WoW-Lost Ark comparation and why Lost Ark is doomed to fail!

[Xyntao]

This is a reply to this thread:

WoW has worse monetization than Lost Ark

Lost Ark get hated on these forums on for being able to buy gold with real money yet WoW does the same exact thing plus you have to pay a required subscription fee. Also, Lost Ark has more equalized content (arenas, hell mode raids) than WoW. WoW not only has worse monetization, it’s p2w is more impactful than LA due to having less content that is equalized. I know the first instinct for people is to defend WoW but deep down you know I’m right.

and also a reply to all Lost Ark defenders.

Before i start i want to mention that this is NOT a WoW defender thread, both games are P2W, but there is a huge difference: Lost Ark is EXTREMELY PREDATORY and more expensive compared to WoW.
What i want to point out is the difference between them and why WoW is more accepted in the West than Lost Ark.
There is no secret, Lost Ark lost 1+ mill players since launch. It started with almost 1,4 mill players at launch and now it declined to an average of 300k players. That’s more than 80% players lost in 2 months. No other game in history managed to loose so much of it’s playerbase in such a short time. Even failed MMORPG’s like Rift, Black Desert, Tera Online and so on managed to keep more than 60%-70% of their initial playerbase for the first half year since they launched.
WoW is not in better shape, it lost a lot of it’s playerbase. From it’s peak of 12+ mill players in TBC now currently it stacks at around 1,7-2 mill players with player increase when new expansion releases. WoW has “that loyal” playerbase (which is around 1+ mill players), who no matter how badly WoW is doing, they will keep playing this game. Lost Ark doesn’t have that “loyal playerbase”.

The OP of the above thread said that WoW is “more P2W” than Lost Ark. I am here to show him wrong.
To start, we need to settle a base idea from which to go and the best one is the value of the WoW token. Because Lost Ark doesn’t have such a “base value”, we will take 20$ as base value (the value of a WoW token) and see what we can do with 20$ in each game. So, let’s start:

1. Dollar to gold ratio:

20$ in Lost Ark equals 3040 gold.

20$ in WoW equals 264k gold.

The Dollar to gold ratio is :

2. What can i buy with 20$ in each game:

We start with Lost Ark.
Gear (aka honing upgrade with HIGH CHANCE TO FAIL):

Mounts:

Pets and skins:

Additional upgrades:

I won’t exemplify consumables and profession materials (mining, foraging, logging,etc), because those are easy to obtain by farming and with that we kinda ended the topic with what you can buy in Lost Ark. Also i won’t exemplify accessories, because for the moment we don’t have relic accessories on sale in AH. Why? Because less than 1% of playerbase can farm end game content.

We now continue with WoW:
Gear:

For those who don’t know, that is a mythic raid gear piece. Basically mythic raid is the END CONTENT of WoW. As a note, this is a 100% ilvl upgrade, not like honing where you have 15% chance.
Mounts:

Pets:

Additional upgrades:

Now the questions are:
Why would i pay 20-40$ for ONE pet in Lost Ark when i can buy 100 pets in WoW?
Why would i pay more than 20$ to buy a mount, when with 20$ i can buy 10 mounts in WoW?
Why would i pay 20$ in Lost Ark to play “ugrade gear lottery” with 15% chance to succeed when i can pay 20$ in WoW with 100$ chance to succeed in ilvl upgrade?
Why would i pay thousands of dollars to make additional upgrades (engraving/gems) in Lost Ark when i can pay 20$ in WoW and get the same upgrade?

The idea is that, yes both games are P2W, but WoW is way more cheaper than Lost Ark. What makes Lost Ark even more expensive is the chances to fail, aka gambling, aka lottery.
On top of being more expensive and “gambling mentality” (two things hated in West), another issue of Lost Ark is the premium currency conversion and prices in the cash shop. All prices don’t match the money requested for the item, unlike WoW where real money price match with the item in store. To give you a idea, i will explain Omen Skin set price:

Regarding WoW’s boosting, in case Puffco&Co didn’t knew, the boosting invasion in chat ended in WoW. There where a few big boosting communities of which one of them (Gallywix) “frauded” Blizzard with millions of dollars. What they did was basically selling the gold earned from boosting for real money. That meant that Blizzard was not selling tokens, therefore damaging their business so they took action and now any boosting community is permanently banned.
Here is a example from Nova Boosting (one of the biggest boosting communities):

Yes, boosting is still available in WoW, but at a fraction of the scale it was before. Not only that today is extremely hard to get a boost, but also it takes a lot of time due to too much demand and too low supply. Only a small fraction of guilds boost and they do one or two boosts/week so it’s not like it was before. PvP boosting is totally gone. Now either you know PvP or you don’t. Not to mention that the chat is completely empty of boosting advertising.

