Amazon Games needs to take action or lostark is done

Game Feedback Game Feedback
1

On February 11, 2022, Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG finally released the NA/EU release of Lost Ark after it was announced in 2014. The game broke records, having its all-time peak of 1.3 million players. This won’t be the case if amazon games continue to handle lost Ark like this.
This is just the start. If Amazon games do not take action on these problems, the game will become New World 2. I’m hoping it doesn’t. In this short letter, I will cover all of the issues with Lost Ark that I am aware of.

P2W?

the P2W issues might be one of the smaller issues I see as a problem. P2W is not a new thing. Almost All MMORPGs, including Diablo or WoW, have some type of P2W mechanics put into the game. Lost Ark, a f2p game, would have more p2w than games that are not f2p. In this sense, Lost Ark isn’t pay-to-win as ten dollars would get you an insane boost in your game progression than not paying at all. But the problem is that Amazon Games looks like they are trying to pressure you into paying your way through the game. That is where the content issue takes place.

Content & Pay Pressure

Lost Ark was first released to the Korean population in 2019 and has been released to Japan and Russia. People have been speculating that Lost Ark would release its T1 content on launch day. But it didn’t. Instead, it released all its content, including Tier 3, 2-3 years of content slowly released in KR coming to NA/EU on LAUNCH DAY. If this wasn’t bad enough, Amazon Games released the first Abyssal Raid, Argos, just a month after launch day, with phase one being at ilvl 1370. Even after a week has since gone by, most of the population in ilvl1370 are whales or no-life f2p players. If you don’t play the game, you might not know how much you have to pour in to get to ilvl 1370 in a month. As a KR player, I poured over 300 hours f2p, and I’m still at 1353. Three hundred hours in a month is 10 hours a day, which most people don’t have. This makes people feel pressured and left behind, making them pay for the game. The honing rates aren’t bad in any sense; it is just that getting to ilvl 1370 is so hard in a month.

Censoring & Advertising issues

In the NA/EU release of Lost Ark, the game went through heavy ‘westernization,’ which is just censoring and adding more black skins into the game. I’m not trying to be racist here, but that happened. First of all, the censoring. Character skins went through heavy censoring and made the game lose some of its identity: skins and customization. The sexy part of the customization disappeared (such as the garter belt of gunslinger) and was replaced with more family-friendly outfits. Note that this is an M-rated game, and I don’t understand why they would censor the characters. Maybe they would get an R. I’d they didn’t? I still don’t understand. Next, the problem with Black skins added to the game. I perfectly understand why Amazon games added dark skins into the game, and I favored it until I saw the new dark skins replacing some of the other pre-made faces in the game. This upset me, and it would if you’d known these pre-made skins before. Why wouldn’t they just add another tab to the pre-made tab instead of replacing them with perfectly normal skins? This is another thing that I don’t understand.
I thought a company would have common sense, but I guess I was wrong. Finally, onto the Advertising issues. In the Smilegate website for Lostark in the Korean website, everything such as events, stats, and new updates are shown in style. For example, skins that will be released in the KR servers are teased on the website so that you can see how the skins look before they are released into the game. In the NA/EU website, the omen skin was only mentioned as one sentence in the update news for the Argos update.

Bots

I won’t go into detail about this issue, but there are so many bots in the game that ruins the experience for all people playing the game. Amazon said they had a ban wave for these bots, but I couldn’t feel any change in the bot population. It can’t be that hard to find bots. I can think of tons of ways to get most of them banned. Bots ruin the chat, economy, and overall game experience.

Lost Ark itself is a wonderful game. Amazon games are just ruining it. I hope Amazon sees this and reflects on what they’ve been doing wrong this whole time. There are tons and tons of other issues that are in the game, and I’ll list some of them here:

  • Europe Transfer Issues

  • Queue Issues (not as much anymore, and this won’t be a problem if Amazon makes lost Ark into new world 2)

  • Bugs (that don’t exist in the KR version of the game)

  • etc. feel free to add more

Amazon, this is your last chance to turn the tides around and keep the game alive for a long time. As a player who loves Lostark, I hope these issues are resolved, and we can all have fun in Arkesia. Sorry for the bad grammar and explanation; I’m not the best English speaker around, plus I’m writing this in the middle of the night. If anyone could improve my thread and make it formal, It would help.

