Is Lost Ark Beyond Saving? 

It's hard to trust the long-term plans of someone who is going to be gone in a few months.

For context on it being a big deal to Koreans at around 2:15 , that idea stems from constant political tension. A year or two ago, Korea allowed the US to set up anti-missile radar systems (THAAD) after receiving threats from North Korea. China wasn't happy about it, claiming the radar system could be used to spy on China. China has been banning imports, the most recent of which has been the banning of Micron chips. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductors, so companies like Samsung and SK are feeling the heat. Korea's economy unfortunately depends on imports from China, so it's in a tricky spot. So yeah, lots of Koreans who are not happy with China right now.

Every time the "money men" take control over design decisions it's over for a game. Games are like pieces of art. They become famous and valuable due to the quality and passion of the artist, not because the artist focused primarily on making as much money as possible over all other considerations.

The game will never change its dailies, they’ll keep talking about how it’s a problem forever but they won’t fix it. The gearing system is designed to make you swipe your card. They make gearing a character so ass to do it the legit way that it’s just easier to save yourself all that time and drop hundreds of dollars so you can enjoy the fun parts of the game. If they want to bring people back they have to drop the fundamental design of gearing and alts from making people want to pay to win and they won’t

Many of us knew even before western launch that if they do not change the game it will flop in the west. Many in the community raged at us "You are just a hater" or "Game is extremely successful in east, no way it fails". We knew better.

This is like watching what happened to ffxiv 1.0 all over again. What koji said in the NoClip video. They where apologizing so much they weren’t talking about the game anymore. The were coming up with new ways to apologize.

Golden Shower should have seen this coming..

This when monetization is the top most priority on the foundation when building mmorpg

It's a shame because Lost Ark combat is really enjoyable. I'm glad I dropped this after 500 hours, it's genuinely an abusive relationship. You're never going to win against the monetisation end of things, but take out all the stupid time penalties in the dailies. Flares are a perfect example. Just drop the player in front of the guardian, that's what they're all there for.

They need to stop forcing doing the dailies x5 times. Playing alts ... Off Also they must reset I lvl

They have definitely lost the ark.

Should've named the video 'Is Lost Ark lost?'

You know the game never had any content when a main form of content was making another exact same character to feed your main character

Love the takes from a guy who hasn’t played the game in months but comes around to get views ❤

"People like that gold river guy right? Put him on put him on now"

So the "Lost Ark" was the game itself this whole time😮

The reason they need to take so much time is because they are trying to figure out ways to still milk as much money out of the remaining player base without driving the rest of them away. Also wanting to try and trick people into coming back. It's not rocket science to make the game more enjoyable.

Honestly Lost Ark would have been the mmo last year or this year. But unfortunately they decided to not study their game and not listen to the community. Sadly. And I hate how they still haven't catered to us from South East Asia, the market would've skyrocked. Even with D4 out I'm still impressed with Lost Ark's class mechanics and the pvp end game is so fun. Oh well, looking forward for Lost Ark private servers.

Gatekeeping is the one of the main reason why I've haven't gotten back to lost ark. Takes too long to get into a room if I'm at item level or with not full relic gear at that point I could play like 2 games of X game by the time I get into a room. Plus the only way to get into a room with no relic gear/ on item level is by buying a bus but like why tf do I have to spend my gold to get the gear when I can do the raid.

They can model after FF 14 daily roulette system that syncs higher level players with lower level players. This way it promotes a healthy mix between newer and veteran players, and ensures you don't just run same content over and over for the daily/weekly rewards

Don’t play lost ark but this video has got me interested in finding out about the timeline of what is going on with this game

Am i crazy for thinking that the rng honing system is THE biggest issue? I mean, you can grind for hours and make 0 progress.. how is this overlooked?

So many emergency livestreams 😂

In my opinion people enjoy different parts of the game. Chaos, Guardian, and raid are different and should be their own thing that people can do IF they want. Chaos and Guardians should be an activity a players can infinity do if they do wish to farm material, and raids should be used to get new gear/upgrade.

100% wasnt a mistake though, easier to make one patch than 3. clearly smilegate is looking towards money.

I keep saying the same thing. As long as there's these many daillies and that absurd amount of rng, even for a korean mmo (I'm sick and tired of this argument), the game is dead in the west, and this is me not mentioning all the issues with the amount of raids a person needs to learn in order to progress vertically and how hard they are for casual players to actually grind them in a weekly basis and a bunch of other issues plaguing the game. More horizontal content won't help. More raids won't help. Better daillies system might, but only for people still playing the game because I know for a fact I'm not comming back to that rng hell that doesn't reward my efforts. Don't blame SG, either. It's their business model, their game, hence their choice on what to do with it. Keeping daillies tedious and vertical progression as maddening as possible is what made them money. Now it feels like they're on a rescue mission which just won't work because they sat on their thumbs for too long - at least in the west. As for AGS, they take half the blame in our version for being complacent as a publisher for not pushing SG to implement the changes that they knew were needed a whole year ago.

Oh, hardcore players do still play Valtan for cards. They just put the gatekeep criterion to 1580 and then sit there with Valtan at 1 HP before the first phase change

It would take a major rework of dailies and gearing to get me back. I left at 1500 gear score when the grind just got too much daily. I don't see them fixing the game for at least a year still. So I'll be gone till then. I feel like the game might completely die by then though.

I still think the “Main” tag should be something you set that let’s you do twice dailies(whether because you just enjoy it or you’re trying to push that toon) and the rest of your roster just gets a one of each daily, Unas included. Double all rewards. Maybe let people join into different boss gates and reclear gates as well. That way others can restart if they want a fresh group or others can join the randoms jailged sitting alone in PF at a gate 2 or 3 after a disband

Lost Ark devs are sorry merchants lmao. Smoking their dead game rn.

