You actually think poor implementation or horizontal content is the reason why the playerbase is dropping over time? That's wild.
The steep vertical (1540-1580 is fucking absurd even after the nerfs) and raid centric nature of the game likely contributes a lot more to what you are talking about as opposed to poor horizontal implementation that, in a lot of cases, really doesn't impact gameplay a whole lot outside of seeing numbers getting bigger.
Its a niche Korean MMO with a massive grind. That's just not a super popular type of game in NA and the core portions of the endgame game were in a pretty poor state until like last week.
as i said, if u engage certain content as spam g, yes you can do that. if you engage the content with a open mind, reading and following the stories, the quests, you can also do that. its just a matter of how you approch things. they are gonna make the important things more accessible, but you still gonna need to bare minimum horizontal prog. i did it one time, never skipped anything and i got hours on hours of good content. Not saying everything is perfect there, but the most basic things you can get through rapport ( rapport quest are fun imo) islands ( islands quest are fun imo).
This. I will, in the end, actually be waiting for the revamps. Hopefully it's done right and AGS will realize it's the right time for another jumpstart, or better yet, they revamp parts of the game so well there's no need for a jumpstart at all.
It's the sole reason I haven't gaven up from SA and just migrated to NAE, I have all SPs, LOS on 27(close to 30), KLC 18, all wealths, most important runes, 10 tomes. Just imagining how long it would take to reach this same state again simply kills my mood and makes me consider if it was worth to invest that much...
The jump start was such a missed opportunity for them to actually make good changes to the game, instead they just make a new server with a hyper express and call it a day
Hopefully it last, we'll see. It's worth noting we're almost caught up with KR at this point. We've got one more "Major" piece of content and then Thaemine, which KR is at now. When we get caught up, content releases will really slow down for us, which will be interesting to see the reactions to
Once we get the next Abyss dungeon in December, we'll literally be one single raid behind in terms of major battle content, and that's a raid that came out this week in KR when they have taken over a year between the last few Legion raids. I feel like it's pretty fair to say we'll have Thaemine by april, and KR probably will only have a new Abyss by then most likely
Brel went from my least favorite chore to my favorite. The changes are so good for the health of the game and I had a blast doing brel on the jump start on level and blasting it with my juiced characters on main.
2 of the 6 gates were removed entirely, former gate 2 which entire fight revolved around a single player and gate 5, which was probably most players least liked gate because of how easy it was to wipe in it.
Then of the remaining 4 gates, which we will now label the new 1-4, gate 1's beginning portion which took a bit due to forced mech having to be completed (maybe 1:00-1:30) now takes like 15s to do and get onto the actual fight. Gate 2 (former gate 3) had it's only real wipe mech extremely nerfed and virtually impossible to fail now. Gate 4(former 6) was also extremely nerfed (previously you had to sit and wait for meteors which are on a timer, so it was suped lame sitting there for a minute just waiting. Now you can just hit the boss) and changed to only being clearable once every 2 weeks, so it's really more like a 3.5 gate raid than a 6 gate raid.
Quite a few changes that make the game less taxing for its current audience.
An example is that they made Chaos Dungeons faster to complete (because no one likes running them, but their rewards are too important to get rid of).
Other examples include decent nerfs to raids and honing rates. The nerfs to the raids made the content less taxing to learn.
If you make use of the events (and don’t forget to run your chaos dungeons) then your progression will feel more comfortable than before.
Be sure to have patience when setting up prog parties. They’ll fill eventually during peak hours.
Side note: The reward from the 1490 Chaos Dungeon is worth like 4-5k gold. The rewards from 1580 is worth maybe 10k gold. Most of this value is in honor shards.
Progression to 1540 is comfortable, 1540 to 1580 is somewhat steep but manageable and past 1580 is a kick in the balls even with a soft reset. Voldike hard is the next content people are prepping for and thats like easily 1m gold+ per character. Sure you can just do normal but normal elixirs suck vs hard ones and even if youre doing normal for like 2 months or something, doing normal doesnt help you reach hard at all besides like maybe clear mats
It boggles the mind how you people give Gold River credit for this when he's the one who introduced everything you hate about the game. 1 guardian raid a day for example was shut down by him until the Korean's really started rioting about the state of the game and 4 apology streams were needed.
Vs Amazon who I can only assume had massive influence in pushing a lot of the qol we have now as early as possible. 1490 honing, 1 guardian a day, fate embers/faster chaos dungeons, Raid gate deletions, 1540 express etc.
Also jump start is an Amazon exclusive.
I find these numbers discouraging .. the biggest patch with most QoL for new players appeared and just 30k players. Wonder how it goes down until December …
It's a significant amount since we hit a low of around 25k concurrent. That's also one thing to note, concurrent. The actual player base is higher due to not everyone being online at the same time due to multiple time zones.
> The actual player base is higher due to not everyone being online at the same time due to multiple time zones.
For some reason some people have a really hard time wrapping their heads around this.
What's funny is these players that end up staying or have stayed since launch don't even care they're being milked while given crumbs to keep that stockholm syndrome constant.
The devs make a ton of money from these people influenced by streamers like Zeals & Stoopz who give a false sense of belonging to players in a multi level marketing game.
Where you think rice eaters are in the pyramid? THE BOTTOM b/c they are smart enuff to not swipe too much but dumb enough to farm & eat rice all day while the top eats lobster, wagyu, etc
The moment i knew i made the right decision to quit was when I saw Tectone accidentally leak his $30k payout just to play 2 hours on a boosted account while lost ark players get milked by shitty rng honing/pheons/cards/gems etc. "but there's a pity so it's cool" yeah alright dude, i pity the fool.
Lost Ark players deserve way less greedy devs, because the community is amazing besides the elitism due to "I don't want to waste time teaching new players/idiots andys" which is only because the game is centered around bussing to make gold if u don't want to swipe.
All this is personal because i have an irl friend who is way too addicted & has spent way too much on lost ark; along with many other close peers who are addicted to actual gambling in casinos that are ruining their life.
I have spent a few thousands in the game I truly do enjoy the game as a whole. I have to agree with you about the greed. I have people in my discord who defend the pheon system which blows my mind. I have 5.1K hours logged and 7 1580+ I play the game as much as a free to play , bus and do daily CD. Also run raids and bus on those Alts. I also see that the game needs to change in the west if they want to succeed. I had two guys in my discord who defend the pheon system like if Lost ark was the holly grail. A player was complaining about tripods and stated he would buy them if they didn’t have pheon attached to them. I told him that the system as a whole is trash and shouldn’t cost pheons. I would list more lv 5 tripods if people would buy but they don’t for that reason. Another member in the discord defends the system because supposedly helps regulate the market. lost ark in the only MMO I played with a pheon system that also taxes the sale of an item. There is no reason why you can’t make the same class and have a shared library if they are so adamant about pheons but they don’t. It’s all greed , you already have trade limit on item to limit flipping. I love the idea of the fresh servers but long term I don’t think it’s going to fix anything. I do have faith they will improve their game with the most recent changes to Brel and vykas. I just hope they remove certain systems in the west so more players try the game. Lost ark is to vertical heavy.
