Just like in New World the numbers are dropping rapidly, and what’s worse is out of the current numbers MOST of them are BOTS. The economy is already ruined. I bought a skin for 9k a few days ago, now that skin is 3.5k. One small example. There’s 330k online right now, I would be willing to bet my house that over 190-200k of those are bots. Proof is all over the forums, Youtube, Reddit. There’s an incredible amount of bots, it’s absurd. Over a million banned already apparently, but they weren’t permanent bans and it’s F2P…More needs to be done and fast. Make ID required to play. Job done. Just like you require linking Steam/Amazon account for the forums…One glance at this forum front page shows how many people are concerned.
I guess this is what happens when you release a game with half the content and release it extremely slowly… Don’t know what AGS/SG were thinking releasing the game with half the end game content missing, almost forcing people to spend money if they want to get to Argos etc without luck.
A f2p game will ALWAYS drop a lof of numbers after the first few weeks. If a f2p game can even keep 10% of the original players it’s a big success.
The dropping numbers are NOT a problem but just the natural way of f2p games and as long as they don’t drop below 100k daily players after 2-3 months there is literally 0 reason to worry.
Also what many don’t see in those dropped numbers is that most players have reached the point of simply doing dailies and then logging out again, meaning your casual players will at most play like 1h a day and then log off again compared to initially going through story and levelling characters, where most players were online multiple hours a day.
With less time per player spend in game (which is not a bad thing), the peak numbers obviously are less.
What steamcharts doesn’t show are total daily/monthly players and that is the interesting metric. Steam only shows concurrent players and in a game like lost ark they mean barely anything.
You can’t use ID that way in most Western countries, it’s not legal (privacy laws). And in other countries, the minute you require real ID, many of your legit players leave, because they don’t want their real ID being disclosed to Amazon, Steam and so on, for fear of identity theft.
Really they are in a true bind when it comes to bots because they are tied to Steam. They need their own launcher, and then they can have some kind of bot protection built into it when players login.
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The drop is numbers is a concern, no question. It’s true that it doesn’t tell us who is actually logging in each day, but PCUs are generally a reliable indicator of how engaged the playerbase is, and when they are dropping, the playerbase is becoming less engaged with the game. That does not mean they have all “quit”. It means either that they are playing less, logging in less often, or have quit. All three are indicators of declining engagement.
We have to understand that the huge reason why over 600k players simply quit was mostly because their MAIN is not available, Scouter / lancemaste / Reaper, those are the games one of the most mained classes and imagine coming to this game and not even KNOWING when they are coming? No wonder people just left. I wanted to leave too but im first setting it up so that if i do happen to leave, when i come back with scouter launch i will have things somewhat ready for him.
Imagine coming to game and not having your main, how sad it is.
The trajectory of this game is nothing like New World. New World nose dived after the first week and went straight into the toilet, LA still has more concurrent players than most MMOs on the market and we’re approaching 2 months post launch. You’re just making a New World comparison because AGS is the publisher.
You bought a skin for 9k and it decreased in price because more people have it, so there’s less people in the market for buying it, so the price has gone down. You pay a premium if you want to get a skin off the marketplace before other people.
The bots are a massive problem I agree, but these doomer “the game is dying” posts are so over the top - there’s literally hundreds of thousands of people enjoying the game.
LA is a Korean grinder MMORPG, which is a niche of a niche - it was never going to hold 1.3m concurrent players. It received huge amounts of exposure via twitch, so lots of people tried it, and lots of people realised that a top down korean grinder isn’t the game for them - and that’s absolutely fine.
People are realising that this isn’t the game for them and quitting, and will continue to do so until the population stabilises, which probably won’t happen for another few months at least.
No, this is definitly not the main reason. Sure, some players might have just quit until their main releases but it’s a fact that most players in the west did not play this game in KR/RU before and often don’t even know the other classes.
The main reason has nothing to do with the game itself but with the nature of f2p titles, especially if hyped like lost ark. A lot of players just try it out to see what it is (as it costs them nothing) and then after some time realize, the main gameplay loop (doing dailies and weekly) is nothing they like and so they quit.
The thing is, those missing classes hold such tremendously huge playersbase ( Scouter, lancemaster/reaper) That those alone would probably have sufficed into the people to keep the game playing, missing those alone is a huge hit, since people need their fantasy to be fulfilled in the game, and those missing classes are what appeals more than others.
