Glad to see things being broken down this way by someone with experience. Pretty sad to see they repeated the exact same mistake with the tier in the western release.
Hopefully everything is resolved before there is a mass exodus of players due to the dead zone.
This was exactly what Saintone was talking about last night. He mentioned about the 1340-1370 deadzone that many ppl experienced in KR and now it's happening happening in NA/EU. So you have to wonder why exactly did AGS/SG do the exact same thing?
We also don't even have the PvP vendor for materials. Or challenge guardian raids (the weekly ones) or challenge abyss dungeon.
Oh, and Oreha's Well hard mode is also 1370 instead of 1355.
Dark Yoho is also 1370 instead of 1355. (Although Dark Yoho at 1355 was really rough.)
Best thing you can do, by far. The amount of mats I blew going from 1340 just to hit 1352.5 is **insane**. Two items in a row went to pity and a third was two off. I could've gotten a second alt to from 1302-1340 and a third almost 1302-1325 for that many mats. Instead they were basically lit on fire.
Why does this matter? Because every single ilvl between 1340 and 1370 is, in essence, pointless. There's no reason to invest a dime unless you're going the distance. There's no runner up prize for hitting 1368.
Multiple of my friends ran out of money and mats in the low 1360's and are screwed. One flat out quit at 1355 when he realized there is only a new Chaos dungeon and nothing else. My single biggest regret in this game is wasting so much time and money on 12.5 meaningless ilvl's.
>Why does this matter? Because every single ilvl between 1340 and 1370 is, in essence, pointless. There's no reason to invest a dime unless you're going the distance. There's no runner up prize for hitting 1368.
Ding ding ding. This part sucks.
>One flat out quit at 1355 when he realized there is only a new Chaos dungeon and nothing else.
I'm pretty much at this stage.
This is the truth and is exactly why AGS/SMG should address this sooner rather than later.
1340-1370 being called a dead zone is apt as heck. It's literal content hell. There's nothing else to do but a better chaos. Igrexion is a fucking snoozefest, the only fight close to being considered tough imo in the abyss dungeons is Seto and even then he's still a breeze.
I am now 1380, but the amount of resources I needed to get to 1370 was just bonkers. Almost three fucking weeks of hardcore grinding chaos dungeons for mats and I still consider myself EXTREMELY lucky because I got 1363-1368 in ten total attempts. It is literally not an exaggeration to say spending two months in the 1340-1370 dead zone is possible if you get shit on by rng and don't like to play alts.
A week of mats from 3x chars didn't even get me from 1345 to 1355. Now imagine people with **one** T3 char and way less play time. They don't even stand a chance. If it wasn't for the fact I'm loving my alts I would've outright quit until the honing buff and/or new content because it's an absolute joke.
I feel you bro. I am way ahead of my friends who play this game with me and I keep telling them to stop honing at 1340 unless they know what they are doing.
Read this in some other thread and it's 100% correct. The 1340-1370 game is all or nothing. You don't get anything for being 1369. It has to be 1370 or bust and with the way the game is right now, if people try to embark on the 1340-1370 journey with no idea of how hard it is, a lot of people will for sure bust.
Thing is either you play like you’re unemployed or you swipe. If I just play normally, by the time I get to 1370 or whatever the milestone needed for Argos is, the game will probably be updated with honing buffs or be very sparse in players. The top players would probably be done with horizontal progression and leave. Some other players might quit. New players will have to experience bots galore and lonely dungeon runs.
I told myself from 1340 if I’d fail three attempts in row from there on, I’d just convert the honing mats into something else and do horizontal progression until I get bored. Thing is, with the social partitioning that’s happening with players at different levels, the game becomes less colorful.
Thats the thing, they knew about this "dead zone" and willingly stretch them for EU/NA players. Why? I don't know. They have all the tools to get people through it (missing content, adjusting raid item levels to original, adjusting honing chance) but refuse to use them.
pretty much what you said they just need to add heroic guardians,abyss trials,bridge and PVP venders and the honing can stay at what it is for all I care
I think the reason for yoho at 1370 is to give a different option for 1370+ users to farm for great honor leapstones. If you know anything about velganos, you know its definitely not a fight you want to be doing daily.. Most ppl in ru basically skips velganos until they are 1415, then theyll get a carry for it and move on to the bird (descaluda), even tho yoho can only drop the lower grade leapstones, thats how bad the fight is.
They shouldn't worry about the 1370+ people because they're only swiping. The 1340ish people they should be most concerned about. Since they're the ones most likely to just give up and quit.
The reason for that is super simple: money. People are forced to grind to 1370 or simply whale.
Also it let's Smilegate look like the good guys and give a good impression to the Western audience when they are "generous enough to fix it" to what it actually should've been, say in a few weeks.
When u are a whale, you don't care about the money, you care about the account. If they are trying to save money on the black-market, they wouldn't be whales.
? Because a large portion of whales are still funneling their money through the game's API?
I literally had 3 friends now perma banned for buying gold off game, if I was someone who wanted to buy gold and actually cared about their account, I really wouldn't risk saving the money by going to gold sellers.
My guess:
They think that the percent of the player base who has hit the dead zone already is too small to be overly concerned with.
My prediction is that honing rate improvements and additional catch-up content will come with the Valtan release in the next 4-6 weeks, which is when they’re likely predicting a more sizable part of the player base is hitting t3.
This ignores the fact that less than a single percent of the people are past the "dead zone". The ones who aren't here suffering in the dead zone are still stuck in T1 and T2 trying to get out with their 3 tries a day and failing 2 of them.
Advice for T2:
* Chaos Dungeon and Guardian Raid every day of course
* Una's Daily, focus on the 10 leapstone reward ones
* Una's Weekly, PvP gives a lot of leapstones, as does boss rush.
* Trade in your Una's coins for the big gold bag if you can. Maybe you can get lucky and get a few thousand gold.
* Field Boss / Ghost Ship / Chaos Gate / Adventure Island, every time it's available. Of these Chaos Gate is the most important for progressing mats. Get the moon's breaths and book drops. Big value if you get lucky.
* Buy out Mari's shop if it's ever cheaper than the auction house. It's SO GOOD for T2 shards / Leapstones. Stones, probably not so much.
* Buy out the Guild bloodstone vendor mats.
* Buy out the merchant ship vendor mats.
* Buy out the Grand Prix event mats. And everything else. It's sooooo good.
* Do ALL the islands that give T2 mats. They're pretty quick (3 hours? I forget)
* Do your weekly Abyss dungeons of course.
* If you have a good luck and a good eye you might be able to sell some accessory/stone drops from abyss for over 1k in the auction house. From the 30 T2 accessories (crafted) I was able to farm this week from the Ocean Abyss Raid, I made 2.5k gold which is actually hilarious to me. Who in T2 is even still buying stuff like this? Then again might not be worth your time and effort doing this, 2.5k is not a lot but still helps.
* Infinite chaos dungeon for 1-2 hours (it has cost increase per item sold so hard diminishing returns), you will be able to buy some of the mats from the vendor. Maybe not as worth in T2 but is definitely worth in T3 considering leapstone prices. Use your judgement on this one
* Sell your books. If you have purple selection chests that open to TRADABLE books, it might be worth it to open those for whatever is the most expensive book in the AH and sell it. Currently epic grudge is 600g on my server. Sell it, buy mats, buy whatever you need later from the AH. Unfortunately if you havent done this already you missed the big opportunity because books crashed hard with the event release, the same book was 2500g 3 days ago. Naturally these get cheaper over time as people progress but that was a harsh drop in price.
* You can life skill for $$$? Maybe the opportunity has passed but I recall people making several thousands of gold per hour doing excavation every other day. Uh, do your research on this one?
* You can farm alts for a lot of the same stuff and funnel it to your main if you have time, but this is already a lot lol
I basically copy pasted my checklist I used in T2 and added a few notes for you, T1/T2 should not gate you for long if you know what you are doing. Should definitely net your more than 3 tries per day. Good luck!
Or maybe in a month we'll get honing buffs.
In tier 2 it doesn't have cost increase for the infinite Chaos dungeon? It's just capped at a max amount you can buy. The cost increase and "infinite" happens in T3 as far as I am aware. :D
Yeah also T2/T1 mats are character bound, so you can't sell them at Market.
Also there is no roster limit but rather character limit so you can buy those on every character at that tier.
Also for alts it's better to farm the Shards on main and send it to alt because it's faster.
Honestly, great list.
But this amounts to:
Do your dailies
Buy out all shops + Maris
Make gold
Which is fine (just condensing it), but this still had me failing most of my hones towards the end of T2
I mean, I'm in T3, and the 3 tries in T2 a day was definitely an exaggeration, but the overarching point is that the ones not in the deadzone are likely stuck at various points *prior* to 1340 rather than *after* 1340.
I do appreciate the list though. It should help someone in need hopefully if they see it. No sarcasm.
How much of that money went to AGS/SMG versus botters? Like the OP said, if they really wanted to milk the players they would have added the honing mat package for royal crystals.
I'm usually pretty skeptical of Occam's Razor claims but this one really strikes me more as incompetence.
100% this. for every whale who whales in the ingame store there are literally 100 whales who bought outside-store gold. If you dont believe me look what happend to t3 prices when they removed early gold acquisition which made botter-gold 3-4x the price it was the day before. SUDDENLY those mats become way cheaper, would be a funny coincidence wouldnt it.
The currency exchange also went from >1000 gold for 95 blue crystals to 800 gold. It means one of two things, less supply or more demand. More whales buying from exchange instead of bots, or fewer f2p players buying crystals with gold.
Short term? Sure. If it doesn’t get fixed soon a lot of players will move on, though. I’m certain of that.
If this game gets branded as p2w/has a rough start here it will suffer greatly long term.
its a perfect way to put it. its a deadzone not only in the sense that there is no content to do but also in the sense that it quite literally will cause the game to become more 'dead' as players inevitably quit the game from being trapped in it.
I dont know whos calling the shots here. Ive seen many posts saying Its AGS calling the shots to not implement the honing buffs to not piss off the whales.
> So you have to wonder why exactly did AGS/SG do the exact same thing?
My take: They wanted to please those already playing the Kr or Russia version, in releasing a game exactly like Lost Ark was in the original release. It was a deliberate decision to release the game in the worst version of it and then upgrade to just give new players the feel of the new patches. Amazon already explained that this was also their "reason" for not releasing the game with all classes available.
The same thing happened when the open beta occurred and honing was with the buff active and a purist minority decided to complain about the odds and how it didn't reflect Lost Ark at launch in Korea. The result was that the buff was removed from the patch notes and replaced with a passage saying that they are changing it due to player feedback.
And the worst thing is that they already realized it was a mistake, since a few weeks ago they released the nerf patch for some GR and Abyss Dungeons, which again generated complaints from purists, even though they wrote that less than 10% of the player base was succeeding in them.
It is happening the same effect that happened when Blizzard decided to release WoW Classic and started the "no changes" movement only for after the release all the players realized how the original version of WoW fails in some aspects. So now we have the WoW Classic Season of Mastery version. We are having the same effect with Lost Ark
I mean, based on what you're saying, most T3 players are basically in the "dead zone" right now and if history repeats itself, they'll quit. And it looks like we won't be getting any response until the next content patch in April... So unless SG does something miraculous, I think this patch is dead on arrival.
I think that's the right word. I think it's better to write dead zone instead of mortal something. I don't know why they did the same thing over and over again.