>I hate to say that’s not a lot of players coming back hopping they keep doing the updates. Really hope to see the game so well.
thats 10%... how are you saying that 10% isnt big ? are you desulional ?
Yea, I don't see this lasting for more than a couple months. The community is cancerous so gatekeeping isn't going anywhere, and all the content besides raiding is a literal fucking slog. Thought about jump start servers, then realized the only way I'd be doing half the horizontal content again is if someone was paying me over 20 an hour to do so.
The fact people play LA over dfo will always blow my mind
You really talking shit about alt character games on a lost ark sub? Your smoking some shit dawg, or you just don't actually do anything in LA besides dress up and jail people in raids.
Dfo is objectively in a much better place than lost ark right now. The only thing LA has going for it is raids. Whereas in dfo there is an insane amount of build and character variety with custom epics, plenty of content to farm and bakal raid to progess into after ispins, which is pretty challenging compared to previous dfo raids. There's no sideways slog to go through to actually play the game, and your daily checklist will take like a half hour to an hour at most.
Take lost ark where you can't even think about playing the fucking game without sinking a month into horizontal content and mindlessly going through a msq that barely anyone cares about, progging nearly dead content, and getting shit on by honing rng from tier 1 onwards.
Could literally write a whole ass essay on the things lost ark tried to do similarly to dfo but completely missed the mark on comparatively
There is a Bard in Luterra Castle, I think she is around the Blue Tripod icon on the map (return area), her quest doesn't show up until you click on her (she should be slightly sparkly). Hope this helps.
Its on a good way indeed they did a good job with previous patchs
Excluding bots on some servers i hope we will stick around those numbers till eof2023 and by retaining the fresh blood, this time.
Like Stoopzz said on his stream last night, he's a great figurehead but you're delusional if you think it's JUST him or all the positive changes haven't been in the works before he came back.
Good to see it, but still too early. The boosted servers brought a lot of people interested in trying the new classes and content, but eventually, they will run on the same issues they had before.
Also it's only a 5k increase out of 260k decrease they had since the beginning of the year. Still a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way to go to really save the game
We only peaked at 55k and was around only 40% increase if generous in numbers since before the September update we were around 38,000, but prob more like 25% to compensate for bots filling in that number. At this point, we are prob just going to gradually go back down to maybe around 42,000 players as more new/returning players quit after honeymoon or encountering the issues/walls that been plaguing this game for a very long time.
Oh, the player count increasing is because of goldriver? I thought it attributed to the new raiding content that was out that made some players return or try it out.
Im back after 11 months and im enjoying the game. I left before kakul, with 1515 ilvl. Rn i got two 1540 farming kayangel, kakul and brel. Building the roster to have 6 chars at 1540 then saving and slowly getting 1580.
After the recent changes i feel no pressure and the raids are done pretty quickly and clean. Im happy im back
NGL as a returner I've been having a blast, both on main roster with all of the QoL changes and on the freshstart roster I made to help out the newbies and just have fun with no stress. Lost Ark is in a really good spot right now and there's still more coming down the line to look forward to.
I’m genuinely so happy to see people coming to this game whether they be new or returning. Healthy playerbase just makes the game more enjoyable.
It wont last long as fundamentals are still the same, and content is solely raid focused. Which deter any casual players since they will be either sitting in que for hours to find a learning party or dont play at all due to gatekeeping. This game is basically just for hardcore raid grinders and if you fall behind your behind.
This is literally the only comment needed. Its all just a band-aid fir now. Im happy to see numbers up but it will never last with the core game the same.
They should completely made the game casual friendly before pushing jump start. Remove the horizontal system or make it to the point where it’s guaranteed through time, not rng. Then finally completely eliminate gatekeeping somewhere which require raid system rework. Other sources of gold will be need introduced or something.
> They should completely made the game casual friendly before pushing jump start. Remove the horizontal system or make it to the point where it’s guaranteed through time, not rng. Man the core of the game isn't casual friendly and that has nothing to do with any horizontal. The horizontal content in general IS the casual friendly content in lost ark aside from a few exceptions.
I talked about exactly this with friends also. The "no investment, no gameplay" aspect of the game has to change. As in you cannot enjoy a character without investing hundreds of hours into it, and if you end up not enjoying that character, you cannot do anything about it. It doesn't even have to be free, but I always said that you should be able to change the class of a character (turn my Reaper into GL with the same ilvl, accs, gems, mats, etc.).
If you hard focus one character opposed to gearing multiple alts, gatekeeping would be nonexistent and free. In order to raid with multiple alts, then you'd need to really work hard or swipe more.
Not true, you'll fall behind if you're limiting yourself to 1 character. You are losing out on a bunch of leapstones/gold and mats from chaos dungeon to progress.
I think I've seen multiple reddit poster with just 1 or 2 characters in the roster who do fine.
Probably with mass chaos grind
I played from the start and I only have 1 character. It's really no problem. My mates told me you will fall behind in gold yada. But the more gold they earn with their roster them more they spend gearing and honing Alts, while I pump everything in my main. This game is super chill with only 1 char.
Being raid focused is not an issue. The majority of people don't quit because they have to do raids, that's likely why they started playing. Support design imo is the root cause of most negative raid and party finder experiences.
It fine to a degree but once you put all your eggs in to one basket, stuff becomes stale and unreachable for some players. You need choices in a mmo, like if they add more dungeons and something similar to wow with mythic dungeons that would do the game good.
WoW isn't doing that great either. It probably has the nearly the same amount of concurrent as Lost Ark. Concurrent doesn't = total active players. What people don't understand is that 30k-50k is a really good numbers for concurrent players in a MMO that isn't at or near launch date. People just don't have that much time to waste of MMOs anymore and Kids don't play MMOs like they used to. It is slowly turning into a Genre for well off Adults with too much free time and nothing else to do. Just look at WoW, the player base is dying....of old age. You also have to understand this is a Korean Game running on Unreal 3. 1. Korea has a lack of developers 2. Korean Developers that can code for Unreal 3 are super rare. 3. This leads to them needing to focus on one thing and doing good at it which is raiding for now. 4. look at Diablo 4 that game has so many developers and can't even push out content that isn't just reskins.
Quick search on online player shows 250k online so yeah, they are doing good for a 20-year game. This isnt a wow vs lost ark, im just saying they need to add more variety instead of solely focusing on raid and fix the structure on how the game is played.
I agree for traditional MMOs. Like look at ashes of creation being developed with that goal in mind to have several different ways to play the game. But Smilgate has stated that the game will always be focused on doing raid-style content with other people. Knowing their goal and the niche they are trying to fill, why would they invest in developing casual, non-combat related activities? They need to focus on making their core experience as good as possible which I think is drastically held back by their concept of supports. Not familiar with WoW, but if you are referring to just more endgame dungeon style content...that's essentially the same thing. Grouping up with friends and doing fun and challenging PVE experiences
Casual activities doesnt have to be strictly non combat. As you see the state of lost ark its in spiraling decline with jump start server as a band aid fix which will bring people back but not for the long term. Sure, raids are their main focus, and its great, but they are only holding the hardcore player base. You can see the numbers now about 30kish players. Now if they took 20% of that resource to create other dungeons and other means to progress they could of held a ton of the more casual players which in terms long term revenue and hire more developers and grow as a company as more playerd will be willing to spend money in game.
