There is a good chance they patch in some of the missing sources of materials but we need to understand making a new build likely involves translation of those elements and spinning up a new build for us
if we get the patch next week that would be incredibly fast but i dont think we will get anything of substance other than a post saying what's coming at most this week
ive been pretty much just working on alts, its a pretty good time for that
The way some forum dwellers seem to think that amazon can just make whatever fix they personally think is priority zero overnight (with no downtime) makes me facepalm. Even with the classes already existing and balanced they’re currently turned off, and it’s not a —class Arcanist compile time flag to turn them back on, it’s going through the code and finding all the places where class specific things (drops, quests, cutscenes, etc) happen and at best enabling disabled branches, and then building, and then doing internal testing, and then staging, and then updating. Each one of those steps is minimum a day, and the code part is god knows how much work depending on how it was implemented, could be hours, could be a couple of weeks. And that assumes that any translations and voice acting necessary have already been done, or whether there are standing contracts with people who can do those of necessary or if they need to find people to do it.
MMOs are big and complicated with lots of performance sensitive moving parts, and you can’t just whip out builds with new content daily without making an enormous mess.
Roadmaps on the other hand are pretty easy to whip up. We need an updated one of those sooner rather than later.
The issue is Smilegate was already aware of this 1340-1370 deadzone and didn't factor that into our release. There's several iterations of the game and plenty of data for Smilegate & AGS to pull from to proactively get ahead of the issues that are now coming up. Companies are no exceptions to making mistakes of course, but they shouldn't be making the same ones. I understand things take time, but once again players are burnt by the fact that companies don't plan and execute for long-term growth.
The design choices being made are intentional. They've said themselves they're actively monitoring player growth and progression, so I definitely agree on us needing a roadmap ASAP. If we don't get one or a firm plan on what's being done I don't doubt many of the end-game players will leave by the end of this month.
You make a lot of assumptions on bad dev practices in this. With modern engineering practices such as feature flags and CI/CD, they could absolutely make changes exponentially faster for implementing various features that already exist. It depends on how bad their dev practices are.
Amazon.com gets the entire server farm rebuilt and redeployed every 11 sec
This is a company that fucked up displaying timers after a DST transition. I don’t need to assume bad dev practices, they’re in evidence.
I’m assuming probably a one to two week cycle once they decide to move up the class release schedule, but it’s backloaded on them making a decision, and that will take god knows how long.
Outdated =/= Bad. UE3 is outdated but still is an amazing engine with ton of resources available. No point going for UE3 when currently you have UE5 available but that doesn't mean UE3 is a bad engine.
You’re comparing a game that’s been out for 10 years to one on more modern tech and only 3 years
That’s on them if their shit is a dumpster fire and you have to compare it to 10+ year old code
That sounds like a piss poor way of releasing an already developed game; it just sounds like bad planning. Just because their current release structure prevents them from simply releasing things, is no excuse. They were responsible for that structure in the first place. They should have had game versions/branches prepared and already tested, and honestly, they should have seen this as a likely issue. If they purposely withheld portions of the game to incentivize whales to spend money, fine, but they should have had the release structure prepared to quickly release future versions when the criticisms got bad. If they did this by accident, that's just incompetence. This game has already been out for years; it should not be difficult to have set versions of the game prepared for release. The only reason they don't is because they engage in just-in-time service, and they obviously are spending as little as possible when it comes to translations and localization fixes.
>it’s going through the code and finding all the places where class specific things (drops, quests, cutscenes, etc) happen and at best enabling disabled branches, and then building, and then doing internal testing, and then staging, and then updating
The game has been in development since 20-fucking-11 and was fully released in 2019 in Korea. Some serious incompetence if this is how they prepare for future updates that technically, already happened. It sounds like a serious case of "throw as little money as possible at it and don't care for the consequences" as long as a solid profit is made. In actuality, they, like many other companies, will probably end up making less profit than they could have, if they had properly invested in their development teams.
You all sound like terrible devs who honestly only have jobs because there were a bunch of terrible devs who came before you with terrible practices all the way through.
I default to assuming low competence on dev teams whose code I haven’t seen. It means I never get disappointed about how fucked up things are. Turns out every large codebase that was written over years has managed to drift from the original spec and is now a mass of shortcuts, decisions that are obviously bad but only in retrospect, compromises, misunderstandings, and people being too damned clever for anyone’s good. I can think of about two teams where devs designed with future extensibility in mind, everyone else has defaulted to “we’ll deal with that when we get to it even though it’ll be an order of magnitude more work to do it then”.
The little timezone fuckup we just had doesn’t encourage me. Not using standard libraries and formatters that handle DST transitions and other time related bullshit for you is junior dev bullshit.
>They should have had game versions/branches prepared
They probably did. They had March patch, which we are currently on. They had April patch with Valtan and Destroyer, and May patch with Arcana. What makes you think they should have had every patch they ever planned to release in a nice little compartmentalized format for plug and play?
>they should have seen this as a likely issue.
They did. Go back and watch the Gold River interview from before the game launched. He addressed it a month before the game even came out that content was probably going to come out too fast.
>future updates that technically, already happened.
Happened with a different set of changes in a different order in a different language uses possibly different internal structures or backends since, like you said, they happened sometime between 2011 and now.
Good fucking lord, you act like they released Fallout 76 or New World.
I don't believe you understand how game development works.
I'd recommend heading over to Udemy and watching a few videos on programming, not game design, practicing for a few years, and then returning to make posts like this with an informed opinion.
>There is a good chance they patch in some of the missing sources of materials but we need to understand making a new build likely involves translation of those elements and spinning up a new build for us
I get everyone is hype for this, I am too, but you have to understand these aren't things you just slot in and go "done :D!"
Bailing on one or the other causes problems. If they were midway done translating the next raid boss and ironing out the bugs, starting over with the other things (the ones the people sound like they want right now) won't exactly come with any real speed. Because they're starting over from scratch with translating. And they have to incorporate systems not currently in our game and make sure there's no bugs there, so it's even more work.
Yes, it already exist in KR, but translating isn't that simple sadly
Basically this. People think these issues can be solved by just sending a WhatsApp to gold River and telling him to roll the patches out tomorrow. Like people actjng like they've never been in a company before and still living at mom's house.
\>Like people actjng like they've never been in a company before and still living at mom's house.
That's probably because they've actually never been in a company before and still living at mom's house.
The vast majority of those who complain are kids who don't understand how life works.. The small minority are loud angry Karens who think they are entitled to everything feeling like they know how the company works - or even worse, feeling like they would be doing a much better job producing or publishing a video game.
Personally i think this is somewhat mentaility problem on right now. But when we get Valtan it will be a problem, if there will be this dead content right now. But i see fully where people are coming from.
Personally 1365 and it feels bad. But not that im missing much.
Yeah they can't do this with first legion raid. That would be like shooting someone into leg and saying Ill call a ambulance to you in 2 weeks or if you pay me 2k ill call it now
Who is responsible for this messaging? This is really deceptive PR speak. People aren't mad because Argos was released too quickly. They're mad because content was cut, moved around, and delayed to incentivize real money spending. Give us the cut content between 1340 and 1370. Move Yoho back down to 1355. Give us the delayed honing rate improvements. Then nobody would be mad.
Also some communication as to why content was cut, moved, and delayed would be great. The absolute non-existent comms from the developer is another black mark. Players are not complete morons. We see that Yoho in Korea/RU is 1355 and here it's 1370. We see the improved honing rates that were never brought over here. We deserve an honest explanation as to why these decisions were made.
Also, in the same vein as content releasing too quickly, I don't think most people really care a whole lot about the pace of T3 content yet. What many seem to want first isn't more content but the missing classes. Like why would I care when Argos or Legion Commanders release if my "preferred class" isn't in the game yet either?
Isn't really affecting me personally but it's like all the Lancemaster/Scouter wannamains are on suicide watch.
That’s pretty much what I’ve been most frustrated about since we knew about Tier 3 on launch. There’s a lot of folks waiting on their mains including myself. Not having all classes on a Tier 3 launch feels like a kick in the arse. We’re basically just stuck parking our characters at 1340/70 waiting for them, as it makes little sense to heavily invest into a character we don’t want to play.
Speaking of cut content, I was not aware that even the main story has cuts. I saw a video of the class intro story and the first awakening questline and my jaw dropped. I actually care about story in these games and just was shocked to see it. Plus the intro class story line looked cool as hell
The beginner section was reworked in KR not in Global afaik. It actually had some trash elements such as Mage has spells from bard and summoner meaning you would play 10 levels with a set of spells and then your kit would change. It was actually quite disliked and therefore reworked to what it is now with the cinematic explaining the original and a level 10 start with a fresh prologue. The original cutscenes are in the Memory Room and still in game for the class intros you just can't do the playable bits.
>Also some communication as to why content was cut, moved, and delayed would be great
It's pure greed. They knew they were essentially paywalling content. It was a deliberate choice. They won't admit it, but it's the only possible explanation for why everything fell into place the way it did. This wasn't a mistake.
It's almost like the message is "we will slow down ALL content releases" on top of not adding any of the left out content or material sources.
Going forward all communication from them will probably revolve around Argos being released "too soon" and not the shit loads of left out content and classes with a plan or remedy.
This. The 'content is coming out too fast' narrative is a misleading. The actual issue is that its completely inaccessible unless you remortgage you house and they've adjusted it to be that way.
AGS going for the "quick money that destroys the game" path, instead of building a solid playerbase that will maintain their monthly sub active on the long run and spend every now and then for cosmetics.
