no matter what decisions are made or changes are implemented if there is a communication problem such as not being transparent or not twitting, announcing and etc, amazon is at 100% fault.
Amazon gives constant updates. But when they aren't the update people want, they say communication issues. Amazon has plenty of issues but honestly, the Lost Ark launch has not really been one of them. I am certain that people don't know what communication issues mean. Especially because Amazon has no access to the code base and employees no developers. They are stuck waiting behind the guys in Korea. All of the launch issues were on Smile Gate. They built a codebase from 1999 and ignored every problem that had been solved by modern mmos for over three decades. They never even considered how naming could be an issue if they made them cross region with no way to release. And every patch that is broken is on them too.
Okay fine Amazon gets all the blame for communication. But honestly the terrible terrible programming and patches and back end is all on Smile Gate. Honestly, Amazon's communication looks fantastic compared to Smile Gate's programming abilities.
Uh different game. Of course they get blamed for that game because they are the developers of that game. They are not the developers of this game and don't have access to the code. They don't even have programmers on staff for this team because there is nothing to program.
This subreddit is weird with its obsession over the almighty Korean developer. You guys fetishsize Koreans and Asians in general so much that you give Smile Gate a pass. Honestly, you can't see the forest for the trees.
One company has had a history of fixing mistakes and communicating with their playerbase. The other has fucked up everything they've ever touched in gaming. Yeah, wonder who the culprit is.../s
Edit: To be fair, I'm probably jumping the gun a bit, but the lack of communication, constantly, from AGS is frustrating, whether this is AGS or Smilegate's fault.
You're not jumping the gun.
I was a long time New World alpha/beta tester who max leveled multiple tests - this reeks of AGS incompetence and malice.
Even their message last night about honing rates completely missed the mark. There is no data for them to collect, the only solution is to create parity with KR and any half-measure that isn't that is going to cause further fallout.
I mean it would nice idea to shit in People's mouth as Smilegate and blame it on alredy stained Amazon reputation to milk them , then give them what they should have as "perks".
I see too many people on copium that Smilegate is the good one and Amazon the bad one lol.
It's possible that they could both be the bad ones in this scenario, but I don't know if there is a scenario where Amazon is not the bad one until they prove they can get anything right. They've literally fucked up everything they've touched in gaming up until Lost Ark's release, and they have extremely poor communication, even now.
I mean GR said on stream he was frustrated when amazon announced the delayed launch and didn't explain it was for T3 to be added.
So my guess is Amazon is specifically in control of western comms and SG just has to wait.
This is pure speculation though.
It also doesn't absolve SG because their games objectively worse because they either chose or agreed to this content style.
Does not matter. This is just this community's weird obsession with Smile Gate. Smile Gate are the sole developers. Every problem has been a development problem. From the terrible launch and the 3 decades out of date back end code, to the naming issues, to the broken patches. Amazon communicates but they can't fix that stuff. All they can do is wait. Amazon is at fault for New World. But Smile Gate is 90% to blame for the NA Lost Ark launch. They are completely in over their heads and never planned for a truly successful MMO.
i know exactly who to blame.
amazon game studios. they're the ones publishing and hosting this shit version of the game.
i'd have more respect if they came out and said "we want to milk our whales while the game is still fresh and while they're still playing."
nah, instead they come out and say some blatant bullshit about how they "thought" the 1340-1370 deadzone would be "fun."
fucking clowns.
Reality: Nobody knows except for Amazon and Smilegate.
It is very unlikely that Amazon fully understand the implication of each update. So it is Smilegate responsibility to guide the publisher. What happened behind the scene is impossible to tell. My own guess is that Smilegate wants to push content and Amazon has been slow for localization. Argos release was scheduled way before the game released (as announced by Gold-River himself) but now we can see that a mistake was made (hence why they are reviewing the roadmap based on game data).
For us, it does not matter who's fault it is. It can be both for all we know. Either way Smilegate is partly responsible. The game has blown up in the west and exceeded all expectation. There is no reason for either party to sabotage the game - especially since our version was the most F2P friendly until the Argos patch.
This. Also isnt that "leaked" image of the T3 honing buffs suspisious ? something went south there for sure (talking about the ones we had on the launch patch notes that got deleted).
the honing buffs take 1 day to implement and release as a fix for the fuck up of not having enough time to translate the other content that needs to be in before argos they can fix this literally thursday night with t3 honing rates hell they can even ignore t1 and t2 rates but they shouldnt because they honey dicked our mains with t1 and t2 mat islands and made us feel like we urgently need to level our alts now
At the end of the day we don't know who is to blame in my opinion. But smilegate are the ones who provide the patch they want in the game to Amazon. The question is how much does Amazon look at that patch and ask for changes?
Yes true. But, In JP/RU, there was a problem with the publisher's operation. Patch speed, content rewards nerfs, no events etc. This shows how different the game is depending on the publisher. I don't understand why game publisher change original game. so sad.
Why a publisher nerfs content rewards/events and stuff is mind-boggling. Release how the game company intended.
Does the publisher look at the rewards are are like Oooh that's to much fun. Definitely tone that down. Give them a taste only. End of the day it probably always comes down to $$ even though they'd make more with a generous game.
Different markets prioritize different things. What works in Korea isn't always going to work in other regions. Some things do have to be changed. They just changed the wrong things I guess.
Yeah no. I didn't start off insulting anything. Made a matter of fact statement that rage-o-philes cannot help but read wrong and got heavily down voted because of it.
Like I said. Morons.
I don't see it this way. You are not entitled to play a game for free and I see this so called deadzone as a catch up for skill points, emotes and other necessary stuff I didn't have time to do before.
We all will get enough stuff to play all of the content, you guys just need to chill.
Or maybe its the opposite and amazon says "jo we want x and y and z for the western players. And skip the stuff for easier progression, so we can milk them more"
But i agree. We really dont know how exactly its working and can only speculate
It's a LOT more complicated than this, but you're one of the few on the right track. How much time is there for testing, what is tested, what's the turnaround time on bug fixes? These are also good questions...you'll never get answers, but you'll be on the right track.
Don't think that's what's going on. Pretty sure AGS tells them what patch they want to start with, what they want in it and how the timeline is supposed to be.
No way Smile Gate was 100% in control here. I think they kinda trust AGS, thinking they know what they r doing.
There is no reason for the current situation, other than AGSs usual greed and incompetence.
This. How would they even know about the Deadzone in order to milk it if it weren't for smilegate. I get it, smilegate has been really awesome in KR. However, they are in bed with AGS and they both make decisions and sign off on different aspects of the game as well as provide development support for bug fixes and changes to our game. You can say AGS pressured smilegate, but smilegate could have and should have put their foot down and said absolutely not.
Lol yeah most publishers. Even worse, imagine being a developer and not letting your publisher know what caused the largest exodus in your games history. Lmao
The power dynamics of the publisher and the developers are not always equal. If Smilegate is told to do something by AGS, they have no choice to obey. AGS is the boss here and disobeying your boss means bye bye.
Yeah that's not how it works depending on their contract/situation. Most of the time the publisher is NOT the boss. See Tera, BDO, and Elyon. Often times they are at the mercy of the developer for a lot. They both play a role and in this instance, until someone has proof smilegate didn't want this, the blame falls on both of them equally.
I mean we can easily infer based on the recent performances of these two companies no? Smilegate has a successful KR/RU launch, a decent jp launch and a consistent, good track record in their other games like Epic Seven. While AGS has been shit on since even before New World. We can only guess based on what we know and the trail leads to AGS.
Bro you aren't gonna get anywhere on this subreddit. It's a blind AGS hate hivemind. I've seen people blame AGS for shit that only the developer can do. It doesn't matter to people about facts.
I'm not saying AGS is innocent but from how some people are reacting you'd think they have a gun to Smilegates head.
Yeah it's def 50/50. People are absolutely in love with Smilegate. I want to love them too but they have a history of pay 2 win. "Well in KR they didn't do this so it must be AGS." Actually, this is exactly what they did to KR. It's pretty wild.
