I saw asmongold video and decided to leave my 2 cents here.
I stopped playing this game a while ago for mainly 2 reasons:
Lack of content. Once you’ve caught up you no longer need alts, I tested it and calculeted honing costs and accessory costs up until 1580 Ilvl and its easily doable. So after deleting my alts and playing only on my main I realised there is nothing to do now, 20min for unas, chaos dungeon and guardian raid and boom, you are done for the day. You could also do rested guardian which is barely any gold loss so you’d only be playing 10min per day…
Raids ARE NOT new player friendly nor are they fun with random players. Wipe mechs are complete disaster, not only does it promote toxicity towards that 1 player who wipes the team, it is also very time consuming and frustrating to restart raid because you can’t do some mechs without certain amount of people alive. And doing normal mode for timestop cheese is not an option as long as it gives less rewards. Leave those wipe mechs to hell mode and perhaps buff normal pattern damage and make dps check tighter.
In short I hated spending countless hours looking for 7 capable players to play with me and in the end, once raids were done there was almost nothing left to do for a week. I enjoyed the combat and all small features such as islands, sailing, life skills and so on put they all lost meaning after reaching t3.
Hopefully in a future I can revisit this game and actually enjoy playing it.
The game keeps you involved during the leveling and T1/T2 with all of those cool dungeons untill abyss ones, which are hard acutally. From there it just teachs you that your wallet can even buy content clear while you are afk, something that never happened so far in other similar games. This is Lost Ark, this is what Korea games are today.
You watch all of those streamers having fun and making raid afte raid and even having fun when they wipe while the reality is totally different for the average player because it’s a miracle already that you can find a group as there is always someone bigger than you to choose, even if raid requirements are very low. Then you have to learn the mechanics, but ofc everyone wants people who knows them already, also because they need to clear the same raid at least other 5 times. Then you are verballly abused and blacklisted if you wipe the party with those stupid mechanincs only this game has.
So you decide to stop raiding and what the game offers out of those weekly big bosses fights is ABSOLUTELY nothing and you realize this game is not MMO actually and you stop investing money and time but just use it as time filler waiting for the next one.
Put in more context. I’m playing again on another server because NAE ping is ass, so technically starting from ground 0. And I tell you, holy shit the new player experience is a pain in the dick. I can’t hone for shit, they nerfed the gold but the honing cost 1445-1460, still there, and even 1460-1490 it’s still practically the same, meanwhile, you’re also getting gatekept in vykas/ valtan just by having such low roster, create your own room and nobody gets in, waiting 2 - 3 hours to get a group. And that is valtan because it’s easy so people are more chill, but vykas ? Damn, 3-4 hours, MINIMUM, to get a group. And I’m not talking about being jailed yet
And that from a guy with 2.6k hours that know wtf to do and wtf is going on, imagine a real new Player playing with this experience. It’s a shit show. When you have everything going on with your roster you can’t imagine the new players experience, But I’m currently experiencing it right now, and I can tell you, holy fuck