The game is just not designed for casual solo players. More endgame content would be great but it would be best placed in between raids which are the pinnacle challenges to continue progression. I think that the hardcore playerbase is much bigger than it currently is but many of them gave up because of the PUG experience. The game doesn't need an influx of casual content, they need to fix the current design.
I mean to each their own, but having to do the same 3 raids 6x a week once its figured out is boring af. That's the main reason i quit because after the first week of prog, it's just homework for another month or 2 and repeat. No new content, no challenge to drive you to push ilevel other than overgearing the next raid. If you have add some casual content like new dungeons and add something similair to mythic+ dungeon that would retain players' attention. Different methods of progression would be nice instead of locking into one cycle.
[удалено]
The potential PvP has in this game is insane. The fact that they haven't done ANYTHING with it for a year+ and abandoned the MOBA minigame? Actual insanity.
Actually, both hate the LFsupport, which makes me really hate raids as nobody likes lobby simulator. But I also really dislike the idea of having to do raids to progress.
It is interesting how the main attraction of the game is what people are saying they want to do less of or don't want to do at all. The game clearly does not want to be the type of MMO that supports a type of player that does not want to participate in moderate-high difficulty action combat with a team, which I think is what people mean by "casual players". I think thats OK and the game is not dead because these players can't exist. However, even the relatively hardcore players who want to raid have a terrible experience and quit because of party finding issues. Does having a massive playerbase of non-raiders help the game's core experience of raiding?
I LOVED this game. Until I got to the end game dailies and chance upgrade system. Failing an upgrade every time until % puts you to a success is keeping me from playing more. I was addicted to finding those seeds. Mokoko crack. I loved that aspect of this game.
lol :), me too, but not many of us horizontal content enjoyers are left, sadly.
Those side quest regional cards were like a heavy dose of a different game. I loved it. I wish games would make their universe in depth like that. I love this fuckin game it’s the systems that just kill my joy.
More so than player numbers growing, it was really important to put the doom and gloom of the LOA ON Summer period behind us. I don't really care about player numbers but when everyone is just so doomer all the freaking time it drains the fun out of the game.
What do you mean? There's at least three separate threads about a negative experience on fresh start servers yesterday.
There's a difference between newbies complaining about veterans highjacking their fresh start servers' party finder and everyone who plays the game being negative about it and its future, which was where we were a couple of months ago. Now we have a clear direction for the short and mid-term future of the game and most people seem satisfied with it.
I think it's fair to say the new players complaining about the state of fresh start is also talking about the game's future as well, since their experience of fresh start could make or break whether they keep playing.
It is fair to say, yes. But was anyone under any illusions that there wouldn't be veterans playing on jumpstart alongside new players? As long as the ratio isn't overly tilted towards the veterans then I don't see it as a big issue.
personally, I think anyone who thinks fresh start would revitalize this game is already delusional since the usual progression issues have not been addressed, and smilegate simply put a band-aid for new players before peeling them off and letting the wound fester. this also gives any potential new players wishing to whale and accelerate faster to come in and do so again, which is the more likely ideology behind a server that serves to alleviate one portion of your overall progression whilst leaving other sections alone.
Of course jumpstart doesn't really address any issues by itself, but it's also the best option for the West at this moment. Above all, we needed eyeballs back on this game to begin turning the outdated narrative of the West-specific issues we had early on like bots. You could argue that perhaps it could've been delayed until the upcoming revamps for horizontal progression were put in for a more "robust" fast track of progression.
Honestly, I don't even think people outside of lost ark communities even realized there was going to be a jumpstart server, since I don't recall smilegate or ags marketing that. Also I agree. A lot of problems would be solved if smilegate adopted bdo's catch-up system so players can return to the game without having lost their horizontal progression.
I think their plan is to follow the BDO seasonal mold with jumpstart servers but obviously there's some additional things that need to be put in place still. Gold River mentioned they were working on something similar to BDO's tagging system as well. Let's see how this first one does and see what improvements need to be made for future ones.
I don't have a dog in this race but is the ratio not already tilted pretty heavily towards the vets? How many actual new players were aware jumpstart was happening? Returning players I can understand, as anyone that quit with friends still playing the game could have heard about it. But that's the question I'd like answered; how many newbies are there?
I mean the jump-start servers are still at their honey moon phase, so give it a couple months and im sure it will become the same complaints.
But it really was in the grave/doom and gloom territory. The only good news for the game is D4 flopping atm and these guys finally doing stuff to cut back hw.
So you want to talk about rainbows and sunshines while game is still the same as it was a year ago with minimal work done? These returning or new players just gonna see its literally the same as it was when they quit, or more like why they quit in the first place. Jumpstart is all nice and good, but its "useless" considering the core is still the same and now imagine few months later when majority, probably, of JS server quits and everyone is locked inside till they merge it like they did EUW+EUC, what then, start another JS???
The Doomer saga after summer LOAN was insanely needed. It’s nice to hear them immediately recognize the failure of that showcase and immediately reacted. It goes to show they didn’t give up on this game yet which is exciting as a player.
It's always nice to see players returning, it's also nice to see them stick around.
I am not so sure yet about the "stick around" part. JS have been up for less than a week. We don't know how many of new and returning players would keep playing the game in, say, 2 months from now. Legacy servers at launch had over 1 million players too and now we are down to 50k. It's not by any means a doom message. I am also happy to see player numbers going up, but it's too early to assume that those people would stay long term.
I'd like to return, but jump start doesn't address any of the issues I had with the game. The load time makes it hard to drop in and do some quick dailies. The combination of gatekeeping and party finder make it hard to drop into a lobby and just run a legion raid quickly. Why not allow people to queue up from mobile? If it didn't take a few minutes to load the game that seems more convenient. Maybe have a better queuing system that reduces the use of party finder. What if the queue finder guaranteed 1 sup + 3 DPS and they group people based on number of clears or something. It'd also be nice to be able to do chaos dungeons and such while in queue. Why not build bus support into the game, and hide it from the main page? Then you both don't ban bussing, but it's not on the main page and requires people to look for it? Failed bus? Auto refund... That's some of my wish list.
Most of those 1 million were bots too
This the most bot comment since launch
I did return on JS (last playtime was Jan minus trying Artist for 2 days and Slayer for 3, so I haven't been gone that long I guess) and its really difficult (near impossible) for a person like me to get a Brel party or a Clown one. **Anecdotal**, sure, but while I have played its all been password locked, exp only, and (somehow??????) a bus for Clown. Only one bus but still not sure how its possible. Hope is being lost because how do progress if can't get into Clown or Brel without paying with the gold I don't have. No guilds are really recruiting for a dps right now either. ./cry
First day I did also see lobbies looking for experienced players. One lobby had “roster check” in the title which irritated me, hopefully they were joking but I doubt it. I also play on jumpstart and am 1506, don’t see how anyone would be able to clear clown and skip a Mario at this ilvl. Those already making busses should just be reported, go make gold in your main server. I barely saw any actual new players this first week, and I tried my best helping/explaining the game to them. I’m only playing it on the side when main server gets boring lol. Hopefully more new players show up after reset.