Another big issue is gold making in Lost Ark compared with WoW:
As F2P player, you have a limited amount of gold you can farm daily/weekly in Lost Ark. You can farm a average of 5-10k gold/week in Lost Ark. And that by selling honing mats also. In WoW, you can farm 10k gold/h for all 7 days of the week. How? One example is crafting, especially potions/foods/flasks. Additional gold: you do all old raids (Legacy Raids) that give between 3 and 5k gold/raid (and there are 30+ old raids). Do that with 6 alts and only from old raids you already farmed 2 WoW tokens (540k gold).
Lost Ark needs to do something fast regarding “gold gain”. People can barely farm gold and the amount they farm gets wasted very fast by just doing honing.

Customer support is another huge problem for Lost Ark. So not only that they force players to spend more (the Royal Crystal SCAM mentioned above), but they also don’t help players with the purchases. One example is even myself, a issue that still is ignored and from what i saw on this forum, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people in my situation or similar one:

Vanquisher Pack problem!

I purchased the Vanquisher Pack on 17/February/2022 while i was playing on EU-Central, on Zinnervale server. [Ark12] On 18/February/2022, when i saw that not even with the release of EU-West, the que issue wasn’t fixed, i decided to move on EU-West because my daily play time is limited and basically my entire daily time allowance was wasted waiting in que. I moved on West and i wanted to buy again the pack (without even thinking to refund the previous one (as you can see above, it’s not refun…

To ignore players that spent money in your game is a big NO NO. That can be clearly seen in the population decline.
Not to mention that players play this game with terror and fear. No other game in history banned players for something that they didn’t do, except Lost Ark. What i talk about? The famous topics where AGS banned players who bought pets/skins/mounts in AH and got banned because the seller refunded the packs. Now people are scared to buy skins/pets/mounts of fear to get banned. That should not happen.

What can be done?

1. Fix customer support. Hire competent people that have game knowledge and know how to fix issues. By ignoring players you will loose, not the player.
2. Change honing chance to fail to 100% success, but gate the mats gain. What i mean with that is make honing 100%, but reduce the drop of mats. There are reports where players needed to reach 100% pity to upgrade and others only one honing try. Therefore a F2P will know that at one point will upgrade 100% and won’t be demotivated by gambling with upgrades. It’s also good for the revenue of the game because it will motivate small spenders or even F2P to spend money to buy mats.
3. Make solo-play dungeons relevant. Turn them into group content and add more difficulty. Give more daily and weekly chances to enter raids/dungeons. What we have now is too little.
4. Infuse more gold into the game and hire more staff to deal with bots. The only way to deal with bots is to manually check them.

P.S. : All the screens you see above where made today, while i was writing this post. I play on Punika server (EU-West) and on Draenor realm (the biggest Horde server for WoW Europe).

[PoohVz]

Comparing a 10-year-old economy with a 2-month-old economy, seems legit

[Qliq]

So you pointed our how highly valued your time spend within Lost Ark is.
You can easily get multiple 100s of dollar of loot in Lost Ark each week.

In WOW you are better of to just swipe for it.

[Xyntao]

@Qliq

You can easily get multiple 100s of dollar of loot in Lost Ark each week.

Can you tell me what i can get?

[Qliq]

loot

mats, gold etc.

[Xyntao]

@PoohVz

LOL, ofc 2 month old economy will have less supply and more demand than a 10 year old economy.
It’s like comparing BDO 4 years ago and now, 4 years ago 100k silver is a lot, now people have like billion just to fail over and over again to finally get a PEN gear.

@WillowstheWisp

I mean, yeah. It literally does.
Since it’s so new, the percentage of players who already possess mounts/skins/etc would be far lower than a game that’s been out for 10 years.