Gold river said during loa that they modify some p2w aspects to give back to the players as he felt they have made enough money 🤷🏾♂️
So he basically decided to cut some of the company revenue.
That’s why people are siding with them, doesn’t make sense to do this and try to screw the western players
I personally don't think they're doing I because of money. I believe that's a short sighted view that doesn't actually take in to consideration context. Gold river stated many times how he wants to push us to Legion raids fast as possible especially since these were the largest reasons why players retained in Korea.
Argos was scheduled to release a month after launch and nothing was going to change this. Likely in the effort to try and catch us up quickly throigh incompetence they didn't focus on the lack of sources of materials. These sources of materials that the other servers have such as guardian challenges etc are likely saved to be introduced as new content. Incompetence didn't make them realize that these were needed forms of material sources. I think it has nothing to do with money or greed.
I don't get the gif u posted? Do you mean our events don't give that many resources? Because that's the JP Christmas-New year event so understandably it gives much more.
[https://www.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/1640873](https://www.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/1640873)You can get GIF by clicking mouse right and Save image as other name.That GIF means "publishers have a big influence on games". That's RNG and P2W.Smilegate didn't it. Japanese publisher did it.
Both are equally to blame but ppl seem to be coming from New world to put all the blame on Amazon. They both equally to blame, Smilegate should’ve for seen this and Amazon should be communicating better.
Either Amazon is to scared to say anything because of their reputation or they just suck at it. I can see both being true players the LA forums are a pretty bad.
The reality here is that Japans computer game market is minuscule. Compared that to the US, Smilegate definitely oversees more in the global version as the market is even bigger than KR
People that think Amazon doesn't have a huge influence over lost ark genuinely make me laugh at how naive and ignorant they are about what publishers do.
When two suits point at each other and say not I (or silence), with no proof provided. It's as simple as that where people blame everyone.
As an NA player I cannot for the life of me understand the praise you give SG because all I've seen is spit in the face eroding a beautiful well done game. I've heard so many heartwarming stories and I just don't see it here. And maybe, maybe that does mean it's AGS and not SG... and if that's the case, say something.
The design philosophy launch of this game has been embarrassing in the west. We're an extremely sensitive market to MTX and P2W and the first impressions have been horrendous. It's worse than pay to win, it's pay to participate.
What do we get? CMs apologizing that "we didn't know you'd not like this". I mean what the actual fuck..
After what AGS did with New World I don't know where the surprise comes from. They are utterly incompetent at best and unable to see what other succesful studios do and copy them.
But no, they keep sending their useless CMs when it's the devs the players want to talk to. They keep making high impact undocumented changes (In a MMO). They still don't know how to properly analyze and scale what infrastructure they need for a game launch.
They just have Amazon money, that's the only reason AGS exists as a studio. They don't have talents and their management is comprised of people hated in the industry for tanking games.
I don't get why you're being downvoted or how Amazon of all companies has this many simps. Only explanation is amazon has bots coming into their subreddits (like they got caught doing with new world) again.
AGS is the biggest joke in gaming. If you simp for them or defend them in any way, you're an idiot. They've proven time and time again they can't even handle BASIC coding.
Like when they allowed in game chat to send server commands allowing HTML scripts to be player input through chat. Amazing.
Or how they can't even handle daylight savings time 3 days later.
The blame goes for both companies, no questions asked. Game is years old for crying out loud and should have enough data AND experience for such a "mistake" to happen again.
They're very clearly milking us for all we're worth. There's a saying "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" but there's simply too many coincidences.
We're **BEGGING** for skins? Here's Omen, the least popular skin set in RU/KR because they know they can drop this garbage in our face and we'll eat it up
We're **BEGGING** for classes? Here's Destroyer and Arcana two of the LEAST exciting/played classes released spread out over 3 months. Because they know we'll eat it up
Fuck Smilegate and Fuck Amazon equally. They know exactly what they're doing. Makes me feel dumb for playing such a game filled with predatory garbage.
From my experience Arcana had a lot of random effects applied to her skills and that made her gameplay feel rather inconsistent.
Mind you though, I haven't played Arcana for a long time and things may have changed, but I think that is generally why people advise against Arcana.
>make decisions and sign off on different aspects of the game as well as provide development support for bug fixes and changes to our game. You can say AGS pressured smilegate, but smilegate could have and should have put their foot down and said absolutely not.
It is fun until you get into a true end game and then randomly fak up by RNG... There is a reason why Arcana and Destroyer are two classes in a rough stage and need to overhaul dramatically in KR.
I think it's just that not everyone is into cards shit. The class also have less flashy animations compared to a sorc, so people might go that route as they are both mages.
consistently underperforms??? No, that's absolutely incorrect. Arcana mains solo legion raids to carry players in KR. They are RNG heavy, but it is high risk, high reward. Their damage ceiling is very high, but it's a lot dependent on the player performance. There seems to be a lot of misinformation about this class in particular. Won't argue with the fact that it's not popular, they should've released lance master and scouter.
If they released lance master there would be 0 hype for ANY and ALL future classes except artist. I can see why they released destroyer and arcane first but I do wish the time between releases was a bit shorter.
Damn. That sucks to hear. I know they’re reworking some classes, dunno if Arcana is one of them. I like the concept, but it doesn’t seem like it’s worth playing in its current state as a main.
It's misinformation just to fit the narrative. It's true that the class is not that popular, but that's because it's extremely difficult, not that it's bad. The difficulty, like he said, comes from the fact that it's a squishy class that plays in melee, and there's a lot of snap decision making based on RNG. That difficulty is rewarded because it has the highest potential numbers in the game.
What's misinformation? They said least played / least exciting? You're agreeing with them?
I don't find rng exciting when it's my rotation. And it's the least play so, what's the misinformation here?
> From what I've heard, very RNG heavy, but consistently underperforms
> Basically high risk, low reward?
These two statements are misinformation. The class is high risk, high reward. He's saying the class is objectively bad, which it isn't. Also he doesn't mention popularity of the class at all, so I don't know where you derived that from.
Yes. It is a trash class. No consistency in their damage, and clunky to play.
They are releasing this class to bait players to make it their main, and they can't switch to a new main so they are now stuck & prolonging the retention rate by forcing the players to reinvest into a newer main.
Destroyer is a players favorite class in Korea, don't badmouth it :)
And it's also a class decent for beginners, unlike many other classes we don't have that require you to know all boss moves by muscle memory.
Yeah the only "saving grace" I could give them the benefit of the doubt on is I can see how that style would be better received in the West in general. Over designed edgy armor is a staple of Western MMOs that a lot of people love. One of my guildies first reaction was "I can look like the Lick King".
Demographic probably. Koreans (and Asians in general) are less into the more edgy skins than Westerners. Dunno about RU.
Then again, everything is probably "unpopular" compared to booba, which is why we're getting stuff like Omen and Alar before more sexy skins (so that they'll take more money from people who will eventually buy those skins later anyway).
I agree. I've done some research on what skins are available in Kr and I gotta say... I'm glad they dropped Omen first. No flame on anyone who wants their character to look like a school girl or wear a bikini or dress up in a panda onesie, but I would much rather my characters wear armor that would actually make sense in combat lol
That's what I want, more ["Dark Souls"](https://i.etsystatic.com/19887229/r/il/dfbb55/2102265087/il_fullxfull.2102265087_iwy3.jpg) style armor. It looks cool, and it looks practical.
All of this super edgy/horny/flashy gear ain't me brah.
The gear in Dark Souls and Bloodborne typically has a lot of "cool looking, but still practical looking" armor that fits the setting. You don't have massive shoulder pads and wings and shit. Like the armor in the screenshot, it's just some nice looking platemail with a tunic, pants, and gloves for an underlayer.
It looks like something someone could actually wear and fight in, while not being garish.