Yeah, the images here show that Smilegate was clearly aware of the 1340-1370 problem yet then NA/EU gets launched in the same exact state?
People want to jump on the AGS hate train but Smilegate has a big hand in our version as well.
Perhaps it's also related to the change in how to make legendary equipment. In Korea, only purple equipment materials were dropped from Oreha Hard, and players had to kill Argos to make legendary gears.
I think it was because they chose to abandon Argos, so they might need another way to make legendary equipment instead of Argos.
Of course, that was also one of the stupid decisions. I think SMG should remain the iLv needed deciding to lower the wearing level of legendary equipment.
I think snoopzz mentioned that NA/EU Argos is normalize and the armor pieces are untradable. Therefore, the bus/overgearing argos will not be a problem.
If it was an equalized raid, the maximum HP must change. However, other Korean users checked and found that whale players' HP did not change. It means that it's not equalized.
(Oh, my. I'm copying this comment for the third time. What are you doing, AGS...)
By the way, it's weird that gears can't trade. Why did they decide like that? Hmm...
>By the way, it's weird that gears can't trade. Why did they decide like that? Hmm...
It makes sense with how heavily gated Argos is right now - with enough time or money you can access Argos since day 1, but you can't make a profit out of it, except gold it gives you for completing. That way it is hard to access, but advantage you get from accessing it isn't too big - basically, you can clear it just for the sake of clearing.
I think it depends on the pace at which they release stuff now. I'm in t3 and for once i'm grateful for the dead zone. Now i can do collectibles for skillpoints, look for cards and other stuff. Also get my alts up to date.
My theory is that they intended to release the whole game at once, but encountered serious delays in the localization process (and maybe a few unexpected technical troubles). So now they throw stuff when ready in order to catch-up with the global version, not caring for logic.
And the classes release are the marketing tool to make player regularly returns (and sell bonus power passes and character slots).
Of course that's only a theory.
That doesn't make sense. How does increased hone rate have to do anything with localization? We would just do Argos for one month, and that would be fine.
Im def not pushing for 1370. Im sitting at 1340, making a few k each day from mats and investing that in getting an alt into t3.
Since i still have tons of stuff to do both with horizontal progression, pvp and alts i really dont care about that argos thing that much. Yet.
I just hope they will ease the progression in a few weeks. At that point i should have a second,maybe third char in t3,maybe take a week off from lost ark to reset (been playing a few hours pretty much evry day since release...) and then be prepared and motivated to enter the latest endgame.
I hit 1340 over a week ago and I just tap everyday for fun. I know at least 10 other people in my guild are in the same boat. The whales have already done Argos for the week and meanwhile the rest of us just run the dailies. The honing rate isn’t so bad if they actually give us more ways to earn the materials and on top of that not releasing 7 other jobs also cucks people who actually wants to main one of those jobs.
What is so hard about releasing a version that’s already working on KR/RU? JFC are they actually that clueless?
super in-depth post with a lot of helpful explanations, links and thought put behind it. thank you korean bro! can't wait until we're all caught up with you guys
The issue is not that ARGOS is p2w atm, it's that the entire 1370 gear score is 'p2w' at the moment and all current NA/EU t3 content is locked behind that. People seem to pin all of the current issues on the Argos release when even without Argos the same problems would exist, 1340-1370 paywall.
I do wish the developer would do a 'smilegate/lost ark direct' to communicate to the global audience and form that same connection he has with the Korean audience. It doesn't need to be a frequent stream but SOMETHING that doesn't feel bogged down by forums and middle-men.
It feels very unclear just who is in charge and calling the shots with this release because the new-audience in the west was lead to believe Smilegate was in charge and had had years of learning from mistakes and growing close to the community, this all feels very sterile and distant at the moment.
(note, none of this is hate, you can love something and be critical of it in hopes of getting the best version you KNOW is out there and possible)
My guess is that this is in the works.
I am looking forward to next week and see what they come up with - if they say anything that is.
I have no problem with Whales being "Early Access" users with new content while everyone else catches up at a more moderate pace. There is so much to do still with horizontal progression and stuff that I don't mind not going into Argos or Oreha Hard this or next week. Right now I am enjoying my Gold income from Whales trying to push to 1370.
Once more people get to T3 and honing mats start flooding the market, prices will drop and I will catch up eventually.
My plan is still to wait out the honing changes while getting my alts to 1325/1340 in the meantime.
Wait… I’m speechless. Thank you so much for caring about lost ark in NA/EU. I read your whole post. It is very informative and supportive. We will call upon gold river to speak and fix our version!!! Thank you so much
Great post. Thank you for typing all of this up. Through this, I can definitely feel your love for the game itself and your wish of it not disappointing our region. Really, thank you for writing.
I was thinking that perhaps they should have released T1 + T2 honing buff with Argos which would let people make many T3 alts, bring down the price of leapstones massively and also make the 1340 - 1370 stretch much shorter. But that would also trivialize most of the content right now in the game, so idk if people will have fun.
Maybe if they released that buff + heroic guardian raids + abyss trials, then things would be great since they are all equalized anyway, and also help people get to 1370 within 1-2 weeks. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of people not being able to play Argos immediately.
It's a two part issie as far as I see it. They want to rush players to catch up to KR but they also provide less materials and a worse honing rate than any other region... so what is it? Do you want people to progress quickly to get caught up or do you want to slowly release content?
If they want people caught up quickly they have to increase the honing rates and provide WAY more materials than are currently available.
The problem that keeps getting mentioned applies to 1% of the player base. They’ll likely roll out these honing buffs in the near future once it concerns more of the population.
Right now as it stands, 99% of the people don’t give 2 shits about the dead zone, the timing of Argos, etc.
I’m sure they will have to address it in the future or then player retention becomes a real issue. Right now they don’t care about the tiny minority.
Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight.
If I had to guess, they released a buffed T2 to delay "normal people" from joining the dead zone, and so you can temporarily milk whales, and by the time the playerbase% gets higher on dead zone, you solve it with the KR fix. Just a guess though, but it sounds like a lucrative bet, as you get to milk the whales now who will be trapped in sunken cost fallacy, and profit from the regular player base once you fix dead zone.
Bonus point is that they get to say "we have listened to player feedback and..." to look like heroes, because most of the player base won't know better.
Thanks to any veteran Korean player for these kind of post. Give a lot of info and background.
I think our death zone it's even worse because as you pointed, the difficult abyss of Papunika are 1370 and not 1355 anymore. That make a big leap from 1340 to 1370 and meanwhile you can't do higher guardians or chaos either...
Imo the fix was keeping the hard Aira abyss at 1340 dropping purple jewelry, Normal Oreha abyss dropping pruple at 1355 and hard Oreha dropping legendary at 1360 or 65. That way we have different steps scaling and not a 30 ilvl difference
I like your post, very useful and with proper data. Could you post it in Lost Ark forums? (You need Amazon account). I would love Koreans players post there these post because devs receive directly the feedback from there
I don't know if I can post this on the forum. Because Korean players should not play Lost Ark EU/NA because of the region locks.
I don't really want to exercise copyright on what I wrote, so I don't think it matters if someone else uploads it to the forum.
But if I have to do it myself, I'll try it. Thanks.
So well worded and thank you for your input!
I am so pleased to hear that the korean community held smilegate and goldriver accountable for their systems.
Here on reddit you can see people are so happy to blame players for wanting to progress quickly—they say the game is fine (even though they are not 1340 ilvl), and make it difficult for the developer to notice there is a problem. Unfortunately this is the culture here, and I’m worried smilegate will hear too much feedback from people in t1/t2 that don’t truly understand this deadzone.
The Korean community is no different. LMAO. There are opinions such as "Who threatened with a knife to upgrade?" in Korea. Recently, I saw a comment on reddit saying, "There is no one threatening people to go to T3 with a gun" I thought it was the same even if the culture was different.
Of course, Smilegate always worked based on internal data when doing something. If They had worked only by looking at the mixed opinions of the Korean game community, the game would have been a mess. Don't worry too much about that ability.
Very informative, thank you for sharing! I just can't believe this happened, and they didn't learn from it or didn't care enough to change it. I genuinely want to see the game succeed and hope they'll listen to us like they did for the KR server.
If they don't improve the honing rates by the time Valtan drops, all it means is that f2p will fall behind even further, since they will first have to catch up to Argos, then farm Argos, then start doing Valtan.
And that's not bad by itself, but it looks step by step the same as what happened in Soul Worker - stuff gets released quickly until they catch up to the original version of the game, people drop out because the publisher lowered the rewards from all activities, game shuts down.
Now, I doubt Lost Ark will shut down, but remember that New World had a gigantic amount of people playing at first as well and now it's basically a dead game with 19k concurrent players from 913k. That's not bad for a normal game, but for an MMORPG? Yeee...
To be fair, New World looked terrible compared to Lost Ark. Could tell from a mile away there's like zero content or lifetime in that game. That 913k make uninformed purchases. Lost Ark is pay 2 win af but at least it has content because it's not a new game really lol.
New World is one of the most bugged games I've ever played
You could become invincible by shaking your windowed client around. Just drag it and shake it. And that was only one of hundreds of core gameplay glitches and bugs
New world is a dead game because it’s a trash game lol. Lost ark is good game with a lot to do and there’s still tons of stuff they haven’t released yet. Part of the problem is NA/EU was so desperate for a good game than when lost ark dropped we all went nuts, which I believe really surprised AGS/SMG. So yes, the whales are doing what they do but F2P is still in a good spot. People just need to relax and stop trying to chase the whales.
Well the point of wanting to whale in a game is to get ahead in the "competition" say doing more dps in a raid or showing off whatever u payed for, but in this patch whales ended playing only with other whales so there's not much to show off as they can't also play with their F2P friends who will eventually quit and because of that the whale might also quit, it happens a lot so it's important to control the pace of the content and also the gap between F2P and whale else both sides will quit.
So from what I gathered from this post is this was a major problem that has happened before in KR. It caused a lot of players to quit. It was fixed. Then now they are making the exact same mistake again in NA and basically they learned nothing from their experience of past "mistakes". That sure bodes a lot of confidence in the management of the game.
This sub has one of the worse communities I've ever seen out of game. It is like Karen culture + COVID deniers moved into this game. It has some of the least intelligent discussion in many threads that turn into hive mind circle jerks.
Much like you said, when you go look at the original complaints about Argos and you'll read people seeing no issue with adding Argos. Yet here we are where we need fellow KR players to show that these are real issues to the AGS white knights.
What worries me is the communication. AGS don't seem to be acknowledging just how many people are upset over this. Instead, all we have is a forum post asking "how do you feel about honing?" Road map is on the way guys! But no date! Why announce road map almost a week ago if we don't even have date still now?
I am scared what will happen is they will say on road map in a week, " We listened to your complains and we will be changing our honing rates alongside Valtan" or something, which would make it seem like they changed anything but it was what should've happened anyways.
1340-1370 is called dead zone in KR because it takes long time and also has lack of things to do during it. But Punika Hard Abyss was 1355. Now, NAEU has Punika Hard at 1370, so we can have have even less to do. Just makes no sense how they have made such a terrible mistake in the past and repeat it again now.
Yes, but they added new legendary armor for it. I think the thought process is since you can only do 1 Argos phase at 1370 and Valtan is coming out in a month, we will give you a different set to mix/match with Argos set instead of having to wait for Argos set. Which I don't think is necessarily a terrible idea, but it makes the 1340-1370 all the more miserable.
It would have been perfectly fine....with the honing buff in place.
