Do players really want hard content?

General Discussion General Discussion
36

Actually, no. People don’t want hard content. People think they want hard content but they don’t actually want hard content. They want satisfying challenges and some want things to brag about.
The easiest way to achieve those two things is to make hard content. Valtan HM and Vykas HM are satisfying content. It feels good to be a good player, but if the content is too easy, there is no difference between good and bad, so the challenge stops being satisfying.
I was excited when we first wiped in an abyssal dungeon, because this meant there was a way for me to improve. It was a challenge.

I could say I like hard content, because it sounds cool and is easy to say. But the truth is: Nobody truly likes hard content, but many people love satisfying challenges like Valtan HM.

Addition: Lost Ark has a huge problem and it’s not overabundance or lack of hard content. The problem is too much grind in too many ways. You don’t have the time to enjoy a good challenge like ValtanHM for long enough, because the amount of daily grind takes too much time. If you want to do your full daily grind on your 5+ characters you need to spend at least 2.5 hours per day. This is very disrespectful of your time because you cannot play when you have time. Instead you have to do your daily rotation. So since this is artificially induced stress, many players don’t have the emotional capacity to learn hard content and thus prefer the easy way.

3 Likes
37

Spot on.

38

Well, as a hardcore player I only care about people who are doing hard content with me. Hardcores will never be stopped by 1370 oreha, if somebody wants to quit because of that being too “difficult” I am only glad to see that. Because even if you don’t make jokes about those people, if you are neutral towards them, why would you care about somebody who will DEFINITELY quit on Vykas? If somebody quits on Oreha and you give them easier time clearing it somehow to keep them in the game then the same should be applied to every legion raid, or they will still quit just a month later. Who cares about these people? I don’t want the content to be nerfed even more, it is already too easy to the point where you have nothing to do for 5\7 days in a week. Casuals - out of the game or play unranked PvP and enjoy skins. I’ve also seen suggestions about “easy mode”, nah bro, I don’t want to see that. There are lots of people who are at the border of being casual but because there is no other way to progress they force themselves to learn how to play. If you give them easy mode a lot of people will just stop doing normal even though they already can.

39

Yes.

40

i have above 700h and this is the first time EVER i read something about an ingame voice chat lol

41

Haha i can believe you. Most players dont know that voice chat actually exist in game. Its under the community tab btw :rofl:

42

I personally like challenging content. I gives content for me to chase after even if I cannot do it anytime soon. Fortunately, this game caters to all sorts of skill level. Even in KR, some players just do normal Valtan and Vykas and still progress just as fine. As you slowly gear up and get more skilled and/or confident, you can try normal Brelshaza. In fact, you don’t even ever need to complete all the gates to progress. Just do Valtan and Vykas gate 1 normal. You might not be able to do Kakul when he comes out, but you can try Brelshaza gate 1 & 2 normal when ready. There’s no real hard progression block for the less skilled or casual players.

That said, there would be ‘casuals’ who want to be able to do the hardest inferno/hell contents but ask for nerfs because they believe the hardest content should be at a skill level that caters to them specifically…

43

Abyss dungeons, Valtan and argos are all a good level of challange-mechanics and I enjoyed learning these.

But Vykass is far too much for me, I used to consider myself a good gamer but I just can’t process vykass at all especially gate 2 with the wings and orbs part the timings are so unforgiving even in gate 1 where I understand the mechanics fully I still find myself failing the orb kite and orb memory bits 3/4 times. Have cleared gates 1-2 but not three and feel like dead weight when doing this raid.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but this is the first game I have ever had so much difficulty with processing what’s going on an reacting fast enough (with all other effects turned off) I won’t blame latency at 180-250ms as that shouldn’t mean I’m missing things like orbs, it’s on me not reacting and moving fast enough.

Hopefully clown is more Valtan like. I am pretty much just going to ignore doing vykas now because I just feel so useless and bad every time I try. I like a challenge but this one seems insurmountable for me, I got worse this week compared to last and letting down 7 other people because I’m not upto their level also weighs heavy (they are very nice people and don’t get angry, but I can tell they are disappointed)

Thankfully I can still get enjoyment out of working on my alt army, and my main (sorc) dosen’t actually need vykas cloths for her gear sets according to maxroll.

I like that this game has a bit of something for everyone, and that there is challenge in the content. For me personally though vykas is to unforgiving.

1 Like
44

I no longer care about engravings, correct stats or jewelry bc of phenols, char level, or even wearing all blue gear.

New 1370 exists and we were all new at one time. Note this doesn’t mean I’m happy to see 3 fresh 1370 in my alt yoho who has bothered to get 4x3, but Not going to waste energy caring about it. Just go on, get content done.

What I do care about and will insta-quit any content over, is when the new alt clearly doesn’t give any damn about even trying to use zero cost, automatically given items.

Examples -

  • every fresh 1370 that unlocks yoho by definition also unlocked 1370 chaos. So even if only few gems slots filled and all low level 1 and 2, that is fine. This shows the player at least tries. Got some free gems with first 2 chaos, slotted them in, great.

But I’ve seen tons, so many players who clearly not only want carry, but gives zero shits about slotting even 1 single level 1 gem.

  • to those that say well it is MM, you get what you get so stfu or use PF. Sorry, no. Almost zero ppl really mean this. What they mean is they have almost no expectations, not zero expectations.