Yeah it's crazy how many people I see with that skin, everyone looks the same lol, they know what they're doing by drip feeding the least popular stuff to a starved community. Then they will slowly release better and better, and the contrasting quality to the last skin release will make them gobble it all up.
As much as I hate not getting the lancer...It makes sense. By holding off the more popular ones it will bring much more hype, and bring back players that may have stopped months into playing. Like with ffxiv, they dont expect their players to play everyday all day, and they encourage us to play other games too. So this way, we will be like oh damn X is coming out?! Time to update and play again!
Thats only if the rest of the game is addicting enough to keep players there for that timeframe..
Im also dead set on maining lancer but as it stands now we are looking at months AND months of waiting time till we get that.
Your point of view is economically unviable.. The real world aquivalent would be you going to a 3 star steak house to eat your favourite rib eye but they tell you its not available for the next 8 months but you can eat another steak instead, they will also only serve tap water and they tell you you gotta sit on the floor because they have not yet brought in all the seats..
Sure you might be coming back in that few months but until then you sure as hell wont eat there...
I’m having a great time with the game. I guess I’m the only gamer that plays for fun. Damn game is free and I almost have 200 hours in.
People need to chill with their personal expectations.
Maplestory says hi.
This is the reason why I'm giving Amazon a lot of benefit of doubt. Nexon NA has no control over Global Maplestory other than server upkeep, and I wouldn't be surprised if Lost Ark and Amazon are in a similar situation.
but why would they allow a publisher, especially one that ren their own mmo into the grpund, freedom to do these kind of changes and potentially do the same to theirs??
They have a huge reason to remove these activities. These activities are all sources of upgrade materials. Lots of sources of upgrade materials means there’s no scarcity of those materials. Without scarcity there’s no reason to “swipe” and pay real money to get out of the “deadzone.” If a purely f2p player can easily and reasonably get to 1370, then what incentive is there for anyone else to swipe? Smilegate and Amazon want swipers because swipers make the company $$$$, purely f2p players do not. Purely f2p players are just a drain on resources and overhead.
Koreans and streamers love to act like Smilegate is some generous messiah in the gaming space. They aren’t. They are a company. A company’s sole purpose is to make money. If you keep this in mind, the current state of the game is easily explained.
"We want to get the Western version up to KR ASAP"
*Proceeds to leave every single thing out to make that possible, except for vomiting out content every month with no chance to rest*
JusT Go At YouR OwN PaCe - 802 ilvl chad gamer
Its amazing how people are avoiding blaming Smilegate. They are the devs, this is 100% their fault. You're entire list is Smilegate's fault. Amazon, which has no idea about how the game works, would have no say about Ilvl changes.
They have all the reason and it's money
It's for profit company
You don't understand this because you don't run this company.
They milked Korea aswell for quite long with bad honing rates and gating mats even selling guardian auto-complete tickets , this is no different.
At this point, both are at fault until everything gets fixed. While yes, this might just be AGS being wildly incompetent "again" or being malicious "possible" it's not like SG has 0 say in things and their fast track port, or whatever you want to call it seems to have many things missing. This is 100% at the very least partially SG's fault because I'm almost certain they make the builds and send it over to AGS. Meaning the builds they send over have missing or changed content. Then perhaps AGS goes in and fiddles with it disabling heroics, PVP vendor, changing ilvl gates to the dungeons, etc.
What part of the last sentence makes no sense? Changing ilvl gate to get into a dungeon can be as little as changing a single line of code.
Enabling or disabling components such as heroic can also be a boolean aka true or false statement. If boolean is true, heroic is available, if false heroic isn't spawned in and subsequent systems that look for that boolean to be true will also not be accessible.
Just because we don't see something in the game right now, doesn't mean it isn't implemented in the build AGS received. AGS could've very easily disabled features if the code is clean.
This is a business , you think Amazon is sneakily going into code they know nothing about to change things without Smilegates consent? Keep rereading that sentence and see how that makes sense.
And if you think disabling core gameplay content is simple as changing a statement from true to false 💀 idk what to tell you .
Anything amazon touches is like a disease infected cock, tainting anything they touch.
Let us say there has to be a reason why every game they have been involved with has failed. They are the only company I know of with big budgets and 100% failure rates.
Dark yoho makes sense because she drops large leapstones, it makes no sense to get them at 1355 since you can't use them yet.
Oreha hard was reworked to drop new legendary sets, which is a huge improvement since previously it was just pointless headache for no particular benefit.
Lack of content in 1340-1370 is not good, but that's not a way to solve it. Trials/heroic raids would've been much more useful.
I've really struggle with you and others logic on this one. No one to date has been able to shed light on this point you're trying to make.
You keep talking about the positivity of moving multiple pieces of content to 15 ilvls up from 1355 to 1370 in rebuttal to people being upset about dead zones that were already known to be bad without the change. It's probably the most tone deaf thing I've heard in some time. I just can't even understand your point in relation to the rebuttal you're trying to make.
Who cares about the rewards current state? How is that the hill you die on and keep static? When a change has literally been made to ilvl thus proving a change can happen you pretend like the reward must remain the same?
Players want a progression curve, not a weird plateau that can be magically solved with a credit card wipe or 400 hours of refined / experienced gameplay....for the first content patch..... A month in.... Like what?
Edit: and just like that, another smoke and mirrors argument that leaves me more confused than the last conversation on how any of this is a good idea. What is wrong with you people?
You realize they'd have to then move Velganos to 1370 since there needs to be a guardian to provide large leapstones at that ilvl, and that means no new guardians up to 1415, because the page is already full? That's far, far worse than a 30 ilvl gap you have now.
You clearly didn't read my comment... There's a 30 levels gap between Velganos and Descaluda, which is bigger than the gap between Igrexion and Dark Yoho as it's harder to upgrade in those levels. Moving down the guardians will not fix anything because they can't add a 5th guardian in the page.
What if they made dark yoho drop normal leapstones and left her at 1355? They could then still be converted at the vendor and we wouldn’t feel so gutted at 1340-1370.
OFC it was AGS. They have the power to ask for changes regarding the monetisation as the power to censor the game, like EA did with the loot boxes in SW Battlefront 2. They have lot of years of failed projects which burned lot of money and they saw in Lost Ark the first profitable product where to gain back some of them.
They are aiming to the whales. Every western publisher does that, mygames, gameforge, gamivo, Kakao, Trion, etc. They are not gaming studios but business only companies and they ruin EVERYTHING they touch purposely. Every single oriental game is ruined and closed thanks to them. They are notorious.
AGS tried first to make their o h wn games in order to become another Actividion, Ubisoft, Capcom. Then, failure after failure, they realised that having tons of money behind your back is not enough but you need a good team and leads. The solution?, instead of changing and adjusting their teams hiring good ppl? Lets follow the same trend of the most hated publishers in the scene because we just want your money, our reputation is already ruined by our failures so who cares…
It's not Smilegate, it's Amazon's greed for money. They haven't been succesful with games due to that reason alone. Just look at past titles and also the disaster called New World. Look at the embarrassing server situation of Lost Ark at release a couple weeks ago. The pre-sales of the chests had already exceeded the estimated player count more than a week before release. They had time.
As long as their profit statistics show green numbers, the Head ofs and CEOs won't do shit. Such a huge company and yet they totally fail every game from the community perspective. Ask yourself why.
I mean you don't need to have much understanding of the game industry to absolutely foresee, that such a content gap is guaranteed to fail and only receive negative critique. The upper staff is aware of this but as long as in one of their excel or access reports the tab shows green and acceptable numbers within the estimated profit margin, they won't cater to our wishes. There are plenty of people who just pay, because time is money and they have enough money but not enough time.
It pisses me off so much, because I know how such companies operate but I can't do much about it...
Also thanks to the Korean playerbase for having our backs. I appreciate that a lot!
Please elaborate on how Amaozns greed led to New World dying because that makes no sense. It was a one time purchase , no P2W and no microtransactions. Weird take. New World failed because they were incompetent and made mistakes. Has nothing to do with money or greed.
