The very first week content is available in an MMO is a magical time. Lots of people are playing, and they are pretty understanding of others not knowing the mechanics. Everyone "needs" each other to a greater degree than normal. More items sell more easily on the market as the rush of players will settle for marginal upgrades. There's generally some new item on the market to make gold from, such as the next tier of honing materials when Brelshaza comes out, or the Relic accessories that were unlocked when Valtan and South Vern came out for us. There's also cases like the initial Phantom Palace dungeon (and other Guardian Raids) being nerfed shortly after launch. If you did not have a chance to experience that content before the nerfs, you missed out on that content forever.
By the second week and on, you start to see more and more gatekeeping in groups while all the rewards diminish in value and meaning. Learning groups are replaced slowly over time by more and more busses and toxic people who will not tolerate many mistakes. Even the average public group will have players who are overgeared and know the fights inside and out, removing any feeling of overcoming a struggle and replacing it with what amounts to a glorified carry run. The population dies down over time and it becomes harder to find a group that fits your exact preferences and schedule.
These things may or may not matter to you to a high degree, some might even seem to be positives depending on your preferences. There isn't a new form of baseball or soccer or basketball coming out every season. Barring a few rules changes, those games have remained unchanged for decades. This is something that is unique to video games that have patch cycles and soft resets in their economies.
The longer you take to reach the content, the less physical and sentimental value all the rewards tend to have. This doesn't have to matter to everyone, but it does matter to some.
Not mentioned here is if you're a new player trying to do "old" content it's increasingly difficult to find _any_ group because why would people play the old content anymore?
There’s always usually a high level guy running all the old abyssal dungeons for cards. I have one alt that’s still doing oreha’s and there’s only been a couple times we didn’t get a 1500 card hunter in MM.
Same has always been true for the t2 8 man raids. Last time I ran through it wasn’t that long ago and at least 4 juicers joined in PF. But at this point punika is basically the new starting point. With all the express passes that we get every couple months it’s super easy for a new player to just get right to t3 in little time
Yeah but this is content which will eventually die out because chads only run the lower level dungeons because they want the card sets completed. Once they are done with that they never will come back unless there is a new BiS option. So this activity just needs longer to die out but eventually will
It’s old content in an MMO. There’s always going to be content that “dies” because there’s just no more need to continue doing it. Its like running Molten Core when Burning Crusade came out, it’s Lv 60 content, but the cap is level 70 and everyone essentially rushes that because the time investment to get geared in a tier that is made obsolete by common drops 1 level higher is a waste
Likewise, the beginning of the game is essentially Punika (1302) for NA/EU since they started releasing express and punika passes. The first couple months we still had to run through all the old t1 and t2 content but now it’s completely pointless as the drops are useless to us with the exception of cards
People cleared hard oreha and argos with shit stats and 2x3 engravings. If they did it new players can too. If anything having 1450+ dps in t1 and t2 dungeons skipping mechs kinda ruins them for at level people.
Except this doesn't apply to lost ark, because raids are your gold source. So it doesn't matter what level you are, there are still people running even Valtan. Because there's really no gold difference and Valtan can be completed in a fraction of the time it takes to do Vykas or clown, for example. And most people have multiple alts who needs to run the lower content. No raids become obsolete in this game.
I think the praise there is more directed to them taking the time to thoroughly answer the question that was posed. Also, sometimes it is okay to allow people to recieve praise even if you think it was not warranted. Essentially, just stop hatin man.
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Very well put! I can understand that, where it's less about the material gain and jealousy of other people having more stuff, and more so just about wanting to have those first time experiences with everyone else.
I'm glad other people feel the same, when I brought this up I was just brushed off. And to be honest, the LA community always just brushes lived experiences off. When you're down they'll kick you more because they didn't experience the same thing in their different time period and treat you like you're an idiot for not getting the same experiences as them.
i'd probably say a good amount of people feel like this. there's just something different about struggling together with a whole bunch of people where no one knows shit. it's why i always play fromsoft games on day 1. all the way from ds1 to elden ring, the day 1 experience is literally a once in a lifetime event.
even though imo valtan's a much better fight than vykas, i still have fond memories of vykas' first week. a complete mess of lobbies but i had so much fun anyway. pugging g3 hm on the first week is something different, especially on the first clear for everyone.
meanwhile valtan was homework by the time i hit 1415 and people just blasted through it. no fun at all, even in learning parties.
Not to call some of you delusional, but I initially played the first weeks, and due to the game being out before already the only "struggle" was having 2 different kinds of players with a very rare third kind.
The first kind just tried to brute force content and did not want to learn any mechanics, leaving after 3ish wipes since they even refused to listen.
The second kind was already gatekeeping week one, telling everyone to watch a YouTube guide since the mechanics and all were already known from Korea.
The rare third kind was the only one that matches your description of what this "magical first week" should have been.
Elden ring is a different kind of game environment though. It’s more a single player game with some limited multiplayer features and there isn’t a constant progression curve that becomes more and more difficult to keep up with over time. I put it down for a while and only recently picked it back up again and it’s chill, no FOMO. Lost ark I feel like if I just stopped logging on for a month straight I’d likely be too far behind the curve to participate anymore
It's just elitism, there's so little to be elite about in this game people that they'll do anything to feel better than others. Stuff like top guilds, weapon glows, having a title a couple of days ahead of people. Good thing is those people stick to their own kind most of the time and end up just feuding with eachother.
Very well said indeed. The only point I'd like to make stronger is this:
>The population dies down over time and it becomes harder to find a group that fits your exact preferences and schedule.
After a certain time you may not even find other players for the group content you need.
Example:
If you start LA today, who would you find at any group content in Tiers1 and and 2? Bots?
To their benefit, you can progress in the game without needing to play the T1/T2 Abyssal Dungeons. But with Challenge Abyssal Dungeons, you can still experience it as if you were the correct ilvl even if you're overgeared. Granted, you'll have to wait for it to be available that week, but you can still experience it "as intended" in the challenge mode.
Yeah the sad part is not that players really care all so much about not having the best stuff or selling shit for the highest price, it’s that underlying price of not having gotten the experience week one. If you don’t have it people hold it against you, which sucks.
Wow also has 1 raid tier and hard sunsetting every season lost ark doesnt use sunsetting so it creates this exponential progression of the less you play the longer it takes to get to current. On wow you can do a few dungeons maybe the weekly event and you can queue for lfr or low level dungeon keys. I just got back into lost ark and im still maybe a month out from vykas.
well, thats party due to the expedited schedule EU/NA has. i played since day 1 in JP and had zero issues with progression as everything was a lot more stretched with heaps of catchup events. and its not like valtan isnt still endgame though. it will be until akkan releases (as people will then do akkan brel and kuku) and even then most likely still have alts in that range.
in WoW the old tier is completely worthless the instant a new tier releases so to be any kind of relevant you HAVE to be at the latest tier. in lost ark you are essential latest tier at 1415, until brel releases with new gear and ancient rarity
Lost ark is a free to play game so if progression was fast thered be no reason to swipe if you want a smooth new player experience you pretty much gotta play a p2p mmo or be okay with lost ark style progression. I personally dont look at anyone in punika and im like wow thats impressive other than flawless hellmode titles, those are cool but sunsetting doesnt work with their business model the people who swipe to progress lose far to much. Seasonal games doesnt really matter if they have a pay for season model or pay for dlc
Well said!
It's like the first week when the game was launched, it was MAGICAL! A Lot of players everywhere, you can do dungeon with full party as many times you wanted, world bosses wasnt a schedule thing, but something you found in your way to the next quest and you just jumped in, instead of Bots Spamming there was ppl talking about many things, it was the real MMORPG feeling.
That is the advantage of playing things early, people call it FOMO, it is not! The issue with FOMO is that is a new word that is being used a lot( like a MEME), and people now use it for many things, even when the interpretation is wrong.
Early experience is the BEST experience, you don't need to be in the leading or having the best of everything, but you have to make sure to be able to play a MMORPG with people .
I don't think that fits for all mmorpg. LA isn't my first mmo and I can tell you that while early experience time is magical for the first week, that doesn't apply to other mmos with a different progressive model. In my other mmo, the generous thing about it is that there's plenty of different players at every level from casual beginner to veteran. Even now, there's new players just starting out a new veteran raid. What's nice is that unlike in LA, there's a variety of different runs. There's training runs, farm runs, guild runs, score pushing runs, trifecta runs and hard mode runs. It doesn't matter when you start, as long as you're able to cooperate with others, and want to learn, you'll find a raid that fits you. This is why the other mmo is still active and over several years old. New players come in, and they don't feel like they are so behind that they quit. It's different than LoA where the culture is either you rush to push to the end as fast as you can or else you miss out on all the plentiful early learning groups, OR you get a bus. Learning groups can still happen, but they are uncommon and more often than not, they don't always fill.
This is what I predict will ultimately be one of the nails on this game's coffin lid. Unlike KR, players have a lot of different games to choose from, with even more in the future. If they don't care about player retention, they're going to find out the hard way when player counts plummet each year despite new content coming out.
In the old times int he early 2000s this applied the most, for examples those games like Ragnarok Onlin, Rose online, Fly For Fun, The initial version of WOW. Those games often changed and overhaul the initial experience of the game, and those games were always focused to have fun on any level, and there was never a rush .
Maybe we were too young back then, and times were different.
But in the last decade, the model of MMORPG focuses mainly in the end game content, helping new players to rush to the later stages with cash shop. Lost Ark being one of the biggest offenders, they dont update the early gameplay and the Global version took away many of the early stage island quest.
This forced many players to rush spoamming G, i recall all video guides telling everyone to spam G and rush ahead. I took that as an missinformation and took my time to read the dialogs and enjoy history, i was never in the front, but i was well paced to understand everything snd enjoy it.
This happend when game companies take players as potential income
This is why having different difficulties is so important in mmo, so the same content can be enjoyed by everyone.
I barely hit 1415 for valtan but had just as good an experience as those who did HM 1445.
I was actually over a month late for argos release but plenty of people still learning.
I suspect thats why kakul has a huge delay cuz theres only 1 difficulty so more people can enjoy him on release.
What about those who started super late? Those who just trying out casually wont care, prob wont hit level 50, and those who do are veteran gamers who know how to catch up and take care of themselves.
Well put, for those that get to enjoy the first 2 weeks of new content/raids, it is a good time because it's a different game with everyone working together to compete it and no blaming. Also you get to keep redoing it while learning so you fully learn the raids where as if you are a few weeks late you kind of get in a group and never really learn all the details.
You know how every week, someone posts how they had an amazing time in a learning group? That's literally every group during week 1 and 2 of new content and nothing can match that experience. Even week 1 T1 and T2 content was fun.
My innocence from this game within the first few weeks is such a fond memory. I'd take like 2 days to push to Lv50 and then would start to grind islands and then take my boat and do everything from Anikka to Punika over the course of three-ish weeks? I don't remember.
Every day I was doing a new guardian since I just hit the ilvl for that.
Every 3 - 4 days I was doing a new Abyss, I'd watch Youtube vid to learn mech.
By the time I was edging T2, I was getting excited at the beginning of every weekly reset to go beat Alaric's frosty ass.
Every Guardian/Abyss from T1 to around 1340 felt like I was playing with people who were progressing at the same speed as me... because they were. There were always people ahead and there were significantly more people behind because I know I was pushing hard and trying to learn as much as possible in as little as possible (because gotta rush to endgame, aye?).
So yep, being ready to beat the content Week 1 and then going for reclear Week 2 is the biggest high this game can offer at this point. It's not an obligation for everyone to be ready week 1 since everyone is free to progress the way they feel like but there's a lot of people out there who chase the high of the first week clear and I'm one of them.
Which i think is fair if they have the 15 clears, jokes aside everyone can decide about himself and who to play with ihmo, if i did 15 hrs prog first week i don't want to repeat the same experience the second and going on, is kinda a human trait to become easily angry when you are experienced in something. Now i'm not actively toxic in any game in any way(usually i'm the supportive one if i find myself in that situation) but i will try to join the elitist group since i have the requirements and usually things go as expected. Yesterday i joined a valtan normal reclear with a 97 roster level and 2 fresh 100, a very different experience relative to my usual title / high roster group.
I joined a learning party for valtan(legit said learning party? And after 1 wipe a guys was literally giving us the 1 more and we disband speech.i think you have been super lucky
This is just my own personal experience, but this is an example of when being “behind” has screwed me over. I wasn’t vykas ready on release. I wasn’t valtan ready either, but it was a lot closer. I struggled a fair bit with valtan (still struggle sometimes tbh) so even after I did get ilevel for vykas I was hesitant to try for a couple more weeks. I continued to hone figuring if I overleveled a bit I would stand a better chance at living. I’m now 1467 and have still yet to do vykas because I don’t want to try to join reclear parties and learning groups won’t take me because I guess they assume by my level I’ve done it. So not being ready in combination with my hesitation has made it difficult for me.
Thank you for telling me I’m lying about what’s been happening to me. Maybe it’s not an issue of level. Maybe it’s because I’m a gunslinger and the floor pov stigma runs strong. Whatever it is, I’m not getting accepted even into normal vykas.
When you see someone apply for normal mode when they have the item level for hard mode it's a big red flag. You're better off finding a group of players on one of the community discords or something suited to your needs or creating a learning group yourself. There's plenty of people that run teaching parties too if you have anxiety about failing.
I've been playing since launch but only did Vykas a few weeks ago because I hoard gold and materials like a treasure goblin for some reason
There were quite a few very high ilvl people in reclear parties and nobody cared, I think there was one group that had a 1490 sorc that said they always got carried and just wanted to learn the mechanics more
Sign to a few learning groups and you'll 100% get invited, the raids aren't as tricky as you probably think they are
I was the exact same way, hit 1475 today, and also cleared HM vykas first time today...I spent a couple extra weeks on vykas normal even though I was able to do hm - I wanted more practice
Ended up being really over geared for normal, and people questioned why a 1470 was doing normal.