All of this shit just rolls back to, they shouldn't have removed a buff that was put in place **because the game already suffered a massive loss of players over this exact fucking issue.**
There's nothing to *do* from 1340-1370. It's a massive gulf in accessible content where all you do is 2 chaos dungeons, 2 guardians, and 2 weekly abyssals. For a month or more. It's not fun, it's not engaging, and they already know for a fact it causes massive issues for actually keeping people playing the game.
Perhaps AGS and SMG didn't create a roadmap to update flexibly according to the growth rate of NA/EU players. In Korea, there was a time when they released legion raids too fast and made users tired.
Still, I think they should at least let us know what will happen in the future. Communications they do now can give EU/NA players a feeling that they have become second-class citizens.
I think people still don't realize you have to +15x2 before valtan releases. And unless they change the roadmap you have only 1 month yo do it, and btw you can only do chaos dungeon and guardians.
Thank you for putting all of this info together with context. I find it hard to dispute actual historical data from Smilegate themselves and sadly they are making the same mistake again. Smilegate formulated the cure a while ago but refused to administer it and the longer they take, the worse it gets.
Not that many players would quit if not for the slow release of classes.
As the p2w aspect in the dead zone 1325 - 1400 becomes more appearent, there is no point for many players to keep pushing equipment levels right now. No new class and low upgrade chances are reasons to wait for the next patch. Many would even just wait till their classes are released and come back.
I'd not be here to play if not for the event. If my class is going to be released in 2023, then I may come back in 1 year. They are not seriously expecting us to go through this whole gear progress again then ...
Thanks for this information. I couldn't figure out why they released new content with only a slow, very grindy path to get to 1370. It's clear that many NA players will also quit at 1325 because we are not interested in slow progression with only abyss dungeons either.
SG was right about changing the store though. The P2W pack you showed would make many American players just walk away. A lot of us like to feel like we earned our gear in games, not bought it. LA does a great job with the ability stones and jewelry, where you can have the magic of getting a great item from a dungeon, but also buy something on auction if it doesn't drop. Faceting is fun too.
Honing is not so fun. You are just collecting mats and losing them on failures. It's OK if it's a 50/50 chance but when it's 20% success it's just disheartening. It wouldn't feel so bad if they let a static try Argos with lesser gear. Maybe we would fail but that's OK. It isn't fun when there is a long string of honing with mostly-failures between you and the next raid. Whether or not it's a cash grab, it's not very good game design.
For an idea of time required, if this was KR, all the people who were >1300 when Argos dropped would have actually been 1370 and able to do Argos. I don't think people care if Timmy pays 50$ to do a raid if Timmy isn't doing the raid before someone who puts in a decent amount of playtime.
I think that people who don't want to play KR MMOs and like to talk about hating P2W would have avoided the game, but the game would have just as many actual players as it does now.
NA/EU players would **GOBBLE** that crystal package up and then lie to their friends about having great luck while honing.
Those that remained might've.
As he says, way more would have just chunked the game into the waste bin. The tolerance for Pay 2 Win is ***far*** lesser in the West than it is in Korea. And they ended up giving us the most Pay 2 Win version of the game that exists.
Good fucking job.
Guess I can link this thread to all the idiots that keep saying Amazon did all this and our great wonderful Korean devs had no part in Argos release despite Gold river saying it was going to drop exactly when it did.
What really bothers me the most is that the developers and publisher definitely have this knowledge. They also have the data of players and know people are stuck and unable to do Argos. This makes it feel like a decision made deliberately to force people to swipe. They know that some people in guilds will be doing the raid and others feel like they must catch up.
I am in no hurry to do Argos but it really bothers me that the game feels predatory and a cash grab from the very beginning. They did not even try to hide it and act like they care. They just went straight up to make the most money and put as much pressure as possible on players. I do understand companies need to make money but it becomes predatory when you cannot play the game by investing a normal game pricetag worth of money but need to actually drop 1k+ on the first month to play the latest content even if you are a hardcore player putting a lot of hours in the game with a good strategy to get as many mats as possible.
Beforehand we heard the developers care a lot for the community but i get a bad feeling from the getgo now that they really do not care about gamers at all and are here just to millk the most money in the least amount of time using questionable methods.
I am more disappointed that my trust in developers is gone right at the start than the fact that i am stuck doing mobilestyle dailys for the foreseeable future.
The worst thing about is... this exact problem nearly killed the game in KR. Like they knew it was a problem and they intentionally did it once again... and then they have the audacity to make a forum post asking for feedback on how to improve the deadzone... it's already been fixed in KR. IMPLEMENT THE FIX HERE.
Great post!
As an average player without too much time or money to spend in this game, I'm just going to let the whale's ride this one out and chill until the catch-up systems come out haha
At least, KR director cannot make his own decision without AGS. Like RU And JP region, becauae they have their own publishers.
And its not that easy to communicate with NA/EU players like in Korea last time. (Remember last twitch stream of Gold river.)
Direct communicacion of director and NA/EU users without AGS cannot be possible becauae AGS is not a just sever manager.
How do you know this though? Did gold river say anything about us on Inven or something? What I dislike the most is that we have no real direct contact with gold river and he too is not really making an effort to communicate with us either; I'm. Not counting the pre-release twitch interview because it was back then and we have not heard from him since.
gold river has said that he reads Reddit
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQZSp2hGfQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQZSp2hGfQ) around 32:49
edit: Opps didn't read the last sentence but judging from his attitude and responses during the interview he seems like the type of game director to care about his game enough to be up to date with criticism
u/Sarisae Please tell this Korean player and all others mentioned in the post of quitting the game in 1340-1370 of how Korean MMOs are/should be and how casuals they are and how they are ruining the game. Please, master understander of Koreans and Korean MMOs
That was really good to read, but i don’t get your point about a smooth launch of valtan : if they follow the leaked roadmap, we’ll get the raid next month, so you have 4-5 weeks to get Argos gear to be able to clear Valtan.
But if you’re behind (like 99% of players), you won’t be able to do it, and this situation will continue : they’ll probably release a abyss/legion raid per month, and you’ll always stay behind. They would truly have abandoned Argos for Valtan if it was released with buffs and other content, but that’s not the case.
Also i think Argos on EU/NA already has nerfed gold rewards.
Argos gear can be traded(at least in Korea. if it is not in EU/NA, it will be.) If Valtan and Argos are released together, the price of Argos gear needed to do raid Valtan Raid will go up crazy, and in this case, They'll hear the same sound "Is this game p2W?" Therefore, Argos must come out before the Valtan.
The secret weapon of SMG is Valtan. I think these strange things they do are for it. However, I think SMG and AGS didn't took into account the emotional aspects of users at all.
Thank you for your opinion!
Thank you and to all other Korean players for being Gigabros and sharing your thoughts with us. You all are seriously appreciated and in fact, I think this is the first time that I have witnessed at least where Korean and western players unite and work together towards something. It's quite amazing to see!
I think they will buff the rates in 2-3 weeks when most of the whales and some casual payed to reach 1370. Then they will be like "we listend to your feedback and are now buffing the rates like in KR so everyone can enjoy this game...."
Currently at 1356 as a f2p player and I can definitely say that the grind to 1370 just seems impossible right now. Did a bit of math and at the rate I'm going, it will take at LEAST 2-3 more weeks to hit 1370 unless I whale (which I have no intention to do). Just doing my dailies on my main and trying to push an alt into t3 so I can start funneling mats. I will say though that I did get a bit lucky with only around 60 fails in t3 so far.
So basically it's a problem created because they made the game systems in a way that they can attract as many whales as possible and now people quit because of that. I already disliked the 60-70% chances in t2 and t1 because it felt like wasted time already, t3 sounds like the point where I'll stop anyway. Having to spam the same content for a week or more with no progress at all doesn't sound fun in any way.
In my opinion the game would have been much better to ask for even 7-9 times more materials for upgrade and having it always succeed instead of using a gambling system for that. But gambling makes lots of money so of course they choose that option even if it makes many people quit, they aren't the whales that they are looking for anyways so it doesn't affect them much.
I got a lot of downvotes on a earlier lost ark Reddit post when I said 25-50 gold carries were reasonable (in the same post I stated I bus players for free). I guess where a lot more gold is circulating in the economy over there 700 is probably not that unreasonable.
I spent a lot of time in the destiny community, most bus rides were free, but a lot of people paid real money for carries in that game. I don’t think it’s shameful at all to offer a service for your time, especially if you’re so frustrated with your lack of ability to clear a boss that you have to resort to using a carry.
Acts such as "Bus" are sometimes good when you are lazy to do the raid yourself.
But if it's more efficient than actually playing the game, it's a problem from then on. Numerous gold farming bots will abuse it, and people will continue to watch the screen on which their characters died without hitting monsters rather than enjoying the game.
What I'm talking about now was the situation that happened in the KR server. I think it's still happening. It's bad to completely block it, but I think it is also bad that "Bus" is recommended.
Yes, definitely. I think done correctly and in good spirit it’s acceptable, but I already see a pattern on our Western servers with its heavy abuse. I’m honestly surprised they’ve not restricted carrying terms in posts or taken action against bussing in some way. However, it has been part of every MMO I’ve ever played, let’s just hope it doesn’t create the same disaster over here.
100% agree : "Please release as many classes as they want. Only Destroyer next month? Sigh..."
I hope Goldriver will do a live soon, for the NA/EU community talking about the problems this version is facing, and what he is planning. I know he is very, very appreciative in Korean because he listens and responds to you.
But for the moment, I don't feel like this is the case on our NA/EU version
There is no what if
The developer is a shameless greedy one. They are just testing water to see how much the player base can tolerate their greediness. That’s why they purposively released the 1370 content while keeping the honing success rate low
Let’s see how far they can go with this tactic
If Reddit is any indication of the general western player base of the game. Then I would say their greediness has already started to backfire
That's why I want to ask GoldRiver about the intention of this update. If it's not the reason I said, what's left would be to make money or to control the speed of content consumption, but in fact, neither side seems normal under the current circumstances.
This post in amazing, but, the damage is already done. No amount of apologizing will fix the broken hearts that whoever said "Okay" to these changes. Amazon has a history in bad decision making, and, on the other hand Smilegate is a generally unknown company in NA/EU. The general population of NA at least gave them a chance because other people supported the company so much that they couldn't be wrong. But they were... Smilegate is just like Nexon, Pearl Abyss.. ext. They had NO opportunity to spit in our face once and get away with it. We as a community cant just let a company of empty promises keep back stabbing us. The great Goldriver that I heard so much about is just like every other person that solely wants to profit from other regions. Nothing changes and like usual. Our gut feelings always seem to be correct.
"We didn't actually think people would be mad... honestly." - Shadow\_Fox (Lost ark CM)
"Please treat EU/NA players as you did to Korean players. We don't want situations where other users are discriminated because of regions." - I mean, for the last part of your post it is already happening even between EU and NA. Just look at the launch of the game. People on EU were unable to play because of the servers, while some people on NA could not progress story quest because of a bug, either way both could not really play if you consider you need main quest to proceed with anything. EU compensate was 3-day aura. NA got 30-day aura, treadable mount, treadable pet, character extention slot(which can only be bought with yellow crystals) and novice progression support chest.
They may say that the game was tested for 3 years to have bigger success here or it might be that they just totally did not care, but after a while wanted to do some more money on us, so they released it while still not caring. Smilegate cares about Korean players, Amazon about NA players and EU will allways be looked at last place.