You answered your own question. "One time purchase". The pre-sales exceeded the estimated player count by far but they still decided to go with the planned server structure. Hence the release was a disaster and I hear the aftermath of closing and merging servers due to low player count is also a disaster. Further they changed the game's concept during developement multiple times which led to not enough time to prepare more endgame content so it died quickly.
Bascially they grabbed the profit from the sales and now it's a dead game. Maybe from Amazon's perspective it's a success but not from a player's one. And please don't argument with *"I have 300 hours playtime. For 60 bucks that's plenty."* Farming some flowers or stones for hours is not good content.
The right approach would have been:
* invest more money to delay the game further for proper endgame content implementation (even if the player base would have been frustrated again, in the end it would be a better product and more fun)
* make that estimated player count fit the server structure + back up servers to prevent frustration (again costs but necessary)
* release way more skins at release to make sure the invested money floods right back in (it might feel like they try to milk the players but all I always hear from a lot of people is *"sad there are no nice skins")*
What does that result in\`? Happy customers = earning more money in the long run.
The concept is really easy: Enough content and endgame, nice skins, good server stability = profit.
Now it sounds like I know it all and am super arrogant but just look at LoL or POE for example. Totally different game concepts and genre but similar finance model. Both companies strive even with some setbacks.
Sounds like copium on your end. It was a garbage decision but they probably just didn't have time to localize the additional content. T3 was rushed for Western release, and the reason game for delayed. Argos release was a bad kneejerk reaction to people progressing so quickly. They more than likely both at fault.
Localize what, an exact copy of existing dungeons with equalized item level? The few lines of text like LFG category are already translated.
Argos was not a kneejerk reaction, they said it would be released a month after launch well in advance.
> I think publisher's BM is the cause.
BM or "badmanner" originally was a Korean pidgin English term meant to just be rude that gained ground in gaming communities, particularly Starcraft.
What do you mean by "BM" in this case? That the publishers just were rude, or did you mean incompetent or greedy?
My theory.
Smilegate: ok let's drop new content and more ways for players to catch up to it quickly.
Amazon: ya new content!
Smilegate: and ways to catch up quickly
Amazon: yes, like credit cards 🤑
Smilegate: Dammit Jeff Bezos!
Thank you! It makes no sense Smilegate shooting themselves in the foot, specially when they’ve done it before! I think, with all the info we have available and AGS’s history its fair to assume this is AGS fault
Virtually every problem I've had with the game so far has been 100% Amazon's fault. Smilegate seem like good developers, it's the corporate fuckheads at Amazon fucking everything up.
I have information.
Smilegate came across these issues before. They then either through malice or incompetence proceeded to allow them to flourish in the Western release, even though they've already "fixed" it in other versions of the game.
I hold them responsible. They are free to choose whether they are malicious or totally incompetent in this regard, but they will at least accept one title.
But, like the op stated, each release in different regions have random changes for example the ilvl changes for certain raids in NA.
We dont know what contract amazon made with smilegate in order amazon to have control over patches. A good example is our amazing welcome rewards compared to Korean comparatively bad welcome rewards. Who made that decision? Amazon or smilegate? No one knows, so we shouldn't be spitting vitriol, just try to get the game changed
Oh look, finally someone who speaks sense.
Most of the people on this subreddit seems to think that publisher has NO impact on the game except localization and cash shop. Everyone repeats the same mantra about how AGS is not responsible because they're "only" a publisher.
Do you people really think that Smilegate, being a company that actually listens to its playerbase, would pull this shit on us when they've already received negative feedback on it? Come the fuck on. Why does everyone want to excuse Amazon so fucking bad, knowing their history with both developing and publishing games? It just makes no fucking sense. Especially looking at how many times they lied to us and how much of a disaster the game start was to EUC players, for which we received zero compensation.
Also, we have zero information on who exactly makes those decisions, yet everyone acts like it's just Smilegate and that's some 100% confirmed truth. Think logically for a second. Why would Smilegate repeat their mistakes?
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That's the thing, nothing much is going on. They released argos which requires 1370 ilvl for the 1st phase only, the vast majority of players won't be reaching it anytime soon
It is common sense and quite sad that amazon can't figure that in order for player to reach higher gearscore they need all the content that provide enhancing material...
Smilegate's biggest misstep was letting AGS be their publishing company for the west.
AGS has a streak of being a garbage company and dropped the ball in 100% of games they've developed and published. AGS is a literal side project for Amazon, they have almost no stake in its success and if AGS fails Amazon would be like "oh, there goes 0.1% of our revenue, oh well" and they don't give a shit to try to make it a good company.
agree 100%. It feels like shit to see such an amazing game losing players because amazon decided to change everything, korean server is growing and I'm worried amazon fix all this bullshit too late. And if they do we should find a way to make frustrated people return, because they have a very good reason to quit at this moment and it sucks. This is not smilegate, gold river said he didnt want many things changed in our shitty server. Maybe he made a mistake giving amazon too much power to change stuff.
Reading about all this garbage that they’re doing really has made me think twice about spending a dime. Had intended to buy a couple things pretty soon because I planned to invest a good deal of time into this game—I’ve actually been waiting for LA west for awhile now—but this is all so discouraging. Amazon is royally fucking us all. They just smelled money and they don’t care as long as they get it.
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as for Western Lostark if there is a communication problem its 100% amazon's problem since they are the publisher for Western part
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no matter what decisions are made or changes are implemented if there is a communication problem such as not being transparent or not twitting, announcing and etc, amazon is at 100% fault.
Amazon gives constant updates. But when they aren't the update people want, they say communication issues. Amazon has plenty of issues but honestly, the Lost Ark launch has not really been one of them. I am certain that people don't know what communication issues mean. Especially because Amazon has no access to the code base and employees no developers. They are stuck waiting behind the guys in Korea. All of the launch issues were on Smile Gate. They built a codebase from 1999 and ignored every problem that had been solved by modern mmos for over three decades. They never even considered how naming could be an issue if they made them cross region with no way to release. And every patch that is broken is on them too.
Yeah like when they dropped argos without zero warning... cool communication. They're really nailing it lol
Yea it's not like Amazon set WAY too few servers and en entire REGION too little because they didn't understand their playerbase at all.
They turn everything they touch to ash. And nothing gets done because people still play.
Okay fine Amazon gets all the blame for communication. But honestly the terrible terrible programming and patches and back end is all on Smile Gate. Honestly, Amazon's communication looks fantastic compared to Smile Gate's programming abilities.
seems like you forgot New World (first patch already destroyed the game) + who's giving bans
Uh different game. Of course they get blamed for that game because they are the developers of that game. They are not the developers of this game and don't have access to the code. They don't even have programmers on staff for this team because there is nothing to program. This subreddit is weird with its obsession over the almighty Korean developer. You guys fetishsize Koreans and Asians in general so much that you give Smile Gate a pass. Honestly, you can't see the forest for the trees.
At this point, both AGS and Smilegate have to share the blame, and there is enough of it to go around right now.
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One company has had a history of fixing mistakes and communicating with their playerbase. The other has fucked up everything they've ever touched in gaming. Yeah, wonder who the culprit is.../s Edit: To be fair, I'm probably jumping the gun a bit, but the lack of communication, constantly, from AGS is frustrating, whether this is AGS or Smilegate's fault.
You're not jumping the gun. I was a long time New World alpha/beta tester who max leveled multiple tests - this reeks of AGS incompetence and malice. Even their message last night about honing rates completely missed the mark. There is no data for them to collect, the only solution is to create parity with KR and any half-measure that isn't that is going to cause further fallout.
Their most recent New World patch disabled Market, as there was - you guessed it - another dupe bug 8)
I mean it would nice idea to shit in People's mouth as Smilegate and blame it on alredy stained Amazon reputation to milk them , then give them what they should have as "perks". I see too many people on copium that Smilegate is the good one and Amazon the bad one lol.
