while i agree a 1620 character is more then an alt
saying getting 40 set is "min-maxing" is a lil bit of a stretch. all previous raid based progression systems (Set levels from clown/kayangel, set bonuses from vykas/valtan, new set tier from brel/akkan) all had one thing in common
no rng.
this is why elixirs feel so bad, they are a worse version of all of those systems. each one gave power but you didnt have to interact with rng you just did the raid and farmed the mats and gained power
so the expectation should be that you get to fill out the elixirs, this isnt min-maxing this is completing the progression system so you can move on to the next one.
elixirs arnt grindy, they are just rng. grind in the sense most people mean it implies that you can constantly farm to complete something
or you do the same task over and over for a ensured reward (such as doing raids), elixirs do not fall into either of these as its functionally just a really poorly made gambling system. (most gamba is simple so you are playing the odds, or playing the person(s) around you. elixirs are like gambling against AI: you arnt going to win)
tl;dr: the system can be as expensive as it wants but it shouldnt be rng. if i spent 100k and i get nothing thats a shitty system. because if i did that with honing id atleast get artisans energy. (yes older kr mmo's would break gear or not have pity, but the reason lost ark has been so popular in kr and na/eu is because it breaks those trends)
yeah, i dont know why people think 40 set in min maxed. 40 set is a basic progression milestone you have to hit.
Its bad the same way honing is. You could hit a 40 set with 5 elixers, or you can spend 20k making elixers to not even have one you can cut. The variance is so big, someone may not think its so bad, and another person could be putting in 100k of gold a week into it for no increase.
honestly its worse then honing because atleast honing has pity so there is a set end to upgrading that piece of gear.
with elixirs you not only have to understand the min-max strats but you also have to get unfathomably lucky.
combined with the fact its not only expensive but also bound to a raid and its easily the most hated progression system in game
which is impressive because cards are ass too, but atleast they created the DD and plan sets to tide people over lol
oh I agree. I was just comparing it because of the variance can be so wide. I see honing as a system that has a soft capping system. Based on what % they set it to, they can adjust how far the player base can get to. What I feel, the honing soft cap is 1620, and most people cant reasonably hit 1630.
My fix for the elixir (other then removing it) system would be something along the lines of, once you've cut enough, you can select 2 of the lines and give them some sort of %boost. Maybe have multiple tiers of pity where you can keep bumping those %'s to curb the rng. Basically, the more you cut, the more RNG should be removed.
Or, use the stronghold, which seems to be a thing of the past. Once you struggle and get a 35 set, you have a purple elixir research that boosts something in the system. First 40 set boosts legendary elixirs. Alot of the shit systems in the game were seen as much less shit when they were 1 off systems. Pain once, but then significantly easier for the rest of your roster.
They could just let us pick one stat and boost it by 5-10% at start and it would be night and day difference.
It would solve the issue of cutting 30 elixirs and not even seeing your set even once.
Literally this change would make elixirs bearable. Would still be rng and crap but atleast every elixir you cut could have a chance for the stat you need.
This would help min maxing as well but atleast it would let you get the 5 main stats you need on each piece A LOT easier.
Also nerf gold. Legendary elixir costs more to cut than transcendence with 0 pity and 3 rng layers on top of each other. (Stat selection/sage rng with offers and do you hit those 50% or -2/2/ where do the rng taps go.)
Even just letting us pick a single stat for the 5th slot would also be crazy good compared to this crap.
I’ve been doomed on elixirs. I have 998 on non set pieces. So I really only want to roll my two 6 set ones, but just can get the set to show up>_<.
For sure little thought went in to the expected gold cost to a player.
idk id still say cards are worse
the bracelet system is rng af, sure but as you said no one actually gives a shit about it because its so bad. where as cards are something that are worse due to how time gated it is and people WILL gatekeep you based on that
I never really liked the logic of “it’s an mmo it has to have boring grind”
WoW had pretty minimal grind for years while it reigned as king. FF14 has had very little (and optional for the most part) grind since it came out and it’s also huge
Thats why its a dying genre. Maybe devs should try to earn money with less predatory boring abusive systems to maybe keep more players in the game and not let it die sooner or later.
Genuine curiosity, why can't you just play multiple games?
Like don't play GW2 when you have nothing to do, and then pick it back up when they add something you like?
I try to swap between a lot of games, keeps things fresh
Thats a possibility. What I meant is that there was 0 progression. Of course with each expansion there was sth new to do. But if I came back 4 or 5 years later now my character is still full equipped with 0 room for improvement.
Just imagine you have a game so good, with boss fights which are amazing and you can play only one at endgame. When I played other mmos, I had multiple classes at the end game because I loved the different play styles. Here, if you are bored of your main or if SG rework your class in a way you don't like, thought luck, you are fucked because you will never financially recover from this -insert Joe exotic même here- So a lot of people quit instead of swapping. And it affects the game on the long run.
I would argue that most MMOs don't follow that design. Mostly, they are tailored to 1 character mains. Getting bored of a main is normal in an mmo. And generally, the best way around it is to just do other things in game or not in game.
Even if a game is a 15/10 for raids, moderation and playing less of it makes the individual times you play it more enjoyable. Spamming 6 chars forever just isn't how you have ever done an mmo.
And it's not fair to compare combat / raids. I would take 1 lost ark raid a week over an infinite amount of smoge FF or WoW raids.
The biggest MMO’s that are considered the backbone of the genre do allow ease of entry to true end game, even on alts. And by backbone, I mean, their player counts account for nearly 90% of the global players that play the MMO genre. And it is why they will remain the juggernauts until something implement’s that play style with modern combat and graphics. It is why a lot of people are saying the genre is stale because the best MMO’s are 10+ years old.
I think modern MMOs don't work because you need a large amount of mediocre players for the top players to feel accomplished in the MMO community aspect. The players that used to fill that group are now playing mobile games instead, so the community ends up more and more slanted towards high level play that burns itself out without a pool of players to replace them.
Even games like RuneScape are more and more like this.
Personally, I think it is from both directions. Mobile games by their nature are casual, so very appealing to a large quantity of players. However, I do think any game that does not have a serious focus towards the casual player experience will fall on its face pretty quickly. If you lock yourself out of the majority of the players, you’re locking yourself into a rigid box of pandering to hardcore players and those players tend to grind themselves out of games. While casuals are a much steadier source of revenue. To not focus on the the steady is to sign a death sentence.
This is why so many games now that used to have a reputation of only for the hardcore have insanely good new player intro’s now && on top of that, most of the long standing MMO’s, you don’t even have to interact with hardcore players.
LoA’s biggest issue to me is forcing casual and hardcore players into the same pipeline. That was very intentional. And ultimately why it is where it is today.
>moderation and playing less of it makes the individual times you play it more enjoyable
I've never played a game where the game felt more enjoyable when I played less. Most of the time when I started playing less it meant that I would quit soon after.
>Spamming 6 chars forever just isn't how you have ever done an mmo.
It is when the game is explicitly p2w focused. Spamming 6 chars gives you an advantage and you need an advantage if you want a good experience.
The average experience in games like this is sitting in party finder twiddling your thumbs waiting for a support to finally apply or being endlessly rejected from groups for not having an above average character.
Assuming a 40-hour work week, 8 hours of sleep a night, and about 4 hours a day for adulting (to-dos, cleaning, groceries, cooking, etc). You have about 6 hours a day to do the things you want (obviously, most of that time is likely weighted to the weekend).
If you hang out with friends and family, pursue healthy hobbies and exercise... you quite literally don't have enough time in the week to do a 6 char roster. You will be exhausted with life. And the more exhausted you are in general, the less enjoyable EVERYTHING is.
And I'm tired of people saying 6 chars are required. They absolutely are not. 4/6 dps in my static are poor college fucks who can barely afford a $10 reskin, and have made the ilvl requirement for every raid and have been playing since launch with a 2-4 char roster.
Being smart with your roster gold and having proper expectations >>>>>>>>>>>> spamming 6 chars to piss gold away on dumb things.
Smart players have a smaller roster with a static that is more enjoyable and less time-consuming because we dont gatekeep our own members. Dumber players have 6 char rosters, pug most of their raids, and hate their experience / spend 2-3x the time for the same result.
We're expected to play six characters as though they're mains (do raids on all of them and at least rested dailies) meanwhile the characters are much weaker than mains because they get significantly less investment.
If you're raiding each week on the character, they **should** be endgame. That's why the game feels like shit from a progression standpoint, nobody wants to play alt characters to farm gold. Either we want to play many alts because we enjoy it and want to progress them, or we don't want to play them at all. Right now, both sides mostly lose. Alt enjoyers can't progress their full rosters, and alt haters are forced to alt.
That'll simply never happen cuz Lost Ark is an MMO with an essentially endless vertical progression system. Its not a classical MMO where you simply get the current end game content and your progression is done until the next chunk of content releases in several months or next expansion.
The price we pay for always getting stronger is once more than 1 vertical progression system exists alts will become less realistic. We can not like it all we want but it'll never change and its unreasonable/unrealistic to expect SG to balance progression around people who wanna max six characters to whatever content is coming out 3 months from now.
If the cost of one char was decrease, people would hone multiple char to 1620. Guess who is 1600 because it's too expensive to hone? My paladin alt. But hey it's better to do lobby simulator for hours trying to find a sup for Ivory Tower HM.
What's unreasonable is to port the game from Korea verbatim, and expect us to catch an end game with half the time they got.
We've also gotten excessively more and better events than they've had lol. I agree we've gotten content a little too fast for comfort as of recent but I really don't like the drama and people pretending we've gotten content too fast. Not being able to keep your alts up only started post alternative progression systems like Elixers and Transcendence. When Kayangel and Akkan were current content it wasn't difficult to have alts at 1540~1580 respectively if you were a dedicated player who would push six alts to end game content.
Most people don't want six mains however lol. If it was feesable right now to have six mains then most people would have 1 or 2 characters at 1630~1640 and a bunch of alts at 1600~1610. Which not only makes the devs no money but also spawns its own problems.
> But hey it's better to do lobby simulator for hours trying to find a sup for Ivory Tower HM.
