AWS Team and Smilegate. Once again we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads with your player base. A mistake was made either via AWS or Smilegate (the who really doesn’t matter) what matters is the mistake wasn’t made by the player base. The mistake was realized and then a series of unfortunate events take place that spiral it into oblivion. I understand that hindsight is 20 20 and it is unreasonable to expect anyone to be clairvoyant however let’s take a look at each item step by step and then the decided “corrective action”.
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In game mail goes out to player base in regards to the upcoming Tripod update with a reminder as well as attached items. Items included battle chests, any card pack and 10x pheon for each character on a roster.
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It is realized that this is a mistake and ultimately decided that it needs to be taken back (knowing that a good quantity of the player based (especially in EU) has used these items.)
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Emergency Maintenance is called in to fix this and take away what was given that has now been extended twice. Not only does this essentially stop your entire western player base from playing but also can affect your possible income from in game store transactions for now over 4 hours.
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What I want to call out is who is the decision maker on this and what was the line of thinking?
10 pheons per character is not going to break the over all economy. In fact it may jumpstart players to purchase more.
Is the overall impact to the player base really being looked at when making a decision like this? Is that even considered at all?
A bigger issue to call out is Emergency Maintenance is decided to be done for an issue involving some mistaken in game currency being sent out (which is a trivial amount over all and hardly game breaking) yet we have had yet to no fixes for the debilitating disconnect issues facing the western servers since last week’s update. And if there have been fixes for it if any the communication surrounding those fixes has lacked any worth while substance. I would even settle for an update explaining what the believed cause of the issue is and what is being worked on to address that. Yet AWS remains radio silent and what content is shared lacks any true value except thanks for telling us and we are passing it on.
Right now the Western Version of Lost Ark feels like a ship with no one at the wheel. We are going somewhere but no one is really calling the shots. It is almost as if we are adrift on a current that sometimes flows towards a unified global version of the game but more often than not we are hit by rogue waves and storms that could have been better navigated if someone just communicated, spelled out a plan and gave good guidance.
TLDR both AWS and Smilegate are looking incompetent with the recent issues. Both for the overall decision making that seems to not keep the best interest and overall impact to the player base in mind and for a complete lack of communication around a truly debilitating issue for its Western Player base. I am not asking for compensation or anything like that, what I am asking for is please improve the communication, be more transparent and truly consider the impact to your player base before taking actions that would be seen as drastic.