so this game is not P2W?
am worried about not receiving the same game Korea, experiencing the characters, spells, the way they look, etc…I heard they are changing few stuff in the game.
Lastly I know they said they censorship on marketing, cuz whoever thought about that does not exist. anyway what am worried is after few months they will just censorship the stuff forward on.
just want someone to clarify it for me.
don’t listen to the people who never played the game in their life and just say it’s P2W just because you can buy materials with blue crystals which you can farm for it ingame or buy it with money. it would be P2W if only real money is able to purchase the currency required for materials. and it’s only pay 2 win if your gear affects other player’s as in pvp which they don’t unless it’s GVG which is a Guild vs Guild that requires well geared Guilds and experienced players etc.
some people say it’s pay 2 win because of the tiny stats the outfits give while they don’t affect other player’s yet again… if these people who keep talking about P2W ever played this game in RU or KR for a good amount of time and actually grinded for a bit they’ll understand that you don’t need money to get good gear and other stuff. you need to farm for gear and all of that not buy it… you can’t buy skill with money you can’t buy gear with money etc…
all i can tell you is to play the game enjoy it for what it is. don’t let other people who never played the game in their entire life make you change your mind about playing it. you can have a lot of fun and do endgame content etc without paying a penny on anything. you can upgrade your gear whatsoever without paying a penny… ignore all this minority of people who got no clue what p2w even means or what does it apply to.
These days, everyone have their own definition of “P2W” so you’re asking a loaded question.
What do you want to know specifically? It would be easier to answer your questions more accurately this way.
This game it’s P2Win. However,
It is p2win like a gacha mobile? No
It is p2win like WoW? Probably, Yes.
For me this game isn’t P2W.
In P2W you have the word “Win”.
What do you win by paying in LA? Nothing.
I would say its a tiny bit pay to win.
The pet buff you get with subscription gets up to +10% to two stats, buying it in game i believe requires hoping the paid players sell your the required currency. So its kinda borderline.
Costumes are kind of in the same spot, you gain like +4% stats for legendary costume over lower one and you rely on other players selling you it (no doubt extremely costly) if you are not paying rl money for it.
They are not HUGE, but at the same time they exist. They should have removed both.
Do you want them to change the RMT side of things but not the costumes?
I dont really understand this thread at all.
But… Anyone can argue P2W for any one thing.
Its not as simple as “is this game P2W”.
Can you pay money to get an advantage in certain avenues of the game? Yes, GVG and Rowen (Rowen might change).
Can you play for free and reach the highest item level? Probably not and you are not competing with players that swipe.
Can you raid all endgame content as a F2P player without any problem? Yes.
Will we have less “P2W” in the West? Potentially, but not sure if that was an issue for you or not.
Just because you’re not competitively minded, it doesn’t mean that it’s the same for everyone else.
As for OP, yes the game is P2W, however in Lost Ark’s case ‘winning’ is finite between content cycles as the people who aren’t paying will have time to catch up to any loose iLvl leads, and that character progression will not transfer over to the next tier of content for the most part. Just depends on how important it is for you to be leading the pack or lagging a little bit behind. That being said, all PvE content can be done on iLvl pretty comfortably provided that you’re coordinated with your raid team and your individual mechanics are good. This is always going to be more important than gearscore. iLvl is needed to unlock content, but it won’t be the driving factor in order for you to actually complete that content. My main concern is if the Western servers ever catch up to the Korean ones and we have a potential shot at some LA World First races. As for PvP; outside of GvG everything is equalised until we get Rowen, so next to no P2W involved there.
EDIT: Also, depending on which raid content you’re doing, it isn’t something that you can carry because some individual mechanics will wipe a raid. Players are required to ‘pilot’ their way through some carryable content. If you’re coming from WoW, then as a more casual-minded P2W aspect, LA is less incriminating than something like the WoW token where you can just pay real money to buy raid lockouts/glad carries. It should also be noted that in LA PvP, there is no such equivalent as a glad-carry as the ranked system is all solo queue.
we cant see in the future. wait for the game to launch and we’ll all see
I come from WoW and WoW is P2W except for skill, I seen a lot people high gear and they dont know how to do boss mechanics,etc. I even diid boosting in WoW for Torghast in exchange for gold ofc. but that does not effect the gameplay of a play, anyway.
it is just I wanted to make sure it is not really P2W, for example like if I buy a lot crystals or gold from in game shop I can use it to buy gear. legendary gear to boost my overall damage, and so let say am level 20 and i face another player lvl 30 it is possible to murder him with 0 effort. now thats pvp. and I only play pve sometimes pvp but like out of 5000 hours of pve will be like 10 hours pvp.
