I would like to preface this by saying that I know nobody asked for my two cents & even more so that Im sure you dont care. However, Id like to add my feelings, and I hope they will been seen by someone at AGS that cares enough to listen.
I have waited for lost ark for what feels like a lifetime - I remember first seeing the trailer in Korean on youtube and I just KNEW this game was going to be amazing! It was being run by a studio who seemed to care about their players and SG was new and didnt seem to have a bad rap like the vast majority of the other studios making games today.
While waiting for Lost Ark, I, like many other gamers, played other games. One of which was SOLO (Swords Of Legends Online). It was being brought to the West from China - an absolutely beautiful game with great gameplay and the genre its based off seemed entrancing. Again, the developers seemed competent, the title was a B2P one with no P2W features, loads of fashion items and the roadmap seemed well planned out.
The key thing to hold onto here is the current devs from Gamerforge were HOSTING the game; like AGS is doing for SG in the west. Thats it. The game in its entirety was already out and had been for years in the east.
Surely this was going to be a great start for those of us who wanted something to sink our teeth into - that couldnt afford to play WoW or FF14 or those of us who simply wanted something new we could play.
It started out much like Lost Ark did; severs were packed during their launch & for the first couple of weeks players were content with the content even though we only got the beginning portion of the game. MINRO changes were made but for the vast majority of the game - everything stayed the same. It became increasingly alarming that the items shop wasnt being updated with the plethora of items the game was known for a month after launch. They also started to release content in the strangest of patterns which completely fractured the flow of progression and access to players - and they tinkered with aspects of the content (namely raids) and “accidentally” gave higher tier raid mechanics to first tier level raiders with no raid gear! Of which they took almost 2 weeks to fix instead of hot-fixing the errors! They even messed up the loot drop rate so bad that you could spend hours in a raid with 6+ bosses and not receive a single piece of loot - or get duplicate loot which you couldnt use together.
This continued after the community begged for features, fashion, classes, & fixes to be implemented and it seemed like it fell on deaf ears; the game started bleeding players left and right and after the awful implementation of choppy content releases (one difficulty level for the same raid released the month previous!) the game was severely hurt - needless to say that game lost a LARGE portion of their player base and the game has only been out for a year; it has since gone F2P and still isnt climbing in popularity anymore - the game is honestly dying and its a shame because it was actually really good.
I said all that to say that I REALLY love lost ark (the 320+ hours Ive spent on it should say that! And I work a full time job! lol) and I want it to be great as its KR/RU counterparts! Im sure you see the threads and I understand the need for bracing content - However, please consider that majority of the players already know what to expect; we have watched our KR/RU friends & streamers play for HOURS on twitch and even more so off - we’ve asked questions and held deep discussions about the game; why hold out on skins, classes, & filler content?
Keep your large raid content and some of the other goodies you got; we have spent the last month understanding that server stability issues and congratulate on the steps you taken - but if the trend youre starting with tinkering with content, withholding classes, changing key aspects of the game to create problems that werent there, slacking on tangible skin updates, & content drop to further us to the KR/RU version - I dont think Lost Ark will survive it & its sounding very much like deja vu.
A lost ark fan <3