Okay, let’s say i agree, although it doesn’t make sense. I remember in the first weeks (before the gold nerf) i had around 60-70k gold. A pet was valued at 5-7k back then. Now a new starting player can barely afford to buy something, especially F2P. That has no connection with how old is the economy. Not to mention that back then, with 238 Royal Crystal you could buy 2k gold. So that means with 20$ you could buy 16k gold. It was more profitable to convert real money into gold and buy things from other players (AH) than to buy directly the same thing from cash shop.
But what about this topic:

@Xyntao

The idea is that, yes both games are P2W, but WoW is way more cheaper than Lost Ark. What makes Lost Ark even more expensive is the chances to fail, aka gambling, aka lottery.
On top of being more expensive and “gambling mentality” (two things hated in West), another issue of Lost Ark is the premium currency conversion and prices in the cash shop. All prices don’t match the money requested for the item, unlike WoW where real money price match with the item in store. To give you a idea, i will explain Omen Skin set price:

How you defend the game against this?

[PoohVz]

Tbh, people having a hard time with the game now is 80% playing without alts or didn’t invest in them much.
I have 4 alts on t3 now and they are giving huge amount of mats, silver daily, with more gold from abyss etc. Even If I need more gold, I can sell the mats to get more gold.
That doesn’t mention about the other benefits that alts bring into the table.

[PoohVz]

And if you can’t tell, the currency exchange is basically an order book exchange, it’s all based on the economy, the system has nothing to do with it.
In Lost Ark, people decide that blue crystal is not really worth it anymore or more people are buying gold with royal crystal => Gold will get more and more expensive.
Not sure about WoW, but I don’t think they are using the same system since it’s direct cash to gold.

I agree that the system that forces people to top up a bit more to buy something is kinda scummy, but it’s the reality now with a lot of games.

But if you want to compare the ecosystem of both games, maybe should use KR server instead.

[Xyntao]

@PoohVz

In Lost Ark, people decide that blue crystal is not really worth it anymore or more people are buying gold with royal crystal => Gold will get more and more expensive.

We talk about gold and gold has fixed “real money value” set by the game, not by the players. Same as blue crystals, fixed value set by the game.

[Feimurgan]

I play both and you don’t understand the value of things. 100 pets? Only those everyone can get easily. I have over 1126 Pets in WoW and the value is not static. There are a lot of pets (more than 300) with costs over 10k and more than 100 with values over 400k Gold PER PET. There are over 1300 pets in the game. So Your “pet argument” is invalid, you just used the “easy to get” shits to compare.

Mounts: You fucking kidding me? Just because you can buy some easy to get for nothing, doesn’t mean they are less valuable than those in Lost Ark. Go and try to “buy” Invincible or Al’
ar and then we talk. Some mounts cost um to 10 Million just from an in-game source with 100% “drop rate” and some cost literally 5k bucks to get (hello there, I’m talking to you spectral shit).

You can not buy real progression in WoW. While you can buy a bus (which you can do in Lost Ark, too) you can’t buy items or upgrades you actually need. You are ALWAYS at the full and really fucked up mercy of RNGESUS.

Then there is the point of 2-month economy which is just facts. No defending is needed.

tldr; you know shit about both games and their economy. Bye.

Sincerely, someone with longboy in WoW

[PoohVz]

It’s not, the gold value is not fixed by the game.
You can literally go to the currency exchange and see people’s order.

[Amesx]

Even if WoW P2W is cheaper there’s still a sub model and B2P model.

You can call it predatory all you like, but instead of paying millions to RMT websites, players are actually paying the devs to continue making the game.
There’s nothing predatory that forces people to swipe other than FOMO and people’s weakness to rage honing.

You can say that you prefer X model or Y model, X progression or Y progression, it’s your preference and that’s fine.
Nothing will take away your achievement of defeating legion raids on HELL MODE ( equalized) once we get them.

[Vehicle]

Was reading through and saw those Platinum chest prices and thought they definitely don’t look realistic.

This is NA East right now

[PoohVz]

He is on EUW so it makes sense, since it should have less supply there.
Most of the whales or people who are spending money are probably in EUC.

This is price for NA-W btw

[holymoldy]

how to say, in as many words and pictures as possible, that you have no idea what you are talking about lol

[ImaChickIRL]

it will be immensely easier to make gold here than wow when legion raids come out and gold here is vastly different value than inflated retail.

im sorry you made this thread. lol

[Xyntao]

@Feimurgan

So Your “pet argument” is invalid, you just used the “easy to get” shits to compare.

