Is HM Brel the ultimate commitment filter?

General Discussion General Discussion
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Wasn’t planning on talking about this, but things changed wildly over the weekend.

I have been playing since launch, lost a few good friends back at argos, valtan and vykas, made new ones, some stayed, and to this day its 4-5 of us for the “static”. You know, hang out together on discord every day, clear content, shittalk. You get the idea.

But besides these good friends, we have a very active small group of 8-10 people who talk pretty much every day on discord, the server which used to be the “main” one for brazilian lost ark players (funny how it went from hundreds of active players on chat and voice calls at launch to this handful). I know these people since launch aswell, hundreds of thousands of messages about the game and off topic, and its still going strong.

Well, the two most dedicated players just quit overnight. they don’t play together, those were separate instances which led to the same outcome. All gems sold or given away to friends, same goes for gold. when someone does this, it is permanent, there is no way of returning. Let alone the folks that didn’t talk as much, but slowly stopped chiming into chat from time to time. its not hard to notice. The main argument was the massive time it takes to play the game and how awful it is to prog new content. People are bad, lazy, entitled. Outside Static parties, it really seem like the skill requirement from content is way above what the average player can perform, and its been disheartening.

By no means i’m free from this, given that i’ve been getting skill issued aswell xD. And at least in my case, Lost ark has become a waiting room for other games.

Maybe this was always been the case and i’m only feeling it now from these anecdotes, maybe it indeed became the breaking point for many people. But one thing i can assure: The current way the game operates isn’t sustainable. There will always be diehard fans playing their average 50-70 hours weekly but at any moment they might simply have enough and never come back.
Are we getting enough new players to compensate this? Is the current progression avaible to them, good enough to replace said vets? I’m don’t think so.

Did anyone notice something similar recently?

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We lost half static after 3 months of brel NM

We lost 1 guy friday after a rough G4 HM clearing

We will rush a semi pug now as 4 people and 1 of us doesnt want to keep clearing g5-6

I think from brel HM to Akkan there will be a natural selection filter wich will push out the average performer and will retain only a niche of dedicated lost ark player. (Skill/gatekeep reqs)

Nb : i also struggled a lot with my GS at ilvl, with paladin and warlord it was fine i would say

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Hm i mean i didnt not notice it since im a full solo player, i pug all my content but all for fun, never tried joining a guild or playing with friends just because i don’t think i need it in this game and i like to relax on my own after work, just relaxing and playing without talking to someone.

But i have to say after my 1k hours i have now (playing since 3 head start) almost no way of playing the raids atleast not brel since the requirements are getting worse and worse.

I don’t think there will be a alot of new players joinging this game atleast not for the raid or mmo content and more for the story and probably dipping after that.

This game is not made for beginners or ppl that just started since they will not be able to get anywhere (no titles, no gems, no card set, no nothing)

So whats gonna be left are all the addicts and hardcore players im pretty sure.

For me… i’ll still play this game since im having fun and it really is a stress reliev atleast but for everyone thats asking me if he should start this game i say no it is not worth it.

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If you’re playing with statics only and can’t imagine playing this game solo, well, that sucks for all of us - for you and for this game, because it’s impossible to hold a static for too long. People’s lives change, their motivations and needs change and they leave regardless of the state of the game.

Whatever was the point of this topic, trust me, it’s lost with people like me who do everything alone. We’ll be the last ones standing probably, as long as it’s possible to pug a lobby.

Although even that is becoming harder and harder as I move up xD

Anyway, you can’t let your satisfaction depend on other people, both IRL and in game. If you like the game, play it regardless. If not, ah well, it is what it is.

Too hard? Disheartening? Well it just means it feels more rewarding once you finally do it.

Other players entitled? sure, most of the community are, but that includes you if you’re quitting cuz this game is too hard for some of your friends. Too bad? I would get it. But too hard? Come on, man, have some dignity xD

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I mean brel 1-4 hm is literally free though. If you just do those every week you’ll be in ancient in no time. Same process with brel 1-4 normal and clown 1-2 was for relic and lvl2 set effects.

If people weren’t aware of the gameplay loop since Valtan idk. :person_shrugging: It’s a degen endgame gameplay loop.

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One of our guild leaders just quit the other day. He states: “The game is getting me to stressed out and people are becoming unreasonable”.

I think, the game just now starts to hit like a truck for those people who dont want or dont have time putting ressources into the game itself. I mean nobody is perfect and i know many people dont like him but asmon said sth. similar regarding WoW classic and retail. People going back to vanilla cause its easier and more accessible for the average joe.

LOA doesnt have systems like that, yet. As many others already pointed out, the problem is the new player experience and further keeping them in game. Several threads already talked about on going issues regarding gearing and raid content. While i am against another “LFR” like in WoW, i am more on the reworking side of things.

Make the raids 4 man abysalls after a certain time. Rework mechs and make them casual friendly with less rewards. Make MM a better experience. The second problem are the people playing this game. Sure, the game systems fuel this kind of behaviour but people being unreasonable cause people being people. I would bet my balls that if LOA would have launched in the early 2000s, this whole ordeal would have played out differently.

