I wonder what their excuses will be for “only 1 PP and express” for Artist and Aeromancer
its likely that those two will have 4+ months intervals now
Major copium. They are more likely already taking their holiday vacation. Pump the roadmap out, let the forum rage for a week, send a statement a week later saying you don’t regret and artist still comes in april, but give out more battle item boxes and vitameows.
I still hope that it actually is an april fools joke but the experience we had so far does not make that likely.
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Yea and there are idiots that say, “LOA ON isn’t for you, its for Korea” yet it has literal English translations from the official channel, meaning they want us as an audience, or more accurately though an attempt at translations, becasue they speak so fast it is really hard to do that in real time.
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SG does want us as an audience and as a playerbase, but from all the possible publishers they could have chosen, they chose the worst one.
I just hope they take the right lessons from this dumpster fire of a release.
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Considering this will be the third time of the community rightfully bitching about a class and raid release at the same time I wouldn’t hold my breath. I genuinely feel as if our feedback is just thrown in the garbage en mass no matter how valid our criticisms are.
From my knowledge this has NEVER happened in any other region so it very annoying that we are different.
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A valid thing to backup this point about feedback is the surveys they send on on occasion. Unless I’ve missed it, I’ve never seen the results of these surveys. It would be excellent if they could communicate back to the player base the results, so we can see where players are happy and unhappy - this would at least help us maybe understand some of their decision making.
“we have found that 37% of players think the pacing of the game is to fast” etc etc.
There is a lot to be desired for communication between AGS and the Player base
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It’s official, as soon as people slow down on buying those RC, game will be closed down instead of working for improvement
this has been an opportunity for AGS to buy possible competitor of their New World before it was released, and now a cash grab to make up for all the losses from NW
They sent out surveys? Thats news to me.
At this point I doubt AGS has anything to do with it, it’s SG who’s pulling the cards. They’re the ones deciding the class release cadence and which events we’ll have, AGS is merely a publisher, the most they can do is try to argue on our behalf.
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about that, AGS had been arguing that they are merely a publisher with some CS team and that’s all since before launch
but at the same time we’ve seen them talk about their “teams” and moving events so their devs in their “team” can look into them. are they referring to SG? I think not
I believe they DO have a team, they just want to blame SG for everything. If not they at least have some decision maker upper heads in AGS who can force all those dumb changes we are and been getting since we don’t know their contract terms.
call me delusional all you want
I dont think you are, I think Amazon has a small team that is only really allowed to do basic stuff like events and small scale fixes because of the drastic difference in timezone and language barrier making it harder to do fast fixes. Like you said, this is all outlined in the contract that no one has access to, so its merely speculation no matter how much we try to rationalize it, which is kinda annoying at this point.
I hope that the video Stoopzz posted on inven does get the Koreans talking about us a bit more and more transparency in general.
Merely a publisher, but they oversee this region. They are the ones who ask for Smilegate to deliver such and such content on such and such patch, with such and such changes. They are the ones who ask Smilegate to censor this and this, change that or another.
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I think that they’re already on vacation and that’s why nobody is responding.
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I suspect that AGS is maintaining infrastructure in our regions, so they need team(s) for that.
It is of course possible that they have very little to say in shaping our roadmap, but I suspect they have some influence and if really wanted they could make it happen for Artist to release in February, so that we can have an actual anniversary, not just 30 witamew.
That decision to push back Artist seems just very detached from what is happening in our region (major support shortage) and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if KR devs gave exactly 0 you-know-what about us and just decided to concentrate meaningful content into one release for bigger bang.
Also do remember that AGS has many failures in their portfolio, like New World, some mediocre titles, some canceled like Crucible (technically not AGS, but their subsidiary). So they are fully capable of repeating those mistakes here as well. They probably have some people that shouldn’t be in the business of making games sitting on key positions within company and destroying everything they touch, while easily scapegoating their incompetence on someone else. If they didn’t suck on Amazon milk to stay afloat, they would have to actually try.
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I mean, this confusion about responsibilities highlights an area which I think should be addressed by AGS at the earliest convenience - if they could tell us how the pipeline works, it wouldn’t fix any issues, but it would let the community know who the shot callers are. Again, not that we can actually do anything with that information, but it would be nice to have some clarity about how things work.
However, I do 100% agree on the Artist decision seems extremely detached. While they hadn’t confirmed anything, as I mentioned in my original post, they set the stage for her to be released in February and the vast majority of the player base expected it (as seen from the backlash).
I have tried to think of an appropriate business reason to explain their decision, and honestly the only thing I can think about is Money - Maybe AGS/SG were told to space out the roadmap so that instead of having a really strong Q1 (Anniversary and Artist both in Feb) followed by slow Q2, they have tried to space it so they have steady Q1 Q2 financials to report and show consistency, rather than a spike then drop in a content ‘drought’? I imagine this would look better on financial reports, but doesn’t do anything to help the player base.
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I also believe the anniversary is a missing opportunity, Artist is one of the most anticipated class of all game and the release date is far form what we expected. It’s even more disappointing that the Witcher event will occur without her because I think we will be the only region without a teamed skin for a character. I understand the censorship but for other classes they have worked in less time.
Amazon has done an amazing and important work bringing the game to this part of the world, but they really need to start hearing our feedback or at least trying to justify some controversial decisions with the results of the feedback they had. I don’t think this is only his responsibility but Smilegate too, because they can do so much only rooting for an equalized content for all regions and giving us same treatment as KR users, but seems the NA/EU region is being left out or marked as unimportant for them.
I believe the last survey may have changed the pace of the content because as a mostly casual player (real life is hard 
) I feel there were times where content come too fast to catch up and that was addressed as a specific question there, so maybe that data back up the decision of content being that late, but I think 4 months is excessive, another games like Path of Exile and Diablo 3 have 3months cycle and seem perfectly fine, in fact I’m more tempted to play Path Of Exile for the coming months instead of Lost Ark because at least there the devs seems to hear a lot more of the community.
Finally, is Amazon and Smilegate decision how to approach the data and the expectations we have of the game, but we all can agree that they really need to work in the communication and that the roadmap they share is nothing more than advertising and a missed opportunity of make the community celebrate their work.
these are skis that u will never get all because of ags incompetence
all because they released ark pass without artist, and now because they are delaying the release we will never get the Witcher skin as well, on top of them altering what ever skins they plan on changing do to censorship. so unless they rerun the skins from the ark pass that were already missed(and no if you save the box you got from the ark pass it cant be used on artist once it comes out. confirmed by roxx) we wont ever be able to buy these skins. If ags isn’t called out now there will continue to be; content, material, etc that we will never get.
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I think the only possible solution is that the KR playerbase see how little fucks SG gives to our version and start to make noise over there.
Our region is nothing more then a cashgrab for SG.
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I’m not sure if you’re right, they seem to take decisions alongside SG, so imo, none of them are out of the hook on how badly our region is being treated, but SG definitely has more power than AGS bc they own the game.
It is, but since they entrusted Amazon with this region, they don’t interfere. What Amazon asks, they deliver and that’s it. That is why we don’t see any attention whatsoever from SG directly - they are working on their main product, in Korea, developing new content, organizing events and so on, and all the research and decision making for the western side is left for Amazon.
Obviously, for game-related issues like game crashes or performance issues, etc., are SG fault, but the other 99% of the issues we experience is on AGS (from bots to monetization to release cadence to censorships and mistranslations, missing content, no proper website, no events, rampant disconnects, unpunished RMT, and so many more).
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