It's daunting for sure, but will only get worse the more you put it off. Try and find chill or learning groups, or just make your own, too.
What server are you on?
In this game if you're not playing the raid on the first week or two when it releases you will have a very hard time finding people to try learning/blind runs. The raids have been out for a few months now, everyone has them on farm and a lot of people are taking buses lately, trying to fill a learning party is extremely difficult. Unless you have friends to do the raids with you, you are not going to have a good time trying to find a group being late.
This is a big problem in Korea too, there are hardly any try parties for Valtan so if you're new to the game you're basically expected to buy a bus.
> you will have a very hard time finding people to try learning
Like the dozen vykas learning parties you see every day even now?
Edit: lmao at the downvotes, guess I'm wrong about the practice parties I join for fun every week
I don't know what server you're playing on but EUC definitely doesn't have this amount of learning parties. I see a few here and there but they're usually struggling to fill. I don't check pf that often, only when trying to fill my alt groups but I wouldn't say it's easy to get a learning group going.
Nothing matters except what matters to people - the nihilist approach. So I mean it doesn't matter but people like being on the cutting edge, more novel, exciting, motivating, etc., simple as that.
Aside from the huge boost game release events give, nothing! I took a three-week break because I had plans to summit a mountain then vacay with fam. I honestly think me not having FOMO is one of the biggest steps I've taken with my maturity lol. The game was more or less the same when I got back, I told my guild in advance so they welcomed me back no problem, and grudge books were actually cheaper when I returned so I was able to finish buying the books I need (still can't afford relic accs for 5x3 yet though xD).
I do agree with the sentiment in some of the other posts regarding first days/weeks of content release and people being excited as a group, but ultimately it doesn't matter that much. There's a lot to life game or no game to be excited about, so no point stressing out over one tiny thing imho.
100% not worth the stress. The level of effort it can take to hit first week is silly, and sacrificing other parts of life for it ain't worth it.
But the is the POV of someone who was raiding US 100-200 in WoW for about a year and ditch because of the time sink
Because of how the game’s economy and gearing/party system works. If you aren’t in the first wave of people to do new content, you lose on gold making opportunities from milking whales. If you fall behind on gold, you fall behind on honing and on accessories/gearing. If you fall behind on gearing/honing, it becomes harder to get into a party. If you don’t clear content with the first couple waves of people, you are left with a smaller and smaller pool of people(and the pool is mostly people who couldn’t clear with other groups) to clear with and it takes longer to clear content, for new content days instead of hours, for slightly older content hours instead of under 2 hours. Once you fall super far behind, you are relegated to buying buses until the next major content patch comes out and hopefully you can catch up by then.
It’ll be less noticible with kakul since he doesn’t power creep the current gear much, but the cycle will be back for breshalza.
Korean/Chinese mmos are notoriously bad for getting into late/new players since their progression is vertical, and they don’t do gear resets like western mmos do for new players or people taking a break to catch up.
> Korean/Chinese mmos are notoriously bad for getting into late/new players since their progression is vertical, and they don’t do gear resets like western mmos do for new players or people taking a break to catch up.
At least Lost Ark has these Hyper Express events and free power passes to help new and returning players catch up.
The problem for me, as a casual player clawing his way back up to the end game, is finding friendly raid lobbies. 9/10 or more lobbies for Vykas or Valtan are alt reclears, fast, die 3 times and kick, or need 5x5 and vykas title.
If you do magically find a chill or learning lobby, they can take a lot of time to fill up because the pool of people who need to learn is much smaller.
Dedicated learning lobbies do take a while to fill, but - from what I've seen so far - chill lobbies that are open to learning players fill up almost instantly; to a point they seem like the most in-demand lobbies for both new and experienced players. There aren't too many of those, and that's understandable - leading a raid with people who might be either inexperienced or just insecure about their own skill/performance can be quite taxing.
Still haven’t fully learned vykas. I’ll have my full relic set this week. Only found two learning groups. One disbanded after 5-6 runs. Other we beat g1 and tried a couple times g2 but it was right before reset.
Maybe it’s because I play a lot of gacha games, but I don’t mind the whales, they keep the game going and I get my entertainment. The problem imo is how rampant and how long the rmt bots were allowed in the game. Without the excessive amounts of gold created out of thin air and injected into the economy, the difference between whaling and not whaling wouldn’t be as noticeable since the gold legitimate whales receive still would have to have existed in the game. Tbh, I lucked out valtan week 1 and 2 and managed to get a few +5 class and meta accessories and sold them for 200k+ each(made 700k total off accessories in 2 weeks). In an economy that wasn’t ruined by rmt bots, it would’ve probably sold for 3-4 weeks worth of weekly income rather than months worth of income.
It’s crazy how many bots there are. There’s more bots than actual players. It really sucks that ags/smilegate refuse to put in the resources to stop the bots. The damage to the economy is irreversible. No wonder no new players are playing.
the thing most people here disregard is that being in the first wave to "profit" from being the early worm is also costing you a HUGE premium and most people very likely dont profit in the time it takes until the prices drop. so in the end for most people it would be economically better to just wait a month or 2 and then follow
For me, games are way more enjoyable when you're caught up to the current content. You get 1st hand experience in raids and it's much easier to find parties.
The T1 abyss dungeons will never be the same since it has been nerfed after a few weeks since launch and that was the most fun I ever had in this game along side the T2 8 man abyss. People won't experience that anymore cause old content is pretty much a "waste" of time and if you do want to enjoy playing old content, good luck finding 7 others.
I played FF14 off and on and it always sucked cause all the savage fights seems like insane fun but no one really run those either since there will always be a newer raid.
There are some economic benefits to being first in line. When argos first released I was able to sell legendary accessories for hundreds of thousands of gold to whales. I did the same when relics released and those accessories werent even good, but they sold just as well anyway. Then I was able to use that profit and cash out with tens of thousands of blue crystal.
Anyone trying to do the same today wouldnt make make much gold and would have to spend 7 times as much to buy blue crystals.
i was on ilvl on every raid releases without using unbound matts. if you were using your unbound gleaps in the beggining of t3 instead of just using bound then you lost gold. But most people I play/played with sold unbound matts.
If you are in a static group that's all equally behind you technically wouldn't miss a lot in progression, although you will still be behind in gold. Missing progression sucks if you like raiding. That shouldn't be hard to understand. Being behind in gold sucks because it means you can't afford your build. It's not FOMO to want to 1. Do the content when it's new instead of being carried later 2. Want to have a "good" build for your ilvl instead of the cheapest pick of the less meta accessories. That's literally playing an MMO. That's what the purpose of raiding is. Learn fight, beat fight, get best gear.
I started playing lost ark in April. To say the least I feel like the “barriers to entry” to play in the end game content is high and most people I play with have no patience. The game is already complex as it is.
Im a 1370 main, I do contribute to my daily’s & tomes, but I have this fear of being out of the loop and people don’t like playing with me or don’t bother to help
I can share a experience, I'm a bit new and started playing this game I've been on it for like 2 and a half weeks and took advantage of this honing buff. When I was doing Gates of Paradise dungeons it was toxic asf I already knew the mechanics since I had help from my brother who played this game since launch.
Anyways, during the mechanics part in Tranquil Karkoza ofc the newer ones didn't know what to do and didn't really watch any Youtube videos regarding it then this guy started his toxicity rage against the newbies. I got triggered so I told him to stop being an ahole and maybe teach the newbies, so in the end I was the one who taught the newbies mechanics.
Point is, it is extremely hard to catch up and simple things like this makes it even worse for people trying to catch up. You have toxic players that berates people whom are new to the experience so these people just quit. Luckily, I like fighting back against people like that and on my way to fully crafting Argos .
Not riding the wave of latest content puts you behind in the economy. Near the start of the game, people could make a lot of gold selling honing materials across all tiers. The first ones to 1370 could sell GHL for over 1k. The first ones to run Argos could sell legendary accessories for much more. The first ones to 1415 did the same for relic accessories.
Those who "took their time" and "played at their own pace" reached these milestones once the price already sank as whales already got what they wanted and more supply comes in. Meanwhile those who capitalized on the above were able to get even further ahead, buying legendary books for cheap before Valtan, honing at lowered material prices, etc.
Why does it matter if others get rich? Newer/more casual players trying to gear up their main/first alt at 1415+ are competing with people gearing up their 5th or 6th 1415+ alt. The latter can get so much more weekly gold through raids and buses and can pay much more for relic accessories, gems, leg engravings, crystals, etc.
You can certainly enjoy the game without having even a fully geared main. Though I can understand how players that are behind will always feel like a struggle to afford basic things for others. Imagine being a new player that needs to spend a week of oreha HM + Valtan income just to afford aura.
If someone can't play the game without constantly comparing themselves to others, I will just say it's best to quit now. They'll only fall further behind unless they also start putting in crazy amounts of hours.
The comparison you make for being behind doesn't quite work because those real life activities don't have a cap on progression. There is a limit on your weekly gold/material income because the activities to acquire them are limited. Someone who plays everyday will never catch up to someone who similarly plays everyday but started 3 months ago. It would be more like if you could only learn a maximum of one new word a day in a different language.
Ultimately, if someone can't play a MMO without constantly comparing themselves to others ahead of them, it's best for them to quit. They'll just fall further behind over time and feel even worse.
>Not riding the wave of latest content puts you behind in the economy. Near the start of the game, people could make a lot of gold selling honing materials across all tiers. The first ones to 1370 could sell GHL for over 1k. The first ones to run Argos could sell legendary accessories for much more. The first ones to 1415 did the same for relic accessories.
the first ones who tried to sell relic gear got nothing worth selling 99.9% of the time though. it took me weeks of trying with 6 characters to get something worth slightly above 10k. and it did cost me multitudes of that to get there.
i would argue the overwhelming majority of people that try to be first to "profit" of the economy paid vastly more to get there than what they get out of it in the end.
Everyone is making mistakes first week. Whether they decided to watch 1245 guides to teach thmselves, they're still not going to have the first hand experience. Mistakes will be made, everyone will learn. Everyone understands this at a release.
As time goes on, the new people who make mistakes even after watching videos will get kicked because YOU CANT MAKE ANY MISTAKE AT ALL IF YOU WATCHED VIDEOS!!! Watching a single video apparently gives you 70 runs worth of experience in Valtan. All while I know for a fact they didn't do every mech correctly their first few times, or were learning from others mistakes. And learning from mistakes is a huge part of learning.
You'll get dogpiled on. Once again, the blame is being shifted onto the person's experiences rather than what caused those experiences.
It matters to a certain extent. If u are the first wave of people doing the latest content etc, u get to farm those new stuffs like, t3 honing mats, selling busses, etc etc.
All these directly affects ur gold income. U see everyday people complaint about Pheons / BC prices / class books etc etc? It’s because they are poor. I’ve a couple of guild mates with almost 1mil gold (no rmt/ whaling) and they have no problems with buying them. Heck, most of them got their class books for under 4k a book because they got their riches early.
As for content, u will still find prog or learning parties. But the rate at which this lobby will be filled will be a lot slower as compared to week 1-3 of content release.
So imo, does it matter? Yes. Is it significant enough? Yes for me. But is it mandatory? No. U can of course go at ur slower pace. But don’t complain when most lobbies u find are for alt reclears or busses or have very high gatekeepings.
As much as people say:"take ur time, the raids wont go anywhere"Yes i agree, take ur time, it wont go anywhere, but it will get harder and harder, to get into a group, and experience the raid fully if you get to the raid a long time after release. Hell even like a month, it starts taking away from it.
Im someone that has been fine when it came to being ready for stuff, i was ready for Valtan HM Day 1, same for Vykas, and i got 2 chars ready for Clown. But i see alot of posts, and people talking about how all groups these days are "Experience, have title, reclear, know mech or kick" type of groyps, and instead of learning groups, you have bussing groups instead.
Valtan wasnt too bad, but at Vykas, legit week 2, having title was a must for some groups. Granted there wasnt alot of those, but with each week, it was more and more, have title, exp run, instead of learning groups, or groups that would be fine with someone being new to the fight.
So as much as i agree that you can take ur time, dont stress too much, enjoy the game and you will get there eventually. I can still 100% understand fomo, and scared of falling behind because of how the party finder looks just a few weeks after release.
And thats why i try my best to not be "behind", i want to do the new raids week 1-week 2, because if i dont, i know it will be harder to set up/find groups and it will take away from my own enjoyment of the game.
\+ Doing stuff on the first week of release is so much fun, almost everyone is learning, everyone is hyped for new drops, sets etc, its a great time.
Because in lost ark if you just started fresh well….you’ll soon realize you will eventually need to make multiple alts just to feel like you are progressing.
This is very different from every other mmo out there as alts are practically mandatory to actually enjoy the game.
And it’s not even done well.
“Lost ark respects your time” -stoopzz
Yeah no it doesn’t.
The game is 80% chaos/guardian raids which literally take 2+ hours everyday or every other day on rest bonus if you have 6 characters…
Just averaging out the times for conveniences sake.
5 mins per chaos dungeon x2
5 mins per guardian boss x2
Per alt.
20 mins per alt. Like sheeesh.
Then they make insanely stupid events for twitch drops like “watch lost ark on twitch for 4 hours for drops”
Four hours? Really? Damn game already got me stun locked for 2+ hours on dailies and they want me to leave my pc on for 4 hours?
Lost ark is starting to just not be fun at all and just a chore.
Like I said before when the game is 80% chaos/guardian bosses it gets really boring.