But still a valid comparation. True, most of them you can get from farm and here is the issue: in Lost Ark there is almost 0 sources for pets and mounts or skins. Except a hand of pets and mounts, everything else is only obtainable from cash shop. WoW sells pet and mounts also, but also have in-game obtainable mounts. A thing that Lost Ark doesn’t.

@Feimurgan

Some mounts cost um to 10 Million just from an in-game source with 100% “drop rate”

Which one?

@Feimurgan

You can not buy real progression in WoW. While you can buy a bus (which you can do in Lost Ark, too) you can’t buy items or upgrades you actually need. You are ALWAYS at the full and really fucked up mercy of RNGESUS.

You can. Yes, P2W, but you can. And not only that is 100% gear progression, but also it’s BIS items for your class.
You can buy boost where 3-4 boosters play your class and give all the drop to you. Out of 10 bosses in a raid, you get at least 5 BIS items with 100% chance.

@PoohVz

It’s not, the gold value is not fixed by the game.

The real money gold value (Royal Crystal amount) is fixed. I can’t buy less gold if i don’t have 238 Royal Crystals. Either i have 238 Crystals to buy x amount of gold or not.
Same applies when you sell gold: you sell x amount of gold for 95 blue crystals. No matter i do, i can’t change that value.

@Amesx

You can call it predatory all you like, but instead of paying millions to RMT websites, players are actually paying the devs to continue making the game.

Do you think that? Who on earth would pay 20$ for 3k gold? 3k gold that is not even enough to try a +15 upgrade. Not to mention after 1370 when the mats change and are even more expensive.
Why do you think the number of players went down from 1,4 mill to less than 300k? I am not saying only because of this “gold topic”, but for sure it influenced a lot of players to give up.

@Amesx

There’s nothing predatory that forces people to swipe other than FOMO and people’s weakness to rage honing.

And that is the core base of this game. To make people “rage honing”. It’s a simple method borrowed from casinos : the more the player looses, the more is motivated to spend more until he gets the desired result.
There is a big explanation about this “casino mentality” and how it was implemented in today’s games. Just search Skinner’s box and online games topic. You will find the full explanation.
To simplify it, the idea is simple: frustrate the player and force him to spend. How you frustrate the player? By adding fail chances and gambling mechanics.
Yes there are some who can abstain and have patience but there are also some who can’t. And those are the players for which Lost Ark was made.

@Vehicle

Was reading through and saw those Platinum chest prices and thought they definitely don’t look realistic.

This is NA East right now

As i said, those are EU-West prices. If you don’t believe my screens, create char and check them yourself.

[Rayvenko]

@PoohVz

I have 4 alts on t3 now and they are giving huge amount of mats, silver daily, with more gold from abyss etc. Even If I need more gold, I can sell the mats to get more gold.

but you can only do this because there are ppl less organized than you who will buy those things from you.
Once they realize that for hard earned $20 they can only get two 10% chances to upgrade (effectively throw $20 out of the window), then they will move to other games that value their money more. And then everything inc. your “i just sell when i need gold” will collapse.

In my opinion honing chances should NEVER drop below 30-50% in the content progression phase. 5-10% or below should be exclusive min-max area to flex not to unlock content.

[Xyntao]

@Rayvenko

but you can only do this because there are ppl less organized than you who will buy those things from you.

By “less organised”, you mean people with limited play time. Be more specific next time.
To have 4 alts and 1 main at T3 that means at least 3h of daily playtime. And those 3h/day ONLY FOCUSED for dailies, without even talking about “side content”. And i don’t even want to start “respect player time” topic. That’s a joke from Lost Ark towards the player.

[PoohVz]

@Xyntao

The real money gold value (Royal Crystal amount) is fixed. I can’t buy less gold if i don’t have 238 Royal Crystals. Either i have 238 Crystals to buy x amount of gold or not.
Same applies when you sell gold: you sell x amount of gold for 95 blue crystals. No matter i do, i can’t change that value.

That doesn’t matter at all tbh.
Cuz that’s to control the ratio of Royal Crystal vs Blue Crystal.
If you let people set that by themselves then you can figure out what will happen with the Royal/Blue Crystal. It will be either too high or too low makes the package from the store seem stupid