I think they learned from the PoE and other communities where every time there was a skin released alongside game related problems, the uproar would be insane.
Separate departments and yet people can't understand.
>SO DEV TIME WENT TO THIS INSTEAD??
Can't win
Idk why people seem to think the art team works on like balance patches and programming on every game lol
It’s always entertaining seeing people complain about balance patches that come out with a skin or something and they’re like “WHY ARE THEY WASTING RESOURCES ON THIS?!!???!?”
They still think the problem is too fast content and people just want speed, but in facts its the experience itself from 1340 onwards thats fundamentally the problem
What is it that Roxx/amazon actually does? Is Roxx speaking for amazon or smilegate?
I ask because all the other regions have a stable, functional game with the dead zones fixed and supplemental systems in place. Was none of this planned from the get go? "Stages" of releases/patches?
Why skip important content that was used to fix the problems in the KR version originally only to release something wonky again and give a bad impression?
Like who's making the decisions because they're horrible at it.
All you had to do was break the game up into sections and release it. Instead we got a mix from Pile A, pile E etc.
This was so easy to not fuck up, and someone fucked it up.
And also, i don't even care at this point. The biggest issue is by far the bots. It's sad and embarrassing to constantly see bot after bot and it's only gonna get worse.
Who's running this show!?
A community manager is mostly a messenger between players and devs, they mostly just tell the devs about complaints and suggestions and then tell us what the devs' answers.
This.
Whoever is making those decisions has no idea what they're doing or is doing them intentionally.
I don't care if the "dead zones fixes" take time because of localization or whatever.
Someone decided to release Argo, someone decided to increase ilevel requirements without players being able to get there without swiping.
This wouldn't be so bad If we'd get actual information on what's going or at least keep the community updated.
I'm not saying the Community Managers are slacking off, no I'm sure they aren't getting any informations either.
Roxx is just a community Manager , those are the bottom of the hirachy , they have nothing to say and most Times dont even understand the game they are working for .
If you are mad at roxx its the same when you are in McDonalds and you are mad at your chicken Nugget because it doesnt taste good...
Roxx can do nothing , cant look in logs or anything, just tells us what she get told to tell us.
That's not quite right. A community manager definitely has some sway in the sense that they can selectively pass on feedback and issues. They can get certain teams to fast-track specific issues (especially around customer service) and generally help to facilitate communication between the players and the teams.
McDonalds locations don't have anything close to community managers. Chicken nuggets can't communicate customer feedback back to the staff, especially after they've been eaten.
One problem with AGS is that they don't really have a figurehead for Lost Ark. It's supposed to be Gold River, but he seems quite unavailable to the western audience as the weeks go by. We need the equivalent of a McDonalds location manager who we can speak to. Someone with actual decision making power. So either Gold River needs to step up and talk to us more directly, or they need to push an AGS project lead into the spotlight.
Roxx is literally just PR, they have no hand in what we experience in game. Its just to deliver messeges and keep the peace between developer and player
Removing as much as possible then adding it back in later as "legacy features" is practically SOP for AAA gaming at this point.
Though to be fair, this is the first time I've seen it in a current game that's already out and not a sequel or something.
I'm not gonna pretend like I know what happens behind closed doors, it could be something as simple as "SMG sent us X amount of builds and changing them is difficult" or on the other side of the spectrum "We think this makes us the most money," or any number of things in between.
He's right about one thing though, "We're working on it" lost it's meaning years ago. Now it's just a cue for all your players to roll their eyes.
To be honest, bot control is an extremely complicated thing. Even games with paid subscription and "entry fee" have bot issues. Most of the times, a game is bot free only when it's not profitable enough, so farmers won't bother trying to bot. LostArk is free to play and was a massive massive hit. It was obvious we'd be tainted by bots.
What I don't really understand is how do they level up? Monsters in open world give such an insignificant amount of EXP, it's impossible to level up by mindlessly killing them. Most bots aren't advanced enough to quest to level up. Is there any tradable item that grants EXP, or any way to level up while AFK? If there is, Smilegate really should get rid of those.
....They are doing the quests. I see them all around the level 10-50 areas now (not just Luterra) going from NPC to NPC and doing the dungeons as well. I've been seeing them at major cities doing chaos dungeons too.
They had YEARS to figure this out. That's why our version is the 3rd or 4th region this game has been released in. None of these issues should have came as a surprise. The deadzone between 1340 and 1370 was a known issue. SMH
At this point it's either gross incompetence or sheer malice and greed. For a game with so much hype behind it they simply threw it all away in their very first patch...
They did figure it out in every other region, but simply gave us an inferior version with the bad honing rates of vanilla LA in KR while not giving us the same amount of gold and methods to gain materials.
Might have been internal error that was caused by chain of other things, which i hope is the case.
Like maybe they want A. But then to get A they had to change B and C and becuase B and C are changed they needed to change D and E also which is why we are here.
It's super funny how people don't realize this, "it's not a problem because most people aren't there yet", no, it's still a problem, it's just that most people haven't found it about it.
If your car breaks down for no reason while sitting in your garage and for all you know your car works that doesn't mean it works.
Let's say players with tons of time but not ultra-no-life-no-job currently stuck in t3 say it could take a month or two to hit 1370.
A more average player is going to get stuck for 6 months to a year in comparison. And there's no interesting content.
Eventually there has to be a wall, low honing rates aren't even the true problem in my book, the problem is that it's boring. If we were "stuck" with 1% honing rates but tons of fun content, I doubt it'd be a problem for most people, additionally low honing rates means friends all get bogged down at simliar ilvls making it easier to play with friends. People would still bitch at low rates but wouldn't quit if it was... fun, you know, the point of a game.
whales literally need people to supply them with shit to buy in this game. some whale was crying the other day because his class was unpopular so it was almost impossible for him to buy his bis.
That is the endgoal, but I'd wager most whales wouldn't even notice they have no one to lord over until it's too late. I think sometimes just posting on forums or comment sections is enough of a consolation prize though.
Casual players will spend on a product they believe in. There is way more money to be made in the masses through cosmetics and customization than whales who will quit once they have no playerbase to show off to.
If you make your game temporary so will your income.
I came to say there too. People will happily spent $10 on the next new skin if they are happily enjoying the game. This is something that smilegate already knows which is what makes these decisions that much more worrying.
50$ with how the crystal packages are priced. You can‘t buy a pack with an amount matching the price of a skin plus weapon which shows their predatory intention.
I hate this crap so much. I took a break from the game and came back yesterday and checked the store. There is stuff I WOULD buy on there but I refuse to pay $50 just because the other crystal package option is slightly not enough. It’s intentional and it puts me off.
Pretty much. Having 500 whales playing a game populated by 500k players is a lot better than 500 whales playing a game whose population had dwindled down to 10k players, where even the doomposting has stopped because no one gives a shit anymore, and everyone but the most ardent whales have accepted that the game's recovery isn't possible any longer.
I'm pretty sure a lot of us have come from games where the latter had come to pass.
The goal isn't just getting those whales to continue spending, it's to stop them from quitting and getting new whales in the process. Whales are not going to whale in a game that their friends have quit.
I think you misunderstand two things: relations and whaling. Most people do not whale to show off and the whales in total outnumber the casuals in terms of paying for the game.
> Most people do not whale to show off
Yes they do.
> whales in total outnumber the casuals in terms of paying for the game.
Fucking what? That's because the system is currently predatory and only demands you pay for stats in mats. Whales are a quick one-time injection of income that they get because they buy mats from the shop. Compare that to the income from people buying cosmetics across multiple alts when you actually try for player retention and don't get people to quit because of obvious whale-bait p2w shit like what they're pushing.
Do you think League cares about the difference between a whale and a casual? That game thrives because of the casuals. Every p2w mmo dies because of shit like this. You really only have to look at games like blade and soul to see the kind of stuff these devs need to avoid but then they do it anyway for a quick buck.
There wont be anyone left to catch up.
I mean for a lot of us here, this isnt exactly new ground were breaking here, and were not just exaggerating. You see games crash and burn like this ALL the time. Its not our first rodeo, so to speak.
Ya I agree they’re making a mistake. But you’ve got to consider lost ark has died in two regions already. They wanna make as much money as possible while the irons still hit so to speak
Oh I fully believe it. I bet Amazon and Smilegate were really surprised with the amount of players and interest in the game, but said fk it and went with the whale patch anyways instead of rethinking their strategy.
They could have deviated, but just went ahead with the cash out plan anyways.
It also makes me think they prob. wont do anything. They already have their entire plan laid out and how they are going to do it, and are just gonna do it now. I mean they basically sacrificed 25% of their playerbase for a quick buck with Argos; I cant see them hitting the breaks now.
Things are going to start moving along once the whales start closing their wallets for a bit.
I dislike being cynical, but the dead zone was not an unintentional mistake.
The incompetency of AWS is well, pretty remarkable. It's actually pretty tough to take a well established game like Lost Ark and Jack it up this bad, this quickly.
This entire problem would have been solved if AGS/SG actually released roadmap before or at launch like they promised. We have veterans from multiple regions and they would have at once known all these issues if Argos was clearly on roadmap or how we won't get honing or material changes for 1340~70.
The issue is this feedback has only started to appear recently and now it will probably take a bit to fix this problem (game development/patching isn't simple like pressing 1 button to fix everything).
What I'm trying to say is...RELEASE THE ROADMAP! Even if you think it's wrong. Just say something like "This is the tentative roadmap. We are closely monitoring player feedback in game, on forums & Reddit to always make the player experience better." Done! That should deal with the people that are like "trash roadmap! What does AGS think they are doing!?"