Thank you for reading this far. I hope you have a fun time in Lost Ark. Thank you for all staff members that are working hard all day to try and fix this problem, I hope we can all work together to build a better community :slight_smile:

2 Likes
2

Iv hear that before many times :'v

1 Like
3

Lost Ark will be fine. You guys are a very loud minority.

2 Likes
4

Not really, games already lost 50% of its population, add in the amount of bots currently in game and the remaining “minority” accounts for huge part of population.

If the issues dont get adressed soon, the game will be playground for bots and whales.

1 Like
5

Even if we count all the active players on this forum we are still minority.

6

Not all players bother to come to forums to complain, most just quit without warning if the issues persist

7

they don’t care

8

Most people don’t give a f about this forum, or about argos

1 Like
9

Bots are really hilarious, not only are the early levels full of bots running around script leveling the chars, but the later areas like sushire in lake eternity at the elite ice bear are bots on every channel farming adventure tome items with those bots…maybe we need an own thread to report such hotspots, i send ingame reports but i dont know the mass of reports they wont get followed.

Not only are bots annoying when they kill all mobs while you quest in these areas, but also they temper with the economy.
We sure need a solution it cant remain like that, in bdo they sure went a different way with no person to person direct trade bots are sure there but less of a problem.

10

being there, done that. So I will rather read doom sayers with “too much content for me to handle” then “there is nothing to do in T1 for a month”.

The P2W is personal matter. If you are weak and can’t handle FOMO… yeah… the opportunity to grow? I guess? Just play at your pace. You are making it a race. Not the game. They might be just trying at the best.

Bots are technical issue. SGR is having more headache about them then I do for sure. But all they can do is trying. This is constant fight of skills and I mind they are vastly overhelmed by numbers. It’s same as any other “security” area in the world. If hackers decide to break through anything THEY WILL. Price for popularity,

Just let them keep trying, they have a motivation even without you telling them :slight_smile:

11

1340-1370 is were a lot of people QUIT until Smile Gate addressed it and legion raids came out they played based 7Xed in Korea and RU so yes there is still lots of hope and this to be turned out

12

Game has not lost 50% of its population. Concurrent player count has dropped by ~50% but that number does not = total players. That is total players currently logged in. You have to actually look at what the steam chart numbers mean. There are alot of variables that can cause concurrent numbers to drop.

For starters ALL games experience an initial hype at launch. People take vacations in order to play for extended periods of time. I myself pulled several all nighters when the game launched.

Now that the launch hype has died down and players are returning to work we are seeing a downward trend. Im sure a % of those numbers are actual players that quit. But its nothing to be concerned about considering the current numbers are still 10 times more than what SMG was expecting for our launch.

The bots are an issue but they are working on a fix as they have stated numerous times. These things take time to fix and the version of the game we have has only been out for a month.

13

That is the problem, and amazon games needs to take this seriously and stop getting updates out but rather fix problems that would drastically decrease server populations.

14

Regarding the 50% thing, im sorry for writing in a weird way. I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was saying. Anyways, back to the problem. The problem isn’t the past, its right now. The very actions amazon games takes could alter the game’s future in NA/EU very easily. The one thing I was trying to say from this post is that Amazon Games should act faster… every minute counts. Sorry if I wasn’t clear in my post.

1 Like
15

I remember seeing fear mongering posts in the head start. Do X or Y will happen, and it’s bad!

16

People like you will always complain, no matter if there is too much or too little to do. Just get off the forums and stop posting things like “stop gettings updates but rather fix…”. A statement like this is ridiculous and only makes the place like forums where people should post valuable opinions just a monkey room.

17

I don’t always complain, I only do when it’s a serious problem. There are alot of things to compliment and praise for the game itself, but I am just worried that these problems would cover up the actual identity of lost ark as a game. I’m sharing my own opinion, and people like you that criticize posts like this never make this ‘monkey room’ situation any better.

1 Like