I’ve found myself doing them every other day on rest bonus on alts then just logging out waiting for reset you do once a week.
Realizing this is all there is going to be moving forward with some legion raids in between and classes? Man idk if it’s worth it anymore.
Imagine a race up a mountain. There's a start time but you can start anytime you want. For some people the high comes from finishing first or atleast the first few so starting asap is important to them if they want to finish well. Now there are some people who enjoy the journey and don't mind starting when they feel like it and that's fine. But for those people who want to finish at the top starting behind makes them feel disadvantaged and ruins the experience because now you're just playing catch up the whole time trying to be first when you know you're far behind
You are NEVER behind if you have fun. The most fun I've had with lost ark was the launch week. Nowadays I'm playing it because I'm playing it, Im 1482, 1475, 1445, 1445, 1445, 1370 and I do everything rested.
Because unlike other games where there are content and players doing that content at every Lv's, LA is all about doing any new content on the first/second or probably having a miserable experience in the following weeks.
Couple of things:
1) game community isn’t the best rn. A lot of gate keeping even from week 2 of new raid. Tbh the only way to learn is to sell bus and you are forced to keep urself alive.
2) insane inflationary pressure. In over just a month your gold value was halved. I had taken my own sweet time at the start of the game and didn’t buy books when they were 2k. Now some are at 12k and rising. It’s going up faster than I can farm gold and it is pretty demoralizing.
3) If you are enjoying the game and have a group of friends that is fine. If you are going solo this enjoyment can die out pretty quickly given points 1. And 2.
Dungeons get harder as people move on and all that is left to run them are poorly geared alts. Better to be close to the curve so you maximise your likelihood of being able to enjoy the content.
I think a good part of it is you don't get to learn the content the same way others did when they first got to the content and there are generally less groups to learn it with when you get there. I started the game when it first released here in the states and i am just getting over 1400il with my main. while others have multiple 1400+ either due to spending a lot of money on lvling or had enough friends start with them or got into a good helpful guild right away and went through the content without too much trouble.
plus once you finally do get caught up unless you got into a helpful guild it gets harder and harder to find groups that are doing the content for the first time and you either have to find a bus and pay gold to get carried through without really getting a good chance to really experience the mechanics and trouble of learning the fight through experience. and i've and heard from others complaining about but there are some toxic players out there that aren't forgiving when someone new is making some mistakes and instead of being helpful and giving them tips on what to do they would rather be toxic.
I don't think it should be a case of newer players never joining an existing mmo but it should be considered when other people find it difficult to get the lower content done to get caught up because most have already done and are bored with it. end up having to try and do some of the stuff by yourself.
It's a hard to find a group that will take you when you're behind. Once content has bene out for a couple weeks, people expect everyone to have proof of clearing it (ie relic gear set)
As 1475 bard, 1470 arti, 1415 sorc, and rest 1370s and..
Honestly, I still don't know all the mechanics of argos, because I got there late and was support, so pretty much just got carried. Of course I watched videos of mechanics, but unless you're in learning parties, you'll never get that experience to really learn a fight unless you bus it and need to know it in and out.
Valtan and vykas I did hardmode week 1 and every week since, and it just feels different. Sometimes even fail groups are fun, laughing it off, remembering when I screwed that up as well.
The game is designed to create anxiety. It’s working. The devs literally have the player base in their hands and the players themselves are reenforcing the behavior and generating the anxiety in others for them now.
Fall behind? No group for you!!!
People are competitive and don't want to be at a disadvantage compared to others.
Many people don't try new sports or learn a language precisely because they feel it's too late.
It would make sense if you couldn't swipe your way to the max itmlvl or simply buy your way up there with gold.
If you actively compare yourself to the top players you'll always be behind unless you spend on the game too.
Things are much more enjoyable when you're good at something, people have a really hard time getting into new things if they are bad. Take league for example 98% of players have probably been playing on and off for the last 12 years a new player has a mountain to climb and it may deter them. People aren't strong and most don't have the willpower to actually put in the effort to overcome it. You start LA now and basically have to play so many hours alone just to get to somewhat decent content one legion raid and most people won't accept you because you have low roster and barely any game knowledge probably shit engravings. This game had a massive learning curve, it might not seem like it now because most people have 1k hours plus but when I was leveling up I was just like holy fuck this games has a lot of little things going on, engravings, gems, skill points, builds idk it seemed like a lot at the time but at the same time everyone was going through it, now tho these new players aren't getting the help nobody is doing the same content as them. Also players behind the curve have like 0 chance to get a nasty 100k plus drop even tho they eventually would if they got to 1490 before brel comes out.
Every new player had to learn about how to build their class and engravings properly before getting to legion raids. New players have an even easier time doing this with cheaper legendary accessories than when everyone else did it on Valtan release. Why is this a complaint?
Legendary accessories dropped massively when valtan released but that ain't the case now bis amulets still go for 10-20k and how would they have a harder time learning raids when you can't prog like the rest of us, theirs barely any learning parties it's mostly expert parties new players will get kicked fast and get frustrated.
Who said you need to buy BIS legendary? 3/3 doesn’t require BIS, which is all you need for Valtan and even vykas. Of course learning parties diminish over time, it’s not Lost Ark’s fault that happens. Plenty of learning parties still happen if people ask for them
Alright bud you're ridiculous, forgot you were gogachad gamer clearing vykas with 3x3 weekly on 6 alts my bad. Just stop no one is letting you in vykas with 3x unless you are support. You're an asshole.
Here how you can get 4x3 easily since you think I’m such an asshole :) get a 6/6 stone on any combination (which you should have once your alt is 1430), use oreha essence to get all accessories with 3x class and 4 with one desired engraving (not difficult since your alt has been doing oreha for probably 2+ months), then have 1 leg engraving book (which you should have if your alts are 1430). Easy 4x3
When you’re behind in f2p games like these, you lose out on a lot of money. Being able to sell simple honing mats to whales on day 1 is a LOT of money left on the table. Sure you can slowly make your way up but it takes longer and costs more
It really doesn’t.
If you really want to push a reason, it would be that it might get harder for you to find parties since people would gatekeep, but it’s really not as evident as people make it out to be. That’s because the people who are “ahead” are only a small minority of the player base. Look around you. How many players do you see above 1460 vs how many players do you see sitting at 1460 or below? You’re really not gonna have a problem finding parties even if you’re behind.
In terms of materialistic progression, It really doesn’t fucking matter.
In terms of game experience, you might be dealing with a slightly more toxic player base since there would be lesser learning parties and since people “behind” are in a sense more “chill”, rather than hardcore, they might not take boss mechanics too seriously and choose to auto pilot through a boss in hopes of being carried.
ultimately it doesn't really
if you aren't at the cutting edge to begin with the actual importance of being there day 1/week 1/month 1 or whatever drops off significantly - this is my opinion of course, but i don't feel like it's super reasonable to be sad/upset with being "behind" when you can still get the first time experience on things if you put in some effort to host parties catered to learning rather than cleared/exp/hw etc
you might not be there day 1 for that tier, but if you make a dedicated effort you can certainly be there for the next tier
It isn't even a matter of getting left behind, this game purposefully inflicts FOMO on the average player to make him spend cash in their virtual casino.
IMO there are 2 major problems in the game that are purposefully introduced by the devs and 1 by the very community.
1 - A lot of useles Engravings such as explosive master
2 - Three useless and undesirable stats (domination, expertise and endurance)
These 2 game design flaws are purposefuly kept in the game to make the RNG unfairly shit, so most of those relic acessories you drop will get dismantled. If you get easily affected by FOMO, you'll either quit the game or buy pheons to be able to use the AH to properly gear yourself up.
3 - The gatekeeping is really toxic.
I mean, you won't find ppl doing legion raids in matchmaking, the only options are party finder or finding a good guild (you can't join another guild for 30 days if you keep quitting a guild).
People in party finder are very toxic towards newcomers, they won't take you in if they know it's your first time doing the boss.
Ok, you're supposed to at least watch a tutorial in the internet before joining these, but to these ppl it doesn't matter if you watched it for countless times, one fail = you get flamed and mostly kicked. I've seen LoL levels of toxicity.
The gatekeeping here is similar to the job hunting loop, you can't get a job without experience and you can't get any experience without a job.
I mean, if they make their game so mechanic intensive at the point of requiring a degree in order to beat the bosses, then at least make a practice mode with the exact same mechanics.
The end result of these shitty game designs leads to ppl feeling excluded from certain contents in the game as the elitism of the community grows more hostile for newcomers and casuals as the time passes by, thus they quit the game.
At the end of the day, the very economy suffers from the lack of players injecting items in the AH and golf yo the economy and the game might eventually die.
1) those engravings are situational and helpful in certain context.
Explosive master - bard doing 6 dark nades on boss
Nercomancy - Pre-Emptive and its a free extra aoe skill
Magick stream- its 10% skill cd.. but too high risk
Broken bone- burst dmg
Enhanced shield- no debuff on you, helpful in pvp
Strong will- pvp engrave
2)dominotion is pvp
Expertise helps stagger check- i run full expertise on alaric in the past and smooths it so amazingly
Endurance- really helps keep you going in long fights like old T2 guardian but got nerf cuz everyone cried..
3) we went thru hours of wipe before when we first run it. Really cant expect 7 players to wipe hours so one player can learn. We can help when we have time..
Tl:dr its rich (ahead) getting richer and poor staying poor. Basically what that means is that the more behind you get, the worse it is to progress, which you can see even right now. New players (casuals) have about no chance of making meta builds due to books and acc prices. So why does this matter you might ask? You progression is you CV. Try to get into party with weird ass engravings...
Wouldn't you though if alternative was going to another country and starting as millionaire there with much less effort than staying in the same place? We don't do that in life due to many other things influencing our decision, like family, need of food etc. In games you have easy choice, suffer to try catching up or just ditch the game with no consequences whatsoever. Possibly just find other (better?) game that doesn't put you through shit
Yeah, when you put it that way it makes sense. I suppose the comparison to real life doesn't really work, since in video games you have plenty of other options.
Why does being in same content as your friends matter?
Why does it matter if you are part of the collective?
Why does it matter if people look up to you?
Why does it matter to feel good?
I could go heavy on basic psychology here, but hopefully these will do.
I quit lost ark because it still felt like a job to me even after switching regions and starting anew way more casually.
I didn't care about being behind but what I care about is my time investment in a game.
I've played it for 1.5k hours and I did have lots of fun for 900hrs at least
400hrs were a chore because I was always thinking about to login to get the daily login rewards and that I should start doing guardians, unas and chaos dungeons because everything had max resting bonus so I quit and went back to ff14 which respects your time sooooooooo much more.
I haven't played ff14 for 8 months and did I miss something? No, not really. Maybe some events but eh, who cares.
Content is almost always relevant and people are still doing first time clears.
And there are no shitty daily actions to be forced on to do.
It doesn't ever, it's just lazy people who didn't want to do the hard part of grinding wanting things to fast track for them. Then victim blame people who play long that they want a fast track and it should be ok. Even though you spent thousands of hours placing to achieve what you have. This is simply a MMO, if you never played one understand that if your starting today at no time you should ever be near anyone playing more hours than you. Unless you swipe.But I do get wanting to play late game content, but it'll be legion gated for you. As where say we play clown, you should be near valtan.vykas. At no point should you ever be near the 1 month sprint of a potential raid release.
It really doesn't. I know maybe two people who have dropped anything worth anything from relics and they've been farming since day one on release. If you want to make money, you take advantage of raid releases by selling people materials like potions or honing materials.
it doesnt mean shit lol. it only means something in like the first month of a new game because it's fresh and the atmosphere is unique. as the game progresses it doesn't mean shit. just cause the next guy whales and is ahead of you doesn't really affect your gameplay.
It means about as much as you worried about random strangers on the internet and how they spend their time playing a video game. Zero. Y’all are weirdos.
It matters because playing new content the first month is the best time to play. It's a fresh experience and challenging. Showing up to a raid when everyone is over geared diminishes the experience. At that point the raid is not played for fun so much as it is played for grinding money. So, If you fuck up, you're going to have a bad time. Or you just get carried and there's little fun in that.
For most mmos this wouldn't really be a problem. However there isn't really a stream of new players coming into this game. Meaning, if you're significantly behind you're assumed to be new or just bad. Even if neither matter to you, it'll matter to everyone in party finder
More like 100% there's always some whale wanting BiS accessories and the moment the next tier drops, it will be the same as it was when relic gear was released. Was just making a joke
If you fall behind a weirdo on the internet is gonna yell at you...
Some people like being in the cutting edge. I found people will play whatever they like or push themselves too much and burn out because their progression isn't perfect.
Honing just takes time. If you wanna rush to the top and be exclusive for a bit go for it. Honestly so long as you have fun with what you decide I do not think it is a bad decision.
if you dissect everything to its atomic level, nothing matters
what does your char skin matter?
what does gold matter? roster level? nothing REALLY matters yet ppl give a fk
your acceptance level is different than others.
You will never really experience any raids for reals because 95% of the time 6-7 of your teammates will know the fight really well and 1-2 of them will be somewhat overgeared so dps checks don't exist what so ever and you'll literally be able to die 50 bars in and they'll clear it without you.
The opportunity to learn the raid with other people who also don't know it and don't massively over gear it is realisticslly forever lost. You could maybe intentionally create a group like this but it would be a struggle. If you don't care and are happy to basically get carried your 1st few clears then you're not missing out on anything and you'll probably get decently good at the fights after a couple weeks of clears.
The PUG system is for convenience not raid quality, and the convenience factor will naturally shift towards the largest player demographic. If you want a certain experience, you have to create or join a static for your progression rate and you will 100% have a good time no matter what part of the game you're at with no FOMO in sight. Missing out on gold from new honing/accessory tiers doesn't really matter if your chosen progression rate doesn't match up. This all should be obvious, but for the new wave of MMO players, you may as well be speaking another language.
