Hello to anyone that will read this post & maybe reply, didn’t think I’d ever be posting on here but as someone with nearly 500 hours in the game, playing daily with multiple characters in T3 all F2P I felt like I should talk about some of the problems I’ve seen once hitting certain points in the game since I do very much enjoy playing, so this might be a bit long but I’ll get to the point with most of it. Also all of this written as a player on the west coast server ( Bergstrom )
Tier 1 and Tier 2 Content
I know a lot of players may not mind running continents like rohendel again but I believe a vast majority of players do not like the feeling of this repetitiveness especially since it is flooded with nothing but bots, also another big issue I really noticed when working on new alts is that all of this content is dead or takes way too long to matchmake, T1 and T2 islands are fine but almost every player has already completed this with their first or 2nd character and most players are 4-6 characters in by now.
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Solution
Make express permanent but nerf it to just speed up the honing in each tier in short speeding characters to a cut off of around feiton ( 960 ) ilvl, this will make T1 and T2 content even more dead but I feel there is really nothing to be done about this other than to get players out of it faster than to have them complain. ( no express rewards just giving us the honing benefits )
Bound to Character Materials vs Roster Bound
There isn’t much to say about this other than at this point in the game all materials should really be roster bound, There isn’t a reason for materials to be bound in the first place and making them roster bound would actually encourage more players to make alts, enjoy the game a bit more and not feel frustrated because the have X amount of bound materials sitting on a Tier 3 character.
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Solution
Make all materials bound to roster, simple quality change that is needed.
PvP Rewards
As someone that loves PvP in any game I play I have to say lost ark PvP is fun but not rewarding to the players that love it, I spent the time getting from Tier 3 to 1st limit, before they changed the names of the ranks and I have to say while it was rewarding getting there and learning PvP in reality I gained nothing from playing it, not a shred of XP, roster XP, any gold or any silver so in the end I feel like it was a mistake to play this mode even though I have earned the additional honing materials from the vendor.
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Solution
I know they said they were incorporating PvP rewards so I don’t have a solution to this other than players should be able to earn combat XP / Roster XP , Silver and Gold.
Botting / Queue Times
As someone that has played a vast majority of online games I know there is no real solution to getting rid of botters, you can lessen them but they will be reprogrammed and run rampant again and a prime example is a server like bergstrom having a 2k player queue when bergstrom isn’t one of the most populated servers it shows how much of the players are actually bots.
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Solution
There isn’t much to do about botters, they will always be here but moving forward I do believe on the coding side of things I do believe some type of " portal " or " zone " can be created in bot pathing so when they walk into it or past it they’re flagged for administration to review the account , when playing through all T1 and T2 content again I realized that every bot takes the same pathing and even though they teleport they still walk to the same parts of the edge of the terrain, another solution is somehow creating a barrier like acts as a death barrier and puts you back at the triport or makes you respawn over and over, as for real players walking into this I believe if its a death barrier they will realize it but a bot wouldn’t meaning you would catch them faster before reprogramming happens for the bot, not sure what a viable solution to this is since botting is in a lot of games and is never removed.
Gold Generation
Now gold is pretty important once you actually hit Tier 3, as a free to play player you will realize that your ways of earning are limited to : any islands that might give them, Unas task, Abyss raids, selling items / cosmetics on the market, welcome challenges and collecting master pieces. Now welcome challenges can only be completed once which is fine and the rest of the ways are fine but once you hit tier 3 you will realize just how much gold is consumed vs earned, Unas task are easy to complete, master pieces take a bit of grinding since it is RNG and for the average player who logs in for maybe 4-5 hours or less because they got tired of doing the same things over and over this way isn’t really good although the gold earned is.
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Solution
First option is to add an actual gold chest that gives X amount of gold in event vendors or other vendors such as the silver chest we just got, the second option is to increase the amount of gold earned from abyss raids primarily being Sea of indolence since this is the most played along with Oreha’s well. 100g per stage is NOT viable or really even worth doing for an abyss with 3 parts to it. The gold should be increased to either 200g per stage or 250g per stage, Oreha’s Well is fine with the gold payout and the rest of the Abyss raids aren’t played to be considered needing a change, the reason I believe this change should happen would be included in the honing topic.