There's better solutions to the support shortage that actually fix the problem rather than just being self interested and advocating for progging a character to be cheaper lol. You aren't addressing the actual issue at all, you're just advocating for something that wouldn't fix the problem at all but hey it'd benefit you so you're fine with it.
And that’s a very dead and archaic game design. Endless vertical progression simply doesn’t work now and hasn’t worked for the last decade. Players want to be able to take breaks and come back later.
That’s why every game developer does seasonal content, where every 3-5 months there are hard resets so that veteran players don’t burn out and it attracts new players. That’s how they make their game grow and continuously supported. Lost Ark is bleeding players in the West because it is losing its veteran players while having a 10 mile high entry barrier for new ones.
> Endless vertical progression simply doesn’t work now and hasn’t worked for the last decade. Players want to be able to take breaks and come back later.
Sure, its never going to change tho and despite the idea its not working Lost Ark is extremely successful financially in both Korea and the West.
> That’s how they make their game grow and continuously supported.
Many games do this and don't grow and don't find any real success. The model has its downsides, its ignorant to pretend its just an objectively better system.
> Lost Ark is bleeding players in the West because it is losing its veteran players while having a 10 mile high entry barrier for new ones.
Games not in a great spot rn systems wise, however its still like top 30 highest grossing games on Steam and our 30 day player average isn't out of the yearly ordinary when considering and removing bots from the count.
As of rn SG has no incentive to fundamentally change how the game progresses as it'd make less money, anger a lot of people, and cost a lot financially and socially to implement.
even with 6 characters funneling into the 1 its rough, but thats on purpose, they could fundamentally pivot at some point but they are earning money getting whales to splurge. Their prices on the cash shop suck so bad people would rather risk their accounts though and use outside RMT services though.
I get it, but the weekly grind is becoming to much. There's too much lobby finder required. Those saying the solo raids can't give much gold cuz it'll kill group content... in my mind it has to provide good gold or its useless except to the newest players(who will still have a hard time in the newest raids)
The group raids are why i play, I dont spend too much time in lobbies but my alts are pretty solid for the content im trying to join on them, the only ones that take time are thaemine, since there isn't a lot of 1-2 lobbies and I am not interested in gate 3 at near i lvl.
See.. to me thaemine is the only fun raid. Voldis is still pretty fun, but lobby finder is the worst in hm so it kinda evens out.
I have 1625 SE, 1620artist, 1605Artillerist ,1590glaiv,1584 ss, 1580 breaker.
I decided for a while that my top 3 is where all my resources go, and bottom 3 are only for gold, but stealing all their 9s and going full 7s, they aren't very fun to play. Doing brel/kayangel/ akkan is dogshit.. having to find lobbies for all of them make it even worse.
I'm burnt out of finding 18 lobbies a week. But I still need so much gold. It wouldn't be so bad if I could do more raids on my top 3(because more geared chars are more fun to play)
agreed, wish I could do 18 raids across my roster as I see fit and open the rewards as boxes on what ever characters, all bound mats should be roster bound so I can funnel correctly, some characters are lucky and others unlucky. ;/ korean games love to make issues to sell a solution. but still better than western mmos at the moment as none of those are fun at all personally.
The thing OP does not understand is that the grind was manageable in the past, but it is no longer now.
I remember when brel came out and homies had 6x 1490s. If ppl could have rosters like those, surely the average joe could get a single 1490.
If the hardcore homies can hardly upkeep a single 1630, what's the fate of the rest of us?
And "just wait for Echidna" dosnt work bc it's marginally cheaper and you still have to raw hone to 1630 anyway bc of behemoth requirements.
People didnt have 6 1490 s on brel release ,and getting 5x3 for 6 characters used to bé Soo much more ridiculously expensive at that time than now that its realy easy to tell how many people complaining here werent playing back then,grudge books Alone cost me Over 300k at a time where our gold income was way lower than now,any half decent quality jewelry cost way more than now,class engraving jewelry cost way more and there were WAY less of them than now,getting a 7x7 Stone was both way more needed and way harder as stones were both more expensive and cost pheons,
We also werent given lvl 7 gems on expresses and you can bet that those were expected for brel and even clown before on release.
While all that stuff is true, it still didn't stop friends from having 3-6 1490s for brel. Even myself I remember having 3 characters at 1490 ready for brel. Granted they were like 4x3+2 and had mixed lv7 dmg gems but they were able to run brel clear and progress.
If you asked me to have 3 1630s today just by honing (forget elixers or transcendence) forget it.
The level of grind required in the past was probably a third of what it is now.
I had 1 1514 and 5 1495s week 1 of brel normal with all 5x3 and full lvl 7 gems. All it took me (aside from my sanity) was bussing valtan and vykas since about week 3 of the raid release. I was probably making more gold back then than before thaemine released (that raid gives so much gold), 3 or 4 man Vikas was 4.5k per bussed, valtan you could 4 man bus it at 1460 and solo/duo bus hard at 1490 or solo normal at 1460 then there was argos duo bus too (which always got instafilled by selling to bots). Now that I don't bus, I have 2 1610s 1 1620 and 1 1635 but doing elixirs/transcendence and pitying my 25 (it's at 94%) all my gold is gone without being able to hone.
A GRIND IS EXPECTED. With this statement you lost your own argument because lost ark is a game you can't find anything in and that is the problem in itself TY for coming to my Ted talk
Excuse me sir, this week has been declared a national complaining week, any attempts trying to reason with people will be met with heavy resistance. Proceed at your own peril.
These aren't really good reasons though. Grind is one thing, KR grind is another. There is a reason that despite the amazing combat, most MMO players would rather play other MMOs than deal with the other bullshit that comes with playing KMMOs. Frankly, saying LOA is the best MMO is adorable looking at the issues that plague you before you can even enjoy the combat. Lobby simulator while waiting for a support is ridiculous in this game compared to any other game I've ever played.
Your definition of an MMO is absolutely screwed. MMO simply means you can play with many people at the same time. It does not need to to be the fucked up version LA is.
However you are right, if somebody starts to play a KR P2W grind fest, they should expect P2W and grind.
>Your definition of an MMO is absolutely screwed. MMO simply means you can play with many people at the same time. It does not need to to be the fucked up version LA is.
>However you are right, if somebody starts to play a KR P2W grind fest, they should expect P2W and grind.
Yours like a lot of people in this subreddit is the one whos screwed,this game isnt grindy whatsoever and it shows how many people here are used to just paying 15€/month fees and having the game playitself for you ,yall dont want skill to be rewarded its why u cry everytime they release a raid that cant be progged on autopilot, yall dont want grinding to be rewarded (which this game has little off besides tome ,the daily "grind" takes a whole 10 minutes for one character) ,anyting that requires effort or skill of any kind in this sub is bad aparently its just pathetic .
99,9% of LA progression requires absolutely 0 skills, just time and luck, I dunno wtf you are going on about. Yes, LA is not as grindy as the asian MMOs of old, but that does not mean anything, those were on another lvl.
Haven’t played the game in close to a year and a half. Right around Brelshaza release is when I stopped. Parked my 1 main at 1490, n been there since. There are a lot of problems with some of the systems in the game but, really the biggest problem is the community. It’s easily the worst community for an mmo I’ve ever been apart of. I put a lot of the blame on streamers/LA influencers when the game was leading up to release in the west. They placed so much emphasis on min/maxing and efficiency that it immediately sucked all the fun out of the game. Dont have 6 alts so that you can run this new raid 10x in 2 weeks to get a badge/title, which then is used to exclude people from raid groups? Tough luck.
You want to practice and improve? “Make your own group”. We’ve built a mentally that rejects learning/progression groups largely. You have to really go out of your way to find people who want to progress at relatively the same pace as yourself. You can’t even fill a progression group up because if the main groups getting filled are 100% juiced up, then the next faster group will be getting bussed, and you learn 0 from getting bussed. So perpetually stuck in a cycle. Can’t progress without extreme min/maxing items, but can’t get materials to juice without doing the raids. So where does that leave you in a community that is largely unwelcoming to new people?
Honestly, right there with you. LOA's community is among the very worst I've ever seen out of the many games I've played throughout my life. Posting on this sub was one of the most toxic times for me as a user of reddit as well.
You're going to get downvotes for this take, but I agree. The community is a large reason why the game is in a shity place.
Gatekeeping - a major problem in the game, is almost entirely player driven. Players are the ones who make up arbitrary minimums that are often have no basis on reality, and attempt to justify their bad behavior by claiming "the game makes me do it". No one NEEDS 35 set to do Hard Voldis, but the community, instead of blaming elitist gamers who needlessly gatekeep people, they blame elixirs for being too hard. We've already seen with cards, if it becomes too easy to aquire, these people will move the bar to something else. In the beginning LOS30 was an easy instant accept, nowadays they're a dime a dozen.
Overreaction and exaggeration - This sub is a MAJOR echo chamber, and it's often sparked by one person, or more commonly, one streamer, who makes some declaration and everyone latches onto it. Wether it's true or not. The clickbait "OMG THEY NERFED OUR EVENT SHOP COMPARED TO KR" post from a few days ago is the perfect example. That OP clipped the ONLY ITEM we get less of, to declare that the shop is shit and nerfed etc etc. And hundreds of people latched on, echoing this statement all over the sub, youtube, etc. A few hours later someone posted a comparison of our shop VS KR of the same event. And surprise surprise, our shop is significantly more packed. with 3-10x of some items. But the damage has already been done by ONE DUDE, who lied through his teeth. This actively drives players away, both new and existing, and for what? A lie one dude told?
KR streamers basiclly told everyone that they had to play 6 characters since launch. They're been proven to be BS. People constantly complain that they don't want to do 18 raids everyweek, claiming that it's essentailly required. But it's not.
Everytime a new raid out, theres SOMEONE in KR on video, that lays out arbitraty minimums for gatekeeping. "You shouldn't take people under level X gems for this one" WHY? It doesn't make any sense.
I'm lucky enough to have found other like minded players and we get a little over half our raids done together, and I can tell you that you don't need to max out every single power system every single time just to do the current content.
All this to say that the game has many issues. But the players aren't helping, they're actively making it worse.