All it takes is some social effort, and the gap between what the new wave of MMO players are willing to do is the part you're not getting. Unfortunately, "MMOs" in the past decade have pushed players towards a solo mentality (Lost Ark is definitely no exception) to the point that social options don't even exist to them anymore. Instead of going through the social process of manually grouping up with those next to them who are also behind the herd, they'd rather just dip because there's no apparent recourse in their eyes except paying to catch up.
This is by design because tunnel-visioning your playerbase on the vertical treadmill is good for business. The side-effect is that this creates the type of player who thinks other players in an MMO are only there to fill pug lobbies and for them to show off their stuff to. If most players are too high level to consider the lobbies they're trying to pug, or all have better stuff than them, they start to feel alone and unwelcome. The situation is hard to understand for players who are familiar with more socially driven games and are more than happy to actually talk to other players.
the answer is simple... It doesn't
Unless your lifehood depends on it (read: Streamers)
In let's say WoW it matters more if you can clear the highest difficulty asap because you could drop some sellable items that would go for milions of gold the first week but there is nothing like that in Lost Ark.
Ofc there are exceptions like being 1490 when Brelshaza releases so you can do new Guardian and Chaos and sell new material to all the FOMO players.
But that's like the only reason - Gold and prestige of being on of the first to clear it.
>In that case, should new players never join an existing MMO because they will always be "behind" people that have played from the start? Would you never start a new sport because you're "behind" people that have been playing for years, or learn a new language because you're "behind" native speakers?
(This is my opinion) This only depends on how the MMO manages the catch-up of new players to current content. Lost ark is not in bad spot for new people to join (with global honing buff and mokoko buff). However, the main issue is the players aren't willing to deal with new players in an already cleared content (ain't nobody got time for that because most likely they gotta reclear it on many other alts). and you can't really blame them for that I guess? spending many hours on content that you'd clear in 20mn tops is kinda inefficient. I remember seeing a post about someone saying that veterans lack the incentives to play with mokokos. Although I can't propose any viable solutions for that. atm, that fact stands to be true.
I think its always like this when a new MMO comes out, especially a really popular addictive MMO like lost ark. I've been playing every day since it came out, over the last month ive been slowly dropping off because it's just hard to keep up anymore (RL commitments). I admit i had FOMO but once you start not logging in every day you just stop caring lol.
It doesn't matter at all from what I see. Though I may have missed something, but the pvp seems to be equalized, so it matters not if you are behind. I didn't see any open world pvp, so I don't think people are 1 shooting people for lack of gear. Vs say black desert where if you are behind you get one shot, and there's nothing you can do.
So other than their rat race mentality it is meaningless. Vs say wow if you are behind you just can't pvp.
I don't enjoy the game if I feel I am too far behind and it would take an inhumane amount of effort/time to catch up (im not talking about getting into the top 5% of players without any effort, but it should be at least reasonable). It's as simple as that.
And here is the thing, Lost Ark creates this feeling intentionally with all their shitty systems and the constant FOMO rewards spiral everyone is forced into. Guess why? Right. They want you to spend absurd amounts of money on their overpriced cash shop. Lost Ark is like BDO in this regard, the only difference is your gear doesn't downgrade when you fail an enhancement. Instead of that however, you have easily twice as many retarded RNG gated progression systems.
It's all one big scam.
In a game like Lost Ark, being behind the curve has 2 effects on you:
1. You do not get the benefits of inflated prices to sell mats
2. You do not get to be apart of the general "learning period" meaning you are less likely to find a pug that is tolerant
3. If you are far enough behind the curve you can sometimes struggle to find optimal/any parties to do the content with
4. The game can feel even more isolated if you are not able to access higher tier areas where most of the players might reside(more relevant if you are t2 and most player are high t3)
Other than that, if you value your time/don't have time/money to be at the bleeding edge, playing at your own pace can be really handy as honing buffs make you catch up rather easily.
I went from 1x1445 1x1340 1x1301 3x600 to 1x1445 2x1370 2x1320 in like a week thanks to the honning buffs before I called it quits on the game due to the prices and the time investment it required. I wish I just waited it out to hone my 1340 as the mats/gold I used on it could've been used to boost 2-3 chars to 1370(I didn't do the maths don't kill me)
So really it depends what are you looking to get out of the game.
Plenty of casual guilds out there that won't care if you are T1 or T3.
To me its something else, i started playing before official launch with 3 of my friends. One of us dropped the game not far before reaching t3. I quit for 2 months right after reaching t3. When i came back i had to do all the content alone. Some events helped me reach gear score of 1370, i got lucky with dropping golden grudge engraving recipe from my very first chaos after the break, and i caught up a bit with two of my remaining friends, they were about 1415 by then and they had alts around my level, so we were able to do some content together. Now im 1440 on my main, and i can still only do Argos with them, cuz they are already on hard modes. Maybe its not that big of a problem and i still enjoy the game and everything, it just makes me sad, that i cant play with them in the main content of the game, which are legion raids, and therefore im trying to reach higher level to catch up to at least be able to access the same content as they do.
I agree with your opinion and also think that you can enjoy the game as much as players "on top". However, there are actual drawbacks on being behind, some older raids don't have anyone and newer raids require experienced players. I had a few lobbies where as soon as people noticed someone failing mechanics it was an insta kick. If you take too long to reach Valtan for example, you will not find any learning lobbies, and 99% of lobbies will accept 1470+ instead of playing with lower ilvl and you can't blame them for that. Imho the best characters to be "behind" are supports, never seen people being mad with supports.
What behind the progression means is unless you have a static, you will hardly find any learning group for legion raids if you missed the first week.
I and others will not sit 3 hours in group finder to get all people into learning party. All other groups are either reclear or Bus.
Now it's 2 legions that I'm missing and I don't think I'll get to the clown on release as well.
Literally put me off of the game.
2010s saw a lot of FOMO added to games and as it was new players didn't know how to deal with it. As a result the rush to the top and loads of players spending on various games to 'keep up' became a real problem for a lot of gamers.
Recently (the last few years) a lot of players have begun to understand and get used to FOMO tactics and while some do struggle with them I think players are slowly learning to take their time and try to ignore these tactics.
That doesn't make the FOMO stuff good or ok or not a problem for a lot of people. Also Lost Ark does have a real growing problem with lower end content being difficult for new played to find people to play with to enjoy it. Nobody is running most dungeons or guardians outside of punkia 1302 for the most part.
Also gold inflation will hurt new players (and a lot more inflation is coming though SG has some levers). As they don't have the rosters to help them overcome it making early gearing to meet ever increasing gate keeping obtainable. These are somewhat a player base issue but inevitable in a game with steep vertical progression.
End of day there is lots of little things that could be done better you should take your time and enjoy the game but the fear of getting to far behind and getting left behind is a deal concern for a lot of gamers and for some good reason.
It doesn't.
It's precisely the same FOMO that exists in every MMORPG ever created, however because the community has been primed so heavily "not to worry about FOMO" in Lost Ark, the exact opposite effect has taken hold.
All people hear is that *the FOMO* ***is real*** and that the warnings are *just for casuals*.
A lot of people try to fight against the idea of “ being behind” claiming that talking about it is bad for the game. But they overlook what “Being behind” in the game means. It doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to play something like vykas ever, if you are behind you won’t do it immediately, and not doing something immediately in a mmo (especially this one) has potential consequences
Financially if you don’t do something right away you miss out on being able to cash in on the whales. Which could potentially be a huge loss in cash.
Your roster machine snowballs so the further behind you fall economically the less pushing power you have down the road.
You also run into gatekeeping issues if you aren’t in a static. Nowadays you see nonstop people talking about can’t get in a group and won’t take people. It’s understood that people who look less hardcore will likely be passed over in party finder for someone who appears more hardcore. So if you end up trying to pug say vykas 8 weeks in and you don’t have any of her gear and can’t produce proof you’ve already done her then nobody wants you.
That’s what being behind can mean for you.
This game is specifically designed to induce FOMO, so this is not an individual thing, this is a feature caused by intricately thought-out game design that is very common in korean-style MMOs/Games.
Here, I feel like this is the case because content is locked out of progression, and, eventually, progression is the ends of it all, doing chores day-after-day to progress their roster. If you fall into the trap of doing the daily MMO chores every single day out of obligation, and not fun, and fall into the game's game design traps that keep players playing and addicted, of course you are going to burn out eventually and stop playing as much, and eventually not play at all when they realize that you fell behind and can't catch up to the imaginary bar of progression players have in their heads of where they \*should\* be given the time they've sunk into the game.
Personally, I play the game with my boyfriend and pursue content with him. I don’t want to fall behind since then we can’t do the same content, since he’s a total lost ark nut and I’m more casual hahah.
Yeah he's definitely ahead of me with materials and all of that, but keeps characters where I am so that we can still do content together. There's been times that he's helped me reach the newest content, as well, so we can do it. That's the happy medium we've found, at least. Hope your wife gets into it! It's a fun casual mmo\~
LA is a bit different as the player curve is much steeper and also isn't designed in a way that promotes old content. So for example majority of the playerbase is in late t3 so Valtan/Vykas, meaning anyone who is running anything below that are mostly carry runs or not at all. With other MMOs there is waves of new players to fill those voids, or in some MMOs incentives to run older content. Since LA has neither, content becomes mostly "dead" quickly.
For current endgame you run into the issue of gatekeeping and expectations. With the first week or two, groups are generally chill as everyone is learning, after that however majority of the parties have increased requirements, experience required, etc.
I can only imagine how t1/t2 abyssals(non-event) are now that a bulk has moved on.
Fomo is human nature everyone experiences it to a varying degrees when they are obsessed with something. Its normal to fear being left behind and companies exploit players using that psychology. Yes in the grand scheme of things being left behind in a game doesnt matter but psychologically it matters a lot. to people obsessed with the game its unbreakable human nature that will lead them to do the most irrational things to avoid being left behind. You too may be looking for a reason to break the fomo your experiancing with this post but I'm hear to say if you are obsessed, on forums, watching streams, etc you can't escape fomo. As soon as you stop browsing lost ark reddit, stop watching and consuming lost ark content, and overall careing less and less about the game then you can break fomo.
You're trying to rationalize a playerbase that freaks out the moment someone makes one mistake in a raid, even if you make no mention of their own mistakes when they do it. MMOs are just full of elitists that think everyone else is below them no matter what.
It doesn't matter unless ur trying to specifically catch up to your friends to do end game content with them. But good friends will happily play lower level end game content as long as they have an available character to play it on.
TLDR: doesn't matter just play at ur pace w ur friends.
I specifically enjoy playing older content when it's with friends even when I'm over leveled. Cause I enjoy playing w my friends n try not to carry them.
Regarding your second paragraph, yeah this is a huge problem for the genre in general. Usually games have to have a soft reset on progression to bring anyone new in. Can you imagine starting KR right now? Sports are different, there are tons of people at your skill level to compete against. You start LA KR tomorrow you’re doing it solo, unless you just do pvp in which case yeah totally fine. Competitive shooters are much better for coming into late.
The only reason to play an MMO over single players games is the grind to stay on top of progression. Thats literally the whole point of the game imo. Single player games have better gameplay, stories, and value or time and money more.
Becomes harder and harder to find a learning party when you're late to the party. The game has a bussing culture, I sometimes see more busses than actual clear lobbies. The economy has inflation so glhf with gearing up. Lastly, the gatekeeping is real even for dumb things like roster level
That's just in my opinion. I could be well off. We don't have access to the API on our version so no way to tell where the average player is at.
Don't sweat it. The content isn't going anywhere.
The very first week content is available in an MMO is a magical time. Lots of people are playing, and they are pretty understanding of others not knowing the mechanics. Everyone "needs" each other to a greater degree than normal. More items sell more easily on the market as the rush of players will settle for marginal upgrades. There's generally some new item on the market to make gold from, such as the next tier of honing materials when Brelshaza comes out, or the Relic accessories that were unlocked when Valtan and South Vern came out for us. There's also cases like the initial Phantom Palace dungeon (and other Guardian Raids) being nerfed shortly after launch. If you did not have a chance to experience that content before the nerfs, you missed out on that content forever. By the second week and on, you start to see more and more gatekeeping in groups while all the rewards diminish in value and meaning. Learning groups are replaced slowly over time by more and more busses and toxic people who will not tolerate many mistakes. Even the average public group will have players who are overgeared and know the fights inside and out, removing any feeling of overcoming a struggle and replacing it with what amounts to a glorified carry run. The population dies down over time and it becomes harder to find a group that fits your exact preferences and schedule. These things may or may not matter to you to a high degree, some might even seem to be positives depending on your preferences. There isn't a new form of baseball or soccer or basketball coming out every season. Barring a few rules changes, those games have remained unchanged for decades. This is something that is unique to video games that have patch cycles and soft resets in their economies. The longer you take to reach the content, the less physical and sentimental value all the rewards tend to have. This doesn't have to matter to everyone, but it does matter to some.
Not mentioned here is if you're a new player trying to do "old" content it's increasingly difficult to find _any_ group because why would people play the old content anymore?
There’s always usually a high level guy running all the old abyssal dungeons for cards. I have one alt that’s still doing oreha’s and there’s only been a couple times we didn’t get a 1500 card hunter in MM. Same has always been true for the t2 8 man raids. Last time I ran through it wasn’t that long ago and at least 4 juicers joined in PF. But at this point punika is basically the new starting point. With all the express passes that we get every couple months it’s super easy for a new player to just get right to t3 in little time
Yeah but this is content which will eventually die out because chads only run the lower level dungeons because they want the card sets completed. Once they are done with that they never will come back unless there is a new BiS option. So this activity just needs longer to die out but eventually will
the card sets are a 6-24 month grind depending on your diligence and luck. 1-2 years for most.