If MM = zero expectations then they’d all be happy with true example has today - player who was asked by another in my party why zero gems when should have at least couple level 1 matching their build. His literal answer was idc, this is MM so stfu, and oh btw lolz haven’t even slotted skills or skill points. He admitted every skill was level 1, hundreds of free points avail to assign but didn’t give a shit and we the party was entitlement anoles for not carrying him since this was MM.

So no, sorry - MM means most reaonable areas of variables should have no expectations (gear quality, stats, engraving level and number, gem level etc). Agree these are all standard variables and you get what you get in MM.

But not assigning skill points is not a standard variable. That is is permanent, or should be, step in every char regardless brand new or not. Same for you ran 2 chaos dungeons, why the F not slot whatever few gems you got? Whatever crazy build you are using, you will always get at least few gems matching, so slotting none is same as not assigning skill points.

Same for deliberately dying. If dies all 3 deaths in guardian bc he sucks, brand new doesn’t know mech, or made mistakes, ok fine - on board with that is MM randomness. But when a player openly admits or even brags is not going to miss even free pots until he uses up all 3 deaths, that is not ‘standard’ MM variable we accept as doing MM. That is self admitted troll.

So answer to OP - if player actually is seen to be trying, idc how bad, gear, gems, whatever. May not be happy about it, but that’s just MMO randomness and I got bad draw that hand. If player clearly doesn’t give a shit, then why should I?

45

As a returning player getting close to 1415 all this gatekeeping and bussing is putting me off continuing playing and it kinda feels like the player base is more toxic then when I played on release. I should be looking forward to valtan not dreading it

2 Likes
46

truth. so many friend groups came here just to raid and had no interest in the community at all. They didnt give a shit if there were even other players

1 Like
47

Dailies are the most challenging content Jessique,
I find it most challenging to not fall asleep doing these…

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48

The difficulty of the game was a big attraction for a majority of people so i would say yes they do.

49

This. I’m going to be one of those players who are 1460+ doing normal vykas because hard mode is just an unfun slog.
Valtan is an enjoyable fight where you can see where you goof up and try to improve. vykas is like tying to do a dance recital while a booba lady yells at you. At least in normal vykas if someone goofs up you pop a time stop and move on. Hard mode is just yelling, people hammering their end raid button and wasted evenings.

No. Thanks.

50

Especially legion raids will always be tuned for korea, the other regions have next to no saying over that. Unless theres a mass exodus of players due to hard content, there isnt anything gonna change. Upcoming raids and even abyss dungeons will be very hard if not even impossible to just pug in the first weeks.

51

If it’s 50-75% of the normal reward minus the bullshit gimmicks, why not? No stress experience and as a casual (myself as well) it’s not like you were gonna keep up with the Whales and hardcore no-lifers anyways.

1 Like
52

I enjoy playing different classes and getting better at playing them. I AT LEAST get 3x3 engravings on all my 1370 alts and always aim for cruel fighter in all guardian raids/abyss dungeons/abyss raids (Argos). I mainly have the alts to increase the amount of materials I get weekly, but I also plan to raid on all of them when they are high enough item level to do Valtan/Vykas. On my 1415 alts, the game is way more fun because I can do Valtan, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try on the 1370 content because it’s boring in comparison. If you’re playing an alt that is not fun, don’t make it.

53
  1. 1370s we see today are not mostly new players but day 1s and returning (bots are back).
  2. like hell are they gunna waste pheons and buy overpriced acc. to gear an alt that’s just fodder.
  3. Yeah who would’ve thought playing an inferior version of your characters sucks

KR version doesn’t have the issue of bots RMT, overpriced relics, gold. NA does and devs/ AGS didn’t tweak our version enough to combat this so welcome to the worse version of Lost Bots.

1 Like
54

Good discussion in here in my opinion. I think kind of what gets lost is that this is an MMO that you play with other people which often makes it hard to hit the sweet spot for the difficulty since it’s different for different people. I remember playing Rock Band with my friends where we would all be playing together even though some of us were playing on hard, others played on normal and others played on easy. It allowed us all to play together at the difficulty we wanted and everyone had fun. That’s not really possible with a game like this.

I think the annoyance factor comes in with the difficulty ramping. Why make all of the previous content so easy then suddenly ramp up the challenge at the end? Many of my friends who played this game got bored with it and left because there was such a grind at the beginning where nothing was challenging at all. I for one would like to see more challenging versions of Chaos Dungeons, Boss Rush and Dimensional Cubes because now those are just boring to do repeatedly. Also look at how many people farm Yoho even though there are more challenging Guardians to do but most people don’t want the challenge or trust others to be up for the challenge in matchmaking for that matter. Tweaking some of the lateral content could help with making the daily grind feel less boring. Sometimes it’s not so much that people don’t want challenging content but rather that they don’t want to grind farmable content where others are failing meaning they have to try again possibly with a different group and waste more time doing old content.

Which once again is why I have such a problem with the 1370 gate. There’s no way around it. Those dungeons are completely do-able with a full group of 1370 characters. I did it multiple times this week because the event got two of my alts up to 1370 as well as having a 3rd that got there before the patch. But so many people just don’t even want to try if they aren’t getting carried. For the other content, you can go over the required iLvl for the content before trying it or just skip it all together like I did for the Gate of Paradise dungeons on nearly all of my characters.

55

They think they do… but they don’t.

1 Like