I think they take in a fair bit, but that information has to be compiled and forwarded along to SG.
If SG takes all our feedback and decides “it’s not worth our time” there is nothing our community manager, our moderators or AGS as a whole can do to change that.
Then when suddenly all LA numbers are trending downward across all older regions and they have to snap react to stop the bleeding, they all of a sudden begin to “care about that feedback”.
It’s all business. The game has bled enough to warrent action before the profits dip too low.
agreed. The letter to community is a perfect example that comes at this time where game is not striving as much as they had hoped it will. In fact like you mentioned, continue to bleed players. Usually , the company would take these PR action first to acknowledge the issue - damage control.
My biggest gripe with streamers/asmon at least on the forums here is that people will come here and make several new threads with just the video and say “hE mAkE gOoD pOinT durrRR” and nothing else of value. When we all have been here for over a year making those points directly to Zon/Sg in much better ways. It’s annoying and regardless of the video or it’s content, this isn’t youtube/twitch.
So I appreciate this post actually saying something, but like others pointed out the ball is in SGs court here. And they really, really, really do not care about us. Griver said from the beginning he expected only 50k cc players… They are entirely focused on kr, and thats fine, thats their decision. What annoys me is they don’t really address that divide in the letter at all. And SG is ENTIRELY silent when it comes to the west. This past LoAon being evidence of that when they didn’t even mention us once…
PS: Asmongold doesn’t even play the game. He never has, he never will, because his shrimps just feed him everything he needs to get to the next content. And then they carry him.
I think that amazon has to back off on some decisions, I don’t doubt they would remove stuff like x2 guardian x2 chaos daily, but korean players would be outraged about it and demand they get it as well. The reason SG said that reducing daily content is a “BIG HARD DECISION” is not because they don’t know how to do it in a better way.
They can’t change it because they would have to do it in Korea as well, and game is thriving there. That grindy daily content is avoided by many, MANY players in KR and they swipe instead to stay relevant. If SG totally simplified daily content there would be less incentive to swipe over there, and they can’t allow that. Just like KR playerbase was strongly against us in the west getting legendary skins without Yoz’s jar, they would be against us having only x1 guardian and chaos daily, and would demand they have it too.
AGS does have developers that work on LAO, but they don’t necessarily get to build/implement new content/decide on that whole heartadely. But AGS still has teams that has worked alongside/for SG to do all of the localisation/westernization whatever you want to call it.
I don’t really want to use this an example, but the blackwashing of certain NPC’s and censorship adjustments certainly didn’t come from asia which is notoriously more homongenous and less caring about those particular things than the west.
Least not forget, AGS is not soley a publisher, they have built/developed (and failed, often) several video game projects themselves. Arguably, they are a publisher second, a developer studio first, as they funneled a majority of their budget into developing New World (i think it was 300m+ if i recall correctly), so by definition, AGS are developers and not publishers (for now).
Granted that will probably change as they seem to have more success publishing games than developing them (new world kekw). That’s not suprising however, amazon isn’t a company that is good at doing “new” things. They just buy stuff and monetize it in some semi-malicious way (twitch + twitch prime, amazon + amazon prime, etc).
Sure they have teams that work closely with SG but when the dust settles, the only person touching LA code is SG.
So AGS can suggest, encourage, threaten or anything else but if SG decide to bad, there is no direct action AGS can take to bypass that decision.
In those weird westernization issues we’ve seen with SH, Artist, some NPCs, etc, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if AGS threatened to pull the product if they didn’t comply.
I was gonna bring that up, but I am certain they’ve got other teams that aren’t “developers” but still produce “alterations” for the game. Their entire letters are about “AGS and SG” this and that, but when something becomes a problem, AGS is always quick to remind its SG who does the “developing”.
Even then, SG wouldnt need AGS if they could “develop” the content for the west in the first place tbh.
Note: Direct development, is not the same as indirect development or even “any” development.
I don’t doubt SG does “all” the development. But all the final production? Hmm, I’m sure AGS has got several teams making changes somewhere along the lifecycle “indirectly”.
Truthfully I’d say SG needed AGS for the infrastructure more than anything else. Renting space with the Amazonians was probably way cheaper than having to bring up the infrastructure themselves lol.
But sure for localization and such it’s nice to have a publisher native to the location to help with that 100%.
I am sure there are lots of teams within AGS that work directly with SG you are right there, and I even think that relationship has grown over the last year to include more people than it started with to try and stop this profitship from sinking in NA/EU lol
Amazon paid for the right to publish the game, representing and profiting from the West.