People want to min max everything these days told by streamers and guides which is the best/most efficient way to play. So there is no blue, green, yellow. Its just a muddy brown somehow combined from only black and white.

People lost the passion for games for the sake of being games. The times where a game should be “fun” most of the time are long gone. Its BIS and only BIS and everything else get lashed out at or insulted. You have to change the player or start making games with completly different goals alltogether.

To end on a final note, i think that LOA isnt a game being played by pugging. This game shines playing in a static or a group mostly consisting out of friends/people who know each other.

EDIT: So to answer your question, yes Brel HM is the second filter for people on their commitment. The first one was Kakul-Saydon and Brel HM is the second. Not only in difficulty but more so in time commitement.

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sometimes people need to put their Egos and FOMO behind to actually understand how this game is supposed to be played while having fun.

We got nerfed brel material drops, you can run Brel HM 1-6 on your main (or even 1-4) and then chill, slowly get your gear materials and farm up without putting your self through the pain if you dont feel confortable learning brel 5-6 to clear at faster times.

Also for you alts you can do 1-2hm and the rest normal, and then when your feel confident u can go to 1-4 HM with alts too.

People who quit because they wipe on a new raid difficulty after the 1st week in my eyes, have a huge ego and they cant handle the fact that they need to learn the fights better.

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I think by now the hardest part is how much time it takes to fill the lobby even as semi pug run and the gatekeeping reqs for g5-6

Sometimes 45min+ to get the supporters
Then you jump in and there is always someone dying from random things

Then you read some «hope u get cancer and die that u wont raid again » « ill kill ur sister for wasting my time and send u her blood »

And here we go 30mins lobbying again…

I think overall running as full static is better in lost ark even if you need to find new friends in the road :confused:

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i mean it’s an MMO that’s the point.

in lost ark you have the option to slowly farm your gear if you dont feel like going on a super competitive mindset.

If you dont want to invest time on doing brel hm 1-6 you can do HM 1-4, they are much more accessible, and you still get most of the gold of the raid from the earlier gates.

people dont want this. did you see how many people started crying over the gold nerfs? Do you think the average player wants to admit that they suck at the game and that they should be getting nerfed rewards because they are casuals and they suck at the game? Nope.

In a fiew months , the only 8 man raid u will be doing will be brel nm/hm. U will be doing clown which is 4 man, kayangel also 4 man.

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I think the rough part is the community standard and toxic behavior behind.

«let me out kekw,ripbozo die to mech ez,ez »
« Sadge noob no counter boss, peeponoob »

Soon they will ask for mini pet as g1-4 clear , but hopefully some lobbys wont

ive red so many bs its disgusting but we go ahead, do our clears get the gear and chill on discord

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G3-6 just does not feel like a video game anymore.
I play games to relax. G3 onwards in Hard Mode is just artifical difficulty caused through stress. It’s not fun and actually not challenging, or difficult for that matter. Just stressful, nothing more.

8 players on item level. One person fucks up, restart, otherwise can’t do Mechanic X and not enough DPS. Unless you play a full raid of burst obviously, while consistant dps builds are left behind due to pattern spams, followed by damage reductions/immunities. (For those, who do not know. A consistant dps build requires 90% uptime for compareable dps. The raid designs simply do not allow that until you outgear the content and don’t need to evade every single attack coming your way. Especially in G5/6 taking 50k dmg from every single oh so small meaningless pattern.)

Now, I don’t like talking bad about people, other than greedy incompetent companies, but there are 2 people in my static, who just don’t learn at a speed where my sanity can keep it together. 3 hours of Gate 5 and every single pull gets worse and worse and worse. Starting by getting 50x or close, with at least stagger/meteor part done, going to not even making it past 140x after just one hour of “progression”. It strains my nerves. And there are just no other people, except pugs. And pugs are toxic, have no patience for anything at all, and expect to get carried. And not to forget, all this talk about “have title”, like NM G6 title means anything for HM competence.

G1 and G2 is fine on 5 of my 6 characters, because I can do Prokel on item level without problems. Simply need 7 people, who can survive on the outside and do the basic mechanics, but even getting the 3 black orbs in one line seems to overwhelm the majority of people.
Whereas my 6th character, Igniter Sorc also on item level, cannot do Prokel comfortably without outside being S-Tier. Prokel just jumps too much to hit any igniter at all. Last PvP phase works though, as backup. Yet, finding someone, who can get that far is a nearly impossible task already.

All in all. Either I stick to G1+2, or I just quit the game, because it’s just not fun anymore. Not to forget, ALL of my friends are gone now. Abrelshud NM was the last straw for most of them. While the last person now has a happy life irl. Glad for him, sad for me. Back to being all alone in a MMORPG, which is designed to have 8 players per raid.
Note: the volcano island raid thing, that is planned to release soon in korea was teased to be “bigger than anything we have seen so far.” So I am expecting 16+ player requirements for that, with around 4hrs of “experienced reclear” investment.

