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Lost Ark Will Reduce Repetitive Content, Help New Players, and Even Get Western-Exclusive Events | M
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Lost Ark Will Reduce Repetitive Content, Help New Players, and Even Get Western-Exclusive Events | MMORPG.com
In a lengthy letter to the Lost Ark community, Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG address falling short in several ways and promising better anti-bot measures, a reduction in repetitive content to reduce burnout, and more improvements to come.
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Even if those changes were enough to get me back, they have shown an unwillingness to really make it hard on botters to start over.
They can't beat the bots in a F2P game without isolating new accounts from the trusted ones for a period of time after the bans. It's either that or remove P2W aspects which is never happening in a Korean game.
Left in January, not planning to go back what ever they do since they took us for milking cows and liars. Waiting for Throne and liberty and Diablo IV, in the meantime, I get bored since I finally have time to by not playing alts
You can mention bots and it's true, but it is only a small part of the problem - that Amazon has chosen as the hill to die on. Bots have always been simply a symptom of a successful online game launch - like any other - but AGS have chosen it as their sole target, while ignoring the flaws of the game design of LA. Now bots have decreased drastically and you will almost never run into one, but is it because of Amazon's actions or because the game fell by 90% within a year? My money is on the latter. The bots are no longer interested.
Amazon and Smilegate keep ignoring the obvious: the game is bleeding players every month and they pretend to a) listen to the players (traditional PR narrative); and b) keep the game clean of those pesky bots that surely keep plaguing it (to show 'they are working on it').
But the reality is actually very simple: for the first time ever you can sell raid gear (Argos) on the auction house, meaning all the players previously stuck forever at illvl 1370 can now grind their way up to 1415, 1445 and beyond. While at the same time Amazon is contemplating easing the honing requirements. This clearly targets players who do not raid and attempts to bring them back to the honing hamster wheel. Presumably with easy and convenient cash shop ways to shorten the grind. It truly is unheard of in the (short) history of this game - all as a way to bring in untapped $$$ of all the non-raiders.
Clearly, there are two thing happening here:
- Amazon is happy with its LA whales, their income in stabilised and thus AGS need to focus on new monetisation gains, a.k.a 1370 ilvl and below players i.e. "big whales will keep whaling, let's catch more fish at the other side of the pond"
- With the drop from 1m to 50-80k, Amazon relent on their traditional stance of ignoring the single player at least in some aspects, as a possible revenue stream to complement all the raiding whales who spend thousands of dollars to hone their raid gear.
In relation to 2) AGS are clearly aware of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of players who have quit the game without any raiding done and with basic tier 3 gear equipped, and are now ramping up to target THEM. After all, the 50 - 80k hardcores remaining in LA are mostly raiders, so not much new gains there, and their behaviour is already conditioned to keep spending to advance. The next untapped market that Amazon is targeting with this (and future) update are the non-raiding players who could potentially bring in new revenue thanks to AGS unlocking new gear levels to them.TL;DR: this is not about reducing grind - this is about enticing the solo players to return and spend money in addition to the existing whales, because absolute numbers have fallen like a 16-ton weight, so now Amazon need to raise the $$$ per player.
Disclaimer: spelling errors (and shit) may have occurred as a result of the author being merrily inebriated. Do not hold it against him. Rather, join in the merriment.
Then I made it to a point where you only logged in to do 3 solo "dungeons" and then you had to LFG to do some "raids" that basically where a boring walk to a boss that had you struggle for a long time and gamble it to not having someone (or you) mess some cheesy mechanic or just lose all the time spent.
If you were lucky to make all attempts at first try in 1-2 hours you where out of content for the rest of the week (after using all you gained in 1-2 attempts to enhance your gear to get nothing but maybe a better chance to do the raid at 1st try thus making your gaming window shorter)... unless you repeated the whole process with another character.
I really liked the action and combat of the game but this engame I cant get my head around it.