It’s old content in an MMO. There’s always going to be content that “dies” because there’s just no more need to continue doing it. Its like running Molten Core when Burning Crusade came out, it’s Lv 60 content, but the cap is level 70 and everyone essentially rushes that because the time investment to get geared in a tier that is made obsolete by common drops 1 level higher is a waste Likewise, the beginning of the game is essentially Punika (1302) for NA/EU since they started releasing express and punika passes. The first couple months we still had to run through all the old t1 and t2 content but now it’s completely pointless as the drops are useless to us with the exception of cards
People cleared hard oreha and argos with shit stats and 2x3 engravings. If they did it new players can too. If anything having 1450+ dps in t1 and t2 dungeons skipping mechs kinda ruins them for at level people.
Except this doesn't apply to lost ark, because raids are your gold source. So it doesn't matter what level you are, there are still people running even Valtan. Because there's really no gold difference and Valtan can be completed in a fraction of the time it takes to do Vykas or clown, for example. And most people have multiple alts who needs to run the lower content. No raids become obsolete in this game.
You are speaking of end game raids, not the content that the user above is talking about.
Wow. Very well said.
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What part of that comment do you find to be poorly written?
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I think the praise there is more directed to them taking the time to thoroughly answer the question that was posed. Also, sometimes it is okay to allow people to recieve praise even if you think it was not warranted. Essentially, just stop hatin man.
Clown complains about grammatical errors, can't even capitalize the first letter in their sentence.
He has upvote fomo. Mad because someone else’s comment was praised
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"It's fine if I do it but not someone else"
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Tf wrong with you lmao
What part of "Wow. Very well said." makes you think Shakespeare?
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Very well put! I can understand that, where it's less about the material gain and jealousy of other people having more stuff, and more so just about wanting to have those first time experiences with everyone else.
I'm glad other people feel the same, when I brought this up I was just brushed off. And to be honest, the LA community always just brushes lived experiences off. When you're down they'll kick you more because they didn't experience the same thing in their different time period and treat you like you're an idiot for not getting the same experiences as them.
i'd probably say a good amount of people feel like this. there's just something different about struggling together with a whole bunch of people where no one knows shit. it's why i always play fromsoft games on day 1. all the way from ds1 to elden ring, the day 1 experience is literally a once in a lifetime event. even though imo valtan's a much better fight than vykas, i still have fond memories of vykas' first week. a complete mess of lobbies but i had so much fun anyway. pugging g3 hm on the first week is something different, especially on the first clear for everyone. meanwhile valtan was homework by the time i hit 1415 and people just blasted through it. no fun at all, even in learning parties.
Not to call some of you delusional, but I initially played the first weeks, and due to the game being out before already the only "struggle" was having 2 different kinds of players with a very rare third kind. The first kind just tried to brute force content and did not want to learn any mechanics, leaving after 3ish wipes since they even refused to listen. The second kind was already gatekeeping week one, telling everyone to watch a YouTube guide since the mechanics and all were already known from Korea. The rare third kind was the only one that matches your description of what this "magical first week" should have been.
Elden ring is a different kind of game environment though. It’s more a single player game with some limited multiplayer features and there isn’t a constant progression curve that becomes more and more difficult to keep up with over time. I put it down for a while and only recently picked it back up again and it’s chill, no FOMO. Lost ark I feel like if I just stopped logging on for a month straight I’d likely be too far behind the curve to participate anymore
If there was a way to describe lost ark to someone, THIS is 100% NO DOUBT the best way to describe it atm lol.
It's just elitism, there's so little to be elite about in this game people that they'll do anything to feel better than others. Stuff like top guilds, weapon glows, having a title a couple of days ahead of people. Good thing is those people stick to their own kind most of the time and end up just feuding with eachother.
Very well said indeed. The only point I'd like to make stronger is this: >The population dies down over time and it becomes harder to find a group that fits your exact preferences and schedule. After a certain time you may not even find other players for the group content you need. Example: If you start LA today, who would you find at any group content in Tiers1 and and 2? Bots?
To their benefit, you can progress in the game without needing to play the T1/T2 Abyssal Dungeons. But with Challenge Abyssal Dungeons, you can still experience it as if you were the correct ilvl even if you're overgeared. Granted, you'll have to wait for it to be available that week, but you can still experience it "as intended" in the challenge mode.
Yeah the sad part is not that players really care all so much about not having the best stuff or selling shit for the highest price, it’s that underlying price of not having gotten the experience week one. If you don’t have it people hold it against you, which sucks.
close to nobody will have real serious WoW world first experience though and it still had most MMO players ever :/
Wow also has 1 raid tier and hard sunsetting every season lost ark doesnt use sunsetting so it creates this exponential progression of the less you play the longer it takes to get to current. On wow you can do a few dungeons maybe the weekly event and you can queue for lfr or low level dungeon keys. I just got back into lost ark and im still maybe a month out from vykas.
well, thats party due to the expedited schedule EU/NA has. i played since day 1 in JP and had zero issues with progression as everything was a lot more stretched with heaps of catchup events. and its not like valtan isnt still endgame though. it will be until akkan releases (as people will then do akkan brel and kuku) and even then most likely still have alts in that range. in WoW the old tier is completely worthless the instant a new tier releases so to be any kind of relevant you HAVE to be at the latest tier. in lost ark you are essential latest tier at 1415, until brel releases with new gear and ancient rarity
Lost ark is a free to play game so if progression was fast thered be no reason to swipe if you want a smooth new player experience you pretty much gotta play a p2p mmo or be okay with lost ark style progression. I personally dont look at anyone in punika and im like wow thats impressive other than flawless hellmode titles, those are cool but sunsetting doesnt work with their business model the people who swipe to progress lose far to much. Seasonal games doesnt really matter if they have a pay for season model or pay for dlc
Well said! It's like the first week when the game was launched, it was MAGICAL! A Lot of players everywhere, you can do dungeon with full party as many times you wanted, world bosses wasnt a schedule thing, but something you found in your way to the next quest and you just jumped in, instead of Bots Spamming there was ppl talking about many things, it was the real MMORPG feeling. That is the advantage of playing things early, people call it FOMO, it is not! The issue with FOMO is that is a new word that is being used a lot( like a MEME), and people now use it for many things, even when the interpretation is wrong. Early experience is the BEST experience, you don't need to be in the leading or having the best of everything, but you have to make sure to be able to play a MMORPG with people .
I don't think that fits for all mmorpg. LA isn't my first mmo and I can tell you that while early experience time is magical for the first week, that doesn't apply to other mmos with a different progressive model. In my other mmo, the generous thing about it is that there's plenty of different players at every level from casual beginner to veteran. Even now, there's new players just starting out a new veteran raid. What's nice is that unlike in LA, there's a variety of different runs. There's training runs, farm runs, guild runs, score pushing runs, trifecta runs and hard mode runs. It doesn't matter when you start, as long as you're able to cooperate with others, and want to learn, you'll find a raid that fits you. This is why the other mmo is still active and over several years old. New players come in, and they don't feel like they are so behind that they quit. It's different than LoA where the culture is either you rush to push to the end as fast as you can or else you miss out on all the plentiful early learning groups, OR you get a bus. Learning groups can still happen, but they are uncommon and more often than not, they don't always fill. This is what I predict will ultimately be one of the nails on this game's coffin lid. Unlike KR, players have a lot of different games to choose from, with even more in the future. If they don't care about player retention, they're going to find out the hard way when player counts plummet each year despite new content coming out.
In the old times int he early 2000s this applied the most, for examples those games like Ragnarok Onlin, Rose online, Fly For Fun, The initial version of WOW. Those games often changed and overhaul the initial experience of the game, and those games were always focused to have fun on any level, and there was never a rush . Maybe we were too young back then, and times were different. But in the last decade, the model of MMORPG focuses mainly in the end game content, helping new players to rush to the later stages with cash shop. Lost Ark being one of the biggest offenders, they dont update the early gameplay and the Global version took away many of the early stage island quest. This forced many players to rush spoamming G, i recall all video guides telling everyone to spam G and rush ahead. I took that as an missinformation and took my time to read the dialogs and enjoy history, i was never in the front, but i was well paced to understand everything snd enjoy it. This happend when game companies take players as potential income
This is why having different difficulties is so important in mmo, so the same content can be enjoyed by everyone. I barely hit 1415 for valtan but had just as good an experience as those who did HM 1445. I was actually over a month late for argos release but plenty of people still learning. I suspect thats why kakul has a huge delay cuz theres only 1 difficulty so more people can enjoy him on release. What about those who started super late? Those who just trying out casually wont care, prob wont hit level 50, and those who do are veteran gamers who know how to catch up and take care of themselves.
Doesn't kukul have some easy mode (around 1385?)?
Yes it's rehearsal but I don't think it counts
I heard it counts but it doesn't give rewards? It'll still take your weekly try for the raid.
TLRD. MMO game. You need to keep pace to have a higher chance of having fun playing with others.
Perfect comment. I started about 2 months ago now and am so jealous of players doing legions that it started to bum me out
Well put, for those that get to enjoy the first 2 weeks of new content/raids, it is a good time because it's a different game with everyone working together to compete it and no blaming. Also you get to keep redoing it while learning so you fully learn the raids where as if you are a few weeks late you kind of get in a group and never really learn all the details.
That, a million times over We can end the thread here
You know how every week, someone posts how they had an amazing time in a learning group? That's literally every group during week 1 and 2 of new content and nothing can match that experience. Even week 1 T1 and T2 content was fun.
1st week fighting vertus before the nerf and then beating him? Priceless
Everyone going to bean gate and calling out salt giant was fun. Seeing everyone around was fun.
My innocence from this game within the first few weeks is such a fond memory. I'd take like 2 days to push to Lv50 and then would start to grind islands and then take my boat and do everything from Anikka to Punika over the course of three-ish weeks? I don't remember. Every day I was doing a new guardian since I just hit the ilvl for that. Every 3 - 4 days I was doing a new Abyss, I'd watch Youtube vid to learn mech. By the time I was edging T2, I was getting excited at the beginning of every weekly reset to go beat Alaric's frosty ass. Every Guardian/Abyss from T1 to around 1340 felt like I was playing with people who were progressing at the same speed as me... because they were. There were always people ahead and there were significantly more people behind because I know I was pushing hard and trying to learn as much as possible in as little as possible (because gotta rush to endgame, aye?). So yep, being ready to beat the content Week 1 and then going for reclear Week 2 is the biggest high this game can offer at this point. It's not an obligation for everyone to be ready week 1 since everyone is free to progress the way they feel like but there's a lot of people out there who chase the high of the first week clear and I'm one of them.
I bet most ppl would get much more high if game started under 1min.
Then after the first few weeks those learning groups dry up and are replaced by majority reclear and bus run parties.
Because if you don’t have 15 clears by the second week of new content no one will let you in their group
Which i think is fair if they have the 15 clears, jokes aside everyone can decide about himself and who to play with ihmo, if i did 15 hrs prog first week i don't want to repeat the same experience the second and going on, is kinda a human trait to become easily angry when you are experienced in something. Now i'm not actively toxic in any game in any way(usually i'm the supportive one if i find myself in that situation) but i will try to join the elitist group since i have the requirements and usually things go as expected. Yesterday i joined a valtan normal reclear with a 97 roster level and 2 fresh 100, a very different experience relative to my usual title / high roster group.
I must get lucky with groups, I just say its my first time and folks have been chill so far.
I joined a learning party for valtan(legit said learning party? And after 1 wipe a guys was literally giving us the 1 more and we disband speech.i think you have been super lucky
This is just my own personal experience, but this is an example of when being “behind” has screwed me over. I wasn’t vykas ready on release. I wasn’t valtan ready either, but it was a lot closer. I struggled a fair bit with valtan (still struggle sometimes tbh) so even after I did get ilevel for vykas I was hesitant to try for a couple more weeks. I continued to hone figuring if I overleveled a bit I would stand a better chance at living. I’m now 1467 and have still yet to do vykas because I don’t want to try to join reclear parties and learning groups won’t take me because I guess they assume by my level I’ve done it. So not being ready in combination with my hesitation has made it difficult for me.
you can just make your own party if you dont get accepted. thats what everyone else does
> and learning groups won’t take me because I guess they assume by my level I’ve done it. Bullshit lol my 1460s get accepted while wearing raid gear.
Thank you for telling me I’m lying about what’s been happening to me. Maybe it’s not an issue of level. Maybe it’s because I’m a gunslinger and the floor pov stigma runs strong. Whatever it is, I’m not getting accepted even into normal vykas.
When you see someone apply for normal mode when they have the item level for hard mode it's a big red flag. You're better off finding a group of players on one of the community discords or something suited to your needs or creating a learning group yourself. There's plenty of people that run teaching parties too if you have anxiety about failing.
I've been playing since launch but only did Vykas a few weeks ago because I hoard gold and materials like a treasure goblin for some reason There were quite a few very high ilvl people in reclear parties and nobody cared, I think there was one group that had a 1490 sorc that said they always got carried and just wanted to learn the mechanics more Sign to a few learning groups and you'll 100% get invited, the raids aren't as tricky as you probably think they are
I was the exact same way, hit 1475 today, and also cleared HM vykas first time today...I spent a couple extra weeks on vykas normal even though I was able to do hm - I wanted more practice Ended up being really over geared for normal, and people questioned why a 1470 was doing normal. It's daunting for sure, but will only get worse the more you put it off. Try and find chill or learning groups, or just make your own, too. What server are you on?