Edit: Holy shit, I vented. Sorry.

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hahaha true.

but i want to also talk about the other side of the spectrum.

i am in a static but i cleared g6 with randoms because my static got too mad we cant beat g6 and they gave up.

i think this is a double edged sword. I had way more fun clearing with the pug group than with my static because everyone was chill, patient and we all were at the same page. Nobody was negative, nobody was insulting the team members i felt pretty bad im in a static were people are so competitive with each other, dont even focus on their own mistakes, and dont even have fun doing the raid.

What is the point of doing brel hm? to ENJOY the challenge. People need to understand this. If you only enjoy the raid because u managed to one shot it on 1st attempt without actually learning it, and then get mad and quit the game because your ego got crushed, then you will never find a good raiding mmo to enjoy.

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I think a MMO shouldnt exclude one or the other. Pugging a game is fine, i mean it needs to be cause not everyone is social or want to communicate via DC.

I think i should have wrote more in the lines of: “Its best played in static groups”. Maybe i worded it badly. :slight_smile:

The problem is tho, which is mainly community made, toxicity is of the charts pugging as a solo player. If you are too slow you are being more or less gatekept which shouldnt be after only 2 weeks of play. And for the 1-6 vs 1-4 argument, yes you are right there but the problems starts already at valtan/vykas.

I think, that Brel Hm is exactly the reason why they started going back with required player group numbers and gates. if you check upcoming raids you will notice:

  1. less people required to play
  2. less gates to clear

They know they overstepped the boundary for feasable content. :slight_smile:

EDIT: And yes, there are people in games who are bad and dont want to admit it. But you cant aliante everyone cause “bad”. Thats the exact problem LOA is facing regarding new players and player rentention.

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Brelshaza tought many lessons to Smilegate.

it was their first “extravaganza” raid , 6 gates, 20 minute boss fights in the end, etc. They got the message pretty fast that this cant be sustainable for long-term grind.

Also this is why Theamine will be 4 gates, and Akkan is 3 gates as well.

That’s why i said that the game allows you to stop at a certain gate if you feel like you cant move on past it. you literally get 5.5k gold from clearing G1-2 in HM.

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Well done for the g6 !! :partying_face:

Hope that i will tell you during next week as it should be better.

i fully agree with what you said as I myself experienced the same with chill people during my g6 prog and it was so cool ^^

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I generally agree with you, but i want to talk about 2 points here.

I pugged brel G6 for around 10 hours this week and managed to clear.

The patterns HURT a lot. BUt you will never die from them. Learning to position in the fight is key. Once you master this the raid is a breeze. The only actual difficulty of the raid is having the party position the meteors in the correct position.

This is the main challenge of Hard mode of G6.

Gate 5 in my opinion is much harder, because we are still on ilvl and many people use Inana on the Stagger/Counter mechanic, as a result you will be very tight on DPS. The more people learn the fight the better it will eventually be. G5 to me is still the biggest challenge.

One last thing i want to point out.

Brelshaza Hard mode, just showed us how little we actually knew about the raid it self. In NM, i would face tank 70% of the attacks since it didnt really matter and i could do more DPS that way. Brel HM just punishes you for that. If you didnt know how to poperly position in NM, you will not have fun in HM.

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That sadly only applies to Abyssal Raids. The ones, which the majority have been 4-player content. With the exception of Feiton (underwater, Alric, and all that) and Argos.
Smilegate seems to have little interest in 4-player content, because they want to keep the game “social”.
A lot of streamers also want bigger raids than 8 players, because they want to play with more people from their community, without having to hone 24 characters into end-endgame.

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Thanks!

At the end of the day this is an MMO, if the social interraction is poor, you will also feel it in the game as well. I hope everyone can be a little bit more patient and wait a couple of weeks as people still get better at the raid and avoid being so toxic.

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But kayangel is a 4 man raid which gets reworked to be dropping gold rewards :slight_smile:
I think going with even more people, is a bad decision. WoW proved that long ago and i hope they dont ramp up on the player numbers required for raids.

Or at least the trend of the raids saying otherwise for now.

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Over the past 2 months we’ve seen a steady decline of players either “taking a break” and never coming back or making sure they won’t ever come back by giving away everything they could that wasn’t nailed down.

I went from being in 3 different active guilds (lv22+ with maxed members and people on waiting lists to join) to having less than 5 active members in each guild and everyone else over a month without logging in.

The discord groups have died down to nobody but the core few players (out of what used to be 100s) interacting with the game at all.

I noticed this really picked up after Brel NM, partly because it wasn’t really all that challenging to complete, but that was the biggest driving factor and motivation players had when they started. They seen this crazy Brel fight from some hype video and pushed themselves to be part of it. Now that they did the motivation is gone.

And yes, Brel HM is a good step up in challenge. Even being over ilvl for it shit still hurts, the patterns are quicker and more punishing, some gates are buggy AF (looking at you G2) and the rewards are kind of whatever.

So we have a combination of content increasing in difficulty, less people motivated to complete the content and a general burnout across the player base at large.

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