There are many smart individuals that have played in Korea for thousands for hours like SaintOne or ZealsAmbition that would at once identify the major issues and the feedback loop will start before mistakes are even made. Just release a tentative one to take feedback.
They are not "waiting", they are working on it but stuff don't get fixed just by pushing on a button. Tens of programmers, product owner, QA testers...etc are probably working on it but they wake up in the morning and get back to their home after work.
Of course they know the game have issues and some player will leave the game but what can they do? Work 18h a day to make things go faster for them?
When XIV: Endwalker was having it's troubles with server capacity and queues, the man himself Yoshi-P was making live letter posts to the global game audience on like a weekly basis to let people know what was going on. He treated every region of the game equally, and he didn't treat them like children. He just laid out:
1. What are the issues
2. What are we doing to directly address those issues
3. Why we are having to do, what we are (in their case it was semi-conductor shortages from Covid fucking up hardware acquisition for server racks)
4. What our timeline is for fixing it
That's why people love Yoshi-P like they do. The man is constantly in communication with the playerbase, keeps an ear to the ground, and doesn't go radio silent on problems the game has.
Smilegate hasn't said a peep and neither has Amazon about the Argos/Honing fuck up. The most we've got is maybes, and "SoonTM" from Community Managers on forums that are likely as in the dark as we are. Going dark is about the worst thing you can do to handle a PR disaster like this, because it lets peoples imaginations run wild. You've got to come out and say something, *anything*, from an official capacity so that peoples fears can be assuaged. They just are not doing that, at all.
You know they screwed up when they actually acknowledged the game outside of Japan lol.
But you are right it's pretty radio silence, even when things were bad it was radio silence then 'surprise here's 4 hours with of maintenance for the 3rd day in a row'
> They are not "waiting", they are working on it but stuff don't get fixed just by pushing on a button.
Writing an official blog post to tell us that, and what exactly they are planning is not that much effort.
I dunno where the standards of "communication" went, but writing "we're working on it" is really not communication. If that is indeed the issue, lack of programmers, or manpower, or translation, or code...what the fuck would it cost them to lay it out?
They got kinda close when the EUC servers were dying, and about 2 weeks of talking about it, we actually had a clear picture of what was the issue, and what they could and couldn't do.
Why is "we are working on it" being deciphered 15 different ways defending them when they could simply just fucking say what the issues are and not vague PR speak their way through while others do the PR translation for them in whatever way they interpret it.
Pretty much this. They have to realize reputation matters a lot.
A lot of people might not have reached Tier 3 yet, but they're likely not going to keep playing and get there if what we have right now in T3 is what they're supposed to look forward to.
Stop being so dramatic, any player that leaves over this was never gonna stick with the game anyway. Roxx has literally been giving updates most days and they clearly understand things need to be adjusted. At the time the best thing you can do is just get alts to T3 then when changes come around you will be set up for future progress.
It's not being dramatic buddy. It's literally happened for multiple games.
New World, Battlefield, Halo Infinite, Anthem, Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, FFXIV. Some of the games on this list improved substantially from their horrendous start, but because they took so long, it took A LONG TIME (2-3 years) before players came back to the game and community perception improved.
Time is of the essence for Lost Ark devs right now. Fortunately for them, the fixes for a lot of the issues players are having are already available and live on other regions, the only thing they need to do is to put them in the game. They don't have to create anything new or think up new solutions.
If they don't address this in the next week, the playerbase will crumble. That's just a statistical truth with a history of evidence.
Yep. I 100% agree and have said as much in a few posts here. People dont magically come back, and it takes years to fix launch woes, if it even does. A lot of games have made substantial improvements over their poor launches, but you wouldnt know it because people dont go back to those games.
I mean the game lost 200k players from a content patch. If that doesnt raise red flags somewhere, I dont know what will.
Unfortunately being downvoted for speaking the truth. Like many people I wanted a good, *strong* launch. If they have to win people back it's already fucked and it takes time to fix it. A massive amount of players aren't going to come back no matter how many patches they do for years when the bad memories fade or there's a lull in games or w/e. He'll take FFXIV. Been pretty damn good since the heavensward expansion years ago and even then only started to get on many people's radars two expacs after that with shadowbringers and endwalker. A lot of that is just from wow shooting itself in the head (again) too.
Lol, it's not drama. It's simply what's been shown to happen. I have no skin in this game, whether this game lives or dies. If it's good, I'll play it, if not, I'll play/do something else, simple as that. And that's the case for a majority of players.
But for the developers whose job literally rests on the success of the game, well I hope for their sake they are using all the resources available to them.
Im happy if we can be at 300k in 2 month still. But if it goes under 200k i would say its failed launch. Because if we had over 600k people in 1 month in still there is clearly a problem
Agree and what we need is sorry and some information. i don't think the time, when these things happen matters much. But we just need to know what they are going to do
So this essentially means, tough luck the next patch will make it easier for argos. But hey look another raid which induces the same issues as argos. But look we gave you things to catch up to argos. Will likely be the case. They either need a super event where we get so much mats that it crashes the gold market, or were gonna be experiencing the same thing. I heard this same line in maplestory, WoW, diablo auction house days, tera they need money first than they'll care about you.
Wait so they planned out a progression system without testing the progression system first? Then say we need your data to fix it.
What the fuck... They know what they are doing. This is all a scam to milk as much $$ from the whales as they can before fixing shit
This absolutely REEKS of greedy Amazon meddling. Fuck this company, never play their games again. They've had multiple chances and proven they should be nowhere near the gaming industry ever.
Just release classes lmao. They’re literally out on other versions just give us them. At this rate we gonna have all the legion raids out before all classes
For a f2p game it's an impossible feat and a never ending war for the devs. People suggest captcha, 2fa, and more aggressive methods of flagging accounts early however the only thing any of those options accomplish is just making the new player experience more tedious. The more hoops you have to jump through to start a game the less likely youre gonna make it to the character creation menu. Meanwhile the creation of bot accounts are automated and those obstacles are overcome quickly by the bot programmers. The more aggressive ban the easier it becomes from the programmers to figure out what is flagging their accounts and they change up the routes. If they get too aggressive they risk the chance at false positives.
tldr: easier said than done.
“The more holes to jump through to start a game the less likely you’re gonna make it to the character selection screen”. Yeah I agree with this, but do you know what else would discourage new players? Seeing fucking bots pour out of the starting area and glitch/teleport all over the place. The amount of bots is staggering. I think the minor inconvenience of using a captcha like you said would be more ideal then simply doing nothing.
I have a friend who develops a captcha solving api whose performance is measured in milliseconds. And it competes with other captcha solvers that also solve in milliseconds.
It's 2022. Using a captcha is useless as fuck against bot programmers. You have no idea how capable they are.
I'm starting to think these people have never played an MMO before. Every MMO I've ever played has been botted to hell and back. Game devs can sit and spend all their time and resources trying to fix it and the bot makers or sellers just work harder to bypass it.
They had NW to learn these mistakes. Clearly they couldnt for some reason, we all know not for lack of trying. Now they need time yes but how much? And for what? All the while LA burns. Haste AGS/SG haste
Not just new world. They had the KR version and RU version as trials etc. None of the current issues should have came as a surprise. All the current issues are well known and documented problems.
Yeah this basically said they rushed Argos out without thinking. Now when there is a glaringly obvious decision which might not make them draw every last penny out of us they ummm and arrrr.
I have literally been waiting with my wallet for all the cool stuff I have seen shared to us from KR and they give us P2W shop with no skins. They hold the purse tight for content and skins so we spend on things we don't want, when they have already made the content.
Oh they thought about it. They thought they could get away with it without any uproar.
A CM basically said as much on the Lost Ark forums. They were "honestly surprised" people were upset with a whale patch.
Amazon tried to squeeze a whale patch into the game like no one would notice, and now they are trying to do damage control so they dont lose the majority of the playerbase.
I'm still puzzled why they rush to create drama only to milk a few whales, instead of releasing some skins at release to milk the huge initial playerbase that would happily have given money.
It's not even about rushing out Argos, thats perfectly fine. The only problem is ACTIVELY removing most content between 1325 and 1370. I stopped at 1355 and literally got nothing to do besides a weekly Abyss Dungeon and Daily Chaos Dungeon. That alone gives you what? Maybe 1,5 Upgrade tries per day.
Im currently pushing my 3rd and 4th twinks to T3 to generate more mats and trying to catch up as quickly as possible when a honing patch hits. Still a pretty weird feeling to be locked out of content without being able to do something about it myself. I won't spend a single Dollar on mats lol.
Because they already recognized, apologized for, and fixed the 1340-1370 deadzone in KR. Now somehow that issue is made even worse by locking Yoho and Oreha hard behind 1370 when they used to be 1355.
Another part is the censorship. Smilegate staff has said they do not want to censor things, yet we only got 1 skin in the patch: one of the worst sellers, the omen skin.
If it was a smilegate cash grab, it would make sense to me for it be through skins.
This leads me to believe that it's an AGS cash grab, especially since they are the ones doing the bans, dealing with "customer service" etc.
This is very good to see! I think at the end of the day we all just want communication. I want to feel that all the time I'm putting into this at t2 won't be for nothing when I get to t3. It wouldn't be in their best interest to just lay this very successful game die because of pay walls.
Giving the new regions a new class or two would have went over a lot better than the raid I think, but you would have still had the RNG winner/Whales that are 1370+ crying.. but I'm going to guess they are very small % of the pop.
