This isn’t the correct direction in my opinion for nerfing content.
This game will quickly become unchallenging and will lose a lot of peoples interest.
AGS, Trying to find the middle ground is something WoW has attempted for over 15 years and never found it.
You basically have two choices
Appeal to the Casual andys and nerf things to make them mindnumbingly easy, alienating the people who play games for difficulty and overcoming challenges
or
Carry on business as usual, with current balancing. and probably alienate a good portion of your casual players.
Think about which group of people will spend more money on the game I guess.
No, this is bizarre binary thinking that a bunch of you on the forums are leaping to.
You literally don’t even know what the changes are and are freaking out about the very concept of change.
There’s a lot of room between 10% success of some t1-t2 content and 100% faceroll easy. They have data from probably millions of runs. If only 10% of runs of certain t1-t2 guardian raids or abyss dungeons are successful, there’s a problem. That doesn’t mean they need to make it braindead easy. Maybe some of them will have hp nerfs, maybe some will have better telegraphed mechanics. We’ll see when they post notes.
There really isn’t a middle ground that has been successfully found in over two decades. Forgive my willingness to believe AGS found it.
The only acceptable nerf is maybe in-game instructions and at that point, its not even a nerf.
This is not just talking about how much changes are being made but really showing us players where AGS stands. With Casual playerbase or the Semi/Hardcore playerbase. This game in other regions is the latter rather than former. You are going to have to understand a large portion of us seek that version of the game without having to use proxies/overseas pings.
I’ve successfully brought two characters to T3, and a few in T1/T2.
The game has been very fun, and one of the fun parts was due to the challenge of it and learning/rising from it.
Nerfing content the majority has cleared/progressed through sets a dangerous precedence and unknown with future content. It enables players to easily bypass training experiences and learning mechanics that are required for future content because they bypassed it and never had to learn.
It also affects the economy, if nerfs require less battle items/potions it makes lifeskilling less of an incentive.
A concern, if you nerf content which has already been progressed by players, what does that say about the future where some fights in KR are 280hp bars + with lots of raid wipe mechanics. And if you do make it easier, how are general players supposed to learn when their training experience was removed (nerfing difficulty).
The game could do better jobs of teaching stagger/counter attacks, and perhaps instead of nerfing maybe offer a beginner difficulty option which provides far less honing materials but offers the nerfed run through?
…
To remove the difficulty gives no way of actually learning them in the first place. We learned from growing & guides/videos/others.
But difficulty gave us the reason to search & learn in the first place.
If nerfing the content is due to players feeling like they cannot progress with their friends, why not decrease honing cost/increase rewards? It’s time gate for a reason.
I personally disagree with this approach as well. I think the most that should be done personally is improving the availability of information and removing a third party neccessity of looking up this information. i.e. an ingame boss journal describing key gimmicks and maybe a general strategy.
MMO’s end up trying to find this middle ground that will appeal the most people possible and end up falling short of too easy or still too hard, and end up with the playerbase that doesn’t care. And the “doesn’t care” crowd largely doesn’t open their wallet very often for cash shops.
I fear for the future is all. I am in the “let smilegate balance the content” boat because they are the ones with the vision of the game. Let them choose the difficulty of their game.
Edit: Yes, I am aware of the buff AGS gave Guardian raids. I typically support buffs to content due to being a challenge seeker, but would argue reversion to KR balancing is potentially still avoiding this slippery slope i’m concerned about.
I personally don’t feel anything required change, but it’s still a better alternative to removing the difficulty. There is no way to learn mechanics without difficulty in the first place.
The number of times I run into players who knows nothing about the dungeon/guardian is basically in the high 90%.
Most of them don’t know, dont care and expect to clear it; cause that’s how WoW heroics is in the beginning. Guardian raids where I’m the only one that brings flare? 90%. Even for players in high GS.
