I really enjoy this game and the legion raids are the best parts of it. I have a bunch of friends who tried it out at launch and quit. I’ve asked them if they would consider giving the game another try in the future and they said they would but I can’t tell them that it’s in a good place. Getting rid of the bots was one giant step in the right direction but there’s still something keeping me from recommending.
To get people back we need substantial catch up options to get people quickly into Valtan range like the global honing buff or a cheap pass to 1415. There’s really no way to keep them interested in the game through t2 and early t3. It’s just a boring daily grind.
Someone asked me what this game was like and I said one day of fun, 7 days of chores. Argos, Valtan are fun. Hell I still run orehas on my 1447 because dammit they are fun. But after that….it’s chores. Chores on alts I don’t want to play. It’s sitting still for 3 minutes or 30 seconds.
I really want level appropriate dungeons that I can run for fun. Something other than the usual chaos and guardian to break up the monotony that is lost ark on a Tuesday.
I keep hearing about roster bound mats. This would break the economy of the game. Mats would literally lose all value if you were able to funnel every single material you get in a day to alts.
let’s put it this way if I was able to funnel every greater leapstone on my alts to my push character I would have the materials to get a character from 1370 to 1415 every 6 days. There would be no reason to ever buy Great Leapstones so the price of all mats would drop into the ground.
So you would have to rely entirely on content gold generation which would increase the value of gold to crazy amounts because it would be the only bottleneck to hitting ilvl parking spots.
Everything else on the list I can kinda get behind but I feel it’s a little too early for it. We are getting a Punika Power Pass and another express event (Hopefully one that takes us into Tier 3 proper) next month so we’ll see how that all plays out.
Thinking about the people I play with in other games, my sense is there are three main barriers to starting Lost Ark new.
Team wipe mechanics on normal mode content is scary for casuals.
I know a ton of “casual” gamers who get ‘stage fright’ at the thought of wiping out the rest of the party because they fail a special mechanic the game never prepared them for in advance. There’s no preparation for them in the story or generally any prior dungeons – each mechanic seems to be unique and artificially shoehorned in.
Yes it’s easy to learn most of them and there aren’t real death consequences. For the folks I know it’s a psychological issue that would scare them off.
Boring early game. If players like roleplaying and the story they’ll be fine the first go-through. But there’s no replayability the second time, gear is binary (it’s higher level or it’s not higher level) and the combat is far easier than anything later on.
Early game’s a forced slog, and there are very few real players there. Not sure how to fix this, but I think the early game would be more fun if they adjusted more of the game systems into early game instead of saving most of them for T3.
Bots and spammers still intrusive.
There are far fewer now than even a month ago, but I feel it’s still a turn-off for new players. Partly related to item 2 – the early game’s empty except for botters and gold spammers.
Lost Ark is practically a single-player game until you get to T3. The bots only get in the way of completion and make it frustrating to have chat open.
If you didn’t play at launch with all the other real players, yeah. Early game right now is very dead - which will not attract new players, it’ll make them want to stop playing.
I agree, but I would at least have it so EVENT-related mats (such as islands from t1-t3), special events, and super express, are roster bound so that they are not wasted.
I do think that even Shards being made roster bound would have some pretty large damages to the economy tho. Like everyone making a big stink to make all bound materials roster bound are thinking very small
I’m not sure. We were introduced to slow honing since late T2 and a lot of people left back then when it required “several days” of dailies compared to constand stream of materials from island.
Now you would give them nearly instant pass to 1415 where they hit a wall so hard compared to pass…
It also kinda sounds like a recipe to disaster. New people, without skillpoints, experience, abilities, tripods… joining Valtan, without zaro experience from dungs since someone just carried them in MM.
T1 should be 100% chance. T2 should have increased chance. T3 honing buffs isn’t gonna give people an instant pass to 1415, it’s going to help a lot with progression but it isn’t 100%. And 1415 is ideal anyway, getting more people legion raid ready and participating in T3 end game content is the goal.
New players will have plenty of time to explore islands and progress horizontally, including skill points, so I’m not sure what you’re saying. The game really starts in T3, leaving new players with chance to fail and spend more time in earlier stages, as well as T3 being so tedious to progress in - isn’t fun