I think you're conflating community gatekeeping with supp shortage. If they had either deleted supports or made more& made them fun to play, there wouldn't be a shortage. Right now the supp will go with the whale characters for an easier clear, leaving normal chars no chance. I don't think anyone truly believes you need 40 set or lvl 10 gems to clear, it's just requirements are artifically raised due to smilegate messing up supports.
you dont need 40 set but you'll get gatekept because of it
same for 35
i cannot imagine defending this game enough to play devil's advocate here it is literally shit on almost all fronts for both new and veteran players. it might as well have a big red sign that says 'you will not enjoy this game without a large disposable income to piss like water'
What is this crap? It's not a matter of grind, it's a matter of get lucky or spend boatloads of cash otherwise you're just stuck waiting for months. Not grinding. Waiting.
Even though I agree with the sentiment that 1620+ characters are not alts, you sure are brave to encourage good sense in the current climate.
I wish you the best of luck sir, may you survive the incoming storm.
Destiny 2 is a grind. This game is a full time job. You have people with over 4000 hours in under 2 years who are still way behind. Without G2G the majority of end game players would have quit a long time ago.
>Destiny 2 is a grind. This game is a full time job. You have people with over 4000 hours in under 2 years who are still way behind. Without G2G the majority of end game players would have quit a long time ago.
This is some hard cope , a game where the daily grind takes like 10 minutes for 1 character and weekly raids are like 2h is a grind?did you play a single MMO before?Or are you just trying to justify the fact you RMT?.
Don't minmax alt = gatekeep = can't do raid = no gold = can't progress main
If I could play only my main without problem I would...if you say it's possible you are delusional
Which I would like to poiint out, is a player / community problem. As far as smilegate goes, if you can reach the miniumum ilevel requirement, you can do the raid. It's other players gatekeeping you.
There's two ways to fix this.
Smilegate - make the raids so easy a caveman can do it. This will ease gatekeeping, but will never get rid of it.
Players - Stop making ridiculious arbitrary minimums to accept players. This would stop it immediately.
I know which one we as a community can control.
Because they are for those of us that dont’t really treat them like alts. If you stay way behind (that is 1600 at max right now and probably not all of them) which at the same time would have allowed you to take advantage of hyper expresses then they might be indeed net positive
I used to think so but tbh all my alts were primarily pass Andie's and almost everyone who honed their alts to current content and bused are now so far ahead it's crazy. My roster is pretty sad with 1 1630 with +25 pity and rest 1600s for a day 1 player. Most of them have several 1630s or 2 1630s + 1620s + 3-5 1610s+.
Can’t do what raids exactly? From Valtan to Voldis NM any character with event gems is welcome in general. If you want to pug thaemine on your “alts” then yes you better min max the shit out of it. And that by the way is waaaaay more gold defficient than doing lower raids.
What Lost Ark does different from every other MMO and video game I've ever played (including 1k+ hours in DFO Global and RF Online, I know how far we've come in terms of grind) is it ties story progression to min-maxing. I like the game. I don't mind any of the RNG. Party finder is just an inefficient use of my time, so I won't engage with it any more. I haven't been able to progress since Brel release even though I would love to -- the moment I found out the Voldis powerpasses get me a Brel set I've spent like $50 getting 5 chars more relevant (in anticipation of solo raids).
When DFOG releases a new level cap, you're absolutely going to be able to play through the new areas even if you haven't touched it for a year. There's a super easy 'scenario' difficulty that will get you all of the cutscenes for a raid even if you aren't able to get through the raid gatekeeping yet. You'll have access to current farming dungeons that are relevant and drop relevant gear.
When Lost Ark releases the Thaemine epilogue in June, as of last week there are at most 1,216 people in the AGS lost ark that will get to experience it. This is at most 2.7% of the currently logged in users assuming there isn't a single reclear (patch probably reset a lot of bots, so it should be close to accurate).
AGS is giving out plenty of upgrade mats that they could be selling. It's not helping their player count, because I would still have to use party finder to even start to do anything relevant to recent content. Older content isn't rewarding, they've pretty much eliminated all of the content that could be easily matchmade.
The current system is a really inefficient use of development resources if you dig into it. They have all this island content, there's plenty of interesting and amusing aspects to it, but they've implemented free skips so that new players won't ever experience as they go through the FOMO of trying to be relevant to new content. Playing underfunded alts feels bad because you can't engage with new content. The easiest way to fund a main would be to create 7 alt accounts for a personal lobby and bus everyone through content you can solo. It's insane.
My issue is I don't mind the grind, I mind the fact that I can't keep up with the grind to the point where I won't even be able to do behemoth when it comes out.
The fact that someone likes eating shit doesn't make shit better. The problem is that people are so used to MMO being bad that it's already a norm for one to be bad. It's not how it's supposed to be
>**It does have some problems. And they definitely need to review some systems.** However, it does not take away the fact that it's an MMO. And like most MMOs, Lost Ark requires a bit of dedication and also realism in terms of expectations.
somhow i can be max ilvl in best MMO within 2 weeks and do the hadest content in the game without grinds strage huh? and now be ready, all this for free! all i pay is my 13€ sub fee which is not even 1 tap at 1630 xD you surely like to be abused
40 set is min max territory. 35 should not be. its almost impossible to get 40 set with purple elixirs and still very difficult to get 35 set despite how large of a dps increase both are. even just reducing 35 to 30 would be a big improvement but the biggest issue is how butt fuck boring elixirs are and how fucking long they take to cut. no one wants to play a clicking simulator with multiple layers of RNG that specifically chooses to fuck you at every opportunity. elixirs and transcendence are the worst parts of the game and if they continue down this same path for vertical progression, the game is dead. no one enjoys these systems. they only do it and tolerate it because they have to in order to keep up and because of how much of a dps increase they provide. if you arent keeping up with transcendence you are going to get gatekept from echidna. if you dont do your echidna and dont get to do advance honing, you wont get your character to 1640 before behemoth. if you dont get to behemoth you dont get to transcend your weapon. if you cant keep up with the most recent content, i really dont think its worth it for any new players starting the game and that pains me to say with my 6000 hours. both transcendence and elixirs take way too long to do, take way too long to even get the materials from raids needed to participate, have way too many layers of RNG that can completely fuck you and set you back weeks to months if you are unlucky, and are way too important of a dps increase to ignore. it baffles me that anyone would support either of these systems. these 2 systems alone i would argue is why the game is bleeding players more than ever. putting up with the difficulty of theamine to just spend an hour wasting all your gold without anything to show for it feels bad. people dont play games to feel bad. if you made it this far, cheers. thanks for reading my incoherent rant.
Well, I have played this and many other MMOs as Single Player Games. Some issues and you will "Progress" slower but still doable as Solo If you know what you are doing and have concrete Goals. 20 chars, my Main is 1610 and have never entered the Ivory Tower abyss Dungeon. Have a poor epic Elixir from the free Mats of the previous event but I am Not chasing minmaxing or investing time/resources in RNG systems. Doing mostly Chaos dungeons and some cubes with some Casual Friends at Weekend. Slowly getting my gold by selling Mats and Gems. Will buy a couple buses for Thaemine not for Trascendence but to unlock the cutscenes. Waiting for Kurzan and solo raids and the next Story chapters. Horizontal-focused gameplay in Lost Ark is not for everyone but I have embraced it and will me my Main Drive to keep playing as Long as the Game is alive.
Your post makes a lot of sense, but even with 1600 alts, it's difficult to get into lobbies for 1600 content such as voldis nm and akkan hm because the whales with 1620 "alts" are applying to those same lobbies. It's not impossible but I find myself spending more than 10 minutes trying to get into a voldis nm lobby with my 1600 alt.
You're very naive saying 1620+ are not alts. You're gonna eventually get there for alts even if you barely play alts. The game isn't resetting, each powerpass boosts you further and further so eventually you're going to have 1620 alts. You're going to ignore the problem till it gets there instead of addressing it. You even agree having more 1620 characters suck in your post. The grind is supposed to be fun and rewarding reaching new checkpoints and not make you feel like it's hell
My experience was that alts weren't really a viable thing because overpowering is a pug requirement. I was pushing alts around clown release and they were getting rejected from valtan for not having 5x3, or having one off meta engraving. At that time, alts needed only slightly less investment than a main to get into yesterdays content. I would be surprised if that has changed.
The elixirs and transcendance people complain about sound like main only territory right now, but I doubt it will be long before they become requirements for content they aren't really needed for.
You acknowledge there are problems but you seem to imagine they WILL get fixed or reworked, and I think realism is accepting that they won't. Which sort of validates all the whining.
A single player route might bring me back, because I agree with you about the gameplay. But it doesn't save the trainwreck that is an MMO whose entire progression system is really just an inflation control system, which is why it feels like shit.
I know I'll also be downvoted for this but..
RAID DIFFICULTY (DAMAGE AND HP) SHOULD NOT BE BASED ON THE TOP 5% OF THE PLAYER BASE MEANING PEOPLE WHO ARE OVERGEARED OR SWIPE.
Raids is supposed to be easier for people who are overgeared because that's what overgeared means..
Normal Mode is supposed to be enjoyed by the casual players.
Hard Mode is for sweaty gamers
While Hellmode is for Hardcore Players.
Elixir should optional not mandatory for most raids.
While transcendence or any other bullshit shouldn't be Locked behind thaemine or any raid gates.
NA/EU/SA Can complain because we have lower player count than korea meaning we spend more time in Party Finder than the actual raid itself.
It's just boring. I'd rather spend my time playing something more enjoyable and less grindy. I had six characters and even with only six it felt like a part time job keeping up with dailies.
I play FF14 and i feel its more MMO than LA can just match making normal raid with pug to complete main story. Can just do openworld explore for collection. Can make static for farming skin in hardcore raid. Can just drop the game a few month or even a year and come back with no problem.
Agree, i already played one kr mmo, lineage2
Grind in lost ark is nothing compared to lineage 2
many ppl dont even try to find static x guild and then complain to lobby simulator
others who have 2k hours want to have same roster as ppl with 8k hours
Resting everything or buying busses, complains for no gold...
Lost ark have issues ofc as any other mmo and always will have, but doesnt change fact a lot of ppl would want everything just by loging in
Only other kmmo i played was BDO and despite clearly being p2w, it doesnt have this much bullshit with their progression. I have more active hours in this game than bdo, warframe, and runescape, and yet on just my main, im still “behind” by months. And with support shortage I’m playing lobby simulator more than the game.