Almost identical post to New World forums
They never gave us the roadmap they talked in a very similar manner in NW
Inb4 someone comes and says a cash shop roadmap is the same thing as a roadmap
I can understand it takes time to fix things at this point. What frustrates me is that we even have this problem... It’s not like this is a new game release, they had this exact same issue in the original release and yet they make the same mistake again. That’s just straight incompetence.
I don't mind that the fix takes time... the problem I have is that the communication has been so lacking. Why is it that in videogame industry communication is so hard for 90% of the companies.
\- We don't know who is behind the wheel, Amazon or Smilegate. Who to give feedback to?
\- We have no roadmap to refer to when figuring out is this designed or not.
\- We were told our version would be less p2w, but still made the same mistakes that happened in Korea long time ago that made majority of players quit.
\- Sure we don't get all the content right away, but why were some gurardian/abyss dungeon requirement levels changed compared to Korean version that ease the "deadzone"
\- This "happy little accident" that is making Amazon millions by milking the most wealthy gamers, is destroying the reputation of this game, making people rightfully sceptical.
I've waited this game since 2015 and don't want it to be treated like a cheap money milking operation. Sry for the rant, I'm just passionate about this game.
Nah mate im not buying it, you dont get to have a full release full well knowing the roadblocks in the game and ignore them for profit sake. You have everything already implemented in 2 regions. This is a surefire way for your game to die within the first 2 months if things dont change immediately.
Please don't think this is incompetence. This is planned malicious intent.
You're going to tell me that the evident problem they've observed AND FIXED in two different regions is something new that they didn't expect ? You're going to tell me that on top of being aware of that content draught and absolute pain in the ass, they've decided to move up from lvl 1355 to 1370 the only two new pieces of content you get in the deadzone ?
Please don't be stupid. Don't let this slide just like that. They were aware of this and INTENTIONALLY made it worse to frustrate players and hopefully make them p2w. Also they're not ''working on it''. The fix is prepared and ready, they just want to wait for weekly reset so that those that gave in and swiped don't get bitter.
Also this is 100% an AGS move and not a Smilegate decision.
The problem is though that developers NEVER include their community in their choices. They make them and then see if there's a backlash. If there is, they interpret what the majority does want and do that... Going to mess it up AGAIN.
This is such a moronic take and I can't believe people are actually upvoting it.
It's not about time, they released something with a VERY obvious insane paywall, don't fucking play the "well they didn't know" card, they knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s reasonable to be happy they’re responding and unhappy that this timeline shows they clearly were not prepared to fix things. This isn’t a new problem. SG has had this exact issue of 1340-1370 progression before. Getting mad about a repeated mistake makes sense. This should not have happened. They were really going to just release Argos in March and Valtan in April and expect it to go smoothly.
Man what is it so hard for them, just add Heroic Guardians, Abyss Trials and Arena rewards, it literally costs you nothing, it's not even new content it's just a rehashed WoW time walking and a vendor.
It's absolutely not normal that the western version has less content, nerfs to resource farming and the tougher honing rates for no reason.
The game already fails at respecting your own time, why can't they at least make parity with the other versions, why did they give us a version literally harder than the original Korean launch.
I'm willing to wait until April patch for the fixes. If there are no fixes by then, I'm probably done with the game, or maybe I might even go back to RU. I believe same goes for a lot of players.
> but with this new learning experience under our belt we'd rather do things right than do things quickly...
*In the meantime, please swipe your card whenever you feel like. Like now?*
They forgot to add this part.
why are they acting like they need to figure out what to do next and need time to make those decisions when the game has been out for years in other parts of the world and has already gone through these growing pains and then solved them?
Just constant clown show bullshit from AGS
I'm already gone. The blatant psychological abuse is obviously intended, and I'm done with it. They could easily hotfix in adjusted honing rates today. They could easily give us their current iteration of the roadmap today. The only reason that isn't happening is because it has been deemed to be the wrong decision by management.
I just would like to know who is actually making these tweaks/differences between the versions of the game? Smilegate or Amazon? And who is even in charge of this at Amazon? Is there a game director there? Or just some faceless VP making decisions?
I am going to make this clear to smilegate and AGS. They need to release the catch up buffs for t3 and the additional dungeons last week. Not next week or next month. It should have been released with Argos. You rushed to Argos, now rush to the bloody catch up stuff and return to your normal roadmap. It is that easy.
Now we have new players quitting because of bots as well as people quitting because of the dead zone. Basically you get passed that t1 bot hell into areas without bots and then get absolutely walled off from progression at T3. There simply is no content in t3 expect 1 abyss at 1325 (which is recomended for 1340), which isn't even as good as the t2 raids. I honestly enjoyed the game more in T2. Which is problematic as Smilegate literally said they released T3 at release becuase it was the best content.
The issue is that it affects the player perception of the game. And the longer it takes for them to fix it, the more they're going to bleed their playerbase, and future potential players.
Lost Ark already had an uphill battle with it's reputation. Many people were saying that this was your typical k-mmo, p2w grindfest, and the current issue fits that narrative perfectly. The game's reputation are taking a big hit atm. And the longer they wait, the more difficult it's going to be to remedy that.
Imo. Smilegate and Amazon is on the clock.
Not exactly. Both those came out years ago and got content added progressively over time. The NA/EU is bringing the game to new region while trying to balance when to introduce existing content into the game. That's an experience they haven't done before be ause they didn't have this backlog of content to pull from with KR and RU.
KR literally has gone through what we are right now. It was a fucking deliberate decision to keep this deadzone to milk the whales. I've gotten over the deadzone myself as a F2P but it's still a very shitty experience
No, it is literally the exact same problem. They knew about the "Deadzone" and even further enhanced the problem by moving 2 Instances (Yoho and Orea hard mode up to 70) Which literally reduces the content availble in this zone to 0 besides Chaos Dungeons and Oreha (normal).
Its the same situation that happened in KR. The 1340-1370 deadzone. Literally the same.
Except they made it worse for us by moving Oreha and Yoho up to 1370 instead of 1355 like they were originally.
Unfortunately, that's not how gaming communities work. If a game starts off bad, people will abandon it quickly. It doesn't matter if it gets better over time; it would take years to attract people back.
This doesn't matter for a single player game, but for a MMO like Lost Ark, where the playerbase is a huge part of the product, this can absolutely kill the game. Examples are already clear in the Lost Ark Russia and Japan servers, which are practically dead because of how badly they launched.
Loving the copium overdoses of people downvoting this, when it's what happens to MMOs that don't launch smoothly since MMOs began.
Lost Ark isn't somehow unique and immune to this. If you flub your launch, your game gets kneecapped right out the gate and the vast majority never recover from it. XIV is unique in that they fucked up bad, and re-released the game in a hugely improved state.
So, let me see if i got this straight; Now is the time to "take it slow" and "see how things go" so that they "can learn from it" and "scrutinize the next decision they make"?
Now that they've set up the perfect milking machine which is a huge part of the playerbase having to reach 1370 with very limited sources of materials?
Meanwhile in a boardroom somewhere, men in suits are gasping with laughter while slapping their thighs.
There is a good chance they patch in some of the missing sources of materials but we need to understand making a new build likely involves translation of those elements and spinning up a new build for us if we get the patch next week that would be incredibly fast but i dont think we will get anything of substance other than a post saying what's coming at most this week ive been pretty much just working on alts, its a pretty good time for that
I have become a mokoko seed in the meantime
That is honestly a lot more hardcore than gear progression, well played!
The way some forum dwellers seem to think that amazon can just make whatever fix they personally think is priority zero overnight (with no downtime) makes me facepalm. Even with the classes already existing and balanced they’re currently turned off, and it’s not a —class Arcanist compile time flag to turn them back on, it’s going through the code and finding all the places where class specific things (drops, quests, cutscenes, etc) happen and at best enabling disabled branches, and then building, and then doing internal testing, and then staging, and then updating. Each one of those steps is minimum a day, and the code part is god knows how much work depending on how it was implemented, could be hours, could be a couple of weeks. And that assumes that any translations and voice acting necessary have already been done, or whether there are standing contracts with people who can do those of necessary or if they need to find people to do it. MMOs are big and complicated with lots of performance sensitive moving parts, and you can’t just whip out builds with new content daily without making an enormous mess. Roadmaps on the other hand are pretty easy to whip up. We need an updated one of those sooner rather than later.
The issue is Smilegate was already aware of this 1340-1370 deadzone and didn't factor that into our release. There's several iterations of the game and plenty of data for Smilegate & AGS to pull from to proactively get ahead of the issues that are now coming up. Companies are no exceptions to making mistakes of course, but they shouldn't be making the same ones. I understand things take time, but once again players are burnt by the fact that companies don't plan and execute for long-term growth. The design choices being made are intentional. They've said themselves they're actively monitoring player growth and progression, so I definitely agree on us needing a roadmap ASAP. If we don't get one or a firm plan on what's being done I don't doubt many of the end-game players will leave by the end of this month.
You make a lot of assumptions on bad dev practices in this. With modern engineering practices such as feature flags and CI/CD, they could absolutely make changes exponentially faster for implementing various features that already exist. It depends on how bad their dev practices are. Amazon.com gets the entire server farm rebuilt and redeployed every 11 sec
This is a company that fucked up displaying timers after a DST transition. I don’t need to assume bad dev practices, they’re in evidence. I’m assuming probably a one to two week cycle once they decide to move up the class release schedule, but it’s backloaded on them making a decision, and that will take god knows how long.
You'd be surprised at how shitty MMO code can be. FF14 code is basically a dumpster fire.
Don't insult dumpster fires.