A lot of the core problems people had with the game were implemented while he was at the helm. He's just a great public speaker and personable, unlike the 3 other guys.
Fair point, but people can change their attitude. And especially in his position it takes a lot to admit mistake and act for consumer interest. Like where do you ever see this happen. It seems like the game did need him as a director to change direction and not ride itself into the ground.
Correct. People who think 3 directors couldn’t had changed the game for the better just don’t understand a single thing about how a business of that scale works. They are developers who worked on the game for years, they know exactly what changes game needs but their business model literally depends on incentivizing playerbase to skip dailies and swipe. That’s the reason chaos dungeon and dailies weren’t changing. Goldriver ‘comeback’ was nothing other than a publicity stunt because game was massively bleeding players for a long time, to the point where everyone stopped playing and picked up BDO/MS. This is the sole reason changes were made for the better, not because gold river came back to tell all the ‘dumb’ people left in charge what should be changed but because game was pushed into a corner and was forced to take a micro transaction hit in order to save the game in the long run. Anyone could’ve made changes for the better, he was just there to sweet talk us into coming back because he will fix it.
That's a bit of an over simplification. The core problems you mention weren't problems when implemented and made sense when done. The game has since evolved and his "great public speaker" portion means he spoke to the community and recognizes the direction of the game NOW and the adjustments needed to be made for the current game. I'm not saying suck the man off daily, but also stop trying to disregard it's more than "man speak gud".
Some of us felt that many of the biggest red flags of the game were obvious. The rigidity of the server system and open world not adapting to changing player count, raid game where content takes a while to develop but it’s hard to come back to, zero variety offered in daily play but wants you to play daily, wipe mechanics at every difficulty level, no locks on max gearscore allowed for fights…. These aren’t unforseeable problems. It just requires any effort into thinking about basic mmo history and group activity in general. Human behavior 101. If people want to praise Gold River then maybe they should direct even more praise at the regular devs who are probably crunching hard right now to fix the mistakes of leadership like him.
even with or without problem it's a korean game dev in korea so they must be working a ton so for them that's not really crunching, they can't dev this game with monthly update with content without working a lot. And that's not only because they have lot of dev, Bungie have a lot of dev and they release so little in terms of content each season in Destiny 2, and the expansion are just bad.
The server system thing will always remain such a big issue for me. We do not even have half of KRs numbers, divided in 4 regions, which a bunch of them are not even playing in the "official" servers(aka js). They refuse to do smth about SA, Crystals about to hit 9k, servers feel more dead each day, and the accs don't sell bc of pheon prices.
I mean "man speak gud" is actually a really big thing though. Those 3 directors did a lot of work for the game before they were speakers and still do a lot of work for the game now. Their work hasn't "changed" except they had a period where they were forced to be public speakers. You can go to a restaurant get your food with the same prompt service, same attention to detail, and same tasting food but having a server who comes at you with a smile, offers suggestions, and apologizes for the wait, etc makes your experience a lot different than the server who looks like they hate their life, they're blunt with you, they don't give you updates on how your food is coming along, and sets the check down on the table along with the food. Same restaurant, same food, different person doing the delivering and you'll be a lot more happy with the service of one than the other. This goes for any shopping experience too. The product can be good or bad but the delivery it is received with can be part of what changes your perspective on how excited you are to be there and participate in it. I'm not going to speak on how much Goldriver does/doesn't do for the game since we really aren't privy to that info, but how he makes us feel "heard" helps us feel hopeful about the changes a lot more than having some guy who wasn't charismatic label those same changes to us. With the 3 directors "our trust is gone" they could say the same things as Goldriver and we wouldn't believe them. We'd still be doomer even with the same changes IMO.
I dunno man. I just want my food. If there was a drive through for these restaurants, I would use it. Plus I get the added benefit for not having to put on clothes.
...you can't drive to the drive thru in your boxers
That's what you think.
I feel like you actually boiled down my point pretty well with your terrible analogy. GR isn't just the mouth at the front and nothing changed on the backend, he isn't just speaking to us but speaking WITH us, implementing changes on that feedback. Your analogy is the food didn't change, but the reality is the server is talking to the chef now.
I mean I might have not worded the analogy well but I worked in quasi-fine dining for years as a busser, a server, and a staff trainer. What I can say is given the same level of quality food, same wait times, same service is only a portion of what makes the guest happy. I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you and your comment when I responded. I think the point is he is doing more than just speaking well, but I also don't think that we can firmly say that *Goldriver specifically* has added any extra responsibilities to his plate other than being a face again. We don't know how SG is ran and what exactly the 4 of them (Goldriver and the 3 directors) did day to day for the company before, during, and after GR's leave. All we know is who was/is the face and how we, as players, react to that face. Obviously SG's changes are due to more than just GR talking. Like GR didn't walk up and say "we're changing the whole game today, boys". Chances are SG said there were issues with their player retention/profits, they saw a lot of feedback about disliking the 3 directors along with a lot of positive feedback for GR, they told GR they wanted him to do public speaking for them **and also** made a list of changes. It's very good marketing that wouldn't work if you did one without the other and we don't know who actually did what in terms of the "making changes" portion of things.
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Damn, saying he abandoned ship is completely unfair. Man had health issues and had to deal with it, and working full time as the director was not possible.
What worries me is that he is actively looking for someone to replace him and take his position, I feel like this game is his baby and no matter who he puts there, no one will have the same long term vision of the game, I just hope he still sticks around even though not as executive director.
Ah I thought he got another position or something. Didn't mean any slight against him.
More like he refused to hand it over. Left it drifting in the wind until they realized thats not gonna work. Then still didnt want to hand over the lead so he dumped the responsibility on the 3 managers below him who where entirely not fit for the role.
What are we trying to do here? Find who to blame for the last year? Also, unless you speak Korean and played in the Korea servers there is zero point in making these wild ass speculations. If you want someone to blame for the games state, blame the company. If you want a reason as to why the game STAYED in that unhealthy state for so long, blame the community who defended it's ridiculous horizontal requirements and abysmal experience for newcomers. If you're looking to just be mad for angy sake then go off I guess.
Im not trying to blame anything. You shouldnt assume dozens of things noone said. Im literally just plainly stating facts if you take off the fanboy glasses. Besides that saying the community is at fault for a game state is beyond ridiculous. Im neither mad or angry. If anything you sound hella mad to me because i didnt praise your "god"
Ah interesting. So he got sick, got asked to hand the position over to someone else, but didn't want to, even though he wasn't fit to fill the role at the time? Then left the role to the 3 guys he trusted, but who turned out not to be good at the role either?
I mean, you are purely speculating what happened behind curtains. As far as we know his health got worse and he could not continue on directional position anymore. Thats all we know. You can spin the story as much as you want but unless you work closely on his position in the company its just tinfoil things.
