Hello CMs and lost ark players of the fourms, right now I’d like to talk about thr state of the game and how I have been feeling about it. I am pretty tired of all these hate posts, this isn’t one of them. I really like this game and what it is, and I really wanna see it thrive in the west. In my 700 hours of playing, I have had alot of fun, and enjoyed all of the available content ingame. I really want more content, at a faster pace. I really want bots to be adressed, and for a healthy economy to be created ingame, and most of all i really really really want more skins.
I think there is a huge stigma right now about F2P not being able to do OLD content from korea on our NA version, on release. This is understandable, and if this was a normal situation in a MMO i would underdstand this frustration especially as i am a F2P player myself. We cant stagger the rate at which we catch up to KR though. if we keep waiting for everyone like myself to catch up to NA whales, we will never catch up to KR in content. Players simply have to accept whales will be ahead, and to enjoy this content at their own pace.
The huge problem with NA lost ark at the moment is bots. This is a huge factor affecting the game, and the effect on the games economy is honestly debateable when looking at specific cases, such as the heavy deflation of t1 mats and adventure tome items. But the overall effect here is a net inflation of the value of gold itself, which real players have nk way to combat or work around since the gold income is currently so low. Now, it is also true that we have absolutely nothing to spend our gold on except for alt characters and honing our mains into the stratosphere. The lost ark economy is highly controlled by in game systems, and there have to be ways to shut these bots out nearly completely, but the bots arent the inflation, they just exascerbate it more than if they didnt exist.
So we have these players, wanting to make more gold, feeling as if they are broke. Personally, I have never run out of gold, or silver for that matter. I am sitting at 1400 GS right now with plenty of alts in t3, and honestly, i want more stuff to spend my currencies on. Skins, skins, skins. Every successful MMO has some kind of incredibly diverse customization system. Look at FFXIV. The glamour system keeps people playing for THOUSANDS of hours, simply playing dress up and chasing cosmetics. Lost Ark doesnt necessarily have the same system, and I understand drip feeding skins would theoretically make more money in the long term with a consistent playerbase. HOWEVER we currently have a very volatile playerbase, a large portion of which is bots. The only thing that will bring players in is more things like express event, where we can boost alts and those who maybe stopped playing a while ago can juice their t1 mains, and tons of skins for us to buy on the AH or with real money, so we can use our hard earned raid old on something cool instead of having nothing reall besides progression to drop currency on.