Lost Arks player base is shrinking, and it desperately needs new players… and we need to encourage player retention for this who do decide to give Lost Ark a try.
While there are many problems with the New Player Experience, here is my recommendation.
First some background, at Launch of Lost Ark in the west, there were many ways to get gold while transversing the story. Sadly, in order to combat the influence that bots were inflicting in the economy… many gold sources were removed.
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I would like to propose that the gold sources that were removed, get replaced with pheons. This way, new players have an Avenue to progress their characters if they choose to invest the time.
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Hopefully, this can help new players gear up when they arrive at gear score 1370 instead of just throwing up their hands and quitting.
I know this is just a small bandaid fix, but I really want Lost Ark to grow and the west, and the best way to do that, is to improve the New Player Experience.
Every new player that is happy and can be retained is a future potential spending customer. Please Amazon Game Studios and Smilegate… please consider this proposition.
Starving new players of Peons is done on purpose. This game is called P2W for a reason. AGS/SG are fine with those players that are not ready to pay big to just leave ASAP.
And apparently you get 132 pheons as a Mokoko player, that is enough to get 3x3 or even 4x3 with smart spending as a new player, then he can focus on reaching 1415 to fight against Valtan
A lot of the gold sources got removed, I’d say mainly because of the bots, but still every character can fund itself.
pre 1370 you don’t need pheons at all, maybe except 6 pheons to buy T2 gear if you don’t want to run the first Yorn chaos dungeon.
At 1370, you have the Una gold chest, Argos P1 (Bus P3) and Oreha hard gold, which is enough to fund that one character. Of course not buying books, honing and buying Pheons in the same week, can’t do everything at the same time. But over time it is more than possible for new players financially.
Two or more characters need more gold to get equipped, but they also earn more gold and unless you don’t spend all that gold to hone your main, you can easily gear an alt in 1-3 weeks (1370+, pref. 1415+)
While I do think pheons is an issue, whether it be the scaling cost as you progress up the tier or the overall cost where buying T3 relic jewellery cost 25 pheons each. I think the cost of pheons in the market in general is also too high or you get too little pheons for what you pay for.
thats an interesting idea to incorporate pheons as quest rewards XD.
This necessity for pheons for new players at the moment are incredibly high as well compared to launch. The requirement by parties to have 4x3 for lets say Argos, by some, forces newer players to get those engravings with pheons compared to on launch where we would get away with 2.5x3 or 3x3 because there were a lack of good jewellery on the market or they were so ungoldy expensive even if you had pheons, you didnt have the gold to buy them.
I really hope AGS and Smilegate works on improving the New Player Experience for the Western Release of Lost Ark soon.
I really wish for the community to grow.
And with all the gate keeping going on… I can’t imagine how tough it must be for Mokoko Players in T3.
Another alternative I was thinking about… was maybe lowering the Pheon Cost for T3 Legendary Accessories, T3 Epic Accessories as well as T3 Magic Accessories.
(I have no idea how much T3 magic and relic accessories cost… but if they cost any at all, I hope they only cost 1 Pheon…)
If the argument is to prevent people from flipping accessories (which they still do anyways) shouldn’t the pheon tax be when you sell and not when you buy? kind of like capital gain tax. The only exception would be if you got the accessory as a drop, then you can sell that drop pheon tax free.
I feel like this implementation allows new players to gear their mains and existing players to gear their alts with proper accessories with no penalties while still discouraging people from flipping, which again, some will still do anyways. And accessories and stones that normally get dismantled will possibly have a demand for, so win-win? In the end, we all know pheons are a pure cash grab by Smilegate anyways
The flipping argument has always been a stupid argument when you can solve it by treating accessories as engravings and limiting it to tradeable once. Also the situation you mention already exists with how skins operate on the market, no pheon cost when the trade limit is 3 times remaining, and then a pheon cost for subsequent trades. But they clearly are not interested in changing this because they want to source gold from players to supply for RMTers to purchase in the shop, especially after they shot themselves in the foot by adding the three day waiting period.