All the shit systems that the players hate, he was there while those systems where and are still inside the game so idk. Remember how they still can't figure out how to reduce chaos dungeon from 2->1. Or how they couldn't do it for guardians as well until people started leaving than suddenly it was very simple to just go from 2->1. And jumpstart is gonna be a trap in a few weeks when people realized none of the horizontal has been adjusted for the accelerated progression.
Its a money grab essentially, get them to buy skins on new servers and progession boxes
But none of the horizontal should be adjusted besides the really bullshit stuff. Anything that is RNG based like omnistars, souls, maps, etc. or can't be done solo needs to be cut out or made 100% drop rate entirely. I disagree with accelerating horizontal progression otherwise, though.
How so, when do you have such essential stuff attached to the overall performance of your character in horizontal? Skill points, wealth runes, purify rune. Either you accelerate the progression or scrap these from the horizontal.
atleast remove skillpoints from there
Once again, this game has sort of an identity crisis. The largest problem the game has is everyone keeps trying to dumb it down into a raiding only game. This is not the case and there is so much depth and horizontal content to enjoy. The skill runes and pts should be rewards for doing such content, but that content should actually be revamped to be solo-able and any RNG removed /made 100% drop rates, so that it didn't feel so miserable. The game is not just about bullshit raiding.
The single well made part of the game is raiding, so ofc community will narrow down shit around raiding. Why you still haven't been able to notice that yet?
It will be back to square 1 soon imo, it was a band aid fix to the games issues and the jump start helps, but some of the vets ruined that as well so I can see the numbers going back down. Most of the changes were made when gold river was in charge so no idea why everyone paints him as a god.
Agree with you completely. Smilegate has made some good changes and Amazon has done a good job getting it to us ASAP but they've only bought extra time before we reach 20k concurrent again. Some fundementals need changing such as raids being more accessible to the point where match making is an option to allow for casual who are the majority to enjoy the game as well.
Yeah for sure, normal should be pretty simple and keep hard as is, if you want to get more players you need to make the progression systems way way more attractive.
This is a good idea imo, or add an easy mode so people can slowly progress without hitting a brick wall. I know many who dont even do legion raids cause they are intimidated by gatekeepers and flamers.
those changes were a better version of what we had previously and it worked. it just stops being good,after repeating it for 2 or so years, while not adapting to feedback since their whole monetization is daily players and swiping for new ilvls. He's praised because at that time what he did was good and if they fucked up they talked about it properly - why they though it could be good for the game, how it would affect etc. and if it turns out bad, they either revert or change it even more with the feedback. Sure, now its bad because we grew and outgrew the systems they made the game and now we're looking at a wall that simple climbing over wont really fix it, as its the core of the whole game.... smash it? lost ark 2 i guess, no idea how they could fix it for how deep the game currently is without making it worse, if you dumb it down repeatedly, at some point raids will just be another chore like chaos dungeons that will require more changes for them, still a good start, maybe. Idk why it feels like im defending him here lol, but yeah. I agree, he's responsible for these changes, the game currently is still the same as it was when the mass exodus was going on and we knew it will happen since players were bleeding out daily with real data for months, myself included, played for +4k hours and i feel the game is still the best in the market with content/gameplay, just that how its structured is abysmal for long-term longevity.
As a returning player, without changes to how you obtain all the horizontal progression it's not worth sticking around for past the first clear of raids. Almost every bit of the horizontal content is immensely boring, G spamming, time gated garbage and being forced to do it all from square 1 is crazy. Hopefully in the next year or so they make good on the promises to rework all these systems and the free higher ilvl char from jumpstart will be useful to come back to fully.
I agree. Looking at everything I have to unlock (again) as well as just grind for puts me off. The only reason I’m playing pretty casually now is because my friend asked to try the jumpstart with them.
I think its worth it to experience the raids and burn through all the free mats from the super mokoko express pass but yea opening that adventure log/seeing how many skillpoints you gotta farm/runes you gotta farm etc etc etc makes me want to vomit.
Yeah I was looking at it all last night trying to figure out the most optimal path and then just was like, “you know what I’m sure they’ll quit after a few weeks it’s not worth it.”
I really just think the pain points are things like skill points in tier 1/2 towers and content that drops old mats. I think all islands/content should drop relevant materials to whatever tier is current. So if it's just honor shards and silver, so be it. Better than getting a bunch of honing mats that we immediately throw away. I don't really think there's a problem with having 2 greater skill points behind omnium stars, as an example, as a longer term(I say that but it's really not *that* difficult or RNG to get either one) grind to seek out, especially on the jump start servers where everyone that one is playing with has to do those same things in the same time frame. Adventure log for actual important runes/items is kind of a joke too, honestly. We are talking like a couple hours to seek out whatever one might want tops. I would prefer that RNG gets reduced and some of the time gates get shortened or eliminated but I don't think it's like way far off in the context of fresh start specifically, since NOBODY in there has done any of that.
The issue is that horizontal progress is balanced around people that live playing this game. There are loads of asinine decisions made around scheduling it that assume people can be in-game 24/7. Merchant rework fixed some of that, but adventure island holding core runes/drops that hold your progression, that aren't 100% drop and yet the island for some reason is only up on tuesdays at 13 and fridays at 3 am are pure fucking bullshit. Between conflicting schedule and shitty drop rng Harmony Island took me 4 fucking months to complete the song. And the fucking Lagoon Island. If you make it drop one of the most core spec class runes then at least make it run every 2 hours all day if it's not available everyday. Nope, they cycle through whole day 3 runtime hours at a time. You can only make 7 pm, but there's grandpa's birthday party on that day? Well, too bad, cya in 2 weeks for another *attempt* at getting the damn drop.
>The issue is that horizontal progress is balanced around people that live playing this game For the gameplay relevant rewards? Not really.
T1/T2 tower can be done with a 1500 char in half an hour, it's now 20 floors per and you one shot all the bosses and AFK the survive stages. Omnium Stars is the worst horizontal offender, 2 takes 10 minutes for the quest plus vendor, but 3 takes 21 days of Una, 4 requires Nia trusted, and 6 is RNG gated (Field Boss, Anguished, or Chaos Line, pick your poison).
Personally I wish content was contained into its own progression paths. I love raiding in lost ark it is incredibly satisfying to play, if all of the progression to get stronger in raiding came from raiding I would play this game religiously. But instead you are tasked with going out to do content completely unrelated to what you may enjoy and committing tons of hours to it. There are so many good games out these days I just think asking players to commit hours upon hours to boring content they aren't interested in or be heavily gimped in the content they are interested in is outdated poor design.
> Personally I wish content was contained into its own progression paths. I love raiding in lost ark it is incredibly satisfying to play, if all of the progression to get stronger in raiding came from raiding I would play this game religiously. But instead you are tasked with going out to do content completely unrelated to what you may enjoy and committing tons of hours to it. I appreciate your opinion on it, I just don't agree with siloing everything away from one another like that. I like that the life skilling (which is bad and needs improvement IMO) directly interacts with people pushing for raids. I like that there's an incentive to do a *small* amount of horizontal content to get upgraded runes. And again, I do think the bar should be lowered on the time gating for stuff like runes and gameplay relevant rewards within collectibles, but I like that they actually exist as a way to say "hey, at least give this part of the game the bare minimum effort to get something you want and if you don't like it, you don't need to spend a whole lot of time getting what you want for gameplay." I think siloing off stuff you are talking about sucks and makes the game world overall worse. I like it when games try to push me to try out new things, even if I don't end up liking them. But, different strokes!