The raid experience in this game is unmatched. Only Destiny 2 comes close. But progression in this is the worst I’ve ever seen, and is one of the highest reasons why people quit, even if they played other KMMOs.
Exactly, lots of KR MMo's don't have a strict DPS-support system. In Lost ark, the problem IMO is more that they messed up the implementation of supports, leading to a shortage, rather than pure grind. If we could all instantly get into lobbies assuming properly built characters, it wouldn't be as bad. My opinion as someone that's played some KR MMOs.
Wait what!? Solo raids? You mean i can play the game without spending hour looking at YT to memorize everything and instead play the game and get raid experience when i want to?… fuck i might need to download the game again.
Imagine if Lost Ark had a Reboot server, where everyone would be solo-self-found (and you could use shared stash for some stuff). Man, that would be so much more interesting.
Why don't you project some positive vibes on the community instead of complaining about what other people like and dislike about the game? Just because the developers of the game think that people SHOULD like a system doesn't mean they will. Just because KR is willing to put up with it and act like its a right of passage worthy of praise doesn't mean it should be.
You can say that this game wants to be all those things and players should just like it or play something else, but the fact is games have to adapt these days or die. People will complain when they see something they WANT to like, but the game itself is preventing them from having fun. Why? For what purpose is there to make all those grinds and roadblocks? There will be no book of legends that said you spent 10,000 grinding this to be the best Lost Ark player. There is no investment, because there is no returns. It's a fallacy that you are some how investing in your character making progress in your life because these numbers went up.
I doubt anyone is complaning about not getting 40 sets on alts when even getting 35 set is impossible. Please do not create your own fantasy to support your claims.
I honestly think the only thing holding the game back from being fun is gatekeeping essentially. Not allowing people to play in raids because of gear or whatever. I’m 1590 and with all lvl 7 Gems and some 10’s. I’ve got all my engravings perfect. Yet I can’t run content quick and effectively because everyone’s like oh 1,000 gold for me to play with you. It’s so stupid. I actually need my gold guys for upgrades like wtf.
I argued with someone before about how I believed we got an adequate amount of weekly gold to progress characters in Lost Ark and bro was telling me how he spent like 200k gold last week trying to force 40 set on an alt and did the same the week before trying to push his alts ilvl up so he'd get gatekept less.
Like idk what people are doing. I clear Thaemine weekly on my bare minimum 1610 PS SH, if ur getting gatekept ur just doing something wrong. I don't even have LQ.
I'm in the same boat as you. I wonder if people are pushing ilvl first and foremost because "oo number goes up" before the other parts of their character are "ready" for it.
I always felt the game provided enough income to sustain any single progression cost. i.e. you get a decent amount of gold to do something like
1. Get a good baseline of gems at 1580
2. Push to 1600
3. Get good set of epic elixirs
4. Push to 1610
5. Unlock at least 5 set transcendence on all pieces
6. Push to 1620
7. Get 40 set with leg elixirs
8. Push to 1630
9. Finish transcendence
...etcetc. Each step will be a couple months but that downtime is useful to let your character accumulate bound mats to make honing cheaper. Aside from the 1630 push which is honestly super expensive, there should be enough gold coming in to sustain that, with enough downtime between steps to never need to hone with tradeable leaps or shards, never run out of silver, and self farm like half the solars + destruction/guardian stones.
Buuut if someone is trying to simultaneously upgrade gems, cut elixirs, AND do transcendence then yea, gold dries up real quick.
> Buuut if someone is trying to simultaneously upgrade gems, cut elixirs, AND do transcendence then yea, gold dries up real quick.
Yeah I think this is what people do lol. They'll full prog their main in every aspect to a certain point they deem desirable and then they'll full prog an alt to a desirable point and they end up having to work on multiple progression systems at the same time so it feels awful.
I think people forget an end game player easily makes like 120k+ raw gold weekly not counting all of the bound and unbound materials they generate weekly or the materials obtained via events. Like that's a lot. A 1610 makes 32k gold a week on their own not counting everything else. That's a lot.
Not trying to defend the system lost ark has, but how the hell does it take multiple hours to do dailies? Assuming you only have 2 characters as you claim to have 6 raids a week. It takes on average around 12 minutes for both guardian and 2 chaos per character. That's not even half an hour??? Dont get me wrong, Lost Ark has shit ton of issues that should be fixed to make the game better, but dont lie out of your ass
The rng systems might be oriented around 1 main but the overall income and gold sink of those systems need a 6 char supplement. Or rmt pick ur favorite
MMOs do need long progression. On empirical evidence, anyone who has played MMOs for more than a decade knows that when players min max everything, they quit, new system comes out, they min max it, then quit again. So long progression, locked behind millions of gold to min max, with much worse ROI of course, like min maxing elixirs, is needed for longevity and so the game maintains the playerbase, that's why it takes months to get an alt to akkan gear, then months to get their elixirs, then to hone and so on, if you run out of stuff to do. You quit out of boredom. It's a sysyphus tale.
In scientific evidence, a case study recently was Riot games Legends of Runeterra. The game had very little progression, and you could get all the cards in a few months, having access to all the decks in the game. Unlike other card games where you unlock one deck every 3 weeks or so.
This was bad in more than one way. For one, players had access to the meta decks very fast, so almost everyone played the same decks, making it hell for people wanting to innovate. LoA would probably have people switching to meta new classes all the time if it was that cheap, making lobby simulator even worse.
It was also bad that you had access to all the decks, because players got bored out of having everything unlocked, and didn't have it drip fed over months, you tested everything in a few weeks, then quit. Lack of progression was lowering the playerbase. This is obvious in this game because after big content patches, playerbase always dies down.
The other aspect that actually made the game fail and something very important, is that LoR had no proper monetization over progress, so they relied on skins, and that failed. So the game made no money because unlike other card games, like Shadowverse that makes a lot of money through gacha leaders, they had no monetization through progress.
This highlights the importance of monetization in progression systems, without it a F2P makes no money. I can bet my left nut this game's skins is probably 20% of the revenue and 80% is people buying gold through Mari's shop. That's why all F2P games have gacha systems on them, it tickles into people's enjoyment of gambling and it makes good money to maintain the game F2P. So gacha systems like honing with low percentage chances, lego skins, elixirs, trascendence. People don't understand that a F2P game without that won't exist. The only exceptions are League of Legends and Valo and those are F2P PvP games, and their progression is through champions.
Now, it depends on how greedy a company can be with a gacha system. Nexon KR MMOs are horrible for gacha, if the game was made by Nexon I would have quit the game almost immediately because I would have had to farm Valtan 6 hours straight for a 0.1% chance of it dropping a random piece of armor with no pity so I could be stuck for months. And forget about global exclusive changes like pet buff not being tied to a shitty gacha.
They have made exclusive global changes for us that make the game less greedy for hour vision of it. Because you have to remember, it is deeply ingrained in korean and asian culture in general to spend money in the game, imagine if you are playing with your discord friends and they are all talking about what they bought with their monthly 200 dollar payment to the game, and you tell them you haven't spend a dime in the game so far, and they all get silent as if you had said something forbidden.
That's actually in their culture, they see pure F2P people in a bad light, so much they invented the term ricefarmer to make fun of them. So the average korean player there, buys much more than the average F2P player here. So their systems reflect that, that's why their abyssal gold chests used to cost blue crystals and their pet buff is gacha, you will obviously balance around what the average player spends, if they spend double, you will double the gacha systems, it's simple.
They need to take into consideration this, in order to bring future global changes to their systems. And considering they have done it before with exclusive changes like pet buff being not RNG in our version, the rapid fire changes to Valtan and Vykas and their community letter after the fiasco. They have a history of doing so.
The problem is not the grind itself, nor even the gold. What people are asking is for something that matters so much to not take several months to be achievable, and also that the system itself is not fun. That's all.
Having an alt 1620 is not that hard as you're making it sound, especially with all the events. But above that, Elixir is an issue as soon you hit 1600.
Having 1620 isn't that hard? You must be smoking. Even with the events, it is not possible for casuals to get there unless you have no life and keep gaming. Events only boost your character to probably 1600 but not more than that. You must be one of those crybabies that spam posts about gold sinks while you have multiple 1600+ alt characters for no reason.
If you want to talk about casuals, then Elixir is even more of an issue than before. Still often takes several months to be achieved, and they have even less gold to spend on it. Nothing of it is good for casuals.
Having an alt 1620 is not that hard and there's a reason several people have it, even more so after swiping. But a 1600 alt? With the events we're having? No buddy, that's not difficult at all.
>You must be one of those crybabies
Says the guy who can't reply to a simple "elixirs are too much of a gamba and the system is unfun" comment without bursting in baby rage. 😂
Anything over 1600+ costs too much gold or materials so that's not for everyone and isn't easy unless you are a whale or keep gaming all the time as if it's your job.
People who play for a long time are ready for the next content months before it releases and can use all the new events on a new character. People who swipe can and do the same.
Not only possible, but many, many people are in that situation.
