A lot of games actually have a massive decline vs. initial hype on release, and since there was a massive (over the top) hype there’s a two-fold on the level of drop of concurrent players- the numbers going from over 1mil down to ~200k is very indicative of that.
But the issue with Lost Ark with NA publishing is the pacing and bots. for many of those who still lingered and felt a K-MMO grind is okay with them:
The discrepancy between whales and non-whales really discouraged them, especially with the lack of grind content to moderately keep up. this was evident when we didn’t have Challenge Guardians, and a few other content that other regions had to start with. I’m sure a lot of the players felt that they wouldn’t have survived through the first few months without the double event (Naruni Racing and Event Guardians) happening. and
Bots. the level of bots got so extreme to the point that real players weren’t able to log in for hours, waiting for a 4000~13000 player queue that was obviously because bots were rampant. AGS wasn’t able to handle the issue swiftly, and a large portions of the players got fed up waiting to log in. Get home at 7pm PT and see a 7k queue ? Many just do something else. Have this issue happen for 4-5 months (February-June) ? Just stop playing.
With a combination of the two and perhaps other factors or even issues, people end up not playing the game, especially if you have another game to go back to:
A lot of the players i know are from FFIV or WOW or other genres, and since LOA NA release, both games have had updates to go back to. other games like Elden Ring came out as well and players went off to play those games instead.
Lost Ark is a fun MMO, but as Gold River has restated in his LOA ON, Lost Ark is a game that wants to grow “With All RPG Fans”- it’s not perfect for everyone and there’s still a lot of room for growth. so the development is there, and as a TERA veteran, publishing really does affect how the game prospers.
Definitely a lot of solo content out there. even a duo or trio content would have been nice- the little things like being allowed to do logging together with another person was refreshing.
Guilds on the other hand, i think most in-game communication has died since Discord anyways.
People are quitting and I am not sure how many new players are joining the game. I think this game will level out at like 125K players when it all settles out.
I know of 12 personal online gaming friends that have uninstalled Lost Ark and are back into FFXIV and/or WoW daily again.
125K is a solid concurrent player level for an MMO. The game will be fine. I am still here because I love lost ark personally
Pathing and collision. I will be honest, when you play WoW or FFXIV, etc then come play this game, the amount of times you get caught or hung up on things is terribad. Makes it hard to take this game seriously as an MMO on the AAA level, this aspect of your mounts getting caught on a box or a bush feels very phone game’y. Hell, most phone games have better collision and pathing than Lost Ark. They need to smooth all that out.
He didn’t say that tho. LA Doesn’t really have that much of horizontal content Asides collectables and Islands / Timegated events, they’re quite cool and you get to explore a lot, but I don’t think Vorti said that it has more than a fully 10 years old game like f14. Not even Smilegate says that. They aknowledges they’re small compared to since the game is like 3-4 years old.
They also said they wanted to focus more on Horizontal content this year. Edit: You do know that Horizontal content is Lost Ark aint’ just collecting mokoko seeds, but I understand your displease.
Cringe bait thread “why are the numbers so low before a big patch? game dying?” OP has never played an mmo before, literally, or he would know how the population fluctuates in mmos between big patch and patch waiting room.
Ani Bot system works thats why. There are still bots in starting zones, but they also getting bans fast, but programs starts whole process over again. I think real player base in peaks of LAO is around 100-120k. Why LAO lost milions of playerbase ? Lets be honest this game is average gives a lot of fun, easy, and friendly for people who dont wanna play everyday, but repetetive content all over again is boring as hell and many people will leave before t3 xd
My friendslist on steam used to have 30-40 players online at a time, nowadays not a single one of them logs in anymore. I have finally quit aswell. Feels really bad to play this game in its current state if you have any kind of self respect.
In NA West - Valtan server peak is during US off-peak hours because that’s when OCE players start gaming… Most of us still at work / school / other RL commitment when OP mentioned the time
110k-179k AVERAGE players in the last couple days, with a peak of 220k.
Assuming that each players plays 1 hour (super casual) to 3 hours (dailies and everything to prep on Wednesday for the patch) at an average of 2 hours over a 24 hour period, that’s still a player base of at least 1.2mil daily players.
You are assuming based on player charts that the same 110k people are playing 24/7.
Now, even if 25% are still bots that’s over 800k daily players in the game.
I like these doomstatitics analytics. So pretty bad according to them that it’s the most played mmo on steam and these guys are pulling numbers off the ass. Imagine thinking average is 100k… and still, 20k per region is more than enough. Specially since most events and instanced content is cross server anyway.
It’s not a game for everyone anyway of course and still pulling more than double than expected by devs.
Edit: imagine thinking CCU is the same as daily player count lmao yeah.
I may go back to Guild Wars, aside from ‘legion raid’ the game is pretty shitty, the content is close to nonexisting atm, you have UNA in which can be done with 3 days and some events, chaos is a chore, raid is a chore in which I have been doing with stronghold.
Right now aside from legion raids I have no motivation to play this game at all.
And I assume a lot of people fell the same. (you can see within this post)