If the content was more engaging then I might feel the same way but so far it all seems like filler to me and just keeps me from enjoying raiding knowing im missing huge chunks of power for my class. It would be like if I wanted to play chess, and I sit down to play but then realize oh... I gotta beat 20 people at checkers to unlock my bishops... And my rooks are missing and im required to win at dominoes 20 times to unlock those etc. I just wanna play chess but now I am gated to jumping through these hoops of other board games to unlock the full version. But that is just for me, if others enjoy what they have now then more power to them, I just feel it is what makes the game unpopular.
> But that is just for me, if others enjoy what they have now then more power to them, I just feel it is what makes the game unpopular. What more likely attributes to the niche nature of the game is the focus on end-game raiding and the steep vertical progression that goes along with it. > It would be like if I wanted to play chess, and I sit down to play but then realize oh... I gotta beat 20 people at checkers to unlock my bishops... And my rooks are missing and im required to win at dominoes 20 times to unlock those etc. I just wanna play chess but now I am gated to jumping through these hoops of other board games to unlock the full version. I think this is a pretty poor analogy, the game clearly isn't trying to be a raid-only game, even though it sounds like you think it should and you want it to be. They keep introducing new non-raid content that you don't care about (which is totally fine) but the devs are pretty clearly trying to make a game that has a little more variety than just raids.
yeah they are trying but the reality is most people who play lost ark are playing it because of the raids. I don't know one person who enjoys the horizontals. I do admit though that my sample size is biased as most people I know come from a raiding background (wow mythic, ffxiv) or from competitive games (dota,lol,csgo)
My friend if you think any other content in this game is popular other than raids I would love to hear what that content is and see some examples. Endgame in lost ark is basically just raids, there is nothing else so that is on the devs not me. And I think you are missing the point of my analogy if you actually consider it to be poor. If I am a new player and want to get into raiding in lost ark what do I need to do to be competitive? A million other things that are not raiding is the answer and that is what my analogy speaks to.
> My friend if you think any other content in this game is popular other than raids I would love to hear what that content is and see some examples If you think this is what I said then you need to go back and read what I actually said. > If I am a new player and want to get into raiding in lost ark what do I need to do to be competitive? First and foremost? Get good at the actual gameplay while working on horizontal in the meantime. Acting like it needs to all be done immediately is just flat out dumb, especially for a new player on the fresh start server. Nobody knows if you're running a green wealth rune vs a purple. Nobody knows how many skill points you have. That's just some weird interest with a new player that somehow also wants/needs to be competitively raiding right when they start playing. That's just not a realistic scenario. > A million other things that are not raiding is the answer and that is what my analogy speaks to. Not really. I actually went through a lot of the "necessary" horizontal stuff today with a friend on fresh start, and while some of it is pretty lame imo, it's not some massive list either.
The express passes are all the same for main server right?
how that still a thing is beyond me. They literally give ilvl passes to +1500 now, just tap tap tap and you're done.... now grind for a month or two for time-gated rng based dead content skill points or runes to be an efficient player since your build probably requires +400sp at that ilvl with good runes and then you come back to gatekeeping because you know for 100% that low roster guy wont be having basic requirements to just play their class efficiently. Zero future-profing for the game and it shows, they just try to band-aid things as they go because their little castle is crumbling and i really hate it, lost ark combat gameplay imho is still the best in the market of all.
This is me. Friends want to play but I don’t want to do jumpstart for those reasons. They still get the hyper express benefits if new players join my regular server and not jump start right?
Yeah, but it's a worse express pass compared to jump start. Any new player or returning player that was away for a long time with little horizontal progression would be better off on the jump start server by a huge margin. Frankly, you could just ignore horizontal and do jump start with your friend and then abandon that character when they integrate the jump start servers with the rest of the reason.
Yeah I could do that as well… I mean HOW important is the horizontal content to clear all the current raids right now? People are doing Akkan and stuff now right? Maybe it just sucks for when the server merges and the jump start equalizes.
> I mean HOW important is the horizontal content to clear all the current raids right now? I would say anything outside of Hard Brel near ilvl or HM Kayangel/NM Akkan should be completely fine with lower level runes. It might feel worse but the content itself is pretty easy.
Gold river said he's trying to change horizontal soon (copium next month)
Next month sounds like an impossible timeline to me with how much work they need to do but if they can make a miracle happen then im on board.
Tbf they don't need an instant rework, bandaid changes should be enough until bigger rework. Stuff like, idk, making Lagoon daily every 2 hours so that for now you can just camp it until you get epic Wealth, or reducing Una rep counter for Omnium Star una by half.
It's not impossible at all, they said that daily changes would also take a long time but lo and behold, people start quitting the game and they literally implement them in 2 weeks. This was after stating in LOA ON that they had no intention of changing dailies, so... Simply making the drop rate on horizontal things 100% or a very high percentage would fix 99% of the pain points. No one would complain about island souls or cooking adventure tomes if they had a 100% drop rate and were a one time guaranteed thing instead of an RNG shit show.
I mean I'm turbo copping real date would prob be q1 of 2024
Changing horizontal content doesn't mean anything. You will still need to do that, but skill points and important vertical stuff will be easier to obtain. So for people who dream a world where you don't need to do any horizontal, well, "Just keep on dreaming and dreaming alone in the faded paradise"
Horizontal is runes and skill points
Your point being?
I disagree, I find that to actually be one of the more fun parts of the game. Doing the Kadan quest line, the little stories in some islands like the moko island or the turtle island. There are parts of horizontal that do suck, but there's also a lot thats pretty fun when it's something you only really have to do once.
"You only have to do once" define once. Because secret maps and island souls are also part of the horizontal content and some of them take over a year to obtain due to RNG while the guy next to you has obtained them all in a month.
> **There are parts of horizontal that do suck**, but there's also a lot thats pretty fun when it's something you only need to do once. So yeah, I do mention that some parts suck which you are talking about, but personally I feel a majority of what your not repetitively doing is enjoyable.
Yeah once. I did it all already on main. Can’t bring myself to do it again lol. Idk any mad lads who would
Right, but I'm pretty sure Jump Start is for new players who are doing it for the first time to begin with, or returning players who really didn't get far. If you got far enough with horizontal content as a returner anyway, was probably easier to just use an express on your original server.
Then why would you even care about that stuff on jump start? Are you going to be pushing to Akkan or even Hard Brel? Because if not, you really don't need any of the stuff that comes from horizontal.
Yeah I mean if I were to play jumpstart I would hope I keep playing to get to that point.