I just dont wanna be walking around the world collecting stuff or mining collecting for my House and someone just dash spin me 1 hit and just keeps moving around the map to farm people.
This game haven’t an open world pvp like black desert. You can do your activities with no disturb. The ranking pvp is instanced and equalized (3vs3 arenas).
In the future we will have more pvp options like sieges or faction pvp but these content will always have dedicated maps to do it.
Crystals are used in the shop. We don’t know exactly how the shop will work yet, but no you cannot buy any items (like gear or weapons), there is a smaller shop (called maris shop) inside the larger one that sells random consumables at times, though its a scam.
You can trade in the crystals you buy for blue crystal, then sell those for gold and that gold can then be used to buy things from the auction house. Usually this is upgrade stones which is used to upgrade your gear, similar to most asian MMORPGS (+1 - +25).
In many ways gearing is quite different than what it is in wow, as you will notice.
There is no open world PVP except for guild Vs guild which is something you do at end-game.
In GVG you probably wont beat a person that swipes, but GVG is not the thing most people even touch. And GVG is more than just PVP too its only 1 part of several and locked to an island.
Rowen is a new continent in Korea that has open PVP. Though its normalized as in the +upgrades on your gear does not count. We won’t have this for a long time though and that might get changed in the future.
Arena PVP is completely equalized as in everyone, no matter swiping or not are on the same playing field in terms of everything.
am worried about not receiving the same game Korea
oh poor child, have you seen all the silly stuff that they changed? I expect them to change the monetization as well being that its Amazon, Amazon didn’t become the biggest corporation by being consumer friendly. for example they(Amazon) recently started charging for grocery deliveries from Whole Foods on top of charging you for being a prime member.
When a company becomes as big as Amazon, it doesn’t work like that anymore.
Amazon games and Amazon Shipping is as far apart as Walmart and Twitch.
Edit:
And if you think making the game more P2W than Korea is in ASG’s best interest you are delusional. But then again you seem to prefer good old Mail.ru.
If you’re coming from WoW, it’s going to make this much easier to explain.
You can expect quite similar level of “P2W” elements. Just as WoW has WoW tokens that can be exchanged for ingame currencies, you can purchase cash currency that can be exchanged to ingame currency from users. There is a difference in terms of gear progression, where obtaining base gear is quite straightforward and easy but actual progression is done with gear upgrading.
Fact that you can exchange cash currency for ingame gold and you can use that gold to purchase upgrade materials from AH is probably the most “P2W” element in the game.
With that being said, you can’t buy skills in this game either and I’d argue that personal skill is even more emphasized in Lost Ark compared to WoW. Having better gear will make you bit more survivable and do a bit more damage but it won’t do anything for you in endgame content where you will die over and over to wipe mechanics unless you know what you’re doing regardless of your gears.
As far as PvP goes, the core PvP content, which is the arena, is completely equalized.
However, there are optional island contents that have unequalized PvP where if you have significantly higher gear level, you will manhandle your opponent. Since gear level is your real level, there is no situation of level 20 with legendary gears one shotting level 30 though.
There is also 2 GvG islands where you will be doing unequalized PvP group battle, where gear advantage will definitely be present. With that being said, the main perk you get for winning those GvG islands is the ability to host a server wide event where everyone on the server can participate, obtain rewards based on participation.
Since there is no open world PvP outside of the newest continent that just released in Korea, you won’t be running around then get jumped by someone in the world.
Hope this answers the questions you had.
Yes thank you, and thank you everyone, last thing Just wanna make sure on is the censorship so it is just they removing the starting outfits and giving us something different at the start, and as for the starter outfit they put them in game so we find them and if like equip. I got that right.
now my question is in the future, will they just keep doing the censorship to outfits, am not a pervert or anything its just I want the game to look the same in terms of charts as Korea charts. as far I know they have not changed any outfits and the korea looks we will get the same thing in shop or in game whatever it is… its just in the future which no one knows I dont know if they will just keep on pushing censorship with everything, its already stupid enough to do censorship at the first place causing to lose some players… anyway.
Yes they will keep doing it
heh, you pretty much answered it yourself. What do you expect here to hear? 
They promised* they won’t. That’s it really. Believe it or not, that’s up to you.
Or be a realist and wait until/if it happens and choose then. What difference does any of those answers make now?