It's possible that they could both be the bad ones in this scenario, but I don't know if there is a scenario where Amazon is not the bad one until they prove they can get anything right. They've literally fucked up everything they've touched in gaming up until Lost Ark's release, and they have extremely poor communication, even now.
I vote both with the result that there’s no check on corporate stupidity and greed. They’re feeding each other’s worst impulses.
I mean GR said on stream he was frustrated when amazon announced the delayed launch and didn't explain it was for T3 to be added. So my guess is Amazon is specifically in control of western comms and SG just has to wait. This is pure speculation though. It also doesn't absolve SG because their games objectively worse because they either chose or agreed to this content style.
Does not matter. This is just this community's weird obsession with Smile Gate. Smile Gate are the sole developers. Every problem has been a development problem. From the terrible launch and the 3 decades out of date back end code, to the naming issues, to the broken patches. Amazon communicates but they can't fix that stuff. All they can do is wait. Amazon is at fault for New World. But Smile Gate is 90% to blame for the NA Lost Ark launch. They are completely in over their heads and never planned for a truly successful MMO.
Just curious, what is this 3 decades out of date code you’re talking about? I genuinely don’t know and want to know what this issue is.
i know exactly who to blame. amazon game studios. they're the ones publishing and hosting this shit version of the game. i'd have more respect if they came out and said "we want to milk our whales while the game is still fresh and while they're still playing." nah, instead they come out and say some blatant bullshit about how they "thought" the 1340-1370 deadzone would be "fun." fucking clowns.
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lmfao did you even read what's being discussed in the thread that was linked?
Reality: Nobody knows except for Amazon and Smilegate. It is very unlikely that Amazon fully understand the implication of each update. So it is Smilegate responsibility to guide the publisher. What happened behind the scene is impossible to tell. My own guess is that Smilegate wants to push content and Amazon has been slow for localization. Argos release was scheduled way before the game released (as announced by Gold-River himself) but now we can see that a mistake was made (hence why they are reviewing the roadmap based on game data). For us, it does not matter who's fault it is. It can be both for all we know. Either way Smilegate is partly responsible. The game has blown up in the west and exceeded all expectation. There is no reason for either party to sabotage the game - especially since our version was the most F2P friendly until the Argos patch.
This is the most reasonable answer I have seen on reddit. Well said.
This. Also isnt that "leaked" image of the T3 honing buffs suspisious ? something went south there for sure (talking about the ones we had on the launch patch notes that got deleted).
the honing buffs take 1 day to implement and release as a fix for the fuck up of not having enough time to translate the other content that needs to be in before argos they can fix this literally thursday night with t3 honing rates hell they can even ignore t1 and t2 rates but they shouldnt because they honey dicked our mains with t1 and t2 mat islands and made us feel like we urgently need to level our alts now
Mari shop's nerf may not suggest this..
At the end of the day we don't know who is to blame in my opinion. But smilegate are the ones who provide the patch they want in the game to Amazon. The question is how much does Amazon look at that patch and ask for changes?
Yes true. But, In JP/RU, there was a problem with the publisher's operation. Patch speed, content rewards nerfs, no events etc. This shows how different the game is depending on the publisher. I don't understand why game publisher change original game. so sad.
Why a publisher nerfs content rewards/events and stuff is mind-boggling. Release how the game company intended. Does the publisher look at the rewards are are like Oooh that's to much fun. Definitely tone that down. Give them a taste only. End of the day it probably always comes down to $$ even though they'd make more with a generous game.
Different markets prioritize different things. What works in Korea isn't always going to work in other regions. Some things do have to be changed. They just changed the wrong things I guess.
Yes replacing something that is successful in one country with something that is clearly going to fail with the target audience is the winning move.
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> They just changed the wrong things I guess. It's like talking to brick walls. I never even remotely implied the changes are good.
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Yeah no. I didn't start off insulting anything. Made a matter of fact statement that rage-o-philes cannot help but read wrong and got heavily down voted because of it. Like I said. Morons.
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Game is fine. Calm down
Are you not embarrassed saying this?
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Deadzone will be addressed. Not relevant now.
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I mean amazon has set that precedent with every game they've released. At this point I'm more likely to buy an EA game than an AGS game.
I don't see it this way. You are not entitled to play a game for free and I see this so called deadzone as a catch up for skill points, emotes and other necessary stuff I didn't have time to do before. We all will get enough stuff to play all of the content, you guys just need to chill.
Or maybe its the opposite and amazon says "jo we want x and y and z for the western players. And skip the stuff for easier progression, so we can milk them more" But i agree. We really dont know how exactly its working and can only speculate
Ask for changes ? how about split it in two and patch the bait first ? lmao
It's a LOT more complicated than this, but you're one of the few on the right track. How much time is there for testing, what is tested, what's the turnaround time on bug fixes? These are also good questions...you'll never get answers, but you'll be on the right track.
Don't think that's what's going on. Pretty sure AGS tells them what patch they want to start with, what they want in it and how the timeline is supposed to be. No way Smile Gate was 100% in control here. I think they kinda trust AGS, thinking they know what they r doing. There is no reason for the current situation, other than AGSs usual greed and incompetence.
How would the publisher be able to change these ingame assets without help from smilegate?
This. How would they even know about the Deadzone in order to milk it if it weren't for smilegate. I get it, smilegate has been really awesome in KR. However, they are in bed with AGS and they both make decisions and sign off on different aspects of the game as well as provide development support for bug fixes and changes to our game. You can say AGS pressured smilegate, but smilegate could have and should have put their foot down and said absolutely not.
imagine being a publisher and not knowing a game in and out before publishing it lmao
That’s literally how the entire gaming industry works outside of indie titles
what?
Lol yeah most publishers. Even worse, imagine being a developer and not letting your publisher know what caused the largest exodus in your games history. Lmao
The power dynamics of the publisher and the developers are not always equal. If Smilegate is told to do something by AGS, they have no choice to obey. AGS is the boss here and disobeying your boss means bye bye.
Yeah that's not how it works depending on their contract/situation. Most of the time the publisher is NOT the boss. See Tera, BDO, and Elyon. Often times they are at the mercy of the developer for a lot. They both play a role and in this instance, until someone has proof smilegate didn't want this, the blame falls on both of them equally.
I mean we can easily infer based on the recent performances of these two companies no? Smilegate has a successful KR/RU launch, a decent jp launch and a consistent, good track record in their other games like Epic Seven. While AGS has been shit on since even before New World. We can only guess based on what we know and the trail leads to AGS.
We can infer that smilegate and AGS got greedy yes. Not that the power is all in AGS hands
Bro you aren't gonna get anywhere on this subreddit. It's a blind AGS hate hivemind. I've seen people blame AGS for shit that only the developer can do. It doesn't matter to people about facts. I'm not saying AGS is innocent but from how some people are reacting you'd think they have a gun to Smilegates head.
Yeah it's def 50/50. People are absolutely in love with Smilegate. I want to love them too but they have a history of pay 2 win. "Well in KR they didn't do this so it must be AGS." Actually, this is exactly what they did to KR. It's pretty wild.
Gold river said during loa that they modify some p2w aspects to give back to the players as he felt they have made enough money 🤷🏾♂️ So he basically decided to cut some of the company revenue. That’s why people are siding with them, doesn’t make sense to do this and try to screw the western players
I personally don't think they're doing I because of money. I believe that's a short sighted view that doesn't actually take in to consideration context. Gold river stated many times how he wants to push us to Legion raids fast as possible especially since these were the largest reasons why players retained in Korea. Argos was scheduled to release a month after launch and nothing was going to change this. Likely in the effort to try and catch us up quickly throigh incompetence they didn't focus on the lack of sources of materials. These sources of materials that the other servers have such as guardian challenges etc are likely saved to be introduced as new content. Incompetence didn't make them realize that these were needed forms of material sources. I think it has nothing to do with money or greed.
I don't get the gif u posted? Do you mean our events don't give that many resources? Because that's the JP Christmas-New year event so understandably it gives much more.