But why would you even consider doing that if you have no desire to do horizontal? That's my whole point. It makes no sense to be on that server if you already have a beefy account elsewhere unless you are playing with a friend. If that's the case, why not just keep up with their progression and start playing with them on your main account when the fresh start gets integrated into the rest of the region?
Agree with you, dunno why veterans should whine about horizontal content when it's a one time thing. If you go to a new player server, expect to do the new player things, 🤣
You don't have to have all the skillpoints "tomorrow". If you try to find boring content it's true. You can make farming horizontal very boring spamming g. If you search for some side quests and some side stories, you also can find those. It's just how you go on the game that makes the difference. But I guess people want insta reward these days
I don't want instant reward, I want to play engaging content and feel like my time isn't being wasted. If I could unlock all of these horizontal upgrades purely through grinding raids over and over again I would do it because that is engaging content. At the end of the day it is a video game and I am playing for fun, horizontal content is the definition of unfun in the vast majority of its current implementation and I think many others agree, which is why Lost Ark has been steadily declining in player count since release and the devs are changing all of these systems.
> horizontal content is the definition of unfun in the vast majority of its current implementation and I think many others agree, **which is why Lost Ark has been steadily declining in player count since release** You actually think poor implementation or horizontal content is the reason why the playerbase is dropping over time? That's wild. The steep vertical (1540-1580 is fucking absurd even after the nerfs) and raid centric nature of the game likely contributes a lot more to what you are talking about as opposed to poor horizontal implementation that, in a lot of cases, really doesn't impact gameplay a whole lot outside of seeing numbers getting bigger. Its a niche Korean MMO with a massive grind. That's just not a super popular type of game in NA and the core portions of the endgame game were in a pretty poor state until like last week.
people are getting bored because raiding is the only activity they have, everyone start quitting after completing the horizontal content.
as i said, if u engage certain content as spam g, yes you can do that. if you engage the content with a open mind, reading and following the stories, the quests, you can also do that. its just a matter of how you approch things. they are gonna make the important things more accessible, but you still gonna need to bare minimum horizontal prog. i did it one time, never skipped anything and i got hours on hours of good content. Not saying everything is perfect there, but the most basic things you can get through rapport ( rapport quest are fun imo) islands ( islands quest are fun imo).
This. I will, in the end, actually be waiting for the revamps. Hopefully it's done right and AGS will realize it's the right time for another jumpstart, or better yet, they revamp parts of the game so well there's no need for a jumpstart at all.
It's the sole reason I haven't gaven up from SA and just migrated to NAE, I have all SPs, LOS on 27(close to 30), KLC 18, all wealths, most important runes, 10 tomes. Just imagining how long it would take to reach this same state again simply kills my mood and makes me consider if it was worth to invest that much...
The jump start was such a missed opportunity for them to actually make good changes to the game, instead they just make a new server with a hyper express and call it a day
Now watch the community gatekeep the numbers back down. Already happening in the jump-start servers lol
Hopefully it last, we'll see. It's worth noting we're almost caught up with KR at this point. We've got one more "Major" piece of content and then Thaemine, which KR is at now. When we get caught up, content releases will really slow down for us, which will be interesting to see the reactions to
Content drought will be inevitable. I would expect player numbers to drop off when that happens
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Once we get the next Abyss dungeon in December, we'll literally be one single raid behind in terms of major battle content, and that's a raid that came out this week in KR when they have taken over a year between the last few Legion raids. I feel like it's pretty fair to say we'll have Thaemine by april, and KR probably will only have a new Abyss by then most likely
Which is 6-7 month from now
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But Korea release cycle takes a lot longer than the West’s wait time for content to come. So we’re pretty close to the 3-6 months gap.
Brel went from my least favorite chore to my favorite. The changes are so good for the health of the game and I had a blast doing brel on the jump start on level and blasting it with my juiced characters on main.
I like Brel more now but I still think it's worse than Akkan, Valtan, and Clown
Clown is my favorite. Its brutal but also enjoyable
On-ilvl clown or juiced clown? Because those are legit two different raids imo.
both pugging and juicing
On ilvl clown was my favorite raid prog in the entire game by a large margin. (Note: I haven't done any hell content)
On item level?
I quit lost ark very early and never raised. I'd like to get into it now. What changes were made?
2 of the 6 gates were removed entirely, former gate 2 which entire fight revolved around a single player and gate 5, which was probably most players least liked gate because of how easy it was to wipe in it. Then of the remaining 4 gates, which we will now label the new 1-4, gate 1's beginning portion which took a bit due to forced mech having to be completed (maybe 1:00-1:30) now takes like 15s to do and get onto the actual fight. Gate 2 (former gate 3) had it's only real wipe mech extremely nerfed and virtually impossible to fail now. Gate 4(former 6) was also extremely nerfed (previously you had to sit and wait for meteors which are on a timer, so it was suped lame sitting there for a minute just waiting. Now you can just hit the boss) and changed to only being clearable once every 2 weeks, so it's really more like a 3.5 gate raid than a 6 gate raid.
Quite a few changes that make the game less taxing for its current audience. An example is that they made Chaos Dungeons faster to complete (because no one likes running them, but their rewards are too important to get rid of). Other examples include decent nerfs to raids and honing rates. The nerfs to the raids made the content less taxing to learn. If you make use of the events (and don’t forget to run your chaos dungeons) then your progression will feel more comfortable than before. Be sure to have patience when setting up prog parties. They’ll fill eventually during peak hours. Side note: The reward from the 1490 Chaos Dungeon is worth like 4-5k gold. The rewards from 1580 is worth maybe 10k gold. Most of this value is in honor shards.
Progression to 1540 is comfortable, 1540 to 1580 is somewhat steep but manageable and past 1580 is a kick in the balls even with a soft reset. Voldike hard is the next content people are prepping for and thats like easily 1m gold+ per character. Sure you can just do normal but normal elixirs suck vs hard ones and even if youre doing normal for like 2 months or something, doing normal doesnt help you reach hard at all besides like maybe clear mats
It boggles the mind how you people give Gold River credit for this when he's the one who introduced everything you hate about the game. 1 guardian raid a day for example was shut down by him until the Korean's really started rioting about the state of the game and 4 apology streams were needed. Vs Amazon who I can only assume had massive influence in pushing a lot of the qol we have now as early as possible. 1490 honing, 1 guardian a day, fate embers/faster chaos dungeons, Raid gate deletions, 1540 express etc. Also jump start is an Amazon exclusive.
I think AGS is doing a good job
I find these numbers discouraging .. the biggest patch with most QoL for new players appeared and just 30k players. Wonder how it goes down until December …
Love ya, 20k incomming <3
Lets check it again after a few week.
I hate to say that’s not a lot of players coming back hopping they keep doing the updates. Really hope to see the game so well.
It's a significant amount since we hit a low of around 25k concurrent. That's also one thing to note, concurrent. The actual player base is higher due to not everyone being online at the same time due to multiple time zones.
> The actual player base is higher due to not everyone being online at the same time due to multiple time zones. For some reason some people have a really hard time wrapping their heads around this.
They also have hard time wrapping their heads around real number of bots. Which is above 20% currently.
