And also one of the Reasons why this game will dry out in the next months.
If you look around, you only see the Hardcore-Players and No-lifers attempting to sell their “achivements” so badly, while fewer and fewer people even care.
And the fact that cheating and botting/RMTing became the norm, is even further taking away from any potential “achivement” this game could ever provide.
The only defense mechanism this game has are the Trolls and Whiteknights defending this game among all the legit critics.
Exactly man. I quit at Argos and I’m rly happy I did lol
I like to play for 1)fun, which I lost when running daily chaos on alts and being forced through the story just to funnel some mats lol
And 2.(which we all do, noone can deny me this) as you say to “showoff” some kinds of achievements. PPL like to be proud of what they managed to achieve, especially ing
Yet LA basically takes that fully away, noone cares how you got 1445. If you ran all alts, if you nolifed and did all those chaos all the time. If you just invested 2k into rmt while playing casually. It’s all the same in the end here. The showoff thing is taken away. Hell noone even cares if u login tomorrow or not, this game isn’t rly focused on the mmo part.
But for ppl who alrdy invested 1k hours, and most ppl posting here prob over 1.5-2k hours. Can’t even blame them to defend the abuse xD
They did the same in NW. And LA will keep you in the daily cycle.
I guess that is the risk of turning an Online-Game into a double full-time job!
Imagine being a streamer or content creator for this! The game has like 10k Twitch-Viewers with 800k “player” peaks! Trends going down, Youtube Clicks going down…
How do we call this? Potentially Forced Retirement?
Games only focusing on the 1% of Hardcore-Players, willing to throw the remaining 99% under the bus, just for their enjoyment and Whale-Bait will not do well in the long run.
This game is nothing but a race to extract the maximum profit ASAP, at this point.
I think this post points out a legitimate problem, but it only focuses on one aspect of the overall problem. The the game is built around indirectly forcing people to either spend an exorbitant amount of time on alts and or spend $$. There are methods to bypass some of the soft-gates that the game has built by doing other content such as PvP, guild activities, sailing, and special events to obtain some of these materials. You’d have to do these on multiple alts which means you have to invest a significant amount of time, but it’s still doable.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that there is no price-adjustments for in-game activities for faster content releases.
Example:
The current release cadence shortens the amount of time that players have to achieve the same amount of success that was required by KR players. KR players had the ability to obtain the same things that we do in a longer timespan, which doesn’t create the same level of panic-FOMO-buying that you see on western regions. It is expediting the speed of inflation due to players opting to leverage RMT for value. Forget about the market/AH, take a look at just the gold cost of honing and the amount of in-game gold that is available to everyday players from raids. If we have to achieve 1460 for Vykas hard in let’s say 4-6 weeks whereas the KR players had more than double that time, that means there are more people honing and therefore there should be larger injection of gold from in-game activities to supplement that. However, this sort of mechanisms don’t exist or are insufficient.
The same applies for other offerings. AGS/Smilegate are releasing content at record speeds and dangling the carrot in front of the players. The faster content release is fine, but if they are releasing content twice as fast, then then in-game gold requirement (for example honing gold costs) should be half of what is normally is. This type of adjustment does not exist, and creates a toxic game environment.
There is like a constant circle-jerk acting like the content releases, abused as whale-bait, is all right!
They didn’t even gave us the T1&T2 Honing Buff yet!
Everyone who just starts this game today (assuming they don’t quit due to bots!) will have a monumental grind ahead, to get where other endgame players are right now!
But that is alright to AGS/SG, since they can just pay an absurd amount of money to catch up.
That is the downside of a game that ties progression and content access to predatory f2p monetization!
And then they are surprised about people spending chunks of money for cheaper bot gold…
The part that baffles me is that this is Amazon leading the way. Their whole business is around selling products. Lost Ark is nothing more than a digital product that targets a specific market. Their current practices of how they are deploying this game does nothing for branding or company credibility. It is, as you mentioned, a predatory practice.
You know, i am a Amazon Customer for a very long time now!
Actually, i just checked out of curiosity, my first order was Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis in July 2008
I also have a Prime Membership, and order there a lot! They often manage to ship my orders across the whole country, and store it in that blue amazon hub down my street in 1 workday (sometimes 2). If there is something wrong or broken, the let me ship it back for free, and instantly send out a replacement!
In terms of e-commerce they are definitily pushing those goal to be the “Most Customer oriented Company” by a good margin!
But AGS… i don’t know who came up with this idea! I know that Frazzini is a friend of Bezos, and maybe just wanted to place him somewhere, where he can attempt to improve his expertise or something…
Yet, it didn’t worked! They blow a whooping 500 Million USD per year on this studio, and they can’t get anything done properly!
New World already showed us that the people who even did the initial sketch have zero of a clue about the market, pushing monumental failures which others gave up on (due to constant failure) years ago already!
There are Critically acclaimed games out there, made with a fraction of the money and resources that AGS has at hands!
Well I’m a bit older. =P
I’ve been a prime member just a couple of years after their inception. But yes, I agree; I don’t think AGS business model aligns to the rest of its business. I don’t think Amazon believes in its AGS division lasting much longer and probably just wants to milk its investment as fast as possible before it topples.
I would really like for AGS to take this message to heart. I love the game for what it is. I don’t mind making reasonable monthly investments for a hobby I love. But let’s be real, the current expectations from the publisher & developer are not reasonable and they are shooting themselves in the foot for what can potentially be a long term investment.