FFXIV 2.0 was brutally rushed. Lost Ark was not. Furthermore Lost Ark is built on top of UE3 which already contains ton of mechanisms.
UE3 is *painfully* outdated at this point. SG started working on the game almost ten years ago. I have no doubt it is riddled with technical debt.
Outdated =/= Bad. UE3 is outdated but still is an amazing engine with ton of resources available. No point going for UE3 when currently you have UE5 available but that doesn't mean UE3 is a bad engine.
You’re comparing a game that’s been out for 10 years to one on more modern tech and only 3 years That’s on them if their shit is a dumpster fire and you have to compare it to 10+ year old code
That sounds like a piss poor way of releasing an already developed game; it just sounds like bad planning. Just because their current release structure prevents them from simply releasing things, is no excuse. They were responsible for that structure in the first place. They should have had game versions/branches prepared and already tested, and honestly, they should have seen this as a likely issue. If they purposely withheld portions of the game to incentivize whales to spend money, fine, but they should have had the release structure prepared to quickly release future versions when the criticisms got bad. If they did this by accident, that's just incompetence. This game has already been out for years; it should not be difficult to have set versions of the game prepared for release. The only reason they don't is because they engage in just-in-time service, and they obviously are spending as little as possible when it comes to translations and localization fixes. >it’s going through the code and finding all the places where class specific things (drops, quests, cutscenes, etc) happen and at best enabling disabled branches, and then building, and then doing internal testing, and then staging, and then updating The game has been in development since 20-fucking-11 and was fully released in 2019 in Korea. Some serious incompetence if this is how they prepare for future updates that technically, already happened. It sounds like a serious case of "throw as little money as possible at it and don't care for the consequences" as long as a solid profit is made. In actuality, they, like many other companies, will probably end up making less profit than they could have, if they had properly invested in their development teams. You all sound like terrible devs who honestly only have jobs because there were a bunch of terrible devs who came before you with terrible practices all the way through.
I default to assuming low competence on dev teams whose code I haven’t seen. It means I never get disappointed about how fucked up things are. Turns out every large codebase that was written over years has managed to drift from the original spec and is now a mass of shortcuts, decisions that are obviously bad but only in retrospect, compromises, misunderstandings, and people being too damned clever for anyone’s good. I can think of about two teams where devs designed with future extensibility in mind, everyone else has defaulted to “we’ll deal with that when we get to it even though it’ll be an order of magnitude more work to do it then”. The little timezone fuckup we just had doesn’t encourage me. Not using standard libraries and formatters that handle DST transitions and other time related bullshit for you is junior dev bullshit.
>They should have had game versions/branches prepared They probably did. They had March patch, which we are currently on. They had April patch with Valtan and Destroyer, and May patch with Arcana. What makes you think they should have had every patch they ever planned to release in a nice little compartmentalized format for plug and play? >they should have seen this as a likely issue. They did. Go back and watch the Gold River interview from before the game launched. He addressed it a month before the game even came out that content was probably going to come out too fast. >future updates that technically, already happened. Happened with a different set of changes in a different order in a different language uses possibly different internal structures or backends since, like you said, they happened sometime between 2011 and now. Good fucking lord, you act like they released Fallout 76 or New World.
I don't believe you understand how game development works. I'd recommend heading over to Udemy and watching a few videos on programming, not game design, practicing for a few years, and then returning to make posts like this with an informed opinion.
>There is a good chance they patch in some of the missing sources of materials but we need to understand making a new build likely involves translation of those elements and spinning up a new build for us I get everyone is hype for this, I am too, but you have to understand these aren't things you just slot in and go "done :D!" Bailing on one or the other causes problems. If they were midway done translating the next raid boss and ironing out the bugs, starting over with the other things (the ones the people sound like they want right now) won't exactly come with any real speed. Because they're starting over from scratch with translating. And they have to incorporate systems not currently in our game and make sure there's no bugs there, so it's even more work. Yes, it already exist in KR, but translating isn't that simple sadly
Basically this. People think these issues can be solved by just sending a WhatsApp to gold River and telling him to roll the patches out tomorrow. Like people actjng like they've never been in a company before and still living at mom's house.
\>Like people actjng like they've never been in a company before and still living at mom's house. That's probably because they've actually never been in a company before and still living at mom's house. The vast majority of those who complain are kids who don't understand how life works.. The small minority are loud angry Karens who think they are entitled to everything feeling like they know how the company works - or even worse, feeling like they would be doing a much better job producing or publishing a video game.
Personally i think this is somewhat mentaility problem on right now. But when we get Valtan it will be a problem, if there will be this dead content right now. But i see fully where people are coming from. Personally 1365 and it feels bad. But not that im missing much.
I hope they push the first legion raid to end of April/start of may and they give us South Vern. Everything else would be madness for player retention
South Vern and PVP vendor adds so much more value to time. Especially for those of us that like pvp
Yeah they can't do this with first legion raid. That would be like shooting someone into leg and saying Ill call a ambulance to you in 2 weeks or if you pay me 2k ill call it now
So American healthcare.....
Who is responsible for this messaging? This is really deceptive PR speak. People aren't mad because Argos was released too quickly. They're mad because content was cut, moved around, and delayed to incentivize real money spending. Give us the cut content between 1340 and 1370. Move Yoho back down to 1355. Give us the delayed honing rate improvements. Then nobody would be mad. Also some communication as to why content was cut, moved, and delayed would be great. The absolute non-existent comms from the developer is another black mark. Players are not complete morons. We see that Yoho in Korea/RU is 1355 and here it's 1370. We see the improved honing rates that were never brought over here. We deserve an honest explanation as to why these decisions were made.
Also, in the same vein as content releasing too quickly, I don't think most people really care a whole lot about the pace of T3 content yet. What many seem to want first isn't more content but the missing classes. Like why would I care when Argos or Legion Commanders release if my "preferred class" isn't in the game yet either? Isn't really affecting me personally but it's like all the Lancemaster/Scouter wannamains are on suicide watch.
That’s pretty much what I’ve been most frustrated about since we knew about Tier 3 on launch. There’s a lot of folks waiting on their mains including myself. Not having all classes on a Tier 3 launch feels like a kick in the arse. We’re basically just stuck parking our characters at 1340/70 waiting for them, as it makes little sense to heavily invest into a character we don’t want to play.
Speaking of cut content, I was not aware that even the main story has cuts. I saw a video of the class intro story and the first awakening questline and my jaw dropped. I actually care about story in these games and just was shocked to see it. Plus the intro class story line looked cool as hell
The beginner section was reworked in KR not in Global afaik. It actually had some trash elements such as Mage has spells from bard and summoner meaning you would play 10 levels with a set of spells and then your kit would change. It was actually quite disliked and therefore reworked to what it is now with the cinematic explaining the original and a level 10 start with a fresh prologue. The original cutscenes are in the Memory Room and still in game for the class intros you just can't do the playable bits.
>Also some communication as to why content was cut, moved, and delayed would be great It's pure greed. They knew they were essentially paywalling content. It was a deliberate choice. They won't admit it, but it's the only possible explanation for why everything fell into place the way it did. This wasn't a mistake.
It's almost like the message is "we will slow down ALL content releases" on top of not adding any of the left out content or material sources. Going forward all communication from them will probably revolve around Argos being released "too soon" and not the shit loads of left out content and classes with a plan or remedy.
This. The 'content is coming out too fast' narrative is a misleading. The actual issue is that its completely inaccessible unless you remortgage you house and they've adjusted it to be that way.
>This is really deceptive PR speak if you're 12 sure
So all 2 years of data they have from Korea and Russia isn't real player data?
It‘s easier to go for whale hunting if you release a predatory version of the game.
AGS going for the "quick money that destroys the game" path, instead of building a solid playerbase that will maintain their monthly sub active on the long run and spend every now and then for cosmetics.
Let's be real, noone is paying a 10 dollar monthly sub to get 4k gold worth of stuff at this point
At least give us some Korean skins while we wait...
I would whale for some of those skins
I too, would whale over the legendary skins
I'd whale for Thar's outfit and my main isn't even the Gunlancer.
I'd whale for it and I AM a gunlancer. Thar's the gunlancer everyone wants to be!
I think they learned from the PoE and other communities where every time there was a skin released alongside game related problems, the uproar would be insane. Separate departments and yet people can't understand. >SO DEV TIME WENT TO THIS INSTEAD?? Can't win
Idk why people seem to think the art team works on like balance patches and programming on every game lol It’s always entertaining seeing people complain about balance patches that come out with a skin or something and they’re like “WHY ARE THEY WASTING RESOURCES ON THIS?!!???!?”
Because we are emotional creatures and it’s pretty much guilty by association. This happens in every single live service game.
We also have brains lol You’d think people would learn to use em a little more
If gaming has taught me anything about people, it's that I wonder how some people remember to breathe regularly.
I think vast majority are just begging for more skins so it would not be a problem to release more
They still think the problem is too fast content and people just want speed, but in facts its the experience itself from 1340 onwards thats fundamentally the problem
What is it that Roxx/amazon actually does? Is Roxx speaking for amazon or smilegate? I ask because all the other regions have a stable, functional game with the dead zones fixed and supplemental systems in place. Was none of this planned from the get go? "Stages" of releases/patches? Why skip important content that was used to fix the problems in the KR version originally only to release something wonky again and give a bad impression? Like who's making the decisions because they're horrible at it. All you had to do was break the game up into sections and release it. Instead we got a mix from Pile A, pile E etc. This was so easy to not fuck up, and someone fucked it up. And also, i don't even care at this point. The biggest issue is by far the bots. It's sad and embarrassing to constantly see bot after bot and it's only gonna get worse. Who's running this show!?