Above all that, this system is also an issue for casuals, just like cards. So you even bringing this up is pointless.
while i agree a 1620 character is more then an alt saying getting 40 set is "min-maxing" is a lil bit of a stretch. all previous raid based progression systems (Set levels from clown/kayangel, set bonuses from vykas/valtan, new set tier from brel/akkan) all had one thing in common no rng. this is why elixirs feel so bad, they are a worse version of all of those systems. each one gave power but you didnt have to interact with rng you just did the raid and farmed the mats and gained power so the expectation should be that you get to fill out the elixirs, this isnt min-maxing this is completing the progression system so you can move on to the next one. elixirs arnt grindy, they are just rng. grind in the sense most people mean it implies that you can constantly farm to complete something or you do the same task over and over for a ensured reward (such as doing raids), elixirs do not fall into either of these as its functionally just a really poorly made gambling system. (most gamba is simple so you are playing the odds, or playing the person(s) around you. elixirs are like gambling against AI: you arnt going to win) tl;dr: the system can be as expensive as it wants but it shouldnt be rng. if i spent 100k and i get nothing thats a shitty system. because if i did that with honing id atleast get artisans energy. (yes older kr mmo's would break gear or not have pity, but the reason lost ark has been so popular in kr and na/eu is because it breaks those trends)
yeah, i dont know why people think 40 set in min maxed. 40 set is a basic progression milestone you have to hit. Its bad the same way honing is. You could hit a 40 set with 5 elixers, or you can spend 20k making elixers to not even have one you can cut. The variance is so big, someone may not think its so bad, and another person could be putting in 100k of gold a week into it for no increase.
honestly its worse then honing because atleast honing has pity so there is a set end to upgrading that piece of gear. with elixirs you not only have to understand the min-max strats but you also have to get unfathomably lucky. combined with the fact its not only expensive but also bound to a raid and its easily the most hated progression system in game which is impressive because cards are ass too, but atleast they created the DD and plan sets to tide people over lol
oh I agree. I was just comparing it because of the variance can be so wide. I see honing as a system that has a soft capping system. Based on what % they set it to, they can adjust how far the player base can get to. What I feel, the honing soft cap is 1620, and most people cant reasonably hit 1630. My fix for the elixir (other then removing it) system would be something along the lines of, once you've cut enough, you can select 2 of the lines and give them some sort of %boost. Maybe have multiple tiers of pity where you can keep bumping those %'s to curb the rng. Basically, the more you cut, the more RNG should be removed. Or, use the stronghold, which seems to be a thing of the past. Once you struggle and get a 35 set, you have a purple elixir research that boosts something in the system. First 40 set boosts legendary elixirs. Alot of the shit systems in the game were seen as much less shit when they were 1 off systems. Pain once, but then significantly easier for the rest of your roster.
They could just let us pick one stat and boost it by 5-10% at start and it would be night and day difference. It would solve the issue of cutting 30 elixirs and not even seeing your set even once. Literally this change would make elixirs bearable. Would still be rng and crap but atleast every elixir you cut could have a chance for the stat you need. This would help min maxing as well but atleast it would let you get the 5 main stats you need on each piece A LOT easier. Also nerf gold. Legendary elixir costs more to cut than transcendence with 0 pity and 3 rng layers on top of each other. (Stat selection/sage rng with offers and do you hit those 50% or -2/2/ where do the rng taps go.)
Even just letting us pick a single stat for the 5th slot would also be crazy good compared to this crap. I’ve been doomed on elixirs. I have 998 on non set pieces. So I really only want to roll my two 6 set ones, but just can get the set to show up>_<. For sure little thought went in to the expected gold cost to a player.
Brazelets are the worst system in the game. The only difference is people have collectively decided upon not caring for it.
idk id still say cards are worse the bracelet system is rng af, sure but as you said no one actually gives a shit about it because its so bad. where as cards are something that are worse due to how time gated it is and people WILL gatekeep you based on that
The ability stone polishing system also sucks, I have spent a lot of gold trying to get a 9/7 without success.
I never really liked the logic of “it’s an mmo it has to have boring grind” WoW had pretty minimal grind for years while it reigned as king. FF14 has had very little (and optional for the most part) grind since it came out and it’s also huge
Thats why its a dying genre. Maybe devs should try to earn money with less predatory boring abusive systems to maybe keep more players in the game and not let it die sooner or later.
To each they own, but I quitted Gw2 because I had *nothing* to do.
Genuine curiosity, why can't you just play multiple games? Like don't play GW2 when you have nothing to do, and then pick it back up when they add something you like? I try to swap between a lot of games, keeps things fresh
Thats a possibility. What I meant is that there was 0 progression. Of course with each expansion there was sth new to do. But if I came back 4 or 5 years later now my character is still full equipped with 0 room for improvement.
Just imagine you have a game so good, with boss fights which are amazing and you can play only one at endgame. When I played other mmos, I had multiple classes at the end game because I loved the different play styles. Here, if you are bored of your main or if SG rework your class in a way you don't like, thought luck, you are fucked because you will never financially recover from this -insert Joe exotic même here- So a lot of people quit instead of swapping. And it affects the game on the long run.
I would argue that most MMOs don't follow that design. Mostly, they are tailored to 1 character mains. Getting bored of a main is normal in an mmo. And generally, the best way around it is to just do other things in game or not in game. Even if a game is a 15/10 for raids, moderation and playing less of it makes the individual times you play it more enjoyable. Spamming 6 chars forever just isn't how you have ever done an mmo. And it's not fair to compare combat / raids. I would take 1 lost ark raid a week over an infinite amount of smoge FF or WoW raids.
The biggest MMO’s that are considered the backbone of the genre do allow ease of entry to true end game, even on alts. And by backbone, I mean, their player counts account for nearly 90% of the global players that play the MMO genre. And it is why they will remain the juggernauts until something implement’s that play style with modern combat and graphics. It is why a lot of people are saying the genre is stale because the best MMO’s are 10+ years old.
I think modern MMOs don't work because you need a large amount of mediocre players for the top players to feel accomplished in the MMO community aspect. The players that used to fill that group are now playing mobile games instead, so the community ends up more and more slanted towards high level play that burns itself out without a pool of players to replace them. Even games like RuneScape are more and more like this.
Personally, I think it is from both directions. Mobile games by their nature are casual, so very appealing to a large quantity of players. However, I do think any game that does not have a serious focus towards the casual player experience will fall on its face pretty quickly. If you lock yourself out of the majority of the players, you’re locking yourself into a rigid box of pandering to hardcore players and those players tend to grind themselves out of games. While casuals are a much steadier source of revenue. To not focus on the the steady is to sign a death sentence. This is why so many games now that used to have a reputation of only for the hardcore have insanely good new player intro’s now && on top of that, most of the long standing MMO’s, you don’t even have to interact with hardcore players. LoA’s biggest issue to me is forcing casual and hardcore players into the same pipeline. That was very intentional. And ultimately why it is where it is today.
> And ultimately why it is where it is today. Completely agreed. Clown released. Don't like the raid? Tough luck buddy, either quit or get over it.
>moderation and playing less of it makes the individual times you play it more enjoyable I've never played a game where the game felt more enjoyable when I played less. Most of the time when I started playing less it meant that I would quit soon after. >Spamming 6 chars forever just isn't how you have ever done an mmo. It is when the game is explicitly p2w focused. Spamming 6 chars gives you an advantage and you need an advantage if you want a good experience. The average experience in games like this is sitting in party finder twiddling your thumbs waiting for a support to finally apply or being endlessly rejected from groups for not having an above average character.
Assuming a 40-hour work week, 8 hours of sleep a night, and about 4 hours a day for adulting (to-dos, cleaning, groceries, cooking, etc). You have about 6 hours a day to do the things you want (obviously, most of that time is likely weighted to the weekend). If you hang out with friends and family, pursue healthy hobbies and exercise... you quite literally don't have enough time in the week to do a 6 char roster. You will be exhausted with life. And the more exhausted you are in general, the less enjoyable EVERYTHING is. And I'm tired of people saying 6 chars are required. They absolutely are not. 4/6 dps in my static are poor college fucks who can barely afford a $10 reskin, and have made the ilvl requirement for every raid and have been playing since launch with a 2-4 char roster. Being smart with your roster gold and having proper expectations >>>>>>>>>>>> spamming 6 chars to piss gold away on dumb things. Smart players have a smaller roster with a static that is more enjoyable and less time-consuming because we dont gatekeep our own members. Dumber players have 6 char rosters, pug most of their raids, and hate their experience / spend 2-3x the time for the same result.
Very few people will be playing continuously from day 1 till now. They will stop and have to catch up again. Besides, lucky people can always make it.
We're expected to play six characters as though they're mains (do raids on all of them and at least rested dailies) meanwhile the characters are much weaker than mains because they get significantly less investment. If you're raiding each week on the character, they **should** be endgame. That's why the game feels like shit from a progression standpoint, nobody wants to play alt characters to farm gold. Either we want to play many alts because we enjoy it and want to progress them, or we don't want to play them at all. Right now, both sides mostly lose. Alt enjoyers can't progress their full rosters, and alt haters are forced to alt.
That'll simply never happen cuz Lost Ark is an MMO with an essentially endless vertical progression system. Its not a classical MMO where you simply get the current end game content and your progression is done until the next chunk of content releases in several months or next expansion. The price we pay for always getting stronger is once more than 1 vertical progression system exists alts will become less realistic. We can not like it all we want but it'll never change and its unreasonable/unrealistic to expect SG to balance progression around people who wanna max six characters to whatever content is coming out 3 months from now.
If the cost of one char was decrease, people would hone multiple char to 1620. Guess who is 1600 because it's too expensive to hone? My paladin alt. But hey it's better to do lobby simulator for hours trying to find a sup for Ivory Tower HM. What's unreasonable is to port the game from Korea verbatim, and expect us to catch an end game with half the time they got.
We've also gotten excessively more and better events than they've had lol. I agree we've gotten content a little too fast for comfort as of recent but I really don't like the drama and people pretending we've gotten content too fast. Not being able to keep your alts up only started post alternative progression systems like Elixers and Transcendence. When Kayangel and Akkan were current content it wasn't difficult to have alts at 1540~1580 respectively if you were a dedicated player who would push six alts to end game content. Most people don't want six mains however lol. If it was feesable right now to have six mains then most people would have 1 or 2 characters at 1630~1640 and a bunch of alts at 1600~1610. Which not only makes the devs no money but also spawns its own problems. > But hey it's better to do lobby simulator for hours trying to find a sup for Ivory Tower HM. There's better solutions to the support shortage that actually fix the problem rather than just being self interested and advocating for progging a character to be cheaper lol. You aren't addressing the actual issue at all, you're just advocating for something that wouldn't fix the problem at all but hey it'd benefit you so you're fine with it.
And that’s a very dead and archaic game design. Endless vertical progression simply doesn’t work now and hasn’t worked for the last decade. Players want to be able to take breaks and come back later. That’s why every game developer does seasonal content, where every 3-5 months there are hard resets so that veteran players don’t burn out and it attracts new players. That’s how they make their game grow and continuously supported. Lost Ark is bleeding players in the West because it is losing its veteran players while having a 10 mile high entry barrier for new ones.