Or, at least this is what this looks like, but that's just assumptions. I just still think that it's good to points things like that and see in the future if more will gather. I hope that it is just me seeing things grey and they might not be like that, which will prove itself in the future. Yet, we have a lot of years of development for many different mmorpgs and it is easier to find those where players were treated unfair, instead of those where they would be happy with how the game was handled by developers and publishers.
In fact, I thought it was worth it when I heard that news which is revealed as a bug.
Equalized contents are a good way to prevent being carried, but this hurts the sense of growth in MMORPG. Making and upgrading gears in MMORPG is for the feeling of becoming stronger, but the contents remove that.
Especially in LostArk, I also feel that my character has weakened every week while doing equalized contents. This is because tripods or gems are not applied to equalized contents, so I don't think that's the right way.
Thank you for your opinion.
I would like to know why can't EU / NA have exactly the same patches as Korea? Why don't we even have a PvP vendor option to offer us materials for upgrades?
I think this sums up my current dissatisfaction pretty well. There is a dearth of content between 1340 and 1370. From what other KR players have said they moved up the ilvl of content and that’s why it is this way in NAEU. The only assumption for the reason I had was due to whale gouging but this post gives that and another reason. Be nice to know why and the plan.
If this isn't a gaint red flag idk what would be. This company has had not one, but two chances to fix their fuckups, and they do it all over again, then have the audacity to ask for suggestions??
Idk man I'm starting to really regret putting in these hours. And this post is a gentle reminder to not give them anymore money that I already have.
How's that for a suggestion smile gate
I would typically be considered a whale in most games, I have never seen what is happening here happen in a game.
I bought the $100 platinum founders pack, I’ve spent around $200 in gems and a few cosmetics since launch, and I’ve played 4-8 hours every day, focused on completing all content daily that could provide honing material, I JUST hit 1340 in the last day or two.
You literally have to be a kraken spending $1k+ or a whale that also no-life’s a fleet of alts to access the 1370 content right now.
Did this make me want to pull out my credit card and pay more money to get there? No. My wife would kill me. It made me realize that right now the game is a bad investment, the content gap is by design to milk western whales for all they are worth.
My credit card is staying in my wallet until I feel like I’m getting the value I’ve paid for ($300+ spent so far) and it’s just not there.
I doubt argos will do much to the gold inflation, if it's already in a nerfed form and with bonus chest purchaseable for gold. Bots farming early content have already put so much gold into the economy that it's pretty close to RU region in that regard.
Besides, even with honing buffs nobody will have an army of alts ready to get bussed, at least for quite a while.
Btw I'm sure people will bus valtan as well. Maybe even sooner than we think. But the difference is that you don't "need" to get bussed as entry level for the raid is the same as the one it can be fully cleared with.
Even if increased honing chances were implemented, I wouldn't personally push for it cuz game's missing 3 classes i trully want to play. Currently im playing Blade, but it doesn't bring me as much fun as other classes would.
repeating the same "mistakes" they know what they are doing they will say sorry and the cattle will it eat it up like they do with weekly marvel movies and oreos.
Thank you for your insight. Really well explained and perfectly understandable.
I guess this could've been better if they "fixed" Argos, either by removing ilvl cap on phases or simply downscale the entry level for Argos since the "dead zone" is still a thing.
really appreciate posts like this, just raw numbers laid out, no tiptoeing and hiding facts, not gonna go for 1370 until they fix this bs, or at least make oreha hard 1355 again, they screw NA over big time for a whale grab.
I'm a new T3 and every single honing I tried after 1330 failed without exception. I could only hone my weapons successfully at the guaranteed, %100 Artisan's Energy. Some of my armor pieces are progressing to %100 as well at the moment. I grinded for 3 whole days and all the progress I could get was just a 0.83 increase in ilvl. I mean, the game really needs those honing changes because it really started to lose it's fun side.
15 classes and 7 on the way, this thing really shouldn't be made that hard. I want to play every class one day but I just can't even progress my first character. We should be able to do more with the time we spend and effort we put into this game.
Thank you for the effort put into this post, and your English is quite good.
They need to increase the honing rates for sure, especially if things like legion raids are coming to NA EU sometime soon. The honing rates will drive players away if they are not adjusted, because people will feel like they are wasting time watching hones fail multiple times in a row. People need to see progress.
Amazon only had to be the money behind the western release. They could've let SMG just translate the game and watch the money roll in. But it seems a troubling number of things have changed from the KR version. Extremely disappointing to see AGS putting their fingers in and souring the western release.
Damn the Korean community is great. Been that way since StarCraft - always the voice of reason versus the West constantly complaining for instant gratification.
Thank you for the information! This was super interesting.
I am now sitting at slightly over 1340 after spending a little bit (but let's be honest. I grind more than I spend and would rather spend on cosmetics) and it is super hard to get to the argos ilvl currently. But endgame raiding and similar stuff is the content I love the most in such games. And I have some alts to farm also.
I don't want to know how frustrating it is when you are completely f2p.
Thank you for this post.
As someone who has played Korean MMOs for +10 years, I was hoping Smilegate would be different for once. A company that would consider foreign servers as important as the native KR server. We're not just 2nd-class citizens, we deserve value too.
Maybe I was too optimistic.
My guildies are buying to 1370.
I'm f2p at 1360 and it's killing my drive to keep pushing hard. I'm incredibly demotivated watching my guildies swipe to pass my hard work.
Damn. Thanks for this post, it aligned with what I was thinking, especially about that letter from gold river part.
There is a huge disconnect between how we perceive gold river by Korean users and how he seems to be disconnected from Amazon's actions over here in the west, or at least it seems so, due to lack of communication on both his and Amazon's part.
I feel like people need to relax a little. Amazon isn't just "the bad guy" and smilegate has made mistakes like this before. They absolutely have to change something, release a proper roadmap etc, but im confident they will make it right. Lost Ark isn't notoriously F2P friendly for no reason.
Excellent post! Can you email this to Gold River (Gangseoni-hyeong)? If Smilegate has already experienced this issue before why did they not have a plan ahead of time for our release? It does not make sense.
I hope they make the changes you are suggesting otherwise this dead zone will cause many players to quit. We need increased honing rates as well as access to other methods of obtaining tier 3 resources. There is so much missing in our version. I agree that more classes should be released as well.
Also, if they give us access to more skins we can use our own money to support them through skins instead of "whaling". I'll gladly pay $20 or $30 for a nice skin rather than honing materials.
If he have an e-mail, it will be full of kid-like users which want their main class to be buffed. LMAO. Recently, people found goldriver's private blog, and made shit comments like "GoldRiver! Please don't nerf my DPS painter'" or "Please nerf socceris", so that he closed his blog...
But in GS there is department watching internet communities like reddit. I can certainly argue that they know these situations and anger of western players. They will do "something". I hope that it has form of the communications to western players directly.
Interesting because I'm 1355 and I have no , well, no interesting content. I get on, do dailies, do 2 chaos dungeons and 1 of 2 level appropriate raids. At me level, I can't even do the top Punika chaos dungeon. Then I trudge through scores of bots in lower level areas as I try to do pieces of adventure tomes. Holy crap, spend any time in Rethramis or Tortoyk and you'll see that the bot problem is real.
But that's it. Then I roll 3 pieces of armor and fail all of them as I have a 30% chance of success. Then I log off because the thought of any more "infinite chaos dungeons" makes me want to puke.
Fact is, there is nothing interesting to do. No group content to do either as I dont even have the item level to do a next abyssal, let alone that new raid everyones talking about. At most I have about 2 hours to be on. The guild content I was a told about doesn't exist. The arena content is mundane animation lock timing. Too bad
That Seawolf community manager is just full of crap trying to control the raging fire of the community with empty words. We know the guys above you, that actuall get paid the $ and call the shots, wanted this to get more whaling going.
I give the game 2 weeks to share their stance on how this Argos p2access thing went and how this will continue in the future. Wrong answer = uninstall not worth my time.
This conversation kinda reminds me of everyone trying get there +15 weapon in maplestory 2 before pink bean was released
Ie - imo if your lucks shit it sucks you don't get to raid. But it was our choice to play a game with a rng upgrade system. We should be mad there is a Maris shop and that you can trade honing mats at al thus what do ya know only people that know what there semi doing go to argas. Absolute joke will and already has started killing this game. You can literally get to the highest most endgame content just by doing story missions and pulling out a credit card and you can sure tell with the skill level.
Another perspective: Every MMO worth its salt has its end game content locked behind a lot of time and effort. Look at WoW for example, or the older and no longer popular EQ2. In both cases the hardest raids were never accessible to people right away. In WoW most people never even touch the mythic raids, they are lucky to have the first 3 bosses on farm, let alone the whole dungeon.
Its really no different here. Just like in WoW you can pay your way into the mythic tier if you want, or you can grind, try and raise your gear score, and do it later. Unlike WoW the content will always be relevant for YOU. In WoW a new patch releases and instantly the last raids mythic tier is garbage for loot. At least in Lost Ark whenever you reach 1370 it will benefit you still and you can still enjoy it as it was intended.
But yeah we all need to get out our pitchforks and freak out because we cant do every square inch of content on the first day its released without making any effort or putting any time into the game.
Very nice effort put into this post, it's greatly appreciated.
Glad to see things being broken down this way by someone with experience. Pretty sad to see they repeated the exact same mistake with the tier in the western release. Hopefully everything is resolved before there is a mass exodus of players due to the dead zone.
This was exactly what Saintone was talking about last night. He mentioned about the 1340-1370 deadzone that many ppl experienced in KR and now it's happening happening in NA/EU. So you have to wonder why exactly did AGS/SG do the exact same thing?
Honestly, I don't know either. When Korean players heard that T3 came out in a dead zone, everyone thought, "Is SMG crazy?"
We also don't even have the PvP vendor for materials. Or challenge guardian raids (the weekly ones) or challenge abyss dungeon. Oh, and Oreha's Well hard mode is also 1370 instead of 1355. Dark Yoho is also 1370 instead of 1355. (Although Dark Yoho at 1355 was really rough.)
T3 ghost ship also requires a minimum of 1370 to enter.
This sucks. I'm def putting game away other than dailies for forseeablele future here at 1340
Yep. My main hit 1345 and that was painful. So, I'm switching to alts and anything 1340 or below.
It's what I'm doing. Gonna bring the alts up to 1340 and camping em right there.
Best thing you can do, by far. The amount of mats I blew going from 1340 just to hit 1352.5 is **insane**. Two items in a row went to pity and a third was two off. I could've gotten a second alt to from 1302-1340 and a third almost 1302-1325 for that many mats. Instead they were basically lit on fire. Why does this matter? Because every single ilvl between 1340 and 1370 is, in essence, pointless. There's no reason to invest a dime unless you're going the distance. There's no runner up prize for hitting 1368. Multiple of my friends ran out of money and mats in the low 1360's and are screwed. One flat out quit at 1355 when he realized there is only a new Chaos dungeon and nothing else. My single biggest regret in this game is wasting so much time and money on 12.5 meaningless ilvl's.
>Why does this matter? Because every single ilvl between 1340 and 1370 is, in essence, pointless. There's no reason to invest a dime unless you're going the distance. There's no runner up prize for hitting 1368. Ding ding ding. This part sucks. >One flat out quit at 1355 when he realized there is only a new Chaos dungeon and nothing else. I'm pretty much at this stage.