It is absolutely their responsibility to communicate with SG on our behalf, IN A TIMELY MANNER, to have changes implemented.
AGS didn’t care until the whales left and the milk dried up. The regular players had quit long before, spending months begging for changes here on the forums. Instead it was nothing but more FOMO bundles, negative Pheon balances, and slaps on the wrist for RMT buyers.
AGS deserves at least 50% of the blame, if not more.
On the bright side… AGS has experience recognizing when promising game dies and starting an apology → comeback tour. If you’ve made it this long it probably won’t get much worse.
Lotta people aren’t thinking about the fact that AGS all of a sudden is publishing for Blue Protocol and other games
Do people think that AGS got these contracts because of New World?
It’s because they were publishing Lost Ark Global, which besides shitshow going around, numbers wise it’s been successful (lol)
Now what will it look like if Lost Ark is bleeding players left and right to these companies that chose AGS as their publisher?
Will it instill trust that they’ll do just as good (lol) of a job that they did with Lost Ark?
AGS is still a company with a brand after all, and stuff like this comes at a time where we now know they’re gonna have more games on their plate
So the best thing they can do is go to SG and be like “yo dawg, we really need to work on getting this shit fixed, not just for you but mostly for us, but you didn’t hear that part, because money dawg”
They need to make sure they can keep this player base now that the bots have been wrangled-ish under control
The biggest culprit here is SG honestly, because it really seems like they wanna stick to their guns on “well this has worked with money before so it will work with money now”
However KR, JP and RU are starting to see that things can get better with Global and catching onto the fact that the game can be made better but the developers don’t want to because money
SG needs to catch up with other Global MMO companies and really see why they’re so successful with so many players in the first place if they even wanna try to compete and retain numbers
At least AGS can show it can handle the load of a large game release. lol.
You would think there should be a non compete with a single publisher getting rights for all these games, because now Amazon couldn’t care less how good any of the 3 of them do, since players are just leaving one game and moving to the next while AGS continues to take it’s cut of the profits lol.
T&L, BP, D4 all coming out pretty soon is the first major blow SG will have since launching here, nothing else really came out over the past year to pull the LA audience. Now they realize the game is bleeding players (from all regions I hear) and even if all 3 of those new releases flop after a couple weeks away from LA, you still don’t choose to come back to LA.
AGS are sitting pretty in all of this. They just get to sit back, develop nothing and make huge bank off 3 games and a divided community that will bounce between all 3 spending way more money than the game itself will be worth to them.
In a sense I agree with this however given the track record of AGS, while they’ll be sitting pretty with those publishing contracts, only idiotic developers will go to them with their games
I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s all business at the end of the day
But you really have to think why now
Why now are they giving us a letter and promising to work on stuff when they could have done something during the entire previous year
And also too people thinking that T&L, BP and even D4 are gonna be the saviors of everything
D4 is gonna be another Diablo clone where you play for a few months after launch, get your shinies and move on and T&L and BP probably are going to have so many issues at launch along with barely being able to play the game because of the queues
Same shit different day with those titles, I don’t expect anything different really
Asmon is asking Smilegate to revamp the whole game so it’s not a KMMO anymore, no wonder. Yeah that’s the reason Lost Ark is struggling but that’s also the reason it’s working so …
Yeah but the reality is people dont care how good you become in the future they only remember how you were in the past. Hence why first impression is very importance. It will have to take them way more effort to fix a broken glass than to not breaking the glass in the first place. Now if they have shown that they are a good dev to players by actually listening instead of pretend to be listening people would give them chance to fix their shit, but so far its the opposite case, hence why people will keep that first impression for a long time.
Don’t worry when they do LoA 2023 for kr only again they’ll introduce the intern they put on this problem that they the devs the literal god of this game cannot solve for some reason. XD
It’s because it’s AGS and while SG is involved they’re in KR so they’re not largely responsible for the western release itself. I really don’t see how people haven’t passed away from copium overdoses when they see these companies and do not understand that these things are doomsday flags. When you vote (with your wallet) for the Leopards Eating Faces party and your face gets eaten, you don’t huff tankfuls of copium voting for the Tigers Eating Arms party and not expect them to not eat your arms, only to then again vote for the Leopards Eating Faces party coping that well since they got social backlash from eating all the faces and weren’t the topdogs for one/few terms in between that they’re not just going to eat your face again. Because they will eat your face. Again. To think that there’s going to be change is to put on a wig, some makeup and a red nose