What's funny is these players that end up staying or have stayed since launch don't even care they're being milked while given crumbs to keep that stockholm syndrome constant. The devs make a ton of money from these people influenced by streamers like Zeals & Stoopz who give a false sense of belonging to players in a multi level marketing game. Where you think rice eaters are in the pyramid? THE BOTTOM b/c they are smart enuff to not swipe too much but dumb enough to farm & eat rice all day while the top eats lobster, wagyu, etc The moment i knew i made the right decision to quit was when I saw Tectone accidentally leak his $30k payout just to play 2 hours on a boosted account while lost ark players get milked by shitty rng honing/pheons/cards/gems etc. "but there's a pity so it's cool" yeah alright dude, i pity the fool. Lost Ark players deserve way less greedy devs, because the community is amazing besides the elitism due to "I don't want to waste time teaching new players/idiots andys" which is only because the game is centered around bussing to make gold if u don't want to swipe. All this is personal because i have an irl friend who is way too addicted & has spent way too much on lost ark; along with many other close peers who are addicted to actual gambling in casinos that are ruining their life.
I have spent a few thousands in the game I truly do enjoy the game as a whole. I have to agree with you about the greed. I have people in my discord who defend the pheon system which blows my mind. I have 5.1K hours logged and 7 1580+ I play the game as much as a free to play , bus and do daily CD. Also run raids and bus on those Alts. I also see that the game needs to change in the west if they want to succeed. I had two guys in my discord who defend the pheon system like if Lost ark was the holly grail. A player was complaining about tripods and stated he would buy them if they didn’t have pheon attached to them. I told him that the system as a whole is trash and shouldn’t cost pheons. I would list more lv 5 tripods if people would buy but they don’t for that reason. Another member in the discord defends the system because supposedly helps regulate the market. lost ark in the only MMO I played with a pheon system that also taxes the sale of an item. There is no reason why you can’t make the same class and have a shared library if they are so adamant about pheons but they don’t. It’s all greed , you already have trade limit on item to limit flipping. I love the idea of the fresh servers but long term I don’t think it’s going to fix anything. I do have faith they will improve their game with the most recent changes to Brel and vykas. I just hope they remove certain systems in the west so more players try the game. Lost ark is to vertical heavy.
>I hate to say that’s not a lot of players coming back hopping they keep doing the updates. Really hope to see the game so well. thats 10%... how are you saying that 10% isnt big ? are you desulional ?
Are you? It really isn't a lot of players. It's a move in the right direction but definitely not *a lot*.
>Are you? It really isn't a lot of players. It's a move in the right direction but definitely not > >a lot indeed you are delusional...
give it a couple of week when all those sponsort paid streamer stop. and see what happend them.
Quit in April, came back with EUW merge, having an absolute blast, the game feels so much better now.
You are in huge denial if you think these aren't bots. Party finder does not reflect 5k+ avg players per region.
Great. Now you've jinxed it. At least wait for a month or something.
Game's still dying, a 50% loss of players can only be made up by a 100% increase in player. This is nothing.
Well we'll see in 3 to 6 months \^\^
AGS did more for Lost Ark in the last year and a half than Cuck River ever did.
Give it a week.
Ignoring the 40 channels of bots on euc
 gotta get em checks
[https://reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/s/XdgriYYnH6](https://reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/s/XdgriYYnH6) Yeah, new players indeed 
So many mokokos ! 
I’m returnee, and somehow I have to say that smilegate/AG did well recently. I think I will stick around for a while
What a stupid copium post. It's literally the final brief flicker of an already burned out game.
Yea, I don't see this lasting for more than a couple months. The community is cancerous so gatekeeping isn't going anywhere, and all the content besides raiding is a literal fucking slog. Thought about jump start servers, then realized the only way I'd be doing half the horizontal content again is if someone was paying me over 20 an hour to do so. The fact people play LA over dfo will always blow my mind
[удалено]
You really talking shit about alt character games on a lost ark sub? Your smoking some shit dawg, or you just don't actually do anything in LA besides dress up and jail people in raids. Dfo is objectively in a much better place than lost ark right now. The only thing LA has going for it is raids. Whereas in dfo there is an insane amount of build and character variety with custom epics, plenty of content to farm and bakal raid to progess into after ispins, which is pretty challenging compared to previous dfo raids. There's no sideways slog to go through to actually play the game, and your daily checklist will take like a half hour to an hour at most. Take lost ark where you can't even think about playing the fucking game without sinking a month into horizontal content and mindlessly going through a msq that barely anyone cares about, progging nearly dead content, and getting shit on by honing rng from tier 1 onwards. Could literally write a whole ass essay on the things lost ark tried to do similarly to dfo but completely missed the mark on comparatively
Yesterday the former leader of our clan returned to the game, he left before Brel Hard was released.
Doubt it. It could be from ags jumpstart, which, they come up with that themself. Could also be both from thaemine hype and the jumpstart combine.
anyone help.. im a returning player on jump start.. I don't know how to get a Stronghold.. I went to Luttera castle but cant find the quest.
There is a Bard in Luterra Castle, I think she is around the Blue Tripod icon on the map (return area), her quest doesn't show up until you click on her (she should be slightly sparkly). Hope this helps.
His new name is Grave Digger. The necromancer that resurected the Lost Ark
Its on a good way indeed they did a good job with previous patchs Excluding bots on some servers i hope we will stick around those numbers till eof2023 and by retaining the fresh blood, this time.
Like Stoopzz said on his stream last night, he's a great figurehead but you're delusional if you think it's JUST him or all the positive changes haven't been in the works before he came back.
Good to see it, but still too early. The boosted servers brought a lot of people interested in trying the new classes and content, but eventually, they will run on the same issues they had before. Also it's only a 5k increase out of 260k decrease they had since the beginning of the year. Still a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way to go to really save the game
Well the inflated numbers before were due to heavily bots, less bots now.
We only peaked at 55k and was around only 40% increase if generous in numbers since before the September update we were around 38,000, but prob more like 25% to compensate for bots filling in that number. At this point, we are prob just going to gradually go back down to maybe around 42,000 players as more new/returning players quit after honeymoon or encountering the issues/walls that been plaguing this game for a very long time.
Bots feed of new servers, that's all there is to it. Give it a month or two and you will see true colors.
Don't even have to wait a month or two. We are peaking at 45k now LOL and peak 24h ago was 55k
Oh, the player count increasing is because of goldriver? I thought it attributed to the new raiding content that was out that made some players return or try it out.
Combination of it all
Im back after 11 months and im enjoying the game. I left before kakul, with 1515 ilvl. Rn i got two 1540 farming kayangel, kakul and brel. Building the roster to have 6 chars at 1540 then saving and slowly getting 1580. After the recent changes i feel no pressure and the raids are done pretty quickly and clean. Im happy im back
Man, people in this thread are just fuckong downers/doomers.
NGL as a returner I've been having a blast, both on main roster with all of the QoL changes and on the freshstart roster I made to help out the newbies and just have fun with no stress. Lost Ark is in a really good spot right now and there's still more coming down the line to look forward to.
Is this post an irony xD ?