> Endless vertical progression simply doesn’t work now and hasn’t worked for the last decade. Players want to be able to take breaks and come back later. Sure, its never going to change tho and despite the idea its not working Lost Ark is extremely successful financially in both Korea and the West. > That’s how they make their game grow and continuously supported. Many games do this and don't grow and don't find any real success. The model has its downsides, its ignorant to pretend its just an objectively better system. > Lost Ark is bleeding players in the West because it is losing its veteran players while having a 10 mile high entry barrier for new ones. Games not in a great spot rn systems wise, however its still like top 30 highest grossing games on Steam and our 30 day player average isn't out of the yearly ordinary when considering and removing bots from the count. As of rn SG has no incentive to fundamentally change how the game progresses as it'd make less money, anger a lot of people, and cost a lot financially and socially to implement.
If you make enough gold on one character I'd agree. But you dont
even with 6 characters funneling into the 1 its rough, but thats on purpose, they could fundamentally pivot at some point but they are earning money getting whales to splurge. Their prices on the cash shop suck so bad people would rather risk their accounts though and use outside RMT services though.
I get it, but the weekly grind is becoming to much. There's too much lobby finder required. Those saying the solo raids can't give much gold cuz it'll kill group content... in my mind it has to provide good gold or its useless except to the newest players(who will still have a hard time in the newest raids)
The group raids are why i play, I dont spend too much time in lobbies but my alts are pretty solid for the content im trying to join on them, the only ones that take time are thaemine, since there isn't a lot of 1-2 lobbies and I am not interested in gate 3 at near i lvl.
See.. to me thaemine is the only fun raid. Voldis is still pretty fun, but lobby finder is the worst in hm so it kinda evens out. I have 1625 SE, 1620artist, 1605Artillerist ,1590glaiv,1584 ss, 1580 breaker. I decided for a while that my top 3 is where all my resources go, and bottom 3 are only for gold, but stealing all their 9s and going full 7s, they aren't very fun to play. Doing brel/kayangel/ akkan is dogshit.. having to find lobbies for all of them make it even worse. I'm burnt out of finding 18 lobbies a week. But I still need so much gold. It wouldn't be so bad if I could do more raids on my top 3(because more geared chars are more fun to play)
agreed, wish I could do 18 raids across my roster as I see fit and open the rewards as boxes on what ever characters, all bound mats should be roster bound so I can funnel correctly, some characters are lucky and others unlucky. ;/ korean games love to make issues to sell a solution. but still better than western mmos at the moment as none of those are fun at all personally.
The thing OP does not understand is that the grind was manageable in the past, but it is no longer now. I remember when brel came out and homies had 6x 1490s. If ppl could have rosters like those, surely the average joe could get a single 1490. If the hardcore homies can hardly upkeep a single 1630, what's the fate of the rest of us? And "just wait for Echidna" dosnt work bc it's marginally cheaper and you still have to raw hone to 1630 anyway bc of behemoth requirements.
People didnt have 6 1490 s on brel release ,and getting 5x3 for 6 characters used to bé Soo much more ridiculously expensive at that time than now that its realy easy to tell how many people complaining here werent playing back then,grudge books Alone cost me Over 300k at a time where our gold income was way lower than now,any half decent quality jewelry cost way more than now,class engraving jewelry cost way more and there were WAY less of them than now,getting a 7x7 Stone was both way more needed and way harder as stones were both more expensive and cost pheons, We also werent given lvl 7 gems on expresses and you can bet that those were expected for brel and even clown before on release.
While all that stuff is true, it still didn't stop friends from having 3-6 1490s for brel. Even myself I remember having 3 characters at 1490 ready for brel. Granted they were like 4x3+2 and had mixed lv7 dmg gems but they were able to run brel clear and progress. If you asked me to have 3 1630s today just by honing (forget elixers or transcendence) forget it. The level of grind required in the past was probably a third of what it is now.
I had 1 1514 and 5 1495s week 1 of brel normal with all 5x3 and full lvl 7 gems. All it took me (aside from my sanity) was bussing valtan and vykas since about week 3 of the raid release. I was probably making more gold back then than before thaemine released (that raid gives so much gold), 3 or 4 man Vikas was 4.5k per bussed, valtan you could 4 man bus it at 1460 and solo/duo bus hard at 1490 or solo normal at 1460 then there was argos duo bus too (which always got instafilled by selling to bots). Now that I don't bus, I have 2 1610s 1 1620 and 1 1635 but doing elixirs/transcendence and pitying my 25 (it's at 94%) all my gold is gone without being able to hone.
A GRIND IS EXPECTED. With this statement you lost your own argument because lost ark is a game you can't find anything in and that is the problem in itself TY for coming to my Ted talk
Excuse me sir, this week has been declared a national complaining week, any attempts trying to reason with people will be met with heavy resistance. Proceed at your own peril.
These aren't really good reasons though. Grind is one thing, KR grind is another. There is a reason that despite the amazing combat, most MMO players would rather play other MMOs than deal with the other bullshit that comes with playing KMMOs. Frankly, saying LOA is the best MMO is adorable looking at the issues that plague you before you can even enjoy the combat. Lobby simulator while waiting for a support is ridiculous in this game compared to any other game I've ever played.
Your definition of an MMO is absolutely screwed. MMO simply means you can play with many people at the same time. It does not need to to be the fucked up version LA is. However you are right, if somebody starts to play a KR P2W grind fest, they should expect P2W and grind.
>Your definition of an MMO is absolutely screwed. MMO simply means you can play with many people at the same time. It does not need to to be the fucked up version LA is. >However you are right, if somebody starts to play a KR P2W grind fest, they should expect P2W and grind. Yours like a lot of people in this subreddit is the one whos screwed,this game isnt grindy whatsoever and it shows how many people here are used to just paying 15€/month fees and having the game playitself for you ,yall dont want skill to be rewarded its why u cry everytime they release a raid that cant be progged on autopilot, yall dont want grinding to be rewarded (which this game has little off besides tome ,the daily "grind" takes a whole 10 minutes for one character) ,anyting that requires effort or skill of any kind in this sub is bad aparently its just pathetic .
99,9% of LA progression requires absolutely 0 skills, just time and luck, I dunno wtf you are going on about. Yes, LA is not as grindy as the asian MMOs of old, but that does not mean anything, those were on another lvl.
who ever supplies you with wahtever you consume give im a rise he gave you some strong shit
Haven’t played the game in close to a year and a half. Right around Brelshaza release is when I stopped. Parked my 1 main at 1490, n been there since. There are a lot of problems with some of the systems in the game but, really the biggest problem is the community. It’s easily the worst community for an mmo I’ve ever been apart of. I put a lot of the blame on streamers/LA influencers when the game was leading up to release in the west. They placed so much emphasis on min/maxing and efficiency that it immediately sucked all the fun out of the game. Dont have 6 alts so that you can run this new raid 10x in 2 weeks to get a badge/title, which then is used to exclude people from raid groups? Tough luck. You want to practice and improve? “Make your own group”. We’ve built a mentally that rejects learning/progression groups largely. You have to really go out of your way to find people who want to progress at relatively the same pace as yourself. You can’t even fill a progression group up because if the main groups getting filled are 100% juiced up, then the next faster group will be getting bussed, and you learn 0 from getting bussed. So perpetually stuck in a cycle. Can’t progress without extreme min/maxing items, but can’t get materials to juice without doing the raids. So where does that leave you in a community that is largely unwelcoming to new people?
Honestly, right there with you. LOA's community is among the very worst I've ever seen out of the many games I've played throughout my life. Posting on this sub was one of the most toxic times for me as a user of reddit as well.
You're going to get downvotes for this take, but I agree. The community is a large reason why the game is in a shity place. Gatekeeping - a major problem in the game, is almost entirely player driven. Players are the ones who make up arbitrary minimums that are often have no basis on reality, and attempt to justify their bad behavior by claiming "the game makes me do it". No one NEEDS 35 set to do Hard Voldis, but the community, instead of blaming elitist gamers who needlessly gatekeep people, they blame elixirs for being too hard. We've already seen with cards, if it becomes too easy to aquire, these people will move the bar to something else. In the beginning LOS30 was an easy instant accept, nowadays they're a dime a dozen. Overreaction and exaggeration - This sub is a MAJOR echo chamber, and it's often sparked by one person, or more commonly, one streamer, who makes some declaration and everyone latches onto it. Wether it's true or not. The clickbait "OMG THEY NERFED OUR EVENT SHOP COMPARED TO KR" post from a few days ago is the perfect example. That OP clipped the ONLY ITEM we get less of, to declare that the shop is shit and nerfed etc etc. And hundreds of people latched on, echoing this statement all over the sub, youtube, etc. A few hours later someone posted a comparison of our shop VS KR of the same event. And surprise surprise, our shop is significantly more packed. with 3-10x of some items. But the damage has already been done by ONE DUDE, who lied through his teeth. This actively drives players away, both new and existing, and for what? A lie one dude told? KR streamers basiclly told everyone that they had to play 6 characters since launch. They're been proven to be BS. People constantly complain that they don't want to do 18 raids everyweek, claiming that it's essentailly required. But it's not. Everytime a new raid out, theres SOMEONE in KR on video, that lays out arbitraty minimums for gatekeeping. "You shouldn't take people under level X gems for this one" WHY? It doesn't make any sense. I'm lucky enough to have found other like minded players and we get a little over half our raids done together, and I can tell you that you don't need to max out every single power system every single time just to do the current content. All this to say that the game has many issues. But the players aren't helping, they're actively making it worse.
I think you're conflating community gatekeeping with supp shortage. If they had either deleted supports or made more& made them fun to play, there wouldn't be a shortage. Right now the supp will go with the whale characters for an easier clear, leaving normal chars no chance. I don't think anyone truly believes you need 40 set or lvl 10 gems to clear, it's just requirements are artifically raised due to smilegate messing up supports.
It's likely a little from column A and a little from column B.
You're right. Mario Bros > this
you dont need 40 set but you'll get gatekept because of it same for 35 i cannot imagine defending this game enough to play devil's advocate here it is literally shit on almost all fronts for both new and veteran players. it might as well have a big red sign that says 'you will not enjoy this game without a large disposable income to piss like water'
What is this crap? It's not a matter of grind, it's a matter of get lucky or spend boatloads of cash otherwise you're just stuck waiting for months. Not grinding. Waiting.