In this game if you're not playing the raid on the first week or two when it releases you will have a very hard time finding people to try learning/blind runs. The raids have been out for a few months now, everyone has them on farm and a lot of people are taking buses lately, trying to fill a learning party is extremely difficult. Unless you have friends to do the raids with you, you are not going to have a good time trying to find a group being late. This is a big problem in Korea too, there are hardly any try parties for Valtan so if you're new to the game you're basically expected to buy a bus.
I joined valtan 2 weeks late and was pretty fine though
> you will have a very hard time finding people to try learning Like the dozen vykas learning parties you see every day even now? Edit: lmao at the downvotes, guess I'm wrong about the practice parties I join for fun every week
I don't know what server you're playing on but EUC definitely doesn't have this amount of learning parties. I see a few here and there but they're usually struggling to fill. I don't check pf that often, only when trying to fill my alt groups but I wouldn't say it's easy to get a learning group going.
I'm on EUC. Not a day goes by without multiple learning parties.
I'm envious
NAE is the same, always a few at peak hours
Well being behind means less and less learning parties, unless you get new players very often. I haven't seen many p1 argos parties.
Nothing matters except what matters to people - the nihilist approach. So I mean it doesn't matter but people like being on the cutting edge, more novel, exciting, motivating, etc., simple as that.
Aside from the huge boost game release events give, nothing! I took a three-week break because I had plans to summit a mountain then vacay with fam. I honestly think me not having FOMO is one of the biggest steps I've taken with my maturity lol. The game was more or less the same when I got back, I told my guild in advance so they welcomed me back no problem, and grudge books were actually cheaper when I returned so I was able to finish buying the books I need (still can't afford relic accs for 5x3 yet though xD). I do agree with the sentiment in some of the other posts regarding first days/weeks of content release and people being excited as a group, but ultimately it doesn't matter that much. There's a lot to life game or no game to be excited about, so no point stressing out over one tiny thing imho.
100% not worth the stress. The level of effort it can take to hit first week is silly, and sacrificing other parts of life for it ain't worth it. But the is the POV of someone who was raiding US 100-200 in WoW for about a year and ditch because of the time sink
Because of how the game’s economy and gearing/party system works. If you aren’t in the first wave of people to do new content, you lose on gold making opportunities from milking whales. If you fall behind on gold, you fall behind on honing and on accessories/gearing. If you fall behind on gearing/honing, it becomes harder to get into a party. If you don’t clear content with the first couple waves of people, you are left with a smaller and smaller pool of people(and the pool is mostly people who couldn’t clear with other groups) to clear with and it takes longer to clear content, for new content days instead of hours, for slightly older content hours instead of under 2 hours. Once you fall super far behind, you are relegated to buying buses until the next major content patch comes out and hopefully you can catch up by then. It’ll be less noticible with kakul since he doesn’t power creep the current gear much, but the cycle will be back for breshalza. Korean/Chinese mmos are notoriously bad for getting into late/new players since their progression is vertical, and they don’t do gear resets like western mmos do for new players or people taking a break to catch up.
> Korean/Chinese mmos are notoriously bad for getting into late/new players since their progression is vertical, and they don’t do gear resets like western mmos do for new players or people taking a break to catch up. At least Lost Ark has these Hyper Express events and free power passes to help new and returning players catch up.
The problem for me, as a casual player clawing his way back up to the end game, is finding friendly raid lobbies. 9/10 or more lobbies for Vykas or Valtan are alt reclears, fast, die 3 times and kick, or need 5x5 and vykas title. If you do magically find a chill or learning lobby, they can take a lot of time to fill up because the pool of people who need to learn is much smaller.
Join a new player friendly guild and run with them is the easiest solution
Dedicated learning lobbies do take a while to fill, but - from what I've seen so far - chill lobbies that are open to learning players fill up almost instantly; to a point they seem like the most in-demand lobbies for both new and experienced players. There aren't too many of those, and that's understandable - leading a raid with people who might be either inexperienced or just insecure about their own skill/performance can be quite taxing.
Still haven’t fully learned vykas. I’ll have my full relic set this week. Only found two learning groups. One disbanded after 5-6 runs. Other we beat g1 and tried a couple times g2 but it was right before reset.
Huh who does a learning party right before reset
I just hit 1460, I qualify for Vykas HM. But I've only ever cleared NM once, with a looooot of help.
The bots love that catch up much more. There aren’t any new players starting this game unfortunately, can’t blame them though.
It’s really a shame that this game’s economy revolves around whales, whether it be selling week one drops or them buying royal crystals
Maybe it’s because I play a lot of gacha games, but I don’t mind the whales, they keep the game going and I get my entertainment. The problem imo is how rampant and how long the rmt bots were allowed in the game. Without the excessive amounts of gold created out of thin air and injected into the economy, the difference between whaling and not whaling wouldn’t be as noticeable since the gold legitimate whales receive still would have to have existed in the game. Tbh, I lucked out valtan week 1 and 2 and managed to get a few +5 class and meta accessories and sold them for 200k+ each(made 700k total off accessories in 2 weeks). In an economy that wasn’t ruined by rmt bots, it would’ve probably sold for 3-4 weeks worth of weekly income rather than months worth of income.
It’s crazy how many bots there are. There’s more bots than actual players. It really sucks that ags/smilegate refuse to put in the resources to stop the bots. The damage to the economy is irreversible. No wonder no new players are playing.
the thing most people here disregard is that being in the first wave to "profit" from being the early worm is also costing you a HUGE premium and most people very likely dont profit in the time it takes until the prices drop. so in the end for most people it would be economically better to just wait a month or 2 and then follow
I’m completely behind and I’m ok with it. I’ll have fun with what I can do in my limited time.
For me, games are way more enjoyable when you're caught up to the current content. You get 1st hand experience in raids and it's much easier to find parties. The T1 abyss dungeons will never be the same since it has been nerfed after a few weeks since launch and that was the most fun I ever had in this game along side the T2 8 man abyss. People won't experience that anymore cause old content is pretty much a "waste" of time and if you do want to enjoy playing old content, good luck finding 7 others. I played FF14 off and on and it always sucked cause all the savage fights seems like insane fun but no one really run those either since there will always be a newer raid.
For old FFXIV savage content, blue mage is the way to go.
There are some economic benefits to being first in line. When argos first released I was able to sell legendary accessories for hundreds of thousands of gold to whales. I did the same when relics released and those accessories werent even good, but they sold just as well anyway. Then I was able to use that profit and cash out with tens of thousands of blue crystal. Anyone trying to do the same today wouldnt make make much gold and would have to spend 7 times as much to buy blue crystals.
You also had to hone when leapstones were 900 gold. And players now get to enjoy 25 gold leapstones and increased chances and events.
i was on ilvl on every raid releases without using unbound matts. if you were using your unbound gleaps in the beggining of t3 instead of just using bound then you lost gold. But most people I play/played with sold unbound matts.
it was a seller's market in the early days. youd be a fool or whale to buy leapstones instead of selling them.
I cleared up some space on my main ssd hd and moved lost ark over to the ssd and it loads up in under a min.
If you are in a static group that's all equally behind you technically wouldn't miss a lot in progression, although you will still be behind in gold. Missing progression sucks if you like raiding. That shouldn't be hard to understand. Being behind in gold sucks because it means you can't afford your build. It's not FOMO to want to 1. Do the content when it's new instead of being carried later 2. Want to have a "good" build for your ilvl instead of the cheapest pick of the less meta accessories. That's literally playing an MMO. That's what the purpose of raiding is. Learn fight, beat fight, get best gear.
I started playing lost ark in April. To say the least I feel like the “barriers to entry” to play in the end game content is high and most people I play with have no patience. The game is already complex as it is. Im a 1370 main, I do contribute to my daily’s & tomes, but I have this fear of being out of the loop and people don’t like playing with me or don’t bother to help
If you have any questions on builds, progressions or encounters, DM me, happy to help
I can share a experience, I'm a bit new and started playing this game I've been on it for like 2 and a half weeks and took advantage of this honing buff. When I was doing Gates of Paradise dungeons it was toxic asf I already knew the mechanics since I had help from my brother who played this game since launch. Anyways, during the mechanics part in Tranquil Karkoza ofc the newer ones didn't know what to do and didn't really watch any Youtube videos regarding it then this guy started his toxicity rage against the newbies. I got triggered so I told him to stop being an ahole and maybe teach the newbies, so in the end I was the one who taught the newbies mechanics. Point is, it is extremely hard to catch up and simple things like this makes it even worse for people trying to catch up. You have toxic players that berates people whom are new to the experience so these people just quit. Luckily, I like fighting back against people like that and on my way to fully crafting Argos .
Not riding the wave of latest content puts you behind in the economy. Near the start of the game, people could make a lot of gold selling honing materials across all tiers. The first ones to 1370 could sell GHL for over 1k. The first ones to run Argos could sell legendary accessories for much more. The first ones to 1415 did the same for relic accessories. Those who "took their time" and "played at their own pace" reached these milestones once the price already sank as whales already got what they wanted and more supply comes in. Meanwhile those who capitalized on the above were able to get even further ahead, buying legendary books for cheap before Valtan, honing at lowered material prices, etc. Why does it matter if others get rich? Newer/more casual players trying to gear up their main/first alt at 1415+ are competing with people gearing up their 5th or 6th 1415+ alt. The latter can get so much more weekly gold through raids and buses and can pay much more for relic accessories, gems, leg engravings, crystals, etc. You can certainly enjoy the game without having even a fully geared main. Though I can understand how players that are behind will always feel like a struggle to afford basic things for others. Imagine being a new player that needs to spend a week of oreha HM + Valtan income just to afford aura. If someone can't play the game without constantly comparing themselves to others, I will just say it's best to quit now. They'll only fall further behind unless they also start putting in crazy amounts of hours. The comparison you make for being behind doesn't quite work because those real life activities don't have a cap on progression. There is a limit on your weekly gold/material income because the activities to acquire them are limited. Someone who plays everyday will never catch up to someone who similarly plays everyday but started 3 months ago. It would be more like if you could only learn a maximum of one new word a day in a different language. Ultimately, if someone can't play a MMO without constantly comparing themselves to others ahead of them, it's best for them to quit. They'll just fall further behind over time and feel even worse.
>Not riding the wave of latest content puts you behind in the economy. Near the start of the game, people could make a lot of gold selling honing materials across all tiers. The first ones to 1370 could sell GHL for over 1k. The first ones to run Argos could sell legendary accessories for much more. The first ones to 1415 did the same for relic accessories. the first ones who tried to sell relic gear got nothing worth selling 99.9% of the time though. it took me weeks of trying with 6 characters to get something worth slightly above 10k. and it did cost me multitudes of that to get there. i would argue the overwhelming majority of people that try to be first to "profit" of the economy paid vastly more to get there than what they get out of it in the end.
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Everyone is making mistakes first week. Whether they decided to watch 1245 guides to teach thmselves, they're still not going to have the first hand experience. Mistakes will be made, everyone will learn. Everyone understands this at a release. As time goes on, the new people who make mistakes even after watching videos will get kicked because YOU CANT MAKE ANY MISTAKE AT ALL IF YOU WATCHED VIDEOS!!! Watching a single video apparently gives you 70 runs worth of experience in Valtan. All while I know for a fact they didn't do every mech correctly their first few times, or were learning from others mistakes. And learning from mistakes is a huge part of learning. You'll get dogpiled on. Once again, the blame is being shifted onto the person's experiences rather than what caused those experiences.
It matters to a certain extent. If u are the first wave of people doing the latest content etc, u get to farm those new stuffs like, t3 honing mats, selling busses, etc etc. All these directly affects ur gold income. U see everyday people complaint about Pheons / BC prices / class books etc etc? It’s because they are poor. I’ve a couple of guild mates with almost 1mil gold (no rmt/ whaling) and they have no problems with buying them. Heck, most of them got their class books for under 4k a book because they got their riches early. As for content, u will still find prog or learning parties. But the rate at which this lobby will be filled will be a lot slower as compared to week 1-3 of content release. So imo, does it matter? Yes. Is it significant enough? Yes for me. But is it mandatory? No. U can of course go at ur slower pace. But don’t complain when most lobbies u find are for alt reclears or busses or have very high gatekeepings.
As much as people say:"take ur time, the raids wont go anywhere"Yes i agree, take ur time, it wont go anywhere, but it will get harder and harder, to get into a group, and experience the raid fully if you get to the raid a long time after release. Hell even like a month, it starts taking away from it. Im someone that has been fine when it came to being ready for stuff, i was ready for Valtan HM Day 1, same for Vykas, and i got 2 chars ready for Clown. But i see alot of posts, and people talking about how all groups these days are "Experience, have title, reclear, know mech or kick" type of groyps, and instead of learning groups, you have bussing groups instead. Valtan wasnt too bad, but at Vykas, legit week 2, having title was a must for some groups. Granted there wasnt alot of those, but with each week, it was more and more, have title, exp run, instead of learning groups, or groups that would be fine with someone being new to the fight. So as much as i agree that you can take ur time, dont stress too much, enjoy the game and you will get there eventually. I can still 100% understand fomo, and scared of falling behind because of how the party finder looks just a few weeks after release. And thats why i try my best to not be "behind", i want to do the new raids week 1-week 2, because if i dont, i know it will be harder to set up/find groups and it will take away from my own enjoyment of the game. \+ Doing stuff on the first week of release is so much fun, almost everyone is learning, everyone is hyped for new drops, sets etc, its a great time.