Yes there are other factors but that is definitely the main factor, i can bet you that probably over 300k over the 600k would’ve stayed if we had missing classes since everyone would have got something for them.
Not having something so essential to the game turns people away, and not having your main can make you quit the game so much easier as you see what happened with argos patch, 200k players disappeared in thin-air, most of those would’ve stayed probably if they had A MAIN they are missing.
Not all people know how to come to forum and complain, they just accept the fact that they dont have their main and they leave.
Friendly reminder that World of Warcraft - a game slowly approaching 18 years of life - was a dead game according to the forums as early as Burning Crusade back in 2007.
I agree the state of the game right now is not good relative to what it could be but the doomsaying is happening far too soon. Wait for Valtan and Vykas before you let relatively low numbers freak you out.
They’ve had many a streaming sites for quite a whiles now. Booba/ Man candy games do not go unnoticed. In a game that is built around the grind with limited resources…it 100% is a factor that people get bored when they are playing their 5th choice.
The WoW dead game thing, unlike possibly the western release of this, was a joke even back then. Similar on how every new MMO got labeled the wow killer.
Again…most people playing here do not even know what kind of classes this game still have or played this game in kr/ru. The amount of players that quit because they can’t play this one specific class is extremly low.
1 Million accounts banned. Lost Ark published a figure not even 2 weeks ago to say there were over 20 Million Accounts in EU and NA.
Don’t look at Steam concurrent as a measure to how alive or dead a game is, this is simply the number of players online at any given moment. If you assume the game only has about an hours worth of content for each character, it’s very likely that many people are logging in to do dailies and then logging out and playing something else.
6 Million people could be doing this at various times in the day and you would never know.
Also the playerbase on the weekend spikes a further 25-50% on top of the current figure. The game is in a really healthy and comfortable position and it’s already got more concurrent than any of the MMO’s on the market.
I bet you definitely is, what do you think those people did when they figured out this game is awesome? They went and searched info about this game on youtube, google, etc, and what do they stumble upon? That our game is missing 6 classes. And interest pops in, check those classes what do they do and then comes the ultimate realization that you cant get it yet, disappointment → quit
All-in-all you have speculations, i have data from other servers about the popularity of the champions. And its definitely easily to implement that data here too.
I dont want to give my ID to amazon to play their game, you shouldnt either and you definitely shouldnt push for this, privacy is the last thing that makes the internet awesome and its been diminished to nothing already, we dont need more of it taken away.
As for losing players, most of them leaving is normal and expected, its true AGS is doing a shit job about it though.
My brother is the average gamer. Works 5 days a week. Has a wife and dog. All his friends are the same. They have a little group chat where they talk about games.
Never got him to play FFXIV cos it’s “some weeb shit with cat people”. Imagine my surprise when he texts me to ask me if I’m playing Lost Ark. The hype was wide.
We are EU, they could never log in after work. They get in on the weekend and find gender locks, “they’re all thots”, “this voice acting”. They get disconnected and hit a 15k queue.
They try again next weekend and it’s “I can’t even queue for the dungeon with my mates” “there’s no outfits?”.
Most of the players have their games tied to their Amazon accounts already. Nobody really cares, why would they? You give amazon your entire history on orders but you can’t tell them you’re playing a game? I don’t get it.
Frankly this is just the same thing we dealt with in NW. AGS just doesn’t care enough or they aren’t equipped well enough to handle the situation. Whichever case it may be, I don’t think they should exist anymore if all they are going to do is pump and dump games.
And don’t act like legit players aren’t dropping like flies, I’m on my way out, so are many other regulars, we’ve been super enthusiastic about the game up until the bots destroyed the market and our investments and 1355+ became too difficult because the content essentially ran dry.
I wanted to give AGS lots of credit, I was really rooting for them but I see now that this company just does not learn, I am certain there are people at the top that need to be FIRED and stay the heck out of the gaming industry for good.
The other problem with this game is that essentially it’s a really pretty fancy phone game. The entire store is a CON. You literally couldn’t run a brick and mortar store anywhere in the US with this type of pricing scheme, you’d be shut down and sued to high heaven. I am flabbergasted that this would be allowed in a game and it’s rather sickening that Amazon would support it.
Nearly everything about this game has some sort of hidden con behind it. It’s pretty sad really.
Well there are laws but i am sure Amazon, Facebook (META) and all very big companies has already my information in one or another way. GDPR was a huge nonesence for me created by EU bureaucracy but that’s off topic. They can use phones number, it’s not the same as ID but bots will drop a little bit.