As title states, I’m a newer player, currently in Tier 2 content. I decided to start playing because of the good communication regarding the pay to win state of the game in march. That’s the kind of communication i really like from a developer.
Currently the content of the game is being time gated, some like this, some don’t, ill leave the raid portion of that topic alone and discuss the class availability portion only
I think you guys (the developers) should release all of the classes in the game immediately. I cant personally think of a good reason to hold them out and trickle in outside of the “rush on honing materials”. However, If you had faith in the recent change to honing materials that you made, then this shouldn’t be a concern. Its not a complete solve, but from what i understand the mentality of the game is “play an alt and get more materials”. By this train of thought, it makes more sense to have more classes to choose from as an alt. The honing material problem will eventually level out, but if you drop a class a month or something along those lines, i think your player base will suffer considerably.
There are plenty of players waiting for X class to be released, and even i myself don’t find any of the available classes very interesting, which is curving my want to play the game. I think the community would respond well if you even said something like “by end of June all available classes in the game will be in the NA/EU servers”, or some formal commitment. Furthermore, i think if this company is truly a “players first” company (which is what i kind of assumed based off the honest self review you guys did in March), and you guys have some backend work to do that’s keeping the classes unavailable, you should poll the community to see what classes they want first, instead of making the decision for them.
I see these forums are pretty hot right now, so know that i write this is good spirit and I’m not upset. There are a lot easy points to be won amongst there community regarding class releases here, take advantage of it.
I think you have some points here. One thing that this ‘trickle them in 1 per month for potentially 8-9 months total’ is going to do is keep the demand of honing materials on lower tiers (and the gold starvation situation) going artifically.
This suggests two long term optimal strategies:
Horde tradeables until the class you want launches, to enable them to rise in ilvl at optimal rate.
Continually vendor tradeables and only hone/advance your current not main characters from bound materials, accumulating gold from the market, potentially riding the peaks and valleys of materials market formed by the class releases. Some level of popularity speculation would be involved to optimize this.
Both assume a long term future for the game and a lack of bots drastically outnumbering players and cratering the honing materials markets. The former is very much a ‘might as well plan for not dying today’ situation, but the latter is an area of concern. Looking at the adventurer’s tome materials market and the engravings market (especially blue and purple tiers) I would suggest going with the ‘market it all now while it’s worth something’ strategy even if you want to horde, just because selling at 6 gold profit and buying later when your main comes out for 1 gold each is good business. (And if not, at least you’ve got gold for other uses.)
Part of why the classes need to be unlocked sooner is the very time gating you brought up, the longer people are ‘stuck’ doing prep for the class they want to play the most, the more it saps morale.
I might find your view on the ‘pay to win state’ communication bizarre, but basically the entire playerbase has common ground on wanting the full roster available sooner rather than later. (And more skins to choose from would be nice too.)
Well the pay to win would be referring to buying gold via RMT and then trading gold on AH for honing materials. I would say this is highly known to exist. The communication being Devs tackling the strength of pay to win by increasing the amount of available honing materials from all sources, therfor devaluing RMT for gold, then gold to material.
I think in 2022 8 to 9 months for a released game to take off is a bit unrealistic. Games live and die in their first impressions these days. Not getting into that being good or bad, there are many cases of it.
I do think you are bringing up good points. regarding the classes. Thanks for the input
I extra agree with this line, in the modern game community, most players will decide if they want to play the game or not the first few days or weeks they started, even if people who already know about this game, it will be such a big downfall for them to know that some of the classes that they were looking forward to will not become out for at least half year, then there is no point for even start it, MMO is not like a single-player game, where the developer can make fixes and DLCs to fill up the content, if you missed one day of progress in a MMO, then you lost it forever if say the classes that a player wants to play going to be released a half year later, not all people will like to start half years later and rush for the content.
On the other hand, I know some people will say “late released classes will make people come back”, in my opinion, that is true but the game will still lose a majority of people based on the reason I wrote above, AGS should really reconsider the class release decision, since this is not 10 years ago, where people will patiently wait for game content and rejoin, there are lots of other games, LA won’t be a game that lasts forever, but I hope these kinds of dumb “company can go longer if they release class 1 per month” ideas won’t be the reason for speed up the fall of Lost Ark.
Again, if the company wants more players to stay, they should release all classes, therefore, people will create more alts with their favorite classes and will be much more willing to do contents while driving there beautiful characters everywhere.
I think you said pretty much what I wanted to say, but easier to understand.
I really wanted to play Destroyer and give Arcanist a try, but guess what both got delayed with arcanist straight up removed from the roadmap.
They wanted to use classes as content, but I tried to explain why they don’t really count as “content”, just like how I’m not interested with Lance Master, there will be people not interested with Destroyer which is important for people to have multiple classes they enjoy playing.
Players who visit the forums, twitch, etc. are a minority. I doubt most of the player-base even know that there are classes not yet in the game.
Releasing classes monthly is just good business, rather you like it or not & AGS/Smilegate obviously have data that proves this so they’re standing behind their decision
People fail to realize that a lot of these classes are undergoing reworks in Korea atm, so I would assume (along with most the other korean/LA streamers) that they’re not releasing them until the rework is finished, to be fully released in NA. I’d rather have a finished product instead of a class I’d have to completely regear a few months later (stats, engravings, gems).
I highly doubt all 6 of the classes are getting a rework. Some of them are already set in stone in terms of their design, especially the new ones. I don’t think this is a good excuse to stagger the classes.
The #1 reason to do this is to avoid overwhelming the player with options. Even 15 classes is a lot, let alone 22. And I’m going to jump the gun for people that say they aren’t overwhelmed: If you’re posting on a forum at all, you’re probably not part of the class of people that Smilegate and Amazon are worried about.
Do I really have to explain it? It’s really not a hard concept to wrap your brain around. I’ll give you a few minutes to think about it before I type 7 paragraphs.