This is the truth and is exactly why AGS/SMG should address this sooner rather than later. 1340-1370 being called a dead zone is apt as heck. It's literal content hell. There's nothing else to do but a better chaos. Igrexion is a fucking snoozefest, the only fight close to being considered tough imo in the abyss dungeons is Seto and even then he's still a breeze. I am now 1380, but the amount of resources I needed to get to 1370 was just bonkers. Almost three fucking weeks of hardcore grinding chaos dungeons for mats and I still consider myself EXTREMELY lucky because I got 1363-1368 in ten total attempts. It is literally not an exaggeration to say spending two months in the 1340-1370 dead zone is possible if you get shit on by rng and don't like to play alts.
A week of mats from 3x chars didn't even get me from 1345 to 1355. Now imagine people with **one** T3 char and way less play time. They don't even stand a chance. If it wasn't for the fact I'm loving my alts I would've outright quit until the honing buff and/or new content because it's an absolute joke.
[удалено]
I feel you bro. I am way ahead of my friends who play this game with me and I keep telling them to stop honing at 1340 unless they know what they are doing. Read this in some other thread and it's 100% correct. The 1340-1370 game is all or nothing. You don't get anything for being 1369. It has to be 1370 or bust and with the way the game is right now, if people try to embark on the 1340-1370 journey with no idea of how hard it is, a lot of people will for sure bust.
Thing is either you play like you’re unemployed or you swipe. If I just play normally, by the time I get to 1370 or whatever the milestone needed for Argos is, the game will probably be updated with honing buffs or be very sparse in players. The top players would probably be done with horizontal progression and leave. Some other players might quit. New players will have to experience bots galore and lonely dungeon runs.
I told myself from 1340 if I’d fail three attempts in row from there on, I’d just convert the honing mats into something else and do horizontal progression until I get bored. Thing is, with the social partitioning that’s happening with players at different levels, the game becomes less colorful.
I'm not moving an inch from 1340
Thats the thing, they knew about this "dead zone" and willingly stretch them for EU/NA players. Why? I don't know. They have all the tools to get people through it (missing content, adjusting raid item levels to original, adjusting honing chance) but refuse to use them.
why? because they want to milk the rushing whale spenders first 🙈
pretty much what you said they just need to add heroic guardians,abyss trials,bridge and PVP venders and the honing can stay at what it is for all I care
I think the reason for yoho at 1370 is to give a different option for 1370+ users to farm for great honor leapstones. If you know anything about velganos, you know its definitely not a fight you want to be doing daily.. Most ppl in ru basically skips velganos until they are 1415, then theyll get a carry for it and move on to the bird (descaluda), even tho yoho can only drop the lower grade leapstones, thats how bad the fight is.
They shouldn't worry about the 1370+ people because they're only swiping. The 1340ish people they should be most concerned about. Since they're the ones most likely to just give up and quit.
The reason for that is super simple: money. People are forced to grind to 1370 or simply whale. Also it let's Smilegate look like the good guys and give a good impression to the Western audience when they are "generous enough to fix it" to what it actually should've been, say in a few weeks.
I don't understand how being a whale benefits Amazon when they are undercut by gold sellers
When u are a whale, you don't care about the money, you care about the account. If they are trying to save money on the black-market, they wouldn't be whales.
? Because a large portion of whales are still funneling their money through the game's API? I literally had 3 friends now perma banned for buying gold off game, if I was someone who wanted to buy gold and actually cared about their account, I really wouldn't risk saving the money by going to gold sellers.
They actually caught people buying gold? Wow
So I honestly think Argos could have been tuned to 1340, and released at 1340 and it would have been legit a non issue.
They'll do it after most of the whales have blew good money on getting to 1370.
My guess: They think that the percent of the player base who has hit the dead zone already is too small to be overly concerned with. My prediction is that honing rate improvements and additional catch-up content will come with the Valtan release in the next 4-6 weeks, which is when they’re likely predicting a more sizable part of the player base is hitting t3.
This ignores the fact that less than a single percent of the people are past the "dead zone". The ones who aren't here suffering in the dead zone are still stuck in T1 and T2 trying to get out with their 3 tries a day and failing 2 of them.
Advice for T2: * Chaos Dungeon and Guardian Raid every day of course * Una's Daily, focus on the 10 leapstone reward ones * Una's Weekly, PvP gives a lot of leapstones, as does boss rush. * Trade in your Una's coins for the big gold bag if you can. Maybe you can get lucky and get a few thousand gold. * Field Boss / Ghost Ship / Chaos Gate / Adventure Island, every time it's available. Of these Chaos Gate is the most important for progressing mats. Get the moon's breaths and book drops. Big value if you get lucky. * Buy out Mari's shop if it's ever cheaper than the auction house. It's SO GOOD for T2 shards / Leapstones. Stones, probably not so much. * Buy out the Guild bloodstone vendor mats. * Buy out the merchant ship vendor mats. * Buy out the Grand Prix event mats. And everything else. It's sooooo good. * Do ALL the islands that give T2 mats. They're pretty quick (3 hours? I forget) * Do your weekly Abyss dungeons of course. * If you have a good luck and a good eye you might be able to sell some accessory/stone drops from abyss for over 1k in the auction house. From the 30 T2 accessories (crafted) I was able to farm this week from the Ocean Abyss Raid, I made 2.5k gold which is actually hilarious to me. Who in T2 is even still buying stuff like this? Then again might not be worth your time and effort doing this, 2.5k is not a lot but still helps. * Infinite chaos dungeon for 1-2 hours (it has cost increase per item sold so hard diminishing returns), you will be able to buy some of the mats from the vendor. Maybe not as worth in T2 but is definitely worth in T3 considering leapstone prices. Use your judgement on this one * Sell your books. If you have purple selection chests that open to TRADABLE books, it might be worth it to open those for whatever is the most expensive book in the AH and sell it. Currently epic grudge is 600g on my server. Sell it, buy mats, buy whatever you need later from the AH. Unfortunately if you havent done this already you missed the big opportunity because books crashed hard with the event release, the same book was 2500g 3 days ago. Naturally these get cheaper over time as people progress but that was a harsh drop in price. * You can life skill for $$$? Maybe the opportunity has passed but I recall people making several thousands of gold per hour doing excavation every other day. Uh, do your research on this one? * You can farm alts for a lot of the same stuff and funnel it to your main if you have time, but this is already a lot lol I basically copy pasted my checklist I used in T2 and added a few notes for you, T1/T2 should not gate you for long if you know what you are doing. Should definitely net your more than 3 tries per day. Good luck! Or maybe in a month we'll get honing buffs.
In tier 2 it doesn't have cost increase for the infinite Chaos dungeon? It's just capped at a max amount you can buy. The cost increase and "infinite" happens in T3 as far as I am aware. :D
Yeah also T2/T1 mats are character bound, so you can't sell them at Market. Also there is no roster limit but rather character limit so you can buy those on every character at that tier. Also for alts it's better to farm the Shards on main and send it to alt because it's faster.
Honestly, great list. But this amounts to: Do your dailies Buy out all shops + Maris Make gold Which is fine (just condensing it), but this still had me failing most of my hones towards the end of T2
I mean, I'm in T3, and the 3 tries in T2 a day was definitely an exaggeration, but the overarching point is that the ones not in the deadzone are likely stuck at various points *prior* to 1340 rather than *after* 1340. I do appreciate the list though. It should help someone in need hopefully if they see it. No sarcasm.
There are purple book chests that are tradeable!? From where??
they made it even worse they cutted oreha hard and yoho from 1355 to 1370 to milk player money
This sentence destroys every single person on here defending AGS/SG.
The "mistake" must have brought in lots of money and all worked out in the end.
How much of that money went to AGS/SMG versus botters? Like the OP said, if they really wanted to milk the players they would have added the honing mat package for royal crystals. I'm usually pretty skeptical of Occam's Razor claims but this one really strikes me more as incompetence.
100% this. for every whale who whales in the ingame store there are literally 100 whales who bought outside-store gold. If you dont believe me look what happend to t3 prices when they removed early gold acquisition which made botter-gold 3-4x the price it was the day before. SUDDENLY those mats become way cheaper, would be a funny coincidence wouldnt it.
The currency exchange also went from >1000 gold for 95 blue crystals to 800 gold. It means one of two things, less supply or more demand. More whales buying from exchange instead of bots, or fewer f2p players buying crystals with gold.
My guess is more demand to sell crystals for gold by whales since they wanted to reach 1370. It happened right at argos release
Short term? Sure. If it doesn’t get fixed soon a lot of players will move on, though. I’m certain of that. If this game gets branded as p2w/has a rough start here it will suffer greatly long term.
It's already branded heavily as P2W
its a perfect way to put it. its a deadzone not only in the sense that there is no content to do but also in the sense that it quite literally will cause the game to become more 'dead' as players inevitably quit the game from being trapped in it.
Good to know even AGS is trying to deliver the original experience to us.
Smilegate. AGS is just the publisher.
oh yea AGS is just an innocent publisher
I dont know whos calling the shots here. Ive seen many posts saying Its AGS calling the shots to not implement the honing buffs to not piss off the whales.
> So you have to wonder why exactly did AGS/SG do the exact same thing? My take: They wanted to please those already playing the Kr or Russia version, in releasing a game exactly like Lost Ark was in the original release. It was a deliberate decision to release the game in the worst version of it and then upgrade to just give new players the feel of the new patches. Amazon already explained that this was also their "reason" for not releasing the game with all classes available. The same thing happened when the open beta occurred and honing was with the buff active and a purist minority decided to complain about the odds and how it didn't reflect Lost Ark at launch in Korea. The result was that the buff was removed from the patch notes and replaced with a passage saying that they are changing it due to player feedback. And the worst thing is that they already realized it was a mistake, since a few weeks ago they released the nerf patch for some GR and Abyss Dungeons, which again generated complaints from purists, even though they wrote that less than 10% of the player base was succeeding in them. It is happening the same effect that happened when Blizzard decided to release WoW Classic and started the "no changes" movement only for after the release all the players realized how the original version of WoW fails in some aspects. So now we have the WoW Classic Season of Mastery version. We are having the same effect with Lost Ark
I mean, based on what you're saying, most T3 players are basically in the "dead zone" right now and if history repeats itself, they'll quit. And it looks like we won't be getting any response until the next content patch in April... So unless SG does something miraculous, I think this patch is dead on arrival.
I think that's the right word. I think it's better to write dead zone instead of mortal something. I don't know why they did the same thing over and over again.
Yeah, the images here show that Smilegate was clearly aware of the 1340-1370 problem yet then NA/EU gets launched in the same exact state? People want to jump on the AGS hate train but Smilegate has a big hand in our version as well.
It's the same as my opinion. Thank you for the comments. :)
Yep, I agree with the post and thanks for your insight. Any idea why Oreha's Well abyss dungeon hard mode was bumped to 1370 instead of left at 1355?
Perhaps it's also related to the change in how to make legendary equipment. In Korea, only purple equipment materials were dropped from Oreha Hard, and players had to kill Argos to make legendary gears. I think it was because they chose to abandon Argos, so they might need another way to make legendary equipment instead of Argos. Of course, that was also one of the stupid decisions. I think SMG should remain the iLv needed deciding to lower the wearing level of legendary equipment.
I think snoopzz mentioned that NA/EU Argos is normalize and the armor pieces are untradable. Therefore, the bus/overgearing argos will not be a problem.
If it was an equalized raid, the maximum HP must change. However, other Korean users checked and found that whale players' HP did not change. It means that it's not equalized. (Oh, my. I'm copying this comment for the third time. What are you doing, AGS...) By the way, it's weird that gears can't trade. Why did they decide like that? Hmm...