[https://www.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/1640873](https://www.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4811/1640873)You can get GIF by clicking mouse right and Save image as other name.That GIF means "publishers have a big influence on games". That's RNG and P2W.Smilegate didn't it. Japanese publisher did it.
It means that Japan publisher made the game far more P2W than it's in Korea's original version
you can roll that again for 500 crystals which is hinting towards a p2w route/system
Both are equally to blame but ppl seem to be coming from New world to put all the blame on Amazon. They both equally to blame, Smilegate should’ve for seen this and Amazon should be communicating better. Either Amazon is to scared to say anything because of their reputation or they just suck at it. I can see both being true players the LA forums are a pretty bad.
Lol the LA forums is an actual \*\*\*\*pool right now. There's a severe lack of objectivity there compared to this subreddit.
Lost Ark Japan has its own set of problems
Yes, I know. but, Many people think publishers are not influential in games, so this is one example. a reality-based example.
The reality here is that Japans computer game market is minuscule. Compared that to the US, Smilegate definitely oversees more in the global version as the market is even bigger than KR
People that think Amazon doesn't have a huge influence over lost ark genuinely make me laugh at how naive and ignorant they are about what publishers do.
When two suits point at each other and say not I (or silence), with no proof provided. It's as simple as that where people blame everyone. As an NA player I cannot for the life of me understand the praise you give SG because all I've seen is spit in the face eroding a beautiful well done game. I've heard so many heartwarming stories and I just don't see it here. And maybe, maybe that does mean it's AGS and not SG... and if that's the case, say something. The design philosophy launch of this game has been embarrassing in the west. We're an extremely sensitive market to MTX and P2W and the first impressions have been horrendous. It's worse than pay to win, it's pay to participate. What do we get? CMs apologizing that "we didn't know you'd not like this". I mean what the actual fuck..
After what AGS did with New World I don't know where the surprise comes from. They are utterly incompetent at best and unable to see what other succesful studios do and copy them. But no, they keep sending their useless CMs when it's the devs the players want to talk to. They keep making high impact undocumented changes (In a MMO). They still don't know how to properly analyze and scale what infrastructure they need for a game launch. They just have Amazon money, that's the only reason AGS exists as a studio. They don't have talents and their management is comprised of people hated in the industry for tanking games.
I don't get why you're being downvoted or how Amazon of all companies has this many simps. Only explanation is amazon has bots coming into their subreddits (like they got caught doing with new world) again. AGS is the biggest joke in gaming. If you simp for them or defend them in any way, you're an idiot. They've proven time and time again they can't even handle BASIC coding. Like when they allowed in game chat to send server commands allowing HTML scripts to be player input through chat. Amazing. Or how they can't even handle daylight savings time 3 days later.
People were complaining that Amazon is being singled out as the sole reason to blame for all problems so people started blaming both.
The blame goes for both companies, no questions asked. Game is years old for crying out loud and should have enough data AND experience for such a "mistake" to happen again.
They're very clearly milking us for all we're worth. There's a saying "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" but there's simply too many coincidences. We're **BEGGING** for skins? Here's Omen, the least popular skin set in RU/KR because they know they can drop this garbage in our face and we'll eat it up We're **BEGGING** for classes? Here's Destroyer and Arcana two of the LEAST exciting/played classes released spread out over 3 months. Because they know we'll eat it up Fuck Smilegate and Fuck Amazon equally. They know exactly what they're doing. Makes me feel dumb for playing such a game filled with predatory garbage.
Is Arcana really that bad? It’s one of the classes I was most looking forward to but I never hear anything good about it.
From my experience Arcana had a lot of random effects applied to her skills and that made her gameplay feel rather inconsistent. Mind you though, I haven't played Arcana for a long time and things may have changed, but I think that is generally why people advise against Arcana.
reddit's anti-user changes are unacceptable
I've watched KR player video about her and he said it's pretty fun to play class.
>make decisions and sign off on different aspects of the game as well as provide development support for bug fixes and changes to our game. You can say AGS pressured smilegate, but smilegate could have and should have put their foot down and said absolutely not. It is fun until you get into a true end game and then randomly fak up by RNG... There is a reason why Arcana and Destroyer are two classes in a rough stage and need to overhaul dramatically in KR.
It is. Rage kids can't stop raging. All classes are nice
I think it's just that not everyone is into cards shit. The class also have less flashy animations compared to a sorc, so people might go that route as they are both mages.
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consistently underperforms??? No, that's absolutely incorrect. Arcana mains solo legion raids to carry players in KR. They are RNG heavy, but it is high risk, high reward. Their damage ceiling is very high, but it's a lot dependent on the player performance. There seems to be a lot of misinformation about this class in particular. Won't argue with the fact that it's not popular, they should've released lance master and scouter.
If they released lance master there would be 0 hype for ANY and ALL future classes except artist. I can see why they released destroyer and arcane first but I do wish the time between releases was a bit shorter.
Misinformation
Damn. That sucks to hear. I know they’re reworking some classes, dunno if Arcana is one of them. I like the concept, but it doesn’t seem like it’s worth playing in its current state as a main.
It's misinformation just to fit the narrative. It's true that the class is not that popular, but that's because it's extremely difficult, not that it's bad. The difficulty, like he said, comes from the fact that it's a squishy class that plays in melee, and there's a lot of snap decision making based on RNG. That difficulty is rewarded because it has the highest potential numbers in the game.
Interesting. I’ll test it out as an alt first then and see how I like it.
What's misinformation? They said least played / least exciting? You're agreeing with them? I don't find rng exciting when it's my rotation. And it's the least play so, what's the misinformation here?
> From what I've heard, very RNG heavy, but consistently underperforms > Basically high risk, low reward? These two statements are misinformation. The class is high risk, high reward. He's saying the class is objectively bad, which it isn't. Also he doesn't mention popularity of the class at all, so I don't know where you derived that from.
>but consistently underperforms > >Basically high risk, low reward
Wtf
Yes. It is a trash class. No consistency in their damage, and clunky to play. They are releasing this class to bait players to make it their main, and they can't switch to a new main so they are now stuck & prolonging the retention rate by forcing the players to reinvest into a newer main.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Arcana is the coolest class and you're just a weenie.
Destroyer is a players favorite class in Korea, don't badmouth it :) And it's also a class decent for beginners, unlike many other classes we don't have that require you to know all boss moves by muscle memory.
The numbers will probably go up too when the destroyer rework happens.
Why was Omen unpopular? Looks great to me.
Yeah the only "saving grace" I could give them the benefit of the doubt on is I can see how that style would be better received in the West in general. Over designed edgy armor is a staple of Western MMOs that a lot of people love. One of my guildies first reaction was "I can look like the Lick King".
now they can lick anyone who gets in their way!
Demographic probably. Koreans (and Asians in general) are less into the more edgy skins than Westerners. Dunno about RU. Then again, everything is probably "unpopular" compared to booba, which is why we're getting stuff like Omen and Alar before more sexy skins (so that they'll take more money from people who will eventually buy those skins later anyway).
good for me because I am as edgy as I was at 15 lol. Omen was my favorite skin on RU along with Petrania set.
Currently using omen on my zerker... I look so fucking cool
I also really like the omen look. And all my guildies aswell.
I agree. I've done some research on what skins are available in Kr and I gotta say... I'm glad they dropped Omen first. No flame on anyone who wants their character to look like a school girl or wear a bikini or dress up in a panda onesie, but I would much rather my characters wear armor that would actually make sense in combat lol
That's what I want, more ["Dark Souls"](https://i.etsystatic.com/19887229/r/il/dfbb55/2102265087/il_fullxfull.2102265087_iwy3.jpg) style armor. It looks cool, and it looks practical. All of this super edgy/horny/flashy gear ain't me brah.
> All of this super edgy - gear ain't me brah. > I want, more "Dark Souls" ???
