There’s a lot of resentment from the community towards CM’s/AGS when it comes to things regarding road maps, class release schedules, raid release schedules and many other things. A lot of this caused by the fact we can’t really understand the POV of AGS and Smilegate.
A business is there to make money and being a F2P game, Lost Ark has to make money through other means, I get that however some of the decisions they make really baffle me to no end.
All we get is some flavored text every now and again where they drop a road map with whats to come for the next two months and then it’s silence until the next road map. I feel really jealous where KR can get streams, especially coming from other games like Blade and Soul where the game was trash, at least they gave us live streams, they did Q and A’s and generally interacted more. It would be nice if we could get some of this treatment.
Covering road maps and patch notes in a stream would make for a really good experience and create a healthier experience between the community and AGS/CM’s.
Why did they move class releases to one every 2 months instead of once a month only to not have the Arcana powerpass last until scouter?
Why are the next major updates only coming in September and August is basically a dry month?
What were the reasons that they choose the class release to be in this order? Summoner was in beta but not in release, other classes have many advanced classes but others only have 2 or 3…etc.
What discussions did they have when they went to Korea HQ?
Even back when Argos was endgame why was there such a rough honing wall from 1340-1370?
All of these are example questions where it would be nice if they could actually communicate with us through streams and tell us directly what they are thinking rather than having us just read, read and read. At the moment it seems like they are just doing the bare minimum and not bothered at all. Shit I’d do this for free, this is a huge opportunity and it doesn’t seem like they are capitalizing on it at all.
Obviously they are milking as much as possible but at some point as a company or team you have to sit down and discuss what the long term goals are and how you will reach them because damn, I don’t see a lot of what they do as in the best interests for the game. Maybe they have the data to suggest that what they are doing IS the best course of action, but we don’t that and it would be nice for them to convey things like this to us.
At the end of the day this is just what I think as somebody who works in Marketing and Business, there’s so much more that they could be doing that isn’t currently being done
Also the CMs claim the LOA ON is only for the Korean audience, and yet Smilegate goes out of their way to have live translations for certain parts if not all of them[even if its not perfect its still better than nothing], if what we see and what they share isnt for us too, why go through that effort?
Anyway thats also one thing i also appreciated from playing Blade and Soul for years.
Tho to be fair, NCsoft didnt change anything from the Korean version to accomodate the Western one. So we knew what we saw from the Korean roadmaps/infodrops would come and most importantly - UNCHANGED cough Shadowhunter cough
I mean, if you really wanna read a juggling of words and terms like ‘long time game health’ to say they did this for money you can go trough the posts CM’s make every update.
I personally don’t feel the communication is all that terrible.
There’s regular roadmaps. Updates on bugs and support problems. Feedback in the forum. (bit less so atm, but I guess, it’s holiday and summer hole in Korea and Amazonia as well)
There’s a content patch pretty much every month.
There’s a new class every two months.
Downtimes all in all are communicated well.
While I don’t always agree with everything publisher and developers do, they did react a lot on the feedback they get. (and some of that might be from internal testing, data, other regions, and not necessarily always flaming thread #421001 in this forum)
That goes both ways, I think CMs would be more present in threads, if players in our regions would be more polite, and threads would be more constructive.
And whatever they post, get nailed down on it afterwards, be it a somewhat informal “We’re planning on X and Y, but it’s not clear yet and we’re not sure about the schedule, maybe around month Z”. Which probably is just being honest. And then is read as “official statement that X and Y will be released in month Z” → more flames and disappointment.
You can always solve stuff with more manpower. Resources are limited tho in every media production. So you can employ more CMs to reply to everything personally. Or a couple more dev’s to solve the actual problems.
I can’t say that MMOs in general do that better or as well even.
I must agree with Singsalot, communication is not as atrocious as people paint it to be.
A big majority of “Dissatisfaction” is not even with the communication but with what’s being communicated and people easily go for pitchforks and try to obliterate the CMs. No, not joking or being exaggerated, they often are blamed despite since release people pointing they are our messengers and aren’t in charge of decisions. There was even a thread witch hunting a CM for something they did during their weekend instead of “Answering questions”.
Sadly as well, the folks here are in big majority anything but reasonable. Proven with April “Critical error” despite claiming for weeks “We can behave” and right after they give us a date, they cannot behave.
So, pair up the childish attitude along not liking the decisions and try to put this up in a stream informing this. Sounds like a literal wreckage, extra stress and imho a waste of effort.
Even with our last patch which was pretty good, there were dozens of threads complaining.
All the “Milking” , “FOMO”, “Predatory” concepts people have adopted so earnestly feel more like an excuse to shit on them just because the mob will join in. Imagine if they wanted to seriously milk players ala Diablo Immortal kek. And there are plenty of opportunities to monetize around yet they don’t.
Communication itself is there, is not great, is not horrible. It can improve and it has been slowly getting better. But one must make a difference between not liking a decision and asking "WHY?, which in most cases are decided in private meetings and not disclosed to the public, with bad communication.
I still say their site looks like a slytherin hallway all gloomy and dark.