Tier 3 Honing
I know every player has talked about this time and time again but I feel like something really needs to happen with the Tier 3 honing rates and how much gold it eats up from F2P players and players who maybe don’t really have that much time to spend on the game but want to enjoy the content. Tier 3 honing also ties into future content which is why I believe this should be addressed. For example the release of valtan the required ilvl is 1415, If you’re a whale then you’re most likely at this mark, if you’re F2P well you’re either grinding a lot or simply put just not at this mark which makes you start to believe that once you hit tier 3 that the game becomes truly P2W.
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Solution
Tier 3 honing needs a boost or some type of change to make F2P players not feel pressured or left out because they didn’t spend the money to get there, I know you can’t make every single player happy but when everyone complains about the honing rates in tier 3 then it’s a glaring problem that the devs don’t seem to address other than trying to give us materials ( weekly ) by running events.
Powepass
Not sure what happened with the feiton powerpass communication but as someone who has done rohendel on 6 characters and every other continent I do believe that a powerpass should be included with every new class coming out if materials are not going to be bound to roster in the future. Why I believe we should get a powerpass with every new class is because players do not want to run the same T1 and T2 bot content again and have to make an unnecessary grind to tier 3 where they then again have to start the real grind against honing, not only is having a powerpass a relief to players who want to get right into the action but for someone just starting the game and they maybe like 2 classes and are given a powerpass that is like the 960 feiton powerpass then it’s a relief to them knowing they can jump right back into the action with their 2nd character, this isn’t just for F2P but also P2W players, there aren’t really any negatives to giving players a powerpass and the only reason I can see why we don’t get one is because the devs simply don’t want to give us one.
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Solution
Add a powerpass to every new class that comes rather than having players complain about not getting one at all or add powerpasses to the store for purchase so if a player wants to skip that content they already did then they can do so using real money.
Abyss Mechanics
Currently in the game all of the abyss raids are easy mechanic wise but once you start doing sea of indolence you will realize just how many players really don’t know the mechanics along with Albion part 1 / 2 and Argos.
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Solution
This isn’t a major issue just more of a time wasted kind of thing but maybe during the first screen that appears when you click the Abyss Raid Statue they can give a button you click to read the key mechanics of bosses ( not bosses that don’t really have any mechanics required other than stagger ) so that players that don’t take the time to watch youtube will have an idea of what to do since this can happen in multiple groups after quitting and requeueing, even in " Know mechs " groups this happens. Also some type of check point save would be nice for Abyss raids like Sea of indolence where there are multiple bosses and quitting means you have to do them again, not sure how this will be implemented but it would be a nice feature.
Character Models
I believe that each class should have a female / male counterpart, I honestly don’t mind classes being one gender but I have seen a lot of players saying they wish they could play as a male mage or male assassin, personally I would of liked to play as a female berserker at launch but since this class has been announced I don’t mind waiting but for other classes it hasn’t been announced, not much of a solution to this since classes are coming to us after KR/RU get’s them and amazon can’t really do solo change just because we asked for them.
Server Queues
This ties into botting but I don’t know why queues are at 3k (bergstrom , non populated server) at almost 7am in the morning and I’m pretty sure every server experiences this across the west coast and east region, maybe even in EU.
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Solution
Less servers but vastly increase the amount of players that can get on, if this isn’t possible then something needs to be done about botting or letting bots be able to login to a server, making more servers doesn’t make any sense in the slightest since they will fill up with bots and just cause the same problem over and over again.
All of this is primarily my opinion of the game as someone who is F2P and plays for a couple of hours everyday, I don’t want everything to be handed to F2P players even if this thread makes it seem so but I do believe some of the things I stated are valid topics that could really use a change / adjust so that more players can find a reason to play the game more and enjoy it. If any devs or people with authority happen to read this then It would be nice to see some of these changes implemented going forward to make the game better and thanks for anyone who reads all of this, also might be some typo’s but you should get the point of what I’m saying.