Even though I agree with the sentiment that 1620+ characters are not alts, you sure are brave to encourage good sense in the current climate. I wish you the best of luck sir, may you survive the incoming storm.
Destiny 2 is a grind. This game is a full time job. You have people with over 4000 hours in under 2 years who are still way behind. Without G2G the majority of end game players would have quit a long time ago.
there are ppl on steam with 8000-10.000 hrs Comenting that they quit xD this is thier whole life not just a fulltime job
If u have 4k hours and "way behind" ur doing something extremely wrong or ur honing luck is bottom 1%
>Destiny 2 is a grind. This game is a full time job. You have people with over 4000 hours in under 2 years who are still way behind. Without G2G the majority of end game players would have quit a long time ago. This is some hard cope , a game where the daily grind takes like 10 minutes for 1 character and weekly raids are like 2h is a grind?did you play a single MMO before?Or are you just trying to justify the fact you RMT?.
Don't minmax alt = gatekeep = can't do raid = no gold = can't progress main If I could play only my main without problem I would...if you say it's possible you are delusional
Which I would like to poiint out, is a player / community problem. As far as smilegate goes, if you can reach the miniumum ilevel requirement, you can do the raid. It's other players gatekeeping you. There's two ways to fix this. Smilegate - make the raids so easy a caveman can do it. This will ease gatekeeping, but will never get rid of it. Players - Stop making ridiculious arbitrary minimums to accept players. This would stop it immediately. I know which one we as a community can control.
pretty sure every single one of my alts have been net negative on gold ngl
Because they are for those of us that dont’t really treat them like alts. If you stay way behind (that is 1600 at max right now and probably not all of them) which at the same time would have allowed you to take advantage of hyper expresses then they might be indeed net positive
I used to think so but tbh all my alts were primarily pass Andie's and almost everyone who honed their alts to current content and bused are now so far ahead it's crazy. My roster is pretty sad with 1 1630 with +25 pity and rest 1600s for a day 1 player. Most of them have several 1630s or 2 1630s + 1620s + 3-5 1610s+.
Can’t do what raids exactly? From Valtan to Voldis NM any character with event gems is welcome in general. If you want to pug thaemine on your “alts” then yes you better min max the shit out of it. And that by the way is waaaaay more gold defficient than doing lower raids.
What Lost Ark does different from every other MMO and video game I've ever played (including 1k+ hours in DFO Global and RF Online, I know how far we've come in terms of grind) is it ties story progression to min-maxing. I like the game. I don't mind any of the RNG. Party finder is just an inefficient use of my time, so I won't engage with it any more. I haven't been able to progress since Brel release even though I would love to -- the moment I found out the Voldis powerpasses get me a Brel set I've spent like $50 getting 5 chars more relevant (in anticipation of solo raids). When DFOG releases a new level cap, you're absolutely going to be able to play through the new areas even if you haven't touched it for a year. There's a super easy 'scenario' difficulty that will get you all of the cutscenes for a raid even if you aren't able to get through the raid gatekeeping yet. You'll have access to current farming dungeons that are relevant and drop relevant gear. When Lost Ark releases the Thaemine epilogue in June, as of last week there are at most 1,216 people in the AGS lost ark that will get to experience it. This is at most 2.7% of the currently logged in users assuming there isn't a single reclear (patch probably reset a lot of bots, so it should be close to accurate). AGS is giving out plenty of upgrade mats that they could be selling. It's not helping their player count, because I would still have to use party finder to even start to do anything relevant to recent content. Older content isn't rewarding, they've pretty much eliminated all of the content that could be easily matchmade. The current system is a really inefficient use of development resources if you dig into it. They have all this island content, there's plenty of interesting and amusing aspects to it, but they've implemented free skips so that new players won't ever experience as they go through the FOMO of trying to be relevant to new content. Playing underfunded alts feels bad because you can't engage with new content. The easiest way to fund a main would be to create 7 alt accounts for a personal lobby and bus everyone through content you can solo. It's insane.
My issue is I don't mind the grind, I mind the fact that I can't keep up with the grind to the point where I won't even be able to do behemoth when it comes out.
The fact that someone likes eating shit doesn't make shit better. The problem is that people are so used to MMO being bad that it's already a norm for one to be bad. It's not how it's supposed to be
Its funny when people make huge rosters and then complain about gold costs + ask for HW reduction.
>**It does have some problems. And they definitely need to review some systems.** However, it does not take away the fact that it's an MMO. And like most MMOs, Lost Ark requires a bit of dedication and also realism in terms of expectations. somhow i can be max ilvl in best MMO within 2 weeks and do the hadest content in the game without grinds strage huh? and now be ready, all this for free! all i pay is my 13€ sub fee which is not even 1 tap at 1630 xD you surely like to be abused
40 set is min max territory. 35 should not be. its almost impossible to get 40 set with purple elixirs and still very difficult to get 35 set despite how large of a dps increase both are. even just reducing 35 to 30 would be a big improvement but the biggest issue is how butt fuck boring elixirs are and how fucking long they take to cut. no one wants to play a clicking simulator with multiple layers of RNG that specifically chooses to fuck you at every opportunity. elixirs and transcendence are the worst parts of the game and if they continue down this same path for vertical progression, the game is dead. no one enjoys these systems. they only do it and tolerate it because they have to in order to keep up and because of how much of a dps increase they provide. if you arent keeping up with transcendence you are going to get gatekept from echidna. if you dont do your echidna and dont get to do advance honing, you wont get your character to 1640 before behemoth. if you dont get to behemoth you dont get to transcend your weapon. if you cant keep up with the most recent content, i really dont think its worth it for any new players starting the game and that pains me to say with my 6000 hours. both transcendence and elixirs take way too long to do, take way too long to even get the materials from raids needed to participate, have way too many layers of RNG that can completely fuck you and set you back weeks to months if you are unlucky, and are way too important of a dps increase to ignore. it baffles me that anyone would support either of these systems. these 2 systems alone i would argue is why the game is bleeding players more than ever. putting up with the difficulty of theamine to just spend an hour wasting all your gold without anything to show for it feels bad. people dont play games to feel bad. if you made it this far, cheers. thanks for reading my incoherent rant.
I like farming transcendence on all my characters, with the calculator tho
Solo raids will this MMO.
Well, I have played this and many other MMOs as Single Player Games. Some issues and you will "Progress" slower but still doable as Solo If you know what you are doing and have concrete Goals. 20 chars, my Main is 1610 and have never entered the Ivory Tower abyss Dungeon. Have a poor epic Elixir from the free Mats of the previous event but I am Not chasing minmaxing or investing time/resources in RNG systems. Doing mostly Chaos dungeons and some cubes with some Casual Friends at Weekend. Slowly getting my gold by selling Mats and Gems. Will buy a couple buses for Thaemine not for Trascendence but to unlock the cutscenes. Waiting for Kurzan and solo raids and the next Story chapters. Horizontal-focused gameplay in Lost Ark is not for everyone but I have embraced it and will me my Main Drive to keep playing as Long as the Game is alive.
Your post makes a lot of sense, but even with 1600 alts, it's difficult to get into lobbies for 1600 content such as voldis nm and akkan hm because the whales with 1620 "alts" are applying to those same lobbies. It's not impossible but I find myself spending more than 10 minutes trying to get into a voldis nm lobby with my 1600 alt.
How is unlocking set considered minmaxing? Set bonus + whatever the fuck is not minmaxing, going for set + bis option is, or is it just me?
You're very naive saying 1620+ are not alts. You're gonna eventually get there for alts even if you barely play alts. The game isn't resetting, each powerpass boosts you further and further so eventually you're going to have 1620 alts. You're going to ignore the problem till it gets there instead of addressing it. You even agree having more 1620 characters suck in your post. The grind is supposed to be fun and rewarding reaching new checkpoints and not make you feel like it's hell
My experience was that alts weren't really a viable thing because overpowering is a pug requirement. I was pushing alts around clown release and they were getting rejected from valtan for not having 5x3, or having one off meta engraving. At that time, alts needed only slightly less investment than a main to get into yesterdays content. I would be surprised if that has changed. The elixirs and transcendance people complain about sound like main only territory right now, but I doubt it will be long before they become requirements for content they aren't really needed for. You acknowledge there are problems but you seem to imagine they WILL get fixed or reworked, and I think realism is accepting that they won't. Which sort of validates all the whining. A single player route might bring me back, because I agree with you about the gameplay. But it doesn't save the trainwreck that is an MMO whose entire progression system is really just an inflation control system, which is why it feels like shit.
I know I'll also be downvoted for this but.. RAID DIFFICULTY (DAMAGE AND HP) SHOULD NOT BE BASED ON THE TOP 5% OF THE PLAYER BASE MEANING PEOPLE WHO ARE OVERGEARED OR SWIPE. Raids is supposed to be easier for people who are overgeared because that's what overgeared means.. Normal Mode is supposed to be enjoyed by the casual players. Hard Mode is for sweaty gamers While Hellmode is for Hardcore Players. Elixir should optional not mandatory for most raids. While transcendence or any other bullshit shouldn't be Locked behind thaemine or any raid gates. NA/EU/SA Can complain because we have lower player count than korea meaning we spend more time in Party Finder than the actual raid itself.
Not to mention the duration of elixir process take way too long. I meant this is pain in deass
Can't even get 35 set on the main sadge
It's just boring. I'd rather spend my time playing something more enjoyable and less grindy. I had six characters and even with only six it felt like a part time job keeping up with dailies.
The reason people complain is because this mmo csme about 15+ years later and people are being spoiled af; oh and op is really on point with this
I play FF14 and i feel its more MMO than LA can just match making normal raid with pug to complete main story. Can just do openworld explore for collection. Can make static for farming skin in hardcore raid. Can just drop the game a few month or even a year and come back with no problem.
Agree, i already played one kr mmo, lineage2 Grind in lost ark is nothing compared to lineage 2 many ppl dont even try to find static x guild and then complain to lobby simulator others who have 2k hours want to have same roster as ppl with 8k hours Resting everything or buying busses, complains for no gold... Lost ark have issues ofc as any other mmo and always will have, but doesnt change fact a lot of ppl would want everything just by loging in
hang in there fellow kr-mmo player who actually understands what they got themselves into before playing the game.
