Here’s feedback from a KR and Russian veteran F2P player.
As of now, i spent 400 hours in-game with a pretty big min-maxing and only achieved 1355 gearscore(110 fails total) with 2 other characters being 1302 gearscore funneling mats to a main.
As of now Argos is unavailable for 99.9% F2P player because:
We don’t have KR or Russia server honing rates for 1302-1370 GS.
We don’t have 3 major sources of t3 materials - Heroic Guardians, Abyssal Trial and Arena PvP vendor.
Abyssal Dungeons have nerfed gold income.
Overall: No mats sources, no gold, and abysmal honing rates.
To get to 1370 you need either insane luck(rolling 10-20% 6 times in a row, same chance as winning a lottery jack-pot) or sell crystals for gold to buy mats from AH.
This is the only version that actually gets you into a “Pay for Content” situation even for an omegatryhard players.
And with the announcement of the Valtan General Raid being released in a month the gap between F2P and “Pay for Content” players will widen even more.
To get the situation fixed i highly suggest to:
Adjust honing rates to KR/Russia for 1302-1370 GS.
*Downside - people who spent $ will be very angry.
Add 3 sources of T3 materials mentioned above.
Reconsider Valtan’s release timeline to not widen the gap between tryhard F2P players and “Pay for Content” players.
I agree. Not simply because it is unfair, but simply because we are not going to have anywhere near enough players in T3. I really don’t mind if I did it the hard way and others get to do it the easy way, it doesn’t take anything away from me. I just want the game to be accessible, and Amazon to realise that most of their money will probably come from cosmetics from the players they keep by making the game playable, so it won’t hurt AGS either.
Not as much. With the optimized t1-t2 route and islands yielding a huge chunk of materials, you can get to t3 relatively quickly or at least comparable speed to whales.
While in t3 as i mentioned above, you either pay or fall behind completely.
Even the Russian publisher "Mail.ru, which is knows for their greed, never put such a massive paywall.
With 3 characters in t3 and I’m assuming you’ll be pushing a couple more, you can generate enough mats to go from 1355 to 1370 in 1-3 weeks depending on your luck. Same relative timeframe whales were getting to t3 to access that content before any of us. Don’t worry we will both get there i promise
I don’t think its the main concern for people to do content t1.
What is worrying most people and me included is that it creates an even bigger gap between players, because it makes being 1370 on argos day very snowbally, with no counter mesures for other players to catch up (eventualy, not day 1).
So its essentialy making people that are already ahead snowball to the sky with no means for palyers that are behind to catch up faster (again, faster, not imediately, not day 1).
Which would not be a problem in itself if the KR and RU versions of the game gave this same experience. But every version of lost ark until now gave much more tools for players that are behind to catch up eventualy and so to reduce the impact of snowballing.
The problem isn’t so much that people can’t clear argos day 1, its that its creating a much bigger gap between players.
Maybe, cause the next content that changes everything in the endgame economy will be dropped in 4 weeks and you need at least 3 weeks to even get a chance to touch this content.
Missing Argos week 1 you are missing:
Reagents to craft Argos set
Gold
Honing materials
Which widens the gap even more. If you’ll lose it by the second week you’ll simply not have enough mats to craft Argos set to get to Valtan.
Valtan raid changes server economy completely. Everything below Relic Grade Accessories will drop its value to 0 and cuts you gold income, while rich will get richer.
That’s why it’s very important to be on the curve.
2 weeks for 1370 = 2 weeks for Argos 1 and Hard Oreha’s
That means 2 more weeks to get the full set of 1370 (+6)
Argos 2 is 1385 and Argos 3 is 1400, that’s another 2-3 weeks of farming with luck
Total: about 7 weeks with a lot of luck
With Valtan (1415) coming in ~2 weeks, F2P players will be at least 1 month late.
This will create a giant gap between players.
We don’t need to do content day 1 or week 1.
But getting to it 1 MONTH later, when the next content is already coming out, will create an infinite snowball.
The issue here, the REALLY issue, actually, two, are:
Communication: Amazon is not being clear about the direction of the game in a feasible time frame. It’s been an issue since the beginning.
Value Hierarchy: we have a list of issues, quality of life improvements, content, events, and from ALL of those options that can affect 100% of the playerbase, they pick the one that affects 0.2% or less. Now, why would they have such priority for a content target for a “negligible” audience? Because they KNOW they are NOT negligible, they are (mostly) WHALES, so the plan seems to squeeze the lemons under some FOMO, with limited skins and such so that eventually some weeks from now, some high command can say “sorry” and improve the game in a meaningful way.
why NOBODY understand that it doesnt mean you HAVE TO DO the content right after it released lol
i promise