The problem here is that players (me included) were expecting to get the game we’ve been looking at and watching videos for years.
With the same skins, same npcs, same art direction etc.
But instead, we’ve got something that looks like Lost Ark but isn’t completely Lost Ark.
Now, it’s understandable that they’d make some minor changes in terms of prices and monetization depending on the market they’re targeting because russia, korea and europe / na doesn’t use the same real life currencies and have different costs of life.
What is not understandable is all the changes they made for skins to be less revealing or look “less korean” since it’s what players were expecting and nobody complained about it.
If they had released the game with everything like the korean version and there would have been lot of people complaining, it would make sense for them to make changes in order to adress those complains and satisfy users.
But here, they just decided to make huge changes for no reasons at all, or for bad reasons.
The worst and dumbest thing here is that instead of keeping the original skins and designs, and adding a few changes with less revealing / sexy outfits for those who would want that, they just removed them and decided for us all.
Which means that not only did they totally erased the work of the developers and art designers, but on the top of that they replaced this work with their own.
Now I highly doubt this will ever change, even if I’d love to get all the great skins I’ve seen from kor / ru, but it’s a lack of respect towards the customers and towards the developers.
Bingo. No changes are welcome, we don’t want amazon’s or some nonexistent ghost’s version of the game. All they had to do was translate the game, make it less p2w so it can be adopted easier by western players, and that’s it.
What do we get? Manpower spent on dogshit sneaky censorship and recolors and changes that not a single soul has requested for, and a release that was somehow more p2w than the KR server itself.
And there are still people that are trying to defend AGS here instead of admitting that they are making mistake after mistake.
This is very much why it can’t be business interest driving the behavior from AGS. If you advertise Beef sasuages, and people are thrilled to buy them, then you try to sell them Turky instead? You are not going to have happy customers.
In the case of a Lost Ark situation, it’s not quite as apples to onions as the above example, but simplification is like that.
What customer’s wanted, the market being pursued by AGS, was Smilegate’s original product, now with English (and other) Text and Dub available. The game that existed in KR/RU/JP, just without the need to break the TOS and connect to servers far away.
This was bargained and done.
A free win. Money on the table for AGS to collect. A good PR moment to help them build some positive reputation and wash away the anger of New World’s mess.
The past cannot be changed, therefore the mistakes made will remain. None of which changes the fact that AGS can shift direction going forward. Reign in your pride, ego and/or ideology in favor of listening to Smilegate Rpg and basic consumer sentiment.
For a good chunk of your potential payers, the money won’t move until they ‘know’ this investment is going to have a return.
A return in the form of classes people want to main, content they want to play, advancement supporting activities in the full version of the game KR/RU/JP has, skins worth putting money down on etc.
You had to redo the roadmap, but unless those potential payers see what’s on it, that won’t change a thing. Silence does not advantage the company’s bottom line.
This can’t be emphasized enough. They didn’t have to do any extra work or anything special, no one asked for those things, and yet somehow they failed.
The important things from now on are admitting that they messed up. They already did when it comes to the pacing of the game, and they touched on classes and skins lightly, but the roadmap really needs to pop off from here, and they need to elaborate more on these types of concerns that I outlined in this thread, because if I can’t feel confident about what direction they take with putting their hand on the art or the cosmetic monetization, then I’m just not going to be able to play this game peacefully while looking forward to things I’m interested in.
I will always be worrying about how they might ruin something I care about, and that’s just not what I’m looking for when I’m trying to have fun or invest my time into a game.
The whole attitude surrounding the promotion of the skins and classes leading up to and from release also doesn’t build any confidence. They also didn’t even bother to show all of the omen skins.
Sadly the people that are making these decisions seem impossible to reach, and even if we could they might not listen. The most we can do is constantly letting our voices be heard and hoping that they might get the message
Yeah. I mean honestly I wouldn’t have given a shit about the ogre presets if they were just additions, cool, more options to play with. But they had the audacity to just outright replace good presets with ones where you can tell they were haphazardly thrown in… lmao I have no clue how someone can arrive at decisions like that.
Whole thing, almost every example in this thread just feels like they thought they could get away with ruining a bunch of “little” things cuz no one will notice. Tough luck
The truth is, all those cards art changes, and character creation…
Amazon is from USA, so you guys over there have this agenda that everyone must be black, or homossexual is just like Netflix.
But they don’t need to… They’re not going to fix their public image with shit like this. The people that care about these things are irrelevant. If you’re reading this AGS, you’re supposed to cater to your players if you want to cater at all (an alternative would just be releasing the game as is,) not to clickbait and attention seekers that hop from topic to topic and never really give a shit about anything they comment on.
They basically came out and said it was basically deliberate. The entire reasoning just reads like complete and utter psychosis. Don’t flame the CMs though, they’re just messengers.