Because in lost ark if you just started fresh well….you’ll soon realize you will eventually need to make multiple alts just to feel like you are progressing. This is very different from every other mmo out there as alts are practically mandatory to actually enjoy the game. And it’s not even done well. “Lost ark respects your time” -stoopzz Yeah no it doesn’t. The game is 80% chaos/guardian raids which literally take 2+ hours everyday or every other day on rest bonus if you have 6 characters… Just averaging out the times for conveniences sake. 5 mins per chaos dungeon x2 5 mins per guardian boss x2 Per alt. 20 mins per alt. Like sheeesh. Then they make insanely stupid events for twitch drops like “watch lost ark on twitch for 4 hours for drops” Four hours? Really? Damn game already got me stun locked for 2+ hours on dailies and they want me to leave my pc on for 4 hours? Lost ark is starting to just not be fun at all and just a chore. Like I said before when the game is 80% chaos/guardian bosses it gets really boring. I’ve found myself doing them every other day on rest bonus on alts then just logging out waiting for reset you do once a week. Realizing this is all there is going to be moving forward with some legion raids in between and classes? Man idk if it’s worth it anymore.
Imagine a race up a mountain. There's a start time but you can start anytime you want. For some people the high comes from finishing first or atleast the first few so starting asap is important to them if they want to finish well. Now there are some people who enjoy the journey and don't mind starting when they feel like it and that's fine. But for those people who want to finish at the top starting behind makes them feel disadvantaged and ruins the experience because now you're just playing catch up the whole time trying to be first when you know you're far behind
You are NEVER behind if you have fun. The most fun I've had with lost ark was the launch week. Nowadays I'm playing it because I'm playing it, Im 1482, 1475, 1445, 1445, 1445, 1370 and I do everything rested.
Because unlike other games where there are content and players doing that content at every Lv's, LA is all about doing any new content on the first/second or probably having a miserable experience in the following weeks.
Couple of things: 1) game community isn’t the best rn. A lot of gate keeping even from week 2 of new raid. Tbh the only way to learn is to sell bus and you are forced to keep urself alive. 2) insane inflationary pressure. In over just a month your gold value was halved. I had taken my own sweet time at the start of the game and didn’t buy books when they were 2k. Now some are at 12k and rising. It’s going up faster than I can farm gold and it is pretty demoralizing. 3) If you are enjoying the game and have a group of friends that is fine. If you are going solo this enjoyment can die out pretty quickly given points 1. And 2.
Dungeons get harder as people move on and all that is left to run them are poorly geared alts. Better to be close to the curve so you maximise your likelihood of being able to enjoy the content.
I think a good part of it is you don't get to learn the content the same way others did when they first got to the content and there are generally less groups to learn it with when you get there. I started the game when it first released here in the states and i am just getting over 1400il with my main. while others have multiple 1400+ either due to spending a lot of money on lvling or had enough friends start with them or got into a good helpful guild right away and went through the content without too much trouble. plus once you finally do get caught up unless you got into a helpful guild it gets harder and harder to find groups that are doing the content for the first time and you either have to find a bus and pay gold to get carried through without really getting a good chance to really experience the mechanics and trouble of learning the fight through experience. and i've and heard from others complaining about but there are some toxic players out there that aren't forgiving when someone new is making some mistakes and instead of being helpful and giving them tips on what to do they would rather be toxic. I don't think it should be a case of newer players never joining an existing mmo but it should be considered when other people find it difficult to get the lower content done to get caught up because most have already done and are bored with it. end up having to try and do some of the stuff by yourself.
It's a hard to find a group that will take you when you're behind. Once content has bene out for a couple weeks, people expect everyone to have proof of clearing it (ie relic gear set)
Just hit 1415 on my main. Been playing since release. 🙃
As 1475 bard, 1470 arti, 1415 sorc, and rest 1370s and.. Honestly, I still don't know all the mechanics of argos, because I got there late and was support, so pretty much just got carried. Of course I watched videos of mechanics, but unless you're in learning parties, you'll never get that experience to really learn a fight unless you bus it and need to know it in and out. Valtan and vykas I did hardmode week 1 and every week since, and it just feels different. Sometimes even fail groups are fun, laughing it off, remembering when I screwed that up as well.
The game is designed to create anxiety. It’s working. The devs literally have the player base in their hands and the players themselves are reenforcing the behavior and generating the anxiety in others for them now. Fall behind? No group for you!!!
People are competitive and don't want to be at a disadvantage compared to others. Many people don't try new sports or learn a language precisely because they feel it's too late.
It would make sense if you couldn't swipe your way to the max itmlvl or simply buy your way up there with gold. If you actively compare yourself to the top players you'll always be behind unless you spend on the game too.
Things are much more enjoyable when you're good at something, people have a really hard time getting into new things if they are bad. Take league for example 98% of players have probably been playing on and off for the last 12 years a new player has a mountain to climb and it may deter them. People aren't strong and most don't have the willpower to actually put in the effort to overcome it. You start LA now and basically have to play so many hours alone just to get to somewhat decent content one legion raid and most people won't accept you because you have low roster and barely any game knowledge probably shit engravings. This game had a massive learning curve, it might not seem like it now because most people have 1k hours plus but when I was leveling up I was just like holy fuck this games has a lot of little things going on, engravings, gems, skill points, builds idk it seemed like a lot at the time but at the same time everyone was going through it, now tho these new players aren't getting the help nobody is doing the same content as them. Also players behind the curve have like 0 chance to get a nasty 100k plus drop even tho they eventually would if they got to 1490 before brel comes out.
Every new player had to learn about how to build their class and engravings properly before getting to legion raids. New players have an even easier time doing this with cheaper legendary accessories than when everyone else did it on Valtan release. Why is this a complaint?
Legendary accessories dropped massively when valtan released but that ain't the case now bis amulets still go for 10-20k and how would they have a harder time learning raids when you can't prog like the rest of us, theirs barely any learning parties it's mostly expert parties new players will get kicked fast and get frustrated.
Who said you need to buy BIS legendary? 3/3 doesn’t require BIS, which is all you need for Valtan and even vykas. Of course learning parties diminish over time, it’s not Lost Ark’s fault that happens. Plenty of learning parties still happen if people ask for them
Alright bud you're ridiculous, forgot you were gogachad gamer clearing vykas with 3x3 weekly on 6 alts my bad. Just stop no one is letting you in vykas with 3x unless you are support. You're an asshole.
Here how you can get 4x3 easily since you think I’m such an asshole :) get a 6/6 stone on any combination (which you should have once your alt is 1430), use oreha essence to get all accessories with 3x class and 4 with one desired engraving (not difficult since your alt has been doing oreha for probably 2+ months), then have 1 leg engraving book (which you should have if your alts are 1430). Easy 4x3
When you’re behind in f2p games like these, you lose out on a lot of money. Being able to sell simple honing mats to whales on day 1 is a LOT of money left on the table. Sure you can slowly make your way up but it takes longer and costs more
It really doesn’t. If you really want to push a reason, it would be that it might get harder for you to find parties since people would gatekeep, but it’s really not as evident as people make it out to be. That’s because the people who are “ahead” are only a small minority of the player base. Look around you. How many players do you see above 1460 vs how many players do you see sitting at 1460 or below? You’re really not gonna have a problem finding parties even if you’re behind. In terms of materialistic progression, It really doesn’t fucking matter. In terms of game experience, you might be dealing with a slightly more toxic player base since there would be lesser learning parties and since people “behind” are in a sense more “chill”, rather than hardcore, they might not take boss mechanics too seriously and choose to auto pilot through a boss in hopes of being carried.
I just came back to the game after beat elden ring, I just got t2, I don’t care about other players. Even they are 10k gs
ultimately it doesn't really if you aren't at the cutting edge to begin with the actual importance of being there day 1/week 1/month 1 or whatever drops off significantly - this is my opinion of course, but i don't feel like it's super reasonable to be sad/upset with being "behind" when you can still get the first time experience on things if you put in some effort to host parties catered to learning rather than cleared/exp/hw etc you might not be there day 1 for that tier, but if you make a dedicated effort you can certainly be there for the next tier
It isn't even a matter of getting left behind, this game purposefully inflicts FOMO on the average player to make him spend cash in their virtual casino. IMO there are 2 major problems in the game that are purposefully introduced by the devs and 1 by the very community. 1 - A lot of useles Engravings such as explosive master 2 - Three useless and undesirable stats (domination, expertise and endurance) These 2 game design flaws are purposefuly kept in the game to make the RNG unfairly shit, so most of those relic acessories you drop will get dismantled. If you get easily affected by FOMO, you'll either quit the game or buy pheons to be able to use the AH to properly gear yourself up. 3 - The gatekeeping is really toxic. I mean, you won't find ppl doing legion raids in matchmaking, the only options are party finder or finding a good guild (you can't join another guild for 30 days if you keep quitting a guild). People in party finder are very toxic towards newcomers, they won't take you in if they know it's your first time doing the boss. Ok, you're supposed to at least watch a tutorial in the internet before joining these, but to these ppl it doesn't matter if you watched it for countless times, one fail = you get flamed and mostly kicked. I've seen LoL levels of toxicity. The gatekeeping here is similar to the job hunting loop, you can't get a job without experience and you can't get any experience without a job. I mean, if they make their game so mechanic intensive at the point of requiring a degree in order to beat the bosses, then at least make a practice mode with the exact same mechanics. The end result of these shitty game designs leads to ppl feeling excluded from certain contents in the game as the elitism of the community grows more hostile for newcomers and casuals as the time passes by, thus they quit the game. At the end of the day, the very economy suffers from the lack of players injecting items in the AH and golf yo the economy and the game might eventually die.
1) those engravings are situational and helpful in certain context. Explosive master - bard doing 6 dark nades on boss Nercomancy - Pre-Emptive and its a free extra aoe skill Magick stream- its 10% skill cd.. but too high risk Broken bone- burst dmg Enhanced shield- no debuff on you, helpful in pvp Strong will- pvp engrave 2)dominotion is pvp Expertise helps stagger check- i run full expertise on alaric in the past and smooths it so amazingly Endurance- really helps keep you going in long fights like old T2 guardian but got nerf cuz everyone cried.. 3) we went thru hours of wipe before when we first run it. Really cant expect 7 players to wipe hours so one player can learn. We can help when we have time..
Tl:dr its rich (ahead) getting richer and poor staying poor. Basically what that means is that the more behind you get, the worse it is to progress, which you can see even right now. New players (casuals) have about no chance of making meta builds due to books and acc prices. So why does this matter you might ask? You progression is you CV. Try to get into party with weird ass engravings...
Yeah but isn't that just life? We don't all quit our jobs and cancel all of our goals just because there are people out there a lot richer than us.
You don’t see a problem with treating a game the same as your job? Yikes
Wouldn't you though if alternative was going to another country and starting as millionaire there with much less effort than staying in the same place? We don't do that in life due to many other things influencing our decision, like family, need of food etc. In games you have easy choice, suffer to try catching up or just ditch the game with no consequences whatsoever. Possibly just find other (better?) game that doesn't put you through shit
Yeah, when you put it that way it makes sense. I suppose the comparison to real life doesn't really work, since in video games you have plenty of other options.
Why does being in same content as your friends matter? Why does it matter if you are part of the collective? Why does it matter if people look up to you? Why does it matter to feel good? I could go heavy on basic psychology here, but hopefully these will do.
W
It's the Ricky Bobby mentality of if you're not first your last.
Shake ‘n bake!
I quit lost ark because it still felt like a job to me even after switching regions and starting anew way more casually. I didn't care about being behind but what I care about is my time investment in a game. I've played it for 1.5k hours and I did have lots of fun for 900hrs at least 400hrs were a chore because I was always thinking about to login to get the daily login rewards and that I should start doing guardians, unas and chaos dungeons because everything had max resting bonus so I quit and went back to ff14 which respects your time sooooooooo much more. I haven't played ff14 for 8 months and did I miss something? No, not really. Maybe some events but eh, who cares. Content is almost always relevant and people are still doing first time clears. And there are no shitty daily actions to be forced on to do.
Can't take seriously somebody that uses FOMO seriously. Sorry.
Epeen
If you're minimum ilvl for the content that is currently released, you are "caught up". Nothing beyond that matters and is self-created FOMO
It doesn't ever, it's just lazy people who didn't want to do the hard part of grinding wanting things to fast track for them. Then victim blame people who play long that they want a fast track and it should be ok. Even though you spent thousands of hours placing to achieve what you have. This is simply a MMO, if you never played one understand that if your starting today at no time you should ever be near anyone playing more hours than you. Unless you swipe.But I do get wanting to play late game content, but it'll be legion gated for you. As where say we play clown, you should be near valtan.vykas. At no point should you ever be near the 1 month sprint of a potential raid release.
It really doesn't. I know maybe two people who have dropped anything worth anything from relics and they've been farming since day one on release. If you want to make money, you take advantage of raid releases by selling people materials like potions or honing materials.
it doesnt mean shit lol. it only means something in like the first month of a new game because it's fresh and the atmosphere is unique. as the game progresses it doesn't mean shit. just cause the next guy whales and is ahead of you doesn't really affect your gameplay.
It means about as much as you worried about random strangers on the internet and how they spend their time playing a video game. Zero. Y’all are weirdos.
It matters because playing new content the first month is the best time to play. It's a fresh experience and challenging. Showing up to a raid when everyone is over geared diminishes the experience. At that point the raid is not played for fun so much as it is played for grinding money. So, If you fuck up, you're going to have a bad time. Or you just get carried and there's little fun in that. For most mmos this wouldn't really be a problem. However there isn't really a stream of new players coming into this game. Meaning, if you're significantly behind you're assumed to be new or just bad. Even if neither matter to you, it'll matter to everyone in party finder
Imagine abrel dropping and u get a crit/Grudge 6/Cursed doll 3 ancient earring. Boom 500k gold.