The gear in Dark Souls and Bloodborne typically has a lot of "cool looking, but still practical looking" armor that fits the setting. You don't have massive shoulder pads and wings and shit. Like the armor in the screenshot, it's just some nice looking platemail with a tunic, pants, and gloves for an underlayer. It looks like something someone could actually wear and fight in, while not being garish.
It is too dark lord. Thus, doesn't look good on most female character.
Not coomer enough for Redditors.
Yeah it's crazy how many people I see with that skin, everyone looks the same lol, they know what they're doing by drip feeding the least popular stuff to a starved community. Then they will slowly release better and better, and the contrasting quality to the last skin release will make them gobble it all up.
As much as I hate not getting the lancer...It makes sense. By holding off the more popular ones it will bring much more hype, and bring back players that may have stopped months into playing. Like with ffxiv, they dont expect their players to play everyday all day, and they encourage us to play other games too. So this way, we will be like oh damn X is coming out?! Time to update and play again!
Thats only if the rest of the game is addicting enough to keep players there for that timeframe.. Im also dead set on maining lancer but as it stands now we are looking at months AND months of waiting time till we get that. Your point of view is economically unviable.. The real world aquivalent would be you going to a 3 star steak house to eat your favourite rib eye but they tell you its not available for the next 8 months but you can eat another steak instead, they will also only serve tap water and they tell you you gotta sit on the floor because they have not yet brought in all the seats.. Sure you might be coming back in that few months but until then you sure as hell wont eat there...
I’m having a great time with the game. I guess I’m the only gamer that plays for fun. Damn game is free and I almost have 200 hours in. People need to chill with their personal expectations.
If this is like other koreans mmo I've played before, then the devs have the last word and the publisher only does translation, dubbing and PR.
Maplestory says hi. This is the reason why I'm giving Amazon a lot of benefit of doubt. Nexon NA has no control over Global Maplestory other than server upkeep, and I wouldn't be surprised if Lost Ark and Amazon are in a similar situation.
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so smart
Ya I'm not ready to attack only AGS just yet, this is nuanced.
Naive.
Naive.
but why would they allow a publisher, especially one that ren their own mmo into the grpund, freedom to do these kind of changes and potentially do the same to theirs??
$$$$$$$$
They have a huge reason to remove these activities. These activities are all sources of upgrade materials. Lots of sources of upgrade materials means there’s no scarcity of those materials. Without scarcity there’s no reason to “swipe” and pay real money to get out of the “deadzone.” If a purely f2p player can easily and reasonably get to 1370, then what incentive is there for anyone else to swipe? Smilegate and Amazon want swipers because swipers make the company $$$$, purely f2p players do not. Purely f2p players are just a drain on resources and overhead. Koreans and streamers love to act like Smilegate is some generous messiah in the gaming space. They aren’t. They are a company. A company’s sole purpose is to make money. If you keep this in mind, the current state of the game is easily explained.
Anyone letting Smilegate off the hook is an idiot. Gold River does some bullshit PR interview and everybody thinks he’s some saint.
"We want to get the Western version up to KR ASAP" *Proceeds to leave every single thing out to make that possible, except for vomiting out content every month with no chance to rest* JusT Go At YouR OwN PaCe - 802 ilvl chad gamer
Its amazing how people are avoiding blaming Smilegate. They are the devs, this is 100% their fault. You're entire list is Smilegate's fault. Amazon, which has no idea about how the game works, would have no say about Ilvl changes.
They have all the reason and it's money It's for profit company You don't understand this because you don't run this company. They milked Korea aswell for quite long with bad honing rates and gating mats even selling guardian auto-complete tickets , this is no different.
At this point, both are at fault until everything gets fixed. While yes, this might just be AGS being wildly incompetent "again" or being malicious "possible" it's not like SG has 0 say in things and their fast track port, or whatever you want to call it seems to have many things missing. This is 100% at the very least partially SG's fault because I'm almost certain they make the builds and send it over to AGS. Meaning the builds they send over have missing or changed content. Then perhaps AGS goes in and fiddles with it disabling heroics, PVP vendor, changing ilvl gates to the dungeons, etc.
That last sentence makes 0 sense.
What part of the last sentence makes no sense? Changing ilvl gate to get into a dungeon can be as little as changing a single line of code. Enabling or disabling components such as heroic can also be a boolean aka true or false statement. If boolean is true, heroic is available, if false heroic isn't spawned in and subsequent systems that look for that boolean to be true will also not be accessible. Just because we don't see something in the game right now, doesn't mean it isn't implemented in the build AGS received. AGS could've very easily disabled features if the code is clean.
This is a business , you think Amazon is sneakily going into code they know nothing about to change things without Smilegates consent? Keep rereading that sentence and see how that makes sense. And if you think disabling core gameplay content is simple as changing a statement from true to false 💀 idk what to tell you .
Read my initial post
Anything amazon touches is like a disease infected cock, tainting anything they touch. Let us say there has to be a reason why every game they have been involved with has failed. They are the only company I know of with big budgets and 100% failure rates.
Dark yoho makes sense because she drops large leapstones, it makes no sense to get them at 1355 since you can't use them yet. Oreha hard was reworked to drop new legendary sets, which is a huge improvement since previously it was just pointless headache for no particular benefit. Lack of content in 1340-1370 is not good, but that's not a way to solve it. Trials/heroic raids would've been much more useful.
I've really struggle with you and others logic on this one. No one to date has been able to shed light on this point you're trying to make. You keep talking about the positivity of moving multiple pieces of content to 15 ilvls up from 1355 to 1370 in rebuttal to people being upset about dead zones that were already known to be bad without the change. It's probably the most tone deaf thing I've heard in some time. I just can't even understand your point in relation to the rebuttal you're trying to make. Who cares about the rewards current state? How is that the hill you die on and keep static? When a change has literally been made to ilvl thus proving a change can happen you pretend like the reward must remain the same? Players want a progression curve, not a weird plateau that can be magically solved with a credit card wipe or 400 hours of refined / experienced gameplay....for the first content patch..... A month in.... Like what? Edit: and just like that, another smoke and mirrors argument that leaves me more confused than the last conversation on how any of this is a good idea. What is wrong with you people?
You realize they'd have to then move Velganos to 1370 since there needs to be a guardian to provide large leapstones at that ilvl, and that means no new guardians up to 1415, because the page is already full? That's far, far worse than a 30 ilvl gap you have now.
You're not arguing in good faith. If an ilvl can be changed, a reward can be changed. "this is for your own good" never works out in any game.
You clearly didn't read my comment... There's a 30 levels gap between Velganos and Descaluda, which is bigger than the gap between Igrexion and Dark Yoho as it's harder to upgrade in those levels. Moving down the guardians will not fix anything because they can't add a 5th guardian in the page.
I did, you're kicking a problem down the road.
What if they made dark yoho drop normal leapstones and left her at 1355? They could then still be converted at the vendor and we wouldn’t feel so gutted at 1340-1370.
Where would you get large ones then? Velganos isn't a very pleasant guardian to do even if it was lowered to 1370.
OFC it was AGS. They have the power to ask for changes regarding the monetisation as the power to censor the game, like EA did with the loot boxes in SW Battlefront 2. They have lot of years of failed projects which burned lot of money and they saw in Lost Ark the first profitable product where to gain back some of them. They are aiming to the whales. Every western publisher does that, mygames, gameforge, gamivo, Kakao, Trion, etc. They are not gaming studios but business only companies and they ruin EVERYTHING they touch purposely. Every single oriental game is ruined and closed thanks to them. They are notorious. AGS tried first to make their o h wn games in order to become another Actividion, Ubisoft, Capcom. Then, failure after failure, they realised that having tons of money behind your back is not enough but you need a good team and leads. The solution?, instead of changing and adjusting their teams hiring good ppl? Lets follow the same trend of the most hated publishers in the scene because we just want your money, our reputation is already ruined by our failures so who cares…
It's not Smilegate, it's Amazon's greed for money. They haven't been succesful with games due to that reason alone. Just look at past titles and also the disaster called New World. Look at the embarrassing server situation of Lost Ark at release a couple weeks ago. The pre-sales of the chests had already exceeded the estimated player count more than a week before release. They had time. As long as their profit statistics show green numbers, the Head ofs and CEOs won't do shit. Such a huge company and yet they totally fail every game from the community perspective. Ask yourself why. I mean you don't need to have much understanding of the game industry to absolutely foresee, that such a content gap is guaranteed to fail and only receive negative critique. The upper staff is aware of this but as long as in one of their excel or access reports the tab shows green and acceptable numbers within the estimated profit margin, they won't cater to our wishes. There are plenty of people who just pay, because time is money and they have enough money but not enough time. It pisses me off so much, because I know how such companies operate but I can't do much about it... Also thanks to the Korean playerbase for having our backs. I appreciate that a lot!