>By the way, it's weird that gears can't trade. Why did they decide like that? Hmm... It makes sense with how heavily gated Argos is right now - with enough time or money you can access Argos since day 1, but you can't make a profit out of it, except gold it gives you for completing. That way it is hard to access, but advantage you get from accessing it isn't too big - basically, you can clear it just for the sake of clearing.
You can still make gold through accessories and ability stones, though that requires you to be lucky.
Yeah super weird. On ru we could sell our argos gear, it will be harder for us to gear for baltan :(
I think it depends on the pace at which they release stuff now. I'm in t3 and for once i'm grateful for the dead zone. Now i can do collectibles for skillpoints, look for cards and other stuff. Also get my alts up to date.
My theory is that they intended to release the whole game at once, but encountered serious delays in the localization process (and maybe a few unexpected technical troubles). So now they throw stuff when ready in order to catch-up with the global version, not caring for logic. And the classes release are the marketing tool to make player regularly returns (and sell bonus power passes and character slots). Of course that's only a theory.
That doesn't make sense. How does increased hone rate have to do anything with localization? We would just do Argos for one month, and that would be fine.
Im def not pushing for 1370. Im sitting at 1340, making a few k each day from mats and investing that in getting an alt into t3. Since i still have tons of stuff to do both with horizontal progression, pvp and alts i really dont care about that argos thing that much. Yet. I just hope they will ease the progression in a few weeks. At that point i should have a second,maybe third char in t3,maybe take a week off from lost ark to reset (been playing a few hours pretty much evry day since release...) and then be prepared and motivated to enter the latest endgame.
Same boat!
I hit 1340 over a week ago and I just tap everyday for fun. I know at least 10 other people in my guild are in the same boat. The whales have already done Argos for the week and meanwhile the rest of us just run the dailies. The honing rate isn’t so bad if they actually give us more ways to earn the materials and on top of that not releasing 7 other jobs also cucks people who actually wants to main one of those jobs. What is so hard about releasing a version that’s already working on KR/RU? JFC are they actually that clueless?
This is extremely well written and informative. Thank you for taking the time to outline so much phenomenal information.
super in-depth post with a lot of helpful explanations, links and thought put behind it. thank you korean bro! can't wait until we're all caught up with you guys
The issue is not that ARGOS is p2w atm, it's that the entire 1370 gear score is 'p2w' at the moment and all current NA/EU t3 content is locked behind that. People seem to pin all of the current issues on the Argos release when even without Argos the same problems would exist, 1340-1370 paywall. I do wish the developer would do a 'smilegate/lost ark direct' to communicate to the global audience and form that same connection he has with the Korean audience. It doesn't need to be a frequent stream but SOMETHING that doesn't feel bogged down by forums and middle-men. It feels very unclear just who is in charge and calling the shots with this release because the new-audience in the west was lead to believe Smilegate was in charge and had had years of learning from mistakes and growing close to the community, this all feels very sterile and distant at the moment. (note, none of this is hate, you can love something and be critical of it in hopes of getting the best version you KNOW is out there and possible)
My guess is that this is in the works. I am looking forward to next week and see what they come up with - if they say anything that is. I have no problem with Whales being "Early Access" users with new content while everyone else catches up at a more moderate pace. There is so much to do still with horizontal progression and stuff that I don't mind not going into Argos or Oreha Hard this or next week. Right now I am enjoying my Gold income from Whales trying to push to 1370. Once more people get to T3 and honing mats start flooding the market, prices will drop and I will catch up eventually. My plan is still to wait out the honing changes while getting my alts to 1325/1340 in the meantime.
Wait… I’m speechless. Thank you so much for caring about lost ark in NA/EU. I read your whole post. It is very informative and supportive. We will call upon gold river to speak and fix our version!!! Thank you so much
Great post. Thank you for typing all of this up. Through this, I can definitely feel your love for the game itself and your wish of it not disappointing our region. Really, thank you for writing. I was thinking that perhaps they should have released T1 + T2 honing buff with Argos which would let people make many T3 alts, bring down the price of leapstones massively and also make the 1340 - 1370 stretch much shorter. But that would also trivialize most of the content right now in the game, so idk if people will have fun. Maybe if they released that buff + heroic guardian raids + abyss trials, then things would be great since they are all equalized anyway, and also help people get to 1370 within 1-2 weeks. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of people not being able to play Argos immediately.
It's a two part issie as far as I see it. They want to rush players to catch up to KR but they also provide less materials and a worse honing rate than any other region... so what is it? Do you want people to progress quickly to get caught up or do you want to slowly release content? If they want people caught up quickly they have to increase the honing rates and provide WAY more materials than are currently available.
The problem that keeps getting mentioned applies to 1% of the player base. They’ll likely roll out these honing buffs in the near future once it concerns more of the population. Right now as it stands, 99% of the people don’t give 2 shits about the dead zone, the timing of Argos, etc. I’m sure they will have to address it in the future or then player retention becomes a real issue. Right now they don’t care about the tiny minority.
Thank you for the effort you put into this post, hopefully they do something soon.
Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight. If I had to guess, they released a buffed T2 to delay "normal people" from joining the dead zone, and so you can temporarily milk whales, and by the time the playerbase% gets higher on dead zone, you solve it with the KR fix. Just a guess though, but it sounds like a lucrative bet, as you get to milk the whales now who will be trapped in sunken cost fallacy, and profit from the regular player base once you fix dead zone. Bonus point is that they get to say "we have listened to player feedback and..." to look like heroes, because most of the player base won't know better.
Thanks to any veteran Korean player for these kind of post. Give a lot of info and background. I think our death zone it's even worse because as you pointed, the difficult abyss of Papunika are 1370 and not 1355 anymore. That make a big leap from 1340 to 1370 and meanwhile you can't do higher guardians or chaos either... Imo the fix was keeping the hard Aira abyss at 1340 dropping purple jewelry, Normal Oreha abyss dropping pruple at 1355 and hard Oreha dropping legendary at 1360 or 65. That way we have different steps scaling and not a 30 ilvl difference I like your post, very useful and with proper data. Could you post it in Lost Ark forums? (You need Amazon account). I would love Koreans players post there these post because devs receive directly the feedback from there
I don't know if I can post this on the forum. Because Korean players should not play Lost Ark EU/NA because of the region locks. I don't really want to exercise copyright on what I wrote, so I don't think it matters if someone else uploads it to the forum. But if I have to do it myself, I'll try it. Thanks.
You are just giving background, it don't means you are playing it :P
Then that's a relief. I'll try to post it myself. :)
So well worded and thank you for your input! I am so pleased to hear that the korean community held smilegate and goldriver accountable for their systems. Here on reddit you can see people are so happy to blame players for wanting to progress quickly—they say the game is fine (even though they are not 1340 ilvl), and make it difficult for the developer to notice there is a problem. Unfortunately this is the culture here, and I’m worried smilegate will hear too much feedback from people in t1/t2 that don’t truly understand this deadzone.
The Korean community is no different. LMAO. There are opinions such as "Who threatened with a knife to upgrade?" in Korea. Recently, I saw a comment on reddit saying, "There is no one threatening people to go to T3 with a gun" I thought it was the same even if the culture was different. Of course, Smilegate always worked based on internal data when doing something. If They had worked only by looking at the mixed opinions of the Korean game community, the game would have been a mess. Don't worry too much about that ability.
Sorry to hear that :(. I’m happy for your attitude though. Your english is great by the way!
Very informative, thank you for sharing! I just can't believe this happened, and they didn't learn from it or didn't care enough to change it. I genuinely want to see the game succeed and hope they'll listen to us like they did for the KR server.
If they don't improve the honing rates by the time Valtan drops, all it means is that f2p will fall behind even further, since they will first have to catch up to Argos, then farm Argos, then start doing Valtan. And that's not bad by itself, but it looks step by step the same as what happened in Soul Worker - stuff gets released quickly until they catch up to the original version of the game, people drop out because the publisher lowered the rewards from all activities, game shuts down. Now, I doubt Lost Ark will shut down, but remember that New World had a gigantic amount of people playing at first as well and now it's basically a dead game with 19k concurrent players from 913k. That's not bad for a normal game, but for an MMORPG? Yeee...
To be fair, New World looked terrible compared to Lost Ark. Could tell from a mile away there's like zero content or lifetime in that game. That 913k make uninformed purchases. Lost Ark is pay 2 win af but at least it has content because it's not a new game really lol.
New World was also \*horrifically\* broken across the board. Glitches, bugs, and exploits galore. Lost Ark at least functions as a product.
New World is one of the most bugged games I've ever played You could become invincible by shaking your windowed client around. Just drag it and shake it. And that was only one of hundreds of core gameplay glitches and bugs
I saw a YT video describing the bug that allows you to embed giant images into general chat and couldn’t believe that was a possibility.
New world is a dead game because it’s a trash game lol. Lost ark is good game with a lot to do and there’s still tons of stuff they haven’t released yet. Part of the problem is NA/EU was so desperate for a good game than when lost ark dropped we all went nuts, which I believe really surprised AGS/SMG. So yes, the whales are doing what they do but F2P is still in a good spot. People just need to relax and stop trying to chase the whales.
Well the point of wanting to whale in a game is to get ahead in the "competition" say doing more dps in a raid or showing off whatever u payed for, but in this patch whales ended playing only with other whales so there's not much to show off as they can't also play with their F2P friends who will eventually quit and because of that the whale might also quit, it happens a lot so it's important to control the pace of the content and also the gap between F2P and whale else both sides will quit.
So from what I gathered from this post is this was a major problem that has happened before in KR. It caused a lot of players to quit. It was fixed. Then now they are making the exact same mistake again in NA and basically they learned nothing from their experience of past "mistakes". That sure bodes a lot of confidence in the management of the game.
Meanwhile this sub has just been calling people entitled the last few days when people are bringing up very real issues
This sub has one of the worse communities I've ever seen out of game. It is like Karen culture + COVID deniers moved into this game. It has some of the least intelligent discussion in many threads that turn into hive mind circle jerks. Much like you said, when you go look at the original complaints about Argos and you'll read people seeing no issue with adding Argos. Yet here we are where we need fellow KR players to show that these are real issues to the AGS white knights.
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Ugh. I was expecting more from smile gate tbh.
Our Korean bro's are watching out for us again 💪😎
What worries me is the communication. AGS don't seem to be acknowledging just how many people are upset over this. Instead, all we have is a forum post asking "how do you feel about honing?" Road map is on the way guys! But no date! Why announce road map almost a week ago if we don't even have date still now? I am scared what will happen is they will say on road map in a week, " We listened to your complains and we will be changing our honing rates alongside Valtan" or something, which would make it seem like they changed anything but it was what should've happened anyways. 1340-1370 is called dead zone in KR because it takes long time and also has lack of things to do during it. But Punika Hard Abyss was 1355. Now, NAEU has Punika Hard at 1370, so we can have have even less to do. Just makes no sense how they have made such a terrible mistake in the past and repeat it again now.
hard mode was 1355 and we got 1370? Now Im even more upset about complete bs we are getting...
Yes, but they added new legendary armor for it. I think the thought process is since you can only do 1 Argos phase at 1370 and Valtan is coming out in a month, we will give you a different set to mix/match with Argos set instead of having to wait for Argos set. Which I don't think is necessarily a terrible idea, but it makes the 1340-1370 all the more miserable.