So from my POV, the nerfs are for people who knows nothing and wants nothing to do with learning and experiencing the game. I don’t know how they are going to nerf the game, but whatever it is, I guess we can all ignore mechanics now; because that’s what the loud people wants.
lmao, you good bro? This is a channel for Game Feedback, read the forum name. I don’t care how many posts there are about this topic. I’m doing my part for my feedback. You know, the whole point of this forum? Stay constructive.
I’m not supporting the Borg guy’s point but the the community manager did say they have percentages of success and failure over the last few weeks. Its safe to say the number is in the millions. Personally I don’t care about the numbers. It’s just showing us the type of Publishers they are. It’s a middle man developer and it’s not going to go well for us in the long run.
For example, lets say 100,000 accounts have attempted just 10 Guardian Raids. That is 1 million data points. Of course if we’re talking about groups of 4 as one point, divide by 4 but then consider how many players this game has based on steam stats and that many of those people have likely attempted more than 10.
I think personally Lost Ark is game of building foundations. Youre basically just layering more and more concrete and rebar with every guardian raid and abyssal because the game teaches you a lot with the content and expands upon it in the content you do later.
Simple Wipe mechanics are the introduction in abyssals. You learn that everyone has to understand and perform a mechanic to avoid certain death. Then you learn that people need to learn to actively communicate on when each will do the mechanic. Then you require teamwork in doing a COMBINED mechanic etc etc.
None of the Abyssals have any risk of enraging or running out of time unless you get matched with 2 supports at once. They are simple “learn mechanics and you will win” and that doesnt change, even up to the current end endgame content in Korea (though thats more like “read this 30 page essay and win”).
My main concern is that almost seems like Amazon have no clue what kind of game they are importing to the west. The game is not easy, and requires a lot of foundations with difficult content to get used to your next challenge. Where does it end? Should everyone be able to clear all the content without any regards to mechanics because its too difficult for them? Seems absurd when that is what Lost Ark is built around.
I do agree with the HP removal on T1 and T2, only because the time taken makes me never want to do guardians on alts lol.
This is kinda that slippery slope I am talking about. You really can’t have your cake and eat it too. If they came out and said
"Ayo, sorry we buffed the content upon reccomendation, it really shows that this was a much greater change than we intended. We are going to let Smilegate dictate balancing rather than us act as a Digital Game Pimp and deliver the content we think is appropriate to the “player-base” of our choosing.
Guardians and Abyssals are completely different in my book. If T3 is how they all guardians are supposed to be; “intensive 5-8 min beatdowns” then im all for it.
I think you’ll find most players find the abyssal nerfs very questionable but not the guardians.
Let’s not completely give AGS credit for this. the “30%” you’re referencing was a balance that was already tuned on previous live release. KR version only recently nerfed these values (the pre “AGS Buff”) to keep it in line with people doing the fights on 6+ alts.
This is where I say let smilegate do the balancing. Because it is clear they don’t have an idea what needs to be done, and their track record isn’t promising from the development standpoint.
I can totally get your view point here. AGS may not be the complete culprit. Frankly AGS just needs to give up being in Video Game industry and let a better company handle Lost Ark. From a Localization, Management, and Balance Standpoint. The censoring, translation hacks, the servers, the shop, the bots, the chatfeature, and the balancing is just … oooof.
From the CM’s post, it seems they are only looking at the number of players who have accomplished the encounters. It doesn’t seem like they are looking into the causes of other 90% of the players not making it through the encounters.
I mean you look how fast they died, how fast they use up 3 resurrections, what items they’ve used , it becomes pretty clear on why they died. I had a run in sea of indolences where players with 1300 gs died to a simple mechanic, that they should’ve been able to avoid; given their GS. But swipe to lose I guess.
And when people are only looking at the end result, you don’t find the cause. AGS is generalizing the issue by stating only 10% of the players are making it through and forcing that 10% to be a part of the 100% that can’t make it through the encounters.
That not only creates resentment, it also creates an isolated situation where players that do understand encounters can’t be bothered to teach the other 90%. When everyone can’t be bothered, the future of this game is slow death.