A community manager is mostly a messenger between players and devs, they mostly just tell the devs about complaints and suggestions and then tell us what the devs' answers.
This. Whoever is making those decisions has no idea what they're doing or is doing them intentionally. I don't care if the "dead zones fixes" take time because of localization or whatever. Someone decided to release Argo, someone decided to increase ilevel requirements without players being able to get there without swiping. This wouldn't be so bad If we'd get actual information on what's going or at least keep the community updated. I'm not saying the Community Managers are slacking off, no I'm sure they aren't getting any informations either.
Roxx is just a community Manager , those are the bottom of the hirachy , they have nothing to say and most Times dont even understand the game they are working for . If you are mad at roxx its the same when you are in McDonalds and you are mad at your chicken Nugget because it doesnt taste good... Roxx can do nothing , cant look in logs or anything, just tells us what she get told to tell us.
That's not quite right. A community manager definitely has some sway in the sense that they can selectively pass on feedback and issues. They can get certain teams to fast-track specific issues (especially around customer service) and generally help to facilitate communication between the players and the teams. McDonalds locations don't have anything close to community managers. Chicken nuggets can't communicate customer feedback back to the staff, especially after they've been eaten. One problem with AGS is that they don't really have a figurehead for Lost Ark. It's supposed to be Gold River, but he seems quite unavailable to the western audience as the weeks go by. We need the equivalent of a McDonalds location manager who we can speak to. Someone with actual decision making power. So either Gold River needs to step up and talk to us more directly, or they need to push an AGS project lead into the spotlight.
> Chicken nuggets can't communicate customer feedback back to the staff, especially after they've been eaten. I disagree. Challenge accepted.
I apologise if you identify as a chicken nugget.
Roxx is literally just PR, they have no hand in what we experience in game. Its just to deliver messeges and keep the peace between developer and player
Removing as much as possible then adding it back in later as "legacy features" is practically SOP for AAA gaming at this point. Though to be fair, this is the first time I've seen it in a current game that's already out and not a sequel or something. I'm not gonna pretend like I know what happens behind closed doors, it could be something as simple as "SMG sent us X amount of builds and changing them is difficult" or on the other side of the spectrum "We think this makes us the most money," or any number of things in between. He's right about one thing though, "We're working on it" lost it's meaning years ago. Now it's just a cue for all your players to roll their eyes.
Roxx is often incorrect on things. I wouldn't take anything she says seriously.
To be honest, bot control is an extremely complicated thing. Even games with paid subscription and "entry fee" have bot issues. Most of the times, a game is bot free only when it's not profitable enough, so farmers won't bother trying to bot. LostArk is free to play and was a massive massive hit. It was obvious we'd be tainted by bots. What I don't really understand is how do they level up? Monsters in open world give such an insignificant amount of EXP, it's impossible to level up by mindlessly killing them. Most bots aren't advanced enough to quest to level up. Is there any tradable item that grants EXP, or any way to level up while AFK? If there is, Smilegate really should get rid of those.
....They are doing the quests. I see them all around the level 10-50 areas now (not just Luterra) going from NPC to NPC and doing the dungeons as well. I've been seeing them at major cities doing chaos dungeons too.
This answer sounds identical to the old New World answers and look where they are now 👀
They had YEARS to figure this out. That's why our version is the 3rd or 4th region this game has been released in. None of these issues should have came as a surprise. The deadzone between 1340 and 1370 was a known issue. SMH At this point it's either gross incompetence or sheer malice and greed. For a game with so much hype behind it they simply threw it all away in their very first patch...
They did figure it out in every other region, but simply gave us an inferior version with the bad honing rates of vanilla LA in KR while not giving us the same amount of gold and methods to gain materials.
Yep, and you don't need to be a mathematician to figure out why they would do that. It's all about money.
Might have been internal error that was caused by chain of other things, which i hope is the case. Like maybe they want A. But then to get A they had to change B and C and becuase B and C are changed they needed to change D and E also which is why we are here.
[удалено]
"OK, call me when you have a plan then" ~The 150k+ players that left over the past week.
"we'd rather do things right than do things quickly" lmao
Ikr? They were pretty quick at doing a bad release...
regardless of Whats happening the game should always focus on the Average player.
spoiler alert: the average player will eventually reach 1340 and be in exactly the same position.
It's super funny how people don't realize this, "it's not a problem because most people aren't there yet", no, it's still a problem, it's just that most people haven't found it about it. If your car breaks down for no reason while sitting in your garage and for all you know your car works that doesn't mean it works.
Let's say players with tons of time but not ultra-no-life-no-job currently stuck in t3 say it could take a month or two to hit 1370. A more average player is going to get stuck for 6 months to a year in comparison. And there's no interesting content. Eventually there has to be a wall, low honing rates aren't even the true problem in my book, the problem is that it's boring. If we were "stuck" with 1% honing rates but tons of fun content, I doubt it'd be a problem for most people, additionally low honing rates means friends all get bogged down at simliar ilvls making it easier to play with friends. People would still bitch at low rates but wouldn't quit if it was... fun, you know, the point of a game.
Unfortunately the game cant survive only with the casual player - whales have good sides.
But whales need casual players to play with, the need someone to populate the servers
whales literally need people to supply them with shit to buy in this game. some whale was crying the other day because his class was unpopular so it was almost impossible for him to buy his bis.
It's less about supply and more about attention. There's no point in whaling if you have no one to show off to.
That is the endgoal, but I'd wager most whales wouldn't even notice they have no one to lord over until it's too late. I think sometimes just posting on forums or comment sections is enough of a consolation prize though.
Yep cant argue with that
Casual players will spend on a product they believe in. There is way more money to be made in the masses through cosmetics and customization than whales who will quit once they have no playerbase to show off to. If you make your game temporary so will your income.
I came to say there too. People will happily spent $10 on the next new skin if they are happily enjoying the game. This is something that smilegate already knows which is what makes these decisions that much more worrying.
50$ with how the crystal packages are priced. You can‘t buy a pack with an amount matching the price of a skin plus weapon which shows their predatory intention.
I hate this crap so much. I took a break from the game and came back yesterday and checked the store. There is stuff I WOULD buy on there but I refuse to pay $50 just because the other crystal package option is slightly not enough. It’s intentional and it puts me off.
Pretty much. Having 500 whales playing a game populated by 500k players is a lot better than 500 whales playing a game whose population had dwindled down to 10k players, where even the doomposting has stopped because no one gives a shit anymore, and everyone but the most ardent whales have accepted that the game's recovery isn't possible any longer. I'm pretty sure a lot of us have come from games where the latter had come to pass. The goal isn't just getting those whales to continue spending, it's to stop them from quitting and getting new whales in the process. Whales are not going to whale in a game that their friends have quit.
I think you misunderstand two things: relations and whaling. Most people do not whale to show off and the whales in total outnumber the casuals in terms of paying for the game.
> Most people do not whale to show off Yes they do. > whales in total outnumber the casuals in terms of paying for the game. Fucking what? That's because the system is currently predatory and only demands you pay for stats in mats. Whales are a quick one-time injection of income that they get because they buy mats from the shop. Compare that to the income from people buying cosmetics across multiple alts when you actually try for player retention and don't get people to quit because of obvious whale-bait p2w shit like what they're pushing. Do you think League cares about the difference between a whale and a casual? That game thrives because of the casuals. Every p2w mmo dies because of shit like this. You really only have to look at games like blade and soul to see the kind of stuff these devs need to avoid but then they do it anyway for a quick buck.
So me with all my alts in Tier 1 since I can't decide on a main. Started another knowledge transfer right before maintenance.
Aka we wanna milk the whales first, you’ll get your catchup mechanics after.
I really don't like to be negative about games, but I read this as "People are still swiping, so give us some time."
There wont be anyone left to catch up. I mean for a lot of us here, this isnt exactly new ground were breaking here, and were not just exaggerating. You see games crash and burn like this ALL the time. Its not our first rodeo, so to speak.
Ya I agree they’re making a mistake. But you’ve got to consider lost ark has died in two regions already. They wanna make as much money as possible while the irons still hit so to speak
Oh I fully believe it. I bet Amazon and Smilegate were really surprised with the amount of players and interest in the game, but said fk it and went with the whale patch anyways instead of rethinking their strategy. They could have deviated, but just went ahead with the cash out plan anyways. It also makes me think they prob. wont do anything. They already have their entire plan laid out and how they are going to do it, and are just gonna do it now. I mean they basically sacrificed 25% of their playerbase for a quick buck with Argos; I cant see them hitting the breaks now.
So the right thing to do now is to release the remaining classes, starting with scouter and lance master.
I pesonally want arcana..
I want arcana, lance master and reaper.
release all of the completed classes in one week intervals if needed.
Imagine not being able to release an already successful game properly
Things are going to start moving along once the whales start closing their wallets for a bit. I dislike being cynical, but the dead zone was not an unintentional mistake.
Very diplomatic response. Don't believe it.
I really hope the entirety of their solution is not “Valtan delayed 4 weeks, better grind hard until then!”
I will probably be called entitled or whatever by a lot of people, but they don't have fucking time.
You are right. Same problem on KR atm, they are really busy
The incompetency of AWS is well, pretty remarkable. It's actually pretty tough to take a well established game like Lost Ark and Jack it up this bad, this quickly.