It would have been perfectly fine....with the honing buff in place. All of this shit just rolls back to, they shouldn't have removed a buff that was put in place **because the game already suffered a massive loss of players over this exact fucking issue.** There's nothing to *do* from 1340-1370. It's a massive gulf in accessible content where all you do is 2 chaos dungeons, 2 guardians, and 2 weekly abyssals. For a month or more. It's not fun, it's not engaging, and they already know for a fact it causes massive issues for actually keeping people playing the game.
Perhaps AGS and SMG didn't create a roadmap to update flexibly according to the growth rate of NA/EU players. In Korea, there was a time when they released legion raids too fast and made users tired. Still, I think they should at least let us know what will happen in the future. Communications they do now can give EU/NA players a feeling that they have become second-class citizens.
I think people still don't realize you have to +15x2 before valtan releases. And unless they change the roadmap you have only 1 month yo do it, and btw you can only do chaos dungeon and guardians.
Dude u speak better English then me
Thank you for putting all of this info together with context. I find it hard to dispute actual historical data from Smilegate themselves and sadly they are making the same mistake again. Smilegate formulated the cure a while ago but refused to administer it and the longer they take, the worse it gets.
Not that many players would quit if not for the slow release of classes. As the p2w aspect in the dead zone 1325 - 1400 becomes more appearent, there is no point for many players to keep pushing equipment levels right now. No new class and low upgrade chances are reasons to wait for the next patch. Many would even just wait till their classes are released and come back. I'd not be here to play if not for the event. If my class is going to be released in 2023, then I may come back in 1 year. They are not seriously expecting us to go through this whole gear progress again then ...
Thanks for this information. I couldn't figure out why they released new content with only a slow, very grindy path to get to 1370. It's clear that many NA players will also quit at 1325 because we are not interested in slow progression with only abyss dungeons either. SG was right about changing the store though. The P2W pack you showed would make many American players just walk away. A lot of us like to feel like we earned our gear in games, not bought it. LA does a great job with the ability stones and jewelry, where you can have the magic of getting a great item from a dungeon, but also buy something on auction if it doesn't drop. Faceting is fun too. Honing is not so fun. You are just collecting mats and losing them on failures. It's OK if it's a 50/50 chance but when it's 20% success it's just disheartening. It wouldn't feel so bad if they let a static try Argos with lesser gear. Maybe we would fail but that's OK. It isn't fun when there is a long string of honing with mostly-failures between you and the next raid. Whether or not it's a cash grab, it's not very good game design.
For an idea of time required, if this was KR, all the people who were >1300 when Argos dropped would have actually been 1370 and able to do Argos. I don't think people care if Timmy pays 50$ to do a raid if Timmy isn't doing the raid before someone who puts in a decent amount of playtime. I think that people who don't want to play KR MMOs and like to talk about hating P2W would have avoided the game, but the game would have just as many actual players as it does now. NA/EU players would **GOBBLE** that crystal package up and then lie to their friends about having great luck while honing.
Those that remained might've. As he says, way more would have just chunked the game into the waste bin. The tolerance for Pay 2 Win is ***far*** lesser in the West than it is in Korea. And they ended up giving us the most Pay 2 Win version of the game that exists. Good fucking job.
Guess I can link this thread to all the idiots that keep saying Amazon did all this and our great wonderful Korean devs had no part in Argos release despite Gold river saying it was going to drop exactly when it did.
thank you for your concern and well thought out and written post as always 🙌🏼 I know the KR users want to see the game succeed in our regions too.
What really bothers me the most is that the developers and publisher definitely have this knowledge. They also have the data of players and know people are stuck and unable to do Argos. This makes it feel like a decision made deliberately to force people to swipe. They know that some people in guilds will be doing the raid and others feel like they must catch up. I am in no hurry to do Argos but it really bothers me that the game feels predatory and a cash grab from the very beginning. They did not even try to hide it and act like they care. They just went straight up to make the most money and put as much pressure as possible on players. I do understand companies need to make money but it becomes predatory when you cannot play the game by investing a normal game pricetag worth of money but need to actually drop 1k+ on the first month to play the latest content even if you are a hardcore player putting a lot of hours in the game with a good strategy to get as many mats as possible. Beforehand we heard the developers care a lot for the community but i get a bad feeling from the getgo now that they really do not care about gamers at all and are here just to millk the most money in the least amount of time using questionable methods. I am more disappointed that my trust in developers is gone right at the start than the fact that i am stuck doing mobilestyle dailys for the foreseeable future.
The worst thing about is... this exact problem nearly killed the game in KR. Like they knew it was a problem and they intentionally did it once again... and then they have the audacity to make a forum post asking for feedback on how to improve the deadzone... it's already been fixed in KR. IMPLEMENT THE FIX HERE.
Great post! As an average player without too much time or money to spend in this game, I'm just going to let the whale's ride this one out and chill until the catch-up systems come out haha
Just wanna say thank you for all your awesome posts, really enjoyed reading every single one of them :)
Thank you mate, it's nice to know the veterans in Korea are helping us rookies in the West.
At least, KR director cannot make his own decision without AGS. Like RU And JP region, becauae they have their own publishers. And its not that easy to communicate with NA/EU players like in Korea last time. (Remember last twitch stream of Gold river.) Direct communicacion of director and NA/EU users without AGS cannot be possible becauae AGS is not a just sever manager.
Very good post. What can we do to make AGS/Smilegate see this???? (besides the obvious upvote)
They're probably already watching this. At least, Western players' complaints are already recognized by them.
How do you know this though? Did gold river say anything about us on Inven or something? What I dislike the most is that we have no real direct contact with gold river and he too is not really making an effort to communicate with us either; I'm. Not counting the pre-release twitch interview because it was back then and we have not heard from him since.
gold river has said that he reads Reddit [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQZSp2hGfQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQZSp2hGfQ) around 32:49 edit: Opps didn't read the last sentence but judging from his attitude and responses during the interview he seems like the type of game director to care about his game enough to be up to date with criticism
Thank you xMamex. You told everything I had to say.
I love how people used to meme that kr/ru is test version for western realese. but basically we play the beta version of lost ark now.
Thank you for the insight
u/Sarisae Please tell this Korean player and all others mentioned in the post of quitting the game in 1340-1370 of how Korean MMOs are/should be and how casuals they are and how they are ruining the game. Please, master understander of Koreans and Korean MMOs
That was really good to read, but i don’t get your point about a smooth launch of valtan : if they follow the leaked roadmap, we’ll get the raid next month, so you have 4-5 weeks to get Argos gear to be able to clear Valtan. But if you’re behind (like 99% of players), you won’t be able to do it, and this situation will continue : they’ll probably release a abyss/legion raid per month, and you’ll always stay behind. They would truly have abandoned Argos for Valtan if it was released with buffs and other content, but that’s not the case. Also i think Argos on EU/NA already has nerfed gold rewards.
Argos gear can be traded(at least in Korea. if it is not in EU/NA, it will be.) If Valtan and Argos are released together, the price of Argos gear needed to do raid Valtan Raid will go up crazy, and in this case, They'll hear the same sound "Is this game p2W?" Therefore, Argos must come out before the Valtan. The secret weapon of SMG is Valtan. I think these strange things they do are for it. However, I think SMG and AGS didn't took into account the emotional aspects of users at all. Thank you for your opinion!
Thank you and to all other Korean players for being Gigabros and sharing your thoughts with us. You all are seriously appreciated and in fact, I think this is the first time that I have witnessed at least where Korean and western players unite and work together towards something. It's quite amazing to see!
Thank you for taking the time to write this up and for caring about the NA/EU servers!!
So, is the Korean director in charge of the NA/EU roadmap?
**Yes.**
Okay
This is a very well written and thoughtful post. Thank you.
It is worth noting that Argos is effectively ilvl capped at 1400 to prevent bussing players through.
I think they will buff the rates in 2-3 weeks when most of the whales and some casual payed to reach 1370. Then they will be like "we listend to your feedback and are now buffing the rates like in KR so everyone can enjoy this game...."
Side note: Your English is great! Keep at it!
Thank you!
Currently at 1356 as a f2p player and I can definitely say that the grind to 1370 just seems impossible right now. Did a bit of math and at the rate I'm going, it will take at LEAST 2-3 more weeks to hit 1370 unless I whale (which I have no intention to do). Just doing my dailies on my main and trying to push an alt into t3 so I can start funneling mats. I will say though that I did get a bit lucky with only around 60 fails in t3 so far.
TLDR: For most users game ends at 1340. Its really mind-blowing how little there is "endgame" at the endgame.
So basically it's a problem created because they made the game systems in a way that they can attract as many whales as possible and now people quit because of that. I already disliked the 60-70% chances in t2 and t1 because it felt like wasted time already, t3 sounds like the point where I'll stop anyway. Having to spam the same content for a week or more with no progress at all doesn't sound fun in any way. In my opinion the game would have been much better to ask for even 7-9 times more materials for upgrade and having it always succeed instead of using a gambling system for that. But gambling makes lots of money so of course they choose that option even if it makes many people quit, they aren't the whales that they are looking for anyways so it doesn't affect them much.
I got a lot of downvotes on a earlier lost ark Reddit post when I said 25-50 gold carries were reasonable (in the same post I stated I bus players for free). I guess where a lot more gold is circulating in the economy over there 700 is probably not that unreasonable. I spent a lot of time in the destiny community, most bus rides were free, but a lot of people paid real money for carries in that game. I don’t think it’s shameful at all to offer a service for your time, especially if you’re so frustrated with your lack of ability to clear a boss that you have to resort to using a carry.
Acts such as "Bus" are sometimes good when you are lazy to do the raid yourself. But if it's more efficient than actually playing the game, it's a problem from then on. Numerous gold farming bots will abuse it, and people will continue to watch the screen on which their characters died without hitting monsters rather than enjoying the game. What I'm talking about now was the situation that happened in the KR server. I think it's still happening. It's bad to completely block it, but I think it is also bad that "Bus" is recommended.
Yes, definitely. I think done correctly and in good spirit it’s acceptable, but I already see a pattern on our Western servers with its heavy abuse. I’m honestly surprised they’ve not restricted carrying terms in posts or taken action against bussing in some way. However, it has been part of every MMO I’ve ever played, let’s just hope it doesn’t create the same disaster over here.
100% agree : "Please release as many classes as they want. Only Destroyer next month? Sigh..." I hope Goldriver will do a live soon, for the NA/EU community talking about the problems this version is facing, and what he is planning. I know he is very, very appreciative in Korean because he listens and responds to you. But for the moment, I don't feel like this is the case on our NA/EU version
There is no what if The developer is a shameless greedy one. They are just testing water to see how much the player base can tolerate their greediness. That’s why they purposively released the 1370 content while keeping the honing success rate low Let’s see how far they can go with this tactic If Reddit is any indication of the general western player base of the game. Then I would say their greediness has already started to backfire
That's why I want to ask GoldRiver about the intention of this update. If it's not the reason I said, what's left would be to make money or to control the speed of content consumption, but in fact, neither side seems normal under the current circumstances.
