So the number of players is not as high as what I would expect for Lost Ark to have. It seems to me that the game itself has more potential and if not the questionable management of the game by AGS we could have more players in the West.
Let’s look at bots: bots are a problem for many games, but I think among MMOs Lost Ark’s degree of bot problems is by far the highest. Hordes of bots can be seen in major areas of the game by a lot of people. Honing, running, doing quests, doing CHAOS GATES. Why not manually ban them? It would contribute to the solution. Lobbies are up in PF for lower tier guardian raids, where accounts with 150+ roster level, obvious RMTers with full 10 gems and insane builds are literally waiting on a pack of bots to bus, and the lobby name is “seven seven seven seven seven seven seven”. How is this possible? Why are they not getting banned?
Measures that are being taken against bots are questionable (a lot of them), and the main question is usually regarding the balance between efficiency of the countermeasure eg. how well it fights the bots and the level of inconvenience it creates for real people who play the game. There were a lot of things that directly impacted me personally in a negative way. One of the most recent ones - the 20 sell limit - put me in a situation where I had enough goods to sell to get enough gold to buy a skin I really really liked, but I was not able to due to the sell limit and somebody else bought that skin, now I have to pay 27K for it instead of 8K, because I lost that amazing opportunity. Just an example for those who never got directly impacted by something like this or think that this is not important \ not a big deal.
Of course something like this is not going to make me quit the game, but the health of the game in many ways depends on how many NEW players or relatively new players are playing \ coming back \ registering their first account. And with the way how Lost Ark is right now - of course there is not much of those people, I would argue that you can say it’s not enough for the game to have promising future.
Lost Ark is a relatively complicated game, you need to learn how to raid, you need to learn how to gear up, how to align engraving sets into proper combinations of proper levels. It has a lot of RNG too. With all of that in mind, it is already difficult to be a new player. Add the fact that low item level activities (even in tier 3) are pretty much abandoned by now. Add the roster level gatekeeping meta. In my opinion - this game has no luxury to make mistakes or have problems of this degree. I could imagine people going through all of the complicated stuff and settling down, but when you have to do all that AND on top of that you see more bots than real players, when you are being gatekept like crazy, when finding a learning group takes hours, when you have to experience stupid inconvenience that “supposedly” helps to fight bots (why are there still 50% of them then) who could have possibly imagined that people are not going to stay in the game for a long time.
So in other words, the actions that are being taken to fix problems like bots are lazy, they are not efficient enough and everyone can see that. It looks like a college intern trying to do some work for a company like Google. A smart college intern who can achieve some relatively acceptable results, but still is unable to do good enough.
I am worried much about this situation mostly because of the two future MMO releases handled by Amazon as well. We, players, could have gained knowledge on them being a publisher for BP and TL only recently, but they themselves of course knew that or anticipated that much earlier. I am worried that when the same company is going to be publishing 4 different MMO games that are supposed to compete against each other, there is not going to be enough motivation for them to invest enough effort into games that are making them less money than the others. And I feel like if BP or TL becomes very popular - that’s the end of the story for Lost Ark West. The bots are going to completely take over, more bugs, more technical difficulties, more disconnects etc. Lost Ark as a game contradicts expectations of the western player, and it needed to be handled very carefully in order to continuously succeed.
I want to keep playing this game, I don’t want to switch over to new MMOs, knowing for how long Lost Ark stays at the top in Korea - I see that the game has a lot of potential and that’s one of the main reasons why I started playing it. Having this number of concurrent players after barely a year since release is unacceptable in my opinion. And the future seems to be only more dire. Just think about it - as soon as D4, BP, TL launches, how much less players are going to be regularly playing Lost Ark?
At the end I just want to clarify that right now the game is not “dead” yet. There are still enough people (only in high iLvL content though) to quickly and comfortably do raids and all of the major activities. But the direction where we are heading is dire, cannot argue against this. On top of all the above - we are steadily catching up to KR and as soon as we start hitting extended content droughts - think about how that is going to impact the game as well. There are just too many factors in the near future that make you worried.