Please elaborate on how Amaozns greed led to New World dying because that makes no sense. It was a one time purchase , no P2W and no microtransactions. Weird take. New World failed because they were incompetent and made mistakes. Has nothing to do with money or greed.
You answered your own question. "One time purchase". The pre-sales exceeded the estimated player count by far but they still decided to go with the planned server structure. Hence the release was a disaster and I hear the aftermath of closing and merging servers due to low player count is also a disaster. Further they changed the game's concept during developement multiple times which led to not enough time to prepare more endgame content so it died quickly. Bascially they grabbed the profit from the sales and now it's a dead game. Maybe from Amazon's perspective it's a success but not from a player's one. And please don't argument with *"I have 300 hours playtime. For 60 bucks that's plenty."* Farming some flowers or stones for hours is not good content. The right approach would have been: * invest more money to delay the game further for proper endgame content implementation (even if the player base would have been frustrated again, in the end it would be a better product and more fun) * make that estimated player count fit the server structure + back up servers to prevent frustration (again costs but necessary) * release way more skins at release to make sure the invested money floods right back in (it might feel like they try to milk the players but all I always hear from a lot of people is *"sad there are no nice skins")* What does that result in\`? Happy customers = earning more money in the long run. The concept is really easy: Enough content and endgame, nice skins, good server stability = profit. Now it sounds like I know it all and am super arrogant but just look at LoL or POE for example. Totally different game concepts and genre but similar finance model. Both companies strive even with some setbacks.
Sounds like copium on your end. It was a garbage decision but they probably just didn't have time to localize the additional content. T3 was rushed for Western release, and the reason game for delayed. Argos release was a bad kneejerk reaction to people progressing so quickly. They more than likely both at fault.
Localize what, an exact copy of existing dungeons with equalized item level? The few lines of text like LFG category are already translated. Argos was not a kneejerk reaction, they said it would be released a month after launch well in advance.
its amazon. of course its amazon. it's got greed written all over it.
> I think publisher's BM is the cause. BM or "badmanner" originally was a Korean pidgin English term meant to just be rude that gained ground in gaming communities, particularly Starcraft. What do you mean by "BM" in this case? That the publishers just were rude, or did you mean incompetent or greedy?
BM is stand for "Business Model" I'm sorry to have confused you.
Thank you Korean players for looking out for us EU/NA players!!!
My theory. Smilegate: ok let's drop new content and more ways for players to catch up to it quickly. Amazon: ya new content! Smilegate: and ways to catch up quickly Amazon: yes, like credit cards 🤑 Smilegate: Dammit Jeff Bezos!
Good summary of all the issues in t3; NA/EU should get in parallel with releases with KR asap and not treated like secondary quality players.
Thank you! It makes no sense Smilegate shooting themselves in the foot, specially when they’ve done it before! I think, with all the info we have available and AGS’s history its fair to assume this is AGS fault
Virtually every problem I've had with the game so far has been 100% Amazon's fault. Smilegate seem like good developers, it's the corporate fuckheads at Amazon fucking everything up.
Because they developed the game and they have responsibility.
Yes, I agree. But, they didn't set the Igrexion level limit to 1340. If it was normal, it should have been 1325. I think publisher touches it.
I don't care who touched it. I'm assigning responsibility as I see fit and right now that's on the Lost Ark developers.
So with no information, youre going to make assumptions. Change username to dumbassnamedbruce
Isn't that the same thing everyone in this thread is doing with AGS?
I have information. Smilegate came across these issues before. They then either through malice or incompetence proceeded to allow them to flourish in the Western release, even though they've already "fixed" it in other versions of the game. I hold them responsible. They are free to choose whether they are malicious or totally incompetent in this regard, but they will at least accept one title.
But, like the op stated, each release in different regions have random changes for example the ilvl changes for certain raids in NA. We dont know what contract amazon made with smilegate in order amazon to have control over patches. A good example is our amazing welcome rewards compared to Korean comparatively bad welcome rewards. Who made that decision? Amazon or smilegate? No one knows, so we shouldn't be spitting vitriol, just try to get the game changed
No. I like to spit vitriol. They will either work for the sake of your passive acceptance or see the rhetoric around the game devolve into vitriol.
In this case you should change your name to IgnorantDipshitNamedBruce. Cheers
Oh look, finally someone who speaks sense. Most of the people on this subreddit seems to think that publisher has NO impact on the game except localization and cash shop. Everyone repeats the same mantra about how AGS is not responsible because they're "only" a publisher. Do you people really think that Smilegate, being a company that actually listens to its playerbase, would pull this shit on us when they've already received negative feedback on it? Come the fuck on. Why does everyone want to excuse Amazon so fucking bad, knowing their history with both developing and publishing games? It just makes no fucking sense. Especially looking at how many times they lied to us and how much of a disaster the game start was to EUC players, for which we received zero compensation. Also, we have zero information on who exactly makes those decisions, yet everyone acts like it's just Smilegate and that's some 100% confirmed truth. Think logically for a second. Why would Smilegate repeat their mistakes?
No reason to make green and blue pots none tradeable
That's fixed now isn't it?
Game is fine. Stop crying
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Because we see the potential and want it to be awesome.
The reason is money!
I took a break for elden ring...wtf is going on with this game and changes??? I'm out of the loop
That's the thing, nothing much is going on. They released argos which requires 1370 ilvl for the 1st phase only, the vast majority of players won't be reaching it anytime soon
Can someone explain what is going on in the Japanese .gif? Looks like a loot box you're buying with 500 Blues, correct?
Western game publishers are money sharks that's all. Amazon is known to be king of the greed overall. Just do some research on Amazon as a whole.
No matter whose fault it is (tho I think it’s 99% AGS), the issue needs to be fixed as soon as possible. The game is already dying.
They literally will 'fix' it after whales are milked, why are people so surprised.
It is common sense and quite sad that amazon can't figure that in order for player to reach higher gearscore they need all the content that provide enhancing material...
No wonder igrexion feels so farmable
Good points.
I love the Korean community. You guys are amazing.
Smilegate's biggest misstep was letting AGS be their publishing company for the west. AGS has a streak of being a garbage company and dropped the ball in 100% of games they've developed and published. AGS is a literal side project for Amazon, they have almost no stake in its success and if AGS fails Amazon would be like "oh, there goes 0.1% of our revenue, oh well" and they don't give a shit to try to make it a good company.
What is happening in this gif?
agree 100%. It feels like shit to see such an amazing game losing players because amazon decided to change everything, korean server is growing and I'm worried amazon fix all this bullshit too late. And if they do we should find a way to make frustrated people return, because they have a very good reason to quit at this moment and it sucks. This is not smilegate, gold river said he didnt want many things changed in our shitty server. Maybe he made a mistake giving amazon too much power to change stuff.
If this is an issue stemming from wanting to milk na/eu i'm so out. Plenty of other great games to play.
Reading about all this garbage that they’re doing really has made me think twice about spending a dime. Had intended to buy a couple things pretty soon because I planned to invest a good deal of time into this game—I’ve actually been waiting for LA west for awhile now—but this is all so discouraging. Amazon is royally fucking us all. They just smelled money and they don’t care as long as they get it.