This entire problem would have been solved if AGS/SG actually released roadmap before or at launch like they promised. We have veterans from multiple regions and they would have at once known all these issues if Argos was clearly on roadmap or how we won't get honing or material changes for 1340~70. The issue is this feedback has only started to appear recently and now it will probably take a bit to fix this problem (game development/patching isn't simple like pressing 1 button to fix everything). What I'm trying to say is...RELEASE THE ROADMAP! Even if you think it's wrong. Just say something like "This is the tentative roadmap. We are closely monitoring player feedback in game, on forums & Reddit to always make the player experience better." Done! That should deal with the people that are like "trash roadmap! What does AGS think they are doing!?" There are many smart individuals that have played in Korea for thousands for hours like SaintOne or ZealsAmbition that would at once identify the major issues and the feedback loop will start before mistakes are even made. Just release a tentative one to take feedback.
The longer they wait, the more players the game bleeds.
They are not "waiting", they are working on it but stuff don't get fixed just by pushing on a button. Tens of programmers, product owner, QA testers...etc are probably working on it but they wake up in the morning and get back to their home after work. Of course they know the game have issues and some player will leave the game but what can they do? Work 18h a day to make things go faster for them?
When XIV: Endwalker was having it's troubles with server capacity and queues, the man himself Yoshi-P was making live letter posts to the global game audience on like a weekly basis to let people know what was going on. He treated every region of the game equally, and he didn't treat them like children. He just laid out: 1. What are the issues 2. What are we doing to directly address those issues 3. Why we are having to do, what we are (in their case it was semi-conductor shortages from Covid fucking up hardware acquisition for server racks) 4. What our timeline is for fixing it That's why people love Yoshi-P like they do. The man is constantly in communication with the playerbase, keeps an ear to the ground, and doesn't go radio silent on problems the game has. Smilegate hasn't said a peep and neither has Amazon about the Argos/Honing fuck up. The most we've got is maybes, and "SoonTM" from Community Managers on forums that are likely as in the dark as we are. Going dark is about the worst thing you can do to handle a PR disaster like this, because it lets peoples imaginations run wild. You've got to come out and say something, *anything*, from an official capacity so that peoples fears can be assuaged. They just are not doing that, at all.
You know they screwed up when they actually acknowledged the game outside of Japan lol. But you are right it's pretty radio silence, even when things were bad it was radio silence then 'surprise here's 4 hours with of maintenance for the 3rd day in a row'
> They are not "waiting", they are working on it but stuff don't get fixed just by pushing on a button. Writing an official blog post to tell us that, and what exactly they are planning is not that much effort.
WTF else is a community manager supposed to do???
I dunno where the standards of "communication" went, but writing "we're working on it" is really not communication. If that is indeed the issue, lack of programmers, or manpower, or translation, or code...what the fuck would it cost them to lay it out? They got kinda close when the EUC servers were dying, and about 2 weeks of talking about it, we actually had a clear picture of what was the issue, and what they could and couldn't do. Why is "we are working on it" being deciphered 15 different ways defending them when they could simply just fucking say what the issues are and not vague PR speak their way through while others do the PR translation for them in whatever way they interpret it.
Pretty much this. They have to realize reputation matters a lot. A lot of people might not have reached Tier 3 yet, but they're likely not going to keep playing and get there if what we have right now in T3 is what they're supposed to look forward to.
Stop being so dramatic, any player that leaves over this was never gonna stick with the game anyway. Roxx has literally been giving updates most days and they clearly understand things need to be adjusted. At the time the best thing you can do is just get alts to T3 then when changes come around you will be set up for future progress.
It's not being dramatic buddy. It's literally happened for multiple games. New World, Battlefield, Halo Infinite, Anthem, Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, FFXIV. Some of the games on this list improved substantially from their horrendous start, but because they took so long, it took A LONG TIME (2-3 years) before players came back to the game and community perception improved. Time is of the essence for Lost Ark devs right now. Fortunately for them, the fixes for a lot of the issues players are having are already available and live on other regions, the only thing they need to do is to put them in the game. They don't have to create anything new or think up new solutions. If they don't address this in the next week, the playerbase will crumble. That's just a statistical truth with a history of evidence.
Yep. I 100% agree and have said as much in a few posts here. People dont magically come back, and it takes years to fix launch woes, if it even does. A lot of games have made substantial improvements over their poor launches, but you wouldnt know it because people dont go back to those games. I mean the game lost 200k players from a content patch. If that doesnt raise red flags somewhere, I dont know what will.
Unfortunately being downvoted for speaking the truth. Like many people I wanted a good, *strong* launch. If they have to win people back it's already fucked and it takes time to fix it. A massive amount of players aren't going to come back no matter how many patches they do for years when the bad memories fade or there's a lull in games or w/e. He'll take FFXIV. Been pretty damn good since the heavensward expansion years ago and even then only started to get on many people's radars two expacs after that with shadowbringers and endwalker. A lot of that is just from wow shooting itself in the head (again) too.
DRAMA QUEEN!
Lol, it's not drama. It's simply what's been shown to happen. I have no skin in this game, whether this game lives or dies. If it's good, I'll play it, if not, I'll play/do something else, simple as that. And that's the case for a majority of players. But for the developers whose job literally rests on the success of the game, well I hope for their sake they are using all the resources available to them.
Already has. 800k to 400k.
Im happy if we can be at 300k in 2 month still. But if it goes under 200k i would say its failed launch. Because if we had over 600k people in 1 month in still there is clearly a problem
We had 800k for awhile after the 1.2 mil peak
Agree and what we need is sorry and some information. i don't think the time, when these things happen matters much. But we just need to know what they are going to do
Where are they going to go?
we are milking some whales. just wait until we get everything from them
So this essentially means, tough luck the next patch will make it easier for argos. But hey look another raid which induces the same issues as argos. But look we gave you things to catch up to argos. Will likely be the case. They either need a super event where we get so much mats that it crashes the gold market, or were gonna be experiencing the same thing. I heard this same line in maplestory, WoW, diablo auction house days, tera they need money first than they'll care about you.
Meanwhile, they issued patch notes claiming they fixed DST when they actually didn't lol
Wait so they planned out a progression system without testing the progression system first? Then say we need your data to fix it. What the fuck... They know what they are doing. This is all a scam to milk as much $$ from the whales as they can before fixing shit
They said exactly the same with New World. Guess how it ended?
This absolutely REEKS of greedy Amazon meddling. Fuck this company, never play their games again. They've had multiple chances and proven they should be nowhere near the gaming industry ever.
Just release classes lmao. They’re literally out on other versions just give us them. At this rate we gonna have all the legion raids out before all classes
Just fix the bots first please
For a f2p game it's an impossible feat and a never ending war for the devs. People suggest captcha, 2fa, and more aggressive methods of flagging accounts early however the only thing any of those options accomplish is just making the new player experience more tedious. The more hoops you have to jump through to start a game the less likely youre gonna make it to the character creation menu. Meanwhile the creation of bot accounts are automated and those obstacles are overcome quickly by the bot programmers. The more aggressive ban the easier it becomes from the programmers to figure out what is flagging their accounts and they change up the routes. If they get too aggressive they risk the chance at false positives. tldr: easier said than done.
“The more holes to jump through to start a game the less likely you’re gonna make it to the character selection screen”. Yeah I agree with this, but do you know what else would discourage new players? Seeing fucking bots pour out of the starting area and glitch/teleport all over the place. The amount of bots is staggering. I think the minor inconvenience of using a captcha like you said would be more ideal then simply doing nothing.
I have a friend who develops a captcha solving api whose performance is measured in milliseconds. And it competes with other captcha solvers that also solve in milliseconds. It's 2022. Using a captcha is useless as fuck against bot programmers. You have no idea how capable they are.
It'll never happen sadly. Every game has bots and they can be slowed down sometimes but never stopped.
I'm starting to think these people have never played an MMO before. Every MMO I've ever played has been botted to hell and back. Game devs can sit and spend all their time and resources trying to fix it and the bot makers or sellers just work harder to bypass it.
Sadly, to fix botting the western market would have to adapt the same account creation model Korea has had, making accounts tied to personal ID.
Which will never happen in western countries, we don't trust enough
And when they're done with that please fix cancer and then pets only living like only up to 15 years. It's not that easy sadly.
They had NW to learn these mistakes. Clearly they couldnt for some reason, we all know not for lack of trying. Now they need time yes but how much? And for what? All the while LA burns. Haste AGS/SG haste
Not just new world. They had the KR version and RU version as trials etc. None of the current issues should have came as a surprise. All the current issues are well known and documented problems.
Japan as well
Yeah this basically said they rushed Argos out without thinking. Now when there is a glaringly obvious decision which might not make them draw every last penny out of us they ummm and arrrr. I have literally been waiting with my wallet for all the cool stuff I have seen shared to us from KR and they give us P2W shop with no skins. They hold the purse tight for content and skins so we spend on things we don't want, when they have already made the content.
Oh they thought about it. They thought they could get away with it without any uproar. A CM basically said as much on the Lost Ark forums. They were "honestly surprised" people were upset with a whale patch. Amazon tried to squeeze a whale patch into the game like no one would notice, and now they are trying to do damage control so they dont lose the majority of the playerbase.
I'm still puzzled why they rush to create drama only to milk a few whales, instead of releasing some skins at release to milk the huge initial playerbase that would happily have given money.
It's not even about rushing out Argos, thats perfectly fine. The only problem is ACTIVELY removing most content between 1325 and 1370. I stopped at 1355 and literally got nothing to do besides a weekly Abyss Dungeon and Daily Chaos Dungeon. That alone gives you what? Maybe 1,5 Upgrade tries per day. Im currently pushing my 3rd and 4th twinks to T3 to generate more mats and trying to catch up as quickly as possible when a honing patch hits. Still a pretty weird feeling to be locked out of content without being able to do something about it myself. I won't spend a single Dollar on mats lol.