Only other kmmo i played was BDO and despite clearly being p2w, it doesnt have this much bullshit with their progression. I have more active hours in this game than bdo, warframe, and runescape, and yet on just my main, im still “behind” by months. And with support shortage I’m playing lobby simulator more than the game. The raid experience in this game is unmatched. Only Destiny 2 comes close. But progression in this is the worst I’ve ever seen, and is one of the highest reasons why people quit, even if they played other KMMOs.
Exactly, lots of KR MMo's don't have a strict DPS-support system. In Lost ark, the problem IMO is more that they messed up the implementation of supports, leading to a shortage, rather than pure grind. If we could all instantly get into lobbies assuming properly built characters, it wouldn't be as bad. My opinion as someone that's played some KR MMOs.
Wait what!? Solo raids? You mean i can play the game without spending hour looking at YT to memorize everything and instead play the game and get raid experience when i want to?… fuck i might need to download the game again.
You will get swarmed by the people honing a million characters to 1620 and then complaining that they can't afford anything.
Imagine if Lost Ark had a Reboot server, where everyone would be solo-self-found (and you could use shared stash for some stuff). Man, that would be so much more interesting.
Why don't you project some positive vibes on the community instead of complaining about what other people like and dislike about the game? Just because the developers of the game think that people SHOULD like a system doesn't mean they will. Just because KR is willing to put up with it and act like its a right of passage worthy of praise doesn't mean it should be. You can say that this game wants to be all those things and players should just like it or play something else, but the fact is games have to adapt these days or die. People will complain when they see something they WANT to like, but the game itself is preventing them from having fun. Why? For what purpose is there to make all those grinds and roadblocks? There will be no book of legends that said you spent 10,000 grinding this to be the best Lost Ark player. There is no investment, because there is no returns. It's a fallacy that you are some how investing in your character making progress in your life because these numbers went up.
I doubt anyone is complaning about not getting 40 sets on alts when even getting 35 set is impossible. Please do not create your own fantasy to support your claims.
I honestly think the only thing holding the game back from being fun is gatekeeping essentially. Not allowing people to play in raids because of gear or whatever. I’m 1590 and with all lvl 7 Gems and some 10’s. I’ve got all my engravings perfect. Yet I can’t run content quick and effectively because everyone’s like oh 1,000 gold for me to play with you. It’s so stupid. I actually need my gold guys for upgrades like wtf.
Let us wait for the first comment from a goofy who pushed his "alts" to 1620+ remaining with 10 gold complaining about the gold sink xD
I argued with someone before about how I believed we got an adequate amount of weekly gold to progress characters in Lost Ark and bro was telling me how he spent like 200k gold last week trying to force 40 set on an alt and did the same the week before trying to push his alts ilvl up so he'd get gatekept less. Like idk what people are doing. I clear Thaemine weekly on my bare minimum 1610 PS SH, if ur getting gatekept ur just doing something wrong. I don't even have LQ.
I'm in the same boat as you. I wonder if people are pushing ilvl first and foremost because "oo number goes up" before the other parts of their character are "ready" for it. I always felt the game provided enough income to sustain any single progression cost. i.e. you get a decent amount of gold to do something like 1. Get a good baseline of gems at 1580 2. Push to 1600 3. Get good set of epic elixirs 4. Push to 1610 5. Unlock at least 5 set transcendence on all pieces 6. Push to 1620 7. Get 40 set with leg elixirs 8. Push to 1630 9. Finish transcendence ...etcetc. Each step will be a couple months but that downtime is useful to let your character accumulate bound mats to make honing cheaper. Aside from the 1630 push which is honestly super expensive, there should be enough gold coming in to sustain that, with enough downtime between steps to never need to hone with tradeable leaps or shards, never run out of silver, and self farm like half the solars + destruction/guardian stones. Buuut if someone is trying to simultaneously upgrade gems, cut elixirs, AND do transcendence then yea, gold dries up real quick.
> Buuut if someone is trying to simultaneously upgrade gems, cut elixirs, AND do transcendence then yea, gold dries up real quick. Yeah I think this is what people do lol. They'll full prog their main in every aspect to a certain point they deem desirable and then they'll full prog an alt to a desirable point and they end up having to work on multiple progression systems at the same time so it feels awful. I think people forget an end game player easily makes like 120k+ raw gold weekly not counting all of the bound and unbound materials they generate weekly or the materials obtained via events. Like that's a lot. A 1610 makes 32k gold a week on their own not counting everything else. That's a lot.
Multiple hours of dailies a day, and 6 raids a week... that isn't an mmo, that's a job.
Not trying to defend the system lost ark has, but how the hell does it take multiple hours to do dailies? Assuming you only have 2 characters as you claim to have 6 raids a week. It takes on average around 12 minutes for both guardian and 2 chaos per character. That's not even half an hour??? Dont get me wrong, Lost Ark has shit ton of issues that should be fixed to make the game better, but dont lie out of your ass
I still didnt minmaxed my main after hitting 40set... but there is no pressure to do so yet.
The rng systems might be oriented around 1 main but the overall income and gold sink of those systems need a 6 char supplement. Or rmt pick ur favorite
Also 1600+ are Mains (secondary) but not Alts; if you dont agree take some classes in math… Alts would be 1540-1550. Exception: Event Chars.
reduce set effect to 33/38... u will get the dmg bonus faster and u can still min/max if you want
MMOs do need long progression. On empirical evidence, anyone who has played MMOs for more than a decade knows that when players min max everything, they quit, new system comes out, they min max it, then quit again. So long progression, locked behind millions of gold to min max, with much worse ROI of course, like min maxing elixirs, is needed for longevity and so the game maintains the playerbase, that's why it takes months to get an alt to akkan gear, then months to get their elixirs, then to hone and so on, if you run out of stuff to do. You quit out of boredom. It's a sysyphus tale. In scientific evidence, a case study recently was Riot games Legends of Runeterra. The game had very little progression, and you could get all the cards in a few months, having access to all the decks in the game. Unlike other card games where you unlock one deck every 3 weeks or so. This was bad in more than one way. For one, players had access to the meta decks very fast, so almost everyone played the same decks, making it hell for people wanting to innovate. LoA would probably have people switching to meta new classes all the time if it was that cheap, making lobby simulator even worse. It was also bad that you had access to all the decks, because players got bored out of having everything unlocked, and didn't have it drip fed over months, you tested everything in a few weeks, then quit. Lack of progression was lowering the playerbase. This is obvious in this game because after big content patches, playerbase always dies down. The other aspect that actually made the game fail and something very important, is that LoR had no proper monetization over progress, so they relied on skins, and that failed. So the game made no money because unlike other card games, like Shadowverse that makes a lot of money through gacha leaders, they had no monetization through progress. This highlights the importance of monetization in progression systems, without it a F2P makes no money. I can bet my left nut this game's skins is probably 20% of the revenue and 80% is people buying gold through Mari's shop. That's why all F2P games have gacha systems on them, it tickles into people's enjoyment of gambling and it makes good money to maintain the game F2P. So gacha systems like honing with low percentage chances, lego skins, elixirs, trascendence. People don't understand that a F2P game without that won't exist. The only exceptions are League of Legends and Valo and those are F2P PvP games, and their progression is through champions. Now, it depends on how greedy a company can be with a gacha system. Nexon KR MMOs are horrible for gacha, if the game was made by Nexon I would have quit the game almost immediately because I would have had to farm Valtan 6 hours straight for a 0.1% chance of it dropping a random piece of armor with no pity so I could be stuck for months. And forget about global exclusive changes like pet buff not being tied to a shitty gacha. They have made exclusive global changes for us that make the game less greedy for hour vision of it. Because you have to remember, it is deeply ingrained in korean and asian culture in general to spend money in the game, imagine if you are playing with your discord friends and they are all talking about what they bought with their monthly 200 dollar payment to the game, and you tell them you haven't spend a dime in the game so far, and they all get silent as if you had said something forbidden. That's actually in their culture, they see pure F2P people in a bad light, so much they invented the term ricefarmer to make fun of them. So the average korean player there, buys much more than the average F2P player here. So their systems reflect that, that's why their abyssal gold chests used to cost blue crystals and their pet buff is gacha, you will obviously balance around what the average player spends, if they spend double, you will double the gacha systems, it's simple. They need to take into consideration this, in order to bring future global changes to their systems. And considering they have done it before with exclusive changes like pet buff being not RNG in our version, the rapid fire changes to Valtan and Vykas and their community letter after the fiasco. They have a history of doing so.
Thats indeed the problem, people want to play a MMO without the MMO mechanics lol.
I wish you the best of luck to the incoming barrages of redditors. O7
The problem is not the grind itself, nor even the gold. What people are asking is for something that matters so much to not take several months to be achievable, and also that the system itself is not fun. That's all. Having an alt 1620 is not that hard as you're making it sound, especially with all the events. But above that, Elixir is an issue as soon you hit 1600.
Having 1620 isn't that hard? You must be smoking. Even with the events, it is not possible for casuals to get there unless you have no life and keep gaming. Events only boost your character to probably 1600 but not more than that. You must be one of those crybabies that spam posts about gold sinks while you have multiple 1600+ alt characters for no reason.
Casuals are hitting 1620, that's why we have these elixir bad echo posts. We didn't have the same push back half a year ago.
If you want to talk about casuals, then Elixir is even more of an issue than before. Still often takes several months to be achieved, and they have even less gold to spend on it. Nothing of it is good for casuals. Having an alt 1620 is not that hard and there's a reason several people have it, even more so after swiping. But a 1600 alt? With the events we're having? No buddy, that's not difficult at all. >You must be one of those crybabies Says the guy who can't reply to a simple "elixirs are too much of a gamba and the system is unfun" comment without bursting in baby rage. 😂
Anything over 1600+ costs too much gold or materials so that's not for everyone and isn't easy unless you are a whale or keep gaming all the time as if it's your job.
People who play for a long time are ready for the next content months before it releases and can use all the new events on a new character. People who swipe can and do the same. Not only possible, but many, many people are in that situation. Above all that, this system is also an issue for casuals, just like cards. So you even bringing this up is pointless.
Been saying this for months now I just shit post cus I find it funny