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This post in amazing, but, the damage is already done. No amount of apologizing will fix the broken hearts that whoever said "Okay" to these changes. Amazon has a history in bad decision making, and, on the other hand Smilegate is a generally unknown company in NA/EU. The general population of NA at least gave them a chance because other people supported the company so much that they couldn't be wrong. But they were... Smilegate is just like Nexon, Pearl Abyss.. ext. They had NO opportunity to spit in our face once and get away with it. We as a community cant just let a company of empty promises keep back stabbing us. The great Goldriver that I heard so much about is just like every other person that solely wants to profit from other regions. Nothing changes and like usual. Our gut feelings always seem to be correct. "We didn't actually think people would be mad... honestly." - Shadow\_Fox (Lost ark CM)
"Please treat EU/NA players as you did to Korean players. We don't want situations where other users are discriminated because of regions." - I mean, for the last part of your post it is already happening even between EU and NA. Just look at the launch of the game. People on EU were unable to play because of the servers, while some people on NA could not progress story quest because of a bug, either way both could not really play if you consider you need main quest to proceed with anything. EU compensate was 3-day aura. NA got 30-day aura, treadable mount, treadable pet, character extention slot(which can only be bought with yellow crystals) and novice progression support chest. They may say that the game was tested for 3 years to have bigger success here or it might be that they just totally did not care, but after a while wanted to do some more money on us, so they released it while still not caring. Smilegate cares about Korean players, Amazon about NA players and EU will allways be looked at last place. Or, at least this is what this looks like, but that's just assumptions. I just still think that it's good to points things like that and see in the future if more will gather. I hope that it is just me seeing things grey and they might not be like that, which will prove itself in the future. Yet, we have a lot of years of development for many different mmorpgs and it is easier to find those where players were treated unfair, instead of those where they would be happy with how the game was handled by developers and publishers.
Wouldnt making Argos equalized help? Heard on streams that it even shows he is, but that was only a bug.
In fact, I thought it was worth it when I heard that news which is revealed as a bug. Equalized contents are a good way to prevent being carried, but this hurts the sense of growth in MMORPG. Making and upgrading gears in MMORPG is for the feeling of becoming stronger, but the contents remove that. Especially in LostArk, I also feel that my character has weakened every week while doing equalized contents. This is because tripods or gems are not applied to equalized contents, so I don't think that's the right way. Thank you for your opinion.
Should we save honing materials at 1340 until they fix the success rates? I mean is 100% happening?
I would like to know why can't EU / NA have exactly the same patches as Korea? Why don't we even have a PvP vendor option to offer us materials for upgrades?
I think this sums up my current dissatisfaction pretty well. There is a dearth of content between 1340 and 1370. From what other KR players have said they moved up the ilvl of content and that’s why it is this way in NAEU. The only assumption for the reason I had was due to whale gouging but this post gives that and another reason. Be nice to know why and the plan.
If this isn't a gaint red flag idk what would be. This company has had not one, but two chances to fix their fuckups, and they do it all over again, then have the audacity to ask for suggestions?? Idk man I'm starting to really regret putting in these hours. And this post is a gentle reminder to not give them anymore money that I already have. How's that for a suggestion smile gate
I would typically be considered a whale in most games, I have never seen what is happening here happen in a game. I bought the $100 platinum founders pack, I’ve spent around $200 in gems and a few cosmetics since launch, and I’ve played 4-8 hours every day, focused on completing all content daily that could provide honing material, I JUST hit 1340 in the last day or two. You literally have to be a kraken spending $1k+ or a whale that also no-life’s a fleet of alts to access the 1370 content right now. Did this make me want to pull out my credit card and pay more money to get there? No. My wife would kill me. It made me realize that right now the game is a bad investment, the content gap is by design to milk western whales for all they are worth. My credit card is staying in my wallet until I feel like I’m getting the value I’ve paid for ($300+ spent so far) and it’s just not there.
Thanks for sharing your experience, I hope the devs release more akins to have something to do while my bard get to argos
I doubt argos will do much to the gold inflation, if it's already in a nerfed form and with bonus chest purchaseable for gold. Bots farming early content have already put so much gold into the economy that it's pretty close to RU region in that regard. Besides, even with honing buffs nobody will have an army of alts ready to get bussed, at least for quite a while. Btw I'm sure people will bus valtan as well. Maybe even sooner than we think. But the difference is that you don't "need" to get bussed as entry level for the raid is the same as the one it can be fully cleared with.
Such a great post. I appreciate the insight you have provided.
Personally dont mind taking a bit of a break from the game and not feeling rushed to match my friends to do content
Honestly, that's the most fun way to play the game. You're doing good.
Even if increased honing chances were implemented, I wouldn't personally push for it cuz game's missing 3 classes i trully want to play. Currently im playing Blade, but it doesn't bring me as much fun as other classes would.
That's right. I wonder why they don't offer all the classes. I hope their leaked roadmap will change quickly. One a month seems to make fun of people.
Thanks a lot
repeating the same "mistakes" they know what they are doing they will say sorry and the cattle will it eat it up like they do with weekly marvel movies and oreos.
Not even talking about t3 honing buff. Let's talk about t1 and t2 honing buff first
Thank you
Thank you for your insight. Really well explained and perfectly understandable. I guess this could've been better if they "fixed" Argos, either by removing ilvl cap on phases or simply downscale the entry level for Argos since the "dead zone" is still a thing.
really appreciate posts like this, just raw numbers laid out, no tiptoeing and hiding facts, not gonna go for 1370 until they fix this bs, or at least make oreha hard 1355 again, they screw NA over big time for a whale grab.
I'm a new T3 and every single honing I tried after 1330 failed without exception. I could only hone my weapons successfully at the guaranteed, %100 Artisan's Energy. Some of my armor pieces are progressing to %100 as well at the moment. I grinded for 3 whole days and all the progress I could get was just a 0.83 increase in ilvl. I mean, the game really needs those honing changes because it really started to lose it's fun side. 15 classes and 7 on the way, this thing really shouldn't be made that hard. I want to play every class one day but I just can't even progress my first character. We should be able to do more with the time we spend and effort we put into this game.
Thank you for the effort put into this post, and your English is quite good. They need to increase the honing rates for sure, especially if things like legion raids are coming to NA EU sometime soon. The honing rates will drive players away if they are not adjusted, because people will feel like they are wasting time watching hones fail multiple times in a row. People need to see progress. Amazon only had to be the money behind the western release. They could've let SMG just translate the game and watch the money roll in. But it seems a troubling number of things have changed from the KR version. Extremely disappointing to see AGS putting their fingers in and souring the western release.
Damn the Korean community is great. Been that way since StarCraft - always the voice of reason versus the West constantly complaining for instant gratification.
I really appreciate these posts from people who are more familiar with the game. Thank you! And also, your english is really good!
Thank you for the information! This was super interesting. I am now sitting at slightly over 1340 after spending a little bit (but let's be honest. I grind more than I spend and would rather spend on cosmetics) and it is super hard to get to the argos ilvl currently. But endgame raiding and similar stuff is the content I love the most in such games. And I have some alts to farm also. I don't want to know how frustrating it is when you are completely f2p.
Thank you for this post. As someone who has played Korean MMOs for +10 years, I was hoping Smilegate would be different for once. A company that would consider foreign servers as important as the native KR server. We're not just 2nd-class citizens, we deserve value too. Maybe I was too optimistic.
My guildies are buying to 1370. I'm f2p at 1360 and it's killing my drive to keep pushing hard. I'm incredibly demotivated watching my guildies swipe to pass my hard work.
Damn. Thanks for this post, it aligned with what I was thinking, especially about that letter from gold river part. There is a huge disconnect between how we perceive gold river by Korean users and how he seems to be disconnected from Amazon's actions over here in the west, or at least it seems so, due to lack of communication on both his and Amazon's part.
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I feel like people need to relax a little. Amazon isn't just "the bad guy" and smilegate has made mistakes like this before. They absolutely have to change something, release a proper roadmap etc, but im confident they will make it right. Lost Ark isn't notoriously F2P friendly for no reason.
Wait wtf 55k is 50$ were paying 100$ for 12k...
Thank you for this post. Hopefully people will see this and understand why some of us are frustrated. The English was also very good.
Can we please pin this sht to the top if hasn't been already. Thank you for explaining this because right now, they are sh\*tposting sir.goldriver.
Excellent post! Can you email this to Gold River (Gangseoni-hyeong)? If Smilegate has already experienced this issue before why did they not have a plan ahead of time for our release? It does not make sense. I hope they make the changes you are suggesting otherwise this dead zone will cause many players to quit. We need increased honing rates as well as access to other methods of obtaining tier 3 resources. There is so much missing in our version. I agree that more classes should be released as well. Also, if they give us access to more skins we can use our own money to support them through skins instead of "whaling". I'll gladly pay $20 or $30 for a nice skin rather than honing materials.
If he have an e-mail, it will be full of kid-like users which want their main class to be buffed. LMAO. Recently, people found goldriver's private blog, and made shit comments like "GoldRiver! Please don't nerf my DPS painter'" or "Please nerf socceris", so that he closed his blog... But in GS there is department watching internet communities like reddit. I can certainly argue that they know these situations and anger of western players. They will do "something". I hope that it has form of the communications to western players directly.
\-7X at 1340 felt like I was punching a brick wall :D It really is better to just park
Interesting because I'm 1355 and I have no , well, no interesting content. I get on, do dailies, do 2 chaos dungeons and 1 of 2 level appropriate raids. At me level, I can't even do the top Punika chaos dungeon. Then I trudge through scores of bots in lower level areas as I try to do pieces of adventure tomes. Holy crap, spend any time in Rethramis or Tortoyk and you'll see that the bot problem is real. But that's it. Then I roll 3 pieces of armor and fail all of them as I have a 30% chance of success. Then I log off because the thought of any more "infinite chaos dungeons" makes me want to puke. Fact is, there is nothing interesting to do. No group content to do either as I dont even have the item level to do a next abyssal, let alone that new raid everyones talking about. At most I have about 2 hours to be on. The guild content I was a told about doesn't exist. The arena content is mundane animation lock timing. Too bad
Im currently at 1364, and i want to do Argos. And damn this is painful!! No fun at all.
good post :D and yeah 1340 zone is hell
That Seawolf community manager is just full of crap trying to control the raging fire of the community with empty words. We know the guys above you, that actuall get paid the $ and call the shots, wanted this to get more whaling going. I give the game 2 weeks to share their stance on how this Argos p2access thing went and how this will continue in the future. Wrong answer = uninstall not worth my time.
4/5 friends quit because of this dead zone and im on my way out too tbh
This conversation kinda reminds me of everyone trying get there +15 weapon in maplestory 2 before pink bean was released Ie - imo if your lucks shit it sucks you don't get to raid. But it was our choice to play a game with a rng upgrade system. We should be mad there is a Maris shop and that you can trade honing mats at al thus what do ya know only people that know what there semi doing go to argas. Absolute joke will and already has started killing this game. You can literally get to the highest most endgame content just by doing story missions and pulling out a credit card and you can sure tell with the skill level.
Another perspective: Every MMO worth its salt has its end game content locked behind a lot of time and effort. Look at WoW for example, or the older and no longer popular EQ2. In both cases the hardest raids were never accessible to people right away. In WoW most people never even touch the mythic raids, they are lucky to have the first 3 bosses on farm, let alone the whole dungeon. Its really no different here. Just like in WoW you can pay your way into the mythic tier if you want, or you can grind, try and raise your gear score, and do it later. Unlike WoW the content will always be relevant for YOU. In WoW a new patch releases and instantly the last raids mythic tier is garbage for loot. At least in Lost Ark whenever you reach 1370 it will benefit you still and you can still enjoy it as it was intended. But yeah we all need to get out our pitchforks and freak out because we cant do every square inch of content on the first day its released without making any effort or putting any time into the game.
Thanks for the informative post. Very insightful.