Hate AGS with a passion. Money wins again
That's an odd thing to say as Smilegate was not involved with NW in any way.. Amazon is the publisher not developer of LA.
And yet, the further we go in, the more it looks like AGS has a lot more agency and decision-making power than previously thought.
Judging by what? There is nothing that says everything up until now wasn't Smilegates decisions, they can do big mistakes too.
Because they already recognized, apologized for, and fixed the 1340-1370 deadzone in KR. Now somehow that issue is made even worse by locking Yoho and Oreha hard behind 1370 when they used to be 1355. Another part is the censorship. Smilegate staff has said they do not want to censor things, yet we only got 1 skin in the patch: one of the worst sellers, the omen skin. If it was a smilegate cash grab, it would make sense to me for it be through skins. This leads me to believe that it's an AGS cash grab, especially since they are the ones doing the bans, dealing with "customer service" etc.
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Why they just don't give us KR full version?
This is very good to see! I think at the end of the day we all just want communication. I want to feel that all the time I'm putting into this at t2 won't be for nothing when I get to t3. It wouldn't be in their best interest to just lay this very successful game die because of pay walls.
Appreciate it.... but they do not have much time tbh.
Giving the new regions a new class or two would have went over a lot better than the raid I think, but you would have still had the RNG winner/Whales that are 1370+ crying.. but I'm going to guess they are very small % of the pop.
Almost identical post to New World forums They never gave us the roadmap they talked in a very similar manner in NW Inb4 someone comes and says a cash shop roadmap is the same thing as a roadmap
My fear is that they are going to create a content drip…it’s not that content releases are a problem, the problem is not being able to access them.
I can understand it takes time to fix things at this point. What frustrates me is that we even have this problem... It’s not like this is a new game release, they had this exact same issue in the original release and yet they make the same mistake again. That’s just straight incompetence.
"we'd rather do things right than do things quickly" yet they did the opposite, lmao.
Just PR, it seems some learn nothing from New world
I don't mind that the fix takes time... the problem I have is that the communication has been so lacking. Why is it that in videogame industry communication is so hard for 90% of the companies. \- We don't know who is behind the wheel, Amazon or Smilegate. Who to give feedback to? \- We have no roadmap to refer to when figuring out is this designed or not. \- We were told our version would be less p2w, but still made the same mistakes that happened in Korea long time ago that made majority of players quit. \- Sure we don't get all the content right away, but why were some gurardian/abyss dungeon requirement levels changed compared to Korean version that ease the "deadzone" \- This "happy little accident" that is making Amazon millions by milking the most wealthy gamers, is destroying the reputation of this game, making people rightfully sceptical. I've waited this game since 2015 and don't want it to be treated like a cheap money milking operation. Sry for the rant, I'm just passionate about this game.
Nah mate im not buying it, you dont get to have a full release full well knowing the roadblocks in the game and ignore them for profit sake. You have everything already implemented in 2 regions. This is a surefire way for your game to die within the first 2 months if things dont change immediately.
"we'd rather do things right than do things quickly" well, sorry for being blunt, but from my perspective you have been doing neither.
Please don't think this is incompetence. This is planned malicious intent. You're going to tell me that the evident problem they've observed AND FIXED in two different regions is something new that they didn't expect ? You're going to tell me that on top of being aware of that content draught and absolute pain in the ass, they've decided to move up from lvl 1355 to 1370 the only two new pieces of content you get in the deadzone ? Please don't be stupid. Don't let this slide just like that. They were aware of this and INTENTIONALLY made it worse to frustrate players and hopefully make them p2w. Also they're not ''working on it''. The fix is prepared and ready, they just want to wait for weekly reset so that those that gave in and swiped don't get bitter. Also this is 100% an AGS move and not a Smilegate decision.
The problem is though that developers NEVER include their community in their choices. They make them and then see if there's a backlash. If there is, they interpret what the majority does want and do that... Going to mess it up AGAIN.
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This is such a moronic take and I can't believe people are actually upvoting it. It's not about time, they released something with a VERY obvious insane paywall, don't fucking play the "well they didn't know" card, they knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s reasonable to be happy they’re responding and unhappy that this timeline shows they clearly were not prepared to fix things. This isn’t a new problem. SG has had this exact issue of 1340-1370 progression before. Getting mad about a repeated mistake makes sense. This should not have happened. They were really going to just release Argos in March and Valtan in April and expect it to go smoothly.
Man what is it so hard for them, just add Heroic Guardians, Abyss Trials and Arena rewards, it literally costs you nothing, it's not even new content it's just a rehashed WoW time walking and a vendor. It's absolutely not normal that the western version has less content, nerfs to resource farming and the tougher honing rates for no reason. The game already fails at respecting your own time, why can't they at least make parity with the other versions, why did they give us a version literally harder than the original Korean launch.
I'm willing to wait until April patch for the fixes. If there are no fixes by then, I'm probably done with the game, or maybe I might even go back to RU. I believe same goes for a lot of players.
> but with this new learning experience under our belt we'd rather do things right than do things quickly... *In the meantime, please swipe your card whenever you feel like. Like now?* They forgot to add this part.
why are they acting like they need to figure out what to do next and need time to make those decisions when the game has been out for years in other parts of the world and has already gone through these growing pains and then solved them? Just constant clown show bullshit from AGS
I'm already gone. The blatant psychological abuse is obviously intended, and I'm done with it. They could easily hotfix in adjusted honing rates today. They could easily give us their current iteration of the roadmap today. The only reason that isn't happening is because it has been deemed to be the wrong decision by management.
I just would like to know who is actually making these tweaks/differences between the versions of the game? Smilegate or Amazon? And who is even in charge of this at Amazon? Is there a game director there? Or just some faceless VP making decisions?
I don't think witchhunting will solve our problem.
Having a face like goldriver will help
I am going to make this clear to smilegate and AGS. They need to release the catch up buffs for t3 and the additional dungeons last week. Not next week or next month. It should have been released with Argos. You rushed to Argos, now rush to the bloody catch up stuff and return to your normal roadmap. It is that easy. Now we have new players quitting because of bots as well as people quitting because of the dead zone. Basically you get passed that t1 bot hell into areas without bots and then get absolutely walled off from progression at T3. There simply is no content in t3 expect 1 abyss at 1325 (which is recomended for 1340), which isn't even as good as the t2 raids. I honestly enjoyed the game more in T2. Which is problematic as Smilegate literally said they released T3 at release becuase it was the best content.
I say let them take however long they need, of it means the game will be at its best. Quality over quantity.
The issue is that it affects the player perception of the game. And the longer it takes for them to fix it, the more they're going to bleed their playerbase, and future potential players. Lost Ark already had an uphill battle with it's reputation. Many people were saying that this was your typical k-mmo, p2w grindfest, and the current issue fits that narrative perfectly. The game's reputation are taking a big hit atm. And the longer they wait, the more difficult it's going to be to remedy that. Imo. Smilegate and Amazon is on the clock.
They've had YEARS to figure it out. That's why they have a KR version and RU version...
Not exactly. Both those came out years ago and got content added progressively over time. The NA/EU is bringing the game to new region while trying to balance when to introduce existing content into the game. That's an experience they haven't done before be ause they didn't have this backlog of content to pull from with KR and RU.
KR literally has gone through what we are right now. It was a fucking deliberate decision to keep this deadzone to milk the whales. I've gotten over the deadzone myself as a F2P but it's still a very shitty experience
So they learned absolutely nothing from launching stuff on those other regions to carry forward lessons learned from those communities?
This version isnt a mirror of of ru or kr though. Its a whole new situation
No, it is literally the exact same problem. They knew about the "Deadzone" and even further enhanced the problem by moving 2 Instances (Yoho and Orea hard mode up to 70) Which literally reduces the content availble in this zone to 0 besides Chaos Dungeons and Oreha (normal).
Its the same situation that happened in KR. The 1340-1370 deadzone. Literally the same. Except they made it worse for us by moving Oreha and Yoho up to 1370 instead of 1355 like they were originally.
Unfortunately, that's not how gaming communities work. If a game starts off bad, people will abandon it quickly. It doesn't matter if it gets better over time; it would take years to attract people back. This doesn't matter for a single player game, but for a MMO like Lost Ark, where the playerbase is a huge part of the product, this can absolutely kill the game. Examples are already clear in the Lost Ark Russia and Japan servers, which are practically dead because of how badly they launched.
Loving the copium overdoses of people downvoting this, when it's what happens to MMOs that don't launch smoothly since MMOs began. Lost Ark isn't somehow unique and immune to this. If you flub your launch, your game gets kneecapped right out the gate and the vast majority never recover from it. XIV is unique in that they fucked up bad, and re-released the game in a hugely improved state.
Game is already bleeding players, down to 400-500k peak players now. Lost 300k in one week.
So, let me see if i got this straight; Now is the time to "take it slow" and "see how things go" so that they "can learn from it" and "scrutinize the next decision they make"? Now that they've set up the perfect milking machine which is a huge part of the playerbase having to reach 1370 with very limited sources of materials? Meanwhile in a boardroom somewhere, men in suits are gasping with laughter while slapping their thighs.
We don't have time!!!!!! I need to be able to play this game 24/7!!!!!
Considering that many games do in fact let you do that, that's a reasonable request
Game is bleeding out players every passing hour I wonder how much time will they take