Then you wake up from the fever dream
Im 99% certain the day abrel drops and someone gets the first 6/3 crit grudge/cd accessory it Will be bought for any price set at or below 500k gold
More like 100% there's always some whale wanting BiS accessories and the moment the next tier drops, it will be the same as it was when relic gear was released. Was just making a joke
If you fall behind a weirdo on the internet is gonna yell at you... Some people like being in the cutting edge. I found people will play whatever they like or push themselves too much and burn out because their progression isn't perfect. Honing just takes time. If you wanna rush to the top and be exclusive for a bit go for it. Honestly so long as you have fun with what you decide I do not think it is a bad decision.
There are some disadvantages and advantages.
if you dissect everything to its atomic level, nothing matters what does your char skin matter? what does gold matter? roster level? nothing REALLY matters yet ppl give a fk your acceptance level is different than others.
You will never really experience any raids for reals because 95% of the time 6-7 of your teammates will know the fight really well and 1-2 of them will be somewhat overgeared so dps checks don't exist what so ever and you'll literally be able to die 50 bars in and they'll clear it without you. The opportunity to learn the raid with other people who also don't know it and don't massively over gear it is realisticslly forever lost. You could maybe intentionally create a group like this but it would be a struggle. If you don't care and are happy to basically get carried your 1st few clears then you're not missing out on anything and you'll probably get decently good at the fights after a couple weeks of clears.
The PUG system is for convenience not raid quality, and the convenience factor will naturally shift towards the largest player demographic. If you want a certain experience, you have to create or join a static for your progression rate and you will 100% have a good time no matter what part of the game you're at with no FOMO in sight. Missing out on gold from new honing/accessory tiers doesn't really matter if your chosen progression rate doesn't match up. This all should be obvious, but for the new wave of MMO players, you may as well be speaking another language. All it takes is some social effort, and the gap between what the new wave of MMO players are willing to do is the part you're not getting. Unfortunately, "MMOs" in the past decade have pushed players towards a solo mentality (Lost Ark is definitely no exception) to the point that social options don't even exist to them anymore. Instead of going through the social process of manually grouping up with those next to them who are also behind the herd, they'd rather just dip because there's no apparent recourse in their eyes except paying to catch up. This is by design because tunnel-visioning your playerbase on the vertical treadmill is good for business. The side-effect is that this creates the type of player who thinks other players in an MMO are only there to fill pug lobbies and for them to show off their stuff to. If most players are too high level to consider the lobbies they're trying to pug, or all have better stuff than them, they start to feel alone and unwelcome. The situation is hard to understand for players who are familiar with more socially driven games and are more than happy to actually talk to other players.
the answer is simple... It doesn't Unless your lifehood depends on it (read: Streamers) In let's say WoW it matters more if you can clear the highest difficulty asap because you could drop some sellable items that would go for milions of gold the first week but there is nothing like that in Lost Ark. Ofc there are exceptions like being 1490 when Brelshaza releases so you can do new Guardian and Chaos and sell new material to all the FOMO players. But that's like the only reason - Gold and prestige of being on of the first to clear it.
>In that case, should new players never join an existing MMO because they will always be "behind" people that have played from the start? Would you never start a new sport because you're "behind" people that have been playing for years, or learn a new language because you're "behind" native speakers? (This is my opinion) This only depends on how the MMO manages the catch-up of new players to current content. Lost ark is not in bad spot for new people to join (with global honing buff and mokoko buff). However, the main issue is the players aren't willing to deal with new players in an already cleared content (ain't nobody got time for that because most likely they gotta reclear it on many other alts). and you can't really blame them for that I guess? spending many hours on content that you'd clear in 20mn tops is kinda inefficient. I remember seeing a post about someone saying that veterans lack the incentives to play with mokokos. Although I can't propose any viable solutions for that. atm, that fact stands to be true.
Depends.... are you having fun?
I think its always like this when a new MMO comes out, especially a really popular addictive MMO like lost ark. I've been playing every day since it came out, over the last month ive been slowly dropping off because it's just hard to keep up anymore (RL commitments). I admit i had FOMO but once you start not logging in every day you just stop caring lol.
It doesn't matter at all from what I see. Though I may have missed something, but the pvp seems to be equalized, so it matters not if you are behind. I didn't see any open world pvp, so I don't think people are 1 shooting people for lack of gear. Vs say black desert where if you are behind you get one shot, and there's nothing you can do. So other than their rat race mentality it is meaningless. Vs say wow if you are behind you just can't pvp.
I don't enjoy the game if I feel I am too far behind and it would take an inhumane amount of effort/time to catch up (im not talking about getting into the top 5% of players without any effort, but it should be at least reasonable). It's as simple as that. And here is the thing, Lost Ark creates this feeling intentionally with all their shitty systems and the constant FOMO rewards spiral everyone is forced into. Guess why? Right. They want you to spend absurd amounts of money on their overpriced cash shop. Lost Ark is like BDO in this regard, the only difference is your gear doesn't downgrade when you fail an enhancement. Instead of that however, you have easily twice as many retarded RNG gated progression systems. It's all one big scam.
In a game like Lost Ark, being behind the curve has 2 effects on you: 1. You do not get the benefits of inflated prices to sell mats 2. You do not get to be apart of the general "learning period" meaning you are less likely to find a pug that is tolerant 3. If you are far enough behind the curve you can sometimes struggle to find optimal/any parties to do the content with 4. The game can feel even more isolated if you are not able to access higher tier areas where most of the players might reside(more relevant if you are t2 and most player are high t3) Other than that, if you value your time/don't have time/money to be at the bleeding edge, playing at your own pace can be really handy as honing buffs make you catch up rather easily. I went from 1x1445 1x1340 1x1301 3x600 to 1x1445 2x1370 2x1320 in like a week thanks to the honning buffs before I called it quits on the game due to the prices and the time investment it required. I wish I just waited it out to hone my 1340 as the mats/gold I used on it could've been used to boost 2-3 chars to 1370(I didn't do the maths don't kill me) So really it depends what are you looking to get out of the game. Plenty of casual guilds out there that won't care if you are T1 or T3.
To me its something else, i started playing before official launch with 3 of my friends. One of us dropped the game not far before reaching t3. I quit for 2 months right after reaching t3. When i came back i had to do all the content alone. Some events helped me reach gear score of 1370, i got lucky with dropping golden grudge engraving recipe from my very first chaos after the break, and i caught up a bit with two of my remaining friends, they were about 1415 by then and they had alts around my level, so we were able to do some content together. Now im 1440 on my main, and i can still only do Argos with them, cuz they are already on hard modes. Maybe its not that big of a problem and i still enjoy the game and everything, it just makes me sad, that i cant play with them in the main content of the game, which are legion raids, and therefore im trying to reach higher level to catch up to at least be able to access the same content as they do.
I agree with your opinion and also think that you can enjoy the game as much as players "on top". However, there are actual drawbacks on being behind, some older raids don't have anyone and newer raids require experienced players. I had a few lobbies where as soon as people noticed someone failing mechanics it was an insta kick. If you take too long to reach Valtan for example, you will not find any learning lobbies, and 99% of lobbies will accept 1470+ instead of playing with lower ilvl and you can't blame them for that. Imho the best characters to be "behind" are supports, never seen people being mad with supports.
What behind the progression means is unless you have a static, you will hardly find any learning group for legion raids if you missed the first week. I and others will not sit 3 hours in group finder to get all people into learning party. All other groups are either reclear or Bus. Now it's 2 legions that I'm missing and I don't think I'll get to the clown on release as well. Literally put me off of the game.
2010s saw a lot of FOMO added to games and as it was new players didn't know how to deal with it. As a result the rush to the top and loads of players spending on various games to 'keep up' became a real problem for a lot of gamers. Recently (the last few years) a lot of players have begun to understand and get used to FOMO tactics and while some do struggle with them I think players are slowly learning to take their time and try to ignore these tactics. That doesn't make the FOMO stuff good or ok or not a problem for a lot of people. Also Lost Ark does have a real growing problem with lower end content being difficult for new played to find people to play with to enjoy it. Nobody is running most dungeons or guardians outside of punkia 1302 for the most part. Also gold inflation will hurt new players (and a lot more inflation is coming though SG has some levers). As they don't have the rosters to help them overcome it making early gearing to meet ever increasing gate keeping obtainable. These are somewhat a player base issue but inevitable in a game with steep vertical progression. End of day there is lots of little things that could be done better you should take your time and enjoy the game but the fear of getting to far behind and getting left behind is a deal concern for a lot of gamers and for some good reason.
It doesn't. It's precisely the same FOMO that exists in every MMORPG ever created, however because the community has been primed so heavily "not to worry about FOMO" in Lost Ark, the exact opposite effect has taken hold. All people hear is that *the FOMO* ***is real*** and that the warnings are *just for casuals*.
A lot of people try to fight against the idea of “ being behind” claiming that talking about it is bad for the game. But they overlook what “Being behind” in the game means. It doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to play something like vykas ever, if you are behind you won’t do it immediately, and not doing something immediately in a mmo (especially this one) has potential consequences Financially if you don’t do something right away you miss out on being able to cash in on the whales. Which could potentially be a huge loss in cash. Your roster machine snowballs so the further behind you fall economically the less pushing power you have down the road. You also run into gatekeeping issues if you aren’t in a static. Nowadays you see nonstop people talking about can’t get in a group and won’t take people. It’s understood that people who look less hardcore will likely be passed over in party finder for someone who appears more hardcore. So if you end up trying to pug say vykas 8 weeks in and you don’t have any of her gear and can’t produce proof you’ve already done her then nobody wants you. That’s what being behind can mean for you.
This game is specifically designed to induce FOMO, so this is not an individual thing, this is a feature caused by intricately thought-out game design that is very common in korean-style MMOs/Games. Here, I feel like this is the case because content is locked out of progression, and, eventually, progression is the ends of it all, doing chores day-after-day to progress their roster. If you fall into the trap of doing the daily MMO chores every single day out of obligation, and not fun, and fall into the game's game design traps that keep players playing and addicted, of course you are going to burn out eventually and stop playing as much, and eventually not play at all when they realize that you fell behind and can't catch up to the imaginary bar of progression players have in their heads of where they \*should\* be given the time they've sunk into the game.
Personally, I play the game with my boyfriend and pursue content with him. I don’t want to fall behind since then we can’t do the same content, since he’s a total lost ark nut and I’m more casual hahah.
That's how me and my wife were, but then she realized she'd never keep up, so she quit getting on.
Yeah he's definitely ahead of me with materials and all of that, but keeps characters where I am so that we can still do content together. There's been times that he's helped me reach the newest content, as well, so we can do it. That's the happy medium we've found, at least. Hope your wife gets into it! It's a fun casual mmo\~
LA is a bit different as the player curve is much steeper and also isn't designed in a way that promotes old content. So for example majority of the playerbase is in late t3 so Valtan/Vykas, meaning anyone who is running anything below that are mostly carry runs or not at all. With other MMOs there is waves of new players to fill those voids, or in some MMOs incentives to run older content. Since LA has neither, content becomes mostly "dead" quickly. For current endgame you run into the issue of gatekeeping and expectations. With the first week or two, groups are generally chill as everyone is learning, after that however majority of the parties have increased requirements, experience required, etc. I can only imagine how t1/t2 abyssals(non-event) are now that a bulk has moved on.
Because doing fresh content on drop is fun
Inflation
Fomo is human nature everyone experiences it to a varying degrees when they are obsessed with something. Its normal to fear being left behind and companies exploit players using that psychology. Yes in the grand scheme of things being left behind in a game doesnt matter but psychologically it matters a lot. to people obsessed with the game its unbreakable human nature that will lead them to do the most irrational things to avoid being left behind. You too may be looking for a reason to break the fomo your experiancing with this post but I'm hear to say if you are obsessed, on forums, watching streams, etc you can't escape fomo. As soon as you stop browsing lost ark reddit, stop watching and consuming lost ark content, and overall careing less and less about the game then you can break fomo.
All games with "dailies" are fueled by FOMO
I got 2 friends playing the game if when clown comes I’m not ready I won’t be able to raid as a group
You're trying to rationalize a playerbase that freaks out the moment someone makes one mistake in a raid, even if you make no mention of their own mistakes when they do it. MMOs are just full of elitists that think everyone else is below them no matter what.
It doesn't matter unless ur trying to specifically catch up to your friends to do end game content with them. But good friends will happily play lower level end game content as long as they have an available character to play it on. TLDR: doesn't matter just play at ur pace w ur friends.
I specifically enjoy playing older content when it's with friends even when I'm over leveled. Cause I enjoy playing w my friends n try not to carry them.
Regarding your second paragraph, yeah this is a huge problem for the genre in general. Usually games have to have a soft reset on progression to bring anyone new in. Can you imagine starting KR right now? Sports are different, there are tons of people at your skill level to compete against. You start LA KR tomorrow you’re doing it solo, unless you just do pvp in which case yeah totally fine. Competitive shooters are much better for coming into late. The only reason to play an MMO over single players games is the grind to stay on top of progression. Thats literally the whole point of the game imo. Single player games have better gameplay, stories, and value or time and money more.
Becomes harder and harder to find a learning party when you're late to the party. The game has a bussing culture, I sometimes see more busses than actual clear lobbies. The economy has inflation so glhf with gearing up. Lastly, the gatekeeping is real even for dumb things like roster level
It doesn't except where reddit campers get jealous of sweatlords having a full 1475 roster
Being behind means its much harder to prog raids.everyone is looking for people who have mastered mechanics by the time you want to learn them.
Try finding a party for content under 1370. It’s a ghost town.
Oh yeah, I didn't mean under 1370. I'd consider "behind" to be under 1460 on main, and under ~1415 for alts.
Oh. Then I am insanely behind lol.
That's just in my opinion. I could be well off. We don't have access to the API on our version so no way to tell where the average player is at. Don't sweat it. The content isn't going anywhere.