Lost Ark could have been a good game. But the grindy gearing system is so bad… You have to do the same things over and over again on « x » different characters only to be able to make your main « viable ». Some people like this system, I don’t. It’s just not fun.

you know the game is fucked when the retired guy goes out of retirement

Lost Ark Is Finitoe

I left lost ark but I think a sensible solution to one of the problems is have 1 chaos dungeon run with a guardian boss at the end

Middle Users catching Endgame: That's the main reason I quit. I was iLvl 1455 when I quit after failing to hone even a single equipment for 2 weeks and I got left out of quild PVP team, as expected. For middle users to catch endgame, which is making 1350-1450 chars 1550+ fast is increasing honing chances for this 1350-1450 iLvl range. And for every new raid, keep the honing chances normal but increase them by a large margin after 3 months the raid came out so everybody can experience them.

There’s no loot chase. It was destined to die.

If you look at Genshin Impact, as an example, they do not bombard you with new costumes aka character skins. They make 1 like every 3-5 months and give 1 free (only if you do events when released) and with 1 as an option to pay. Also they do not change or alter how a character looks to an extreme like Lost Ark tends to do. You lose some immersion with Lost Ark skins whereas Genshin the skin fits canonically and does not ruin immersion. I'll stop there but yea, you can make more points too.

They should take Guardian raids and turn them into Trials or Normal raids from FF14 and delete flares and pheromone bombs

developers take players for granted so they act like "it will happen, just not right now".

much easier solution: put random guardian at the end of the chaos dungeon as a boss on a arena that does not require you to use flare or phero. do this once a day problem solved!

hell nay! how dare we get the CHINESE PATCH!

listening to zeals for more that 5 minutes drains the life out of me

I don't think they can fix the game as fast because they don't just need to limit the grind repetitions, they need to develop new revenues of activity, per character, once you're done with the daily grind all you can do is like exploration/events, if the game limited all content to just once a day, regardless of what character you chose to do it on, so it would be more like a traditional western MMO, we'd probably find ourselves out of things to do after an hour or two of playing the game a day, and this is likely an overestimate, would you play an MMO that you can complete each day within like an hour and make absolutely no meaningful other progress?

They should include the legacy raids/Abyss dungeons as alternate ways to get T3 materials for your main, instead of grinding alts

Got my gold terpion and haven’t logged on since 😂. I’m kinda more interested in checking out new world again but I haven’t been following lost Ark

But why do raids even need to give gold and the weapon/armor honing materials? To hone with? They already have the raids dropping a currency that's a free honing attempt. Why do they not lean into those instead of enforcing arbitrary limits on people who like alts and "encourage" people who don't like alts to make them anyway? Or raids give a universal currency that you can use to buy weekly materials, so you can do highest raids on couple characters to max out your main, or a lot of the raids on one character to get them maxed, and just give the currency a weekly cap. These are problems that other KR MMOs have solved. This is not the first alt-centric KR MMO. I don't know why they don't just do what they had great success with and copy the systems other games have while just being a better game.

sometimes the easiest solution takes the bravest man to choose

This game reallllyy couldve been the best in its genre.

caught the tail end of this before the fireworks. Good to know these pop up really quick.

The alt character gameplay loop in this game was always the worst idea since this game's inception.

the endgame is basically doing a very long and convoluted captcha in order to get your free (tm) lootbox. of course its beyond saving. climb a ladder for long enough and your arms get tired and you dont want to climb anymore, every game is a ladder game now, fatigue is real.

I enjoyed Lost Ark up until I hit the level 50 xp gain wall. I was willing to put in some extra grind for dailies, weeklies, etc UNTIL I found out you needed other characters to grind on just to level your main(still confusing as hell to me). The world was beautiful and loved finding the little side quests that added to the npcs around(even if tedious at times. Yes, you Seagull 😒). Island hopping and dailing the sea was by far my favorite aspect of it all, but the joy fizzled and hasn't come back 😥

so basically greed eventually pushed away even the most hardcore greedy game defenders who woulda thought?

yes "he" beat brel not the 7 ppl willing to carry him for free

As it should, a rpg that gives up on having a coherent story is destined to become unpopular.

What will make me come back? Lost ark 2, new story, new progression revamp classes etc at this point any small band aid won’t the feeling like there’s 100 new things to catch up with if I came back

Missed opportunity to call this video ' Is Lost Ark lost?'

The main issue I quit was they were banning people from buying gold from a third party, but would happily sell you gold at a much more expensive price. So they weren't concerned with gold buying messing up the game, they just wanted all the money for themselves by eliminating their competitors under their "policy".

22:46 there are very select few classes that absolutely change when getting relic set. For example, Arcanas and Reflux sorcs enjoy boundless MP because of the crazy CDR steroid.. it completely does change their gameplay. This might be the only example though. NM is genuinely one of the cooler sets. Like Asmon said, I think Betrayal is awesome too cuz you can afk while doing chaos dungeons

I wish they have sea server for a long time so I can play this game... But seeing the situation they had right now I'm both kinda sad and relieved at the same time I didn't play this game lol.

I wish this game will disappear, because this one is waste of time at least for me. Maybe I am too old for this shit.

Or if they really want people doing 2 Guardians, they could easily give additional rewards for doing 2 different Guardians instead of running the same one, which negates the incentives. Guardian rewards can be scaled according to your ilvl, so players are not forced to just run the same Guardian every single day. How is this problem hard to solve?

Come home from a long day of work, grind for maybe 4-5 hours, hone, fail all hone, go to sleep, work

just make it so that you can either do 2 chaos dungeons or complete a world/island event to get daily rewards then make the world/island events that give rewards rotate every week/2 weeks so that people arent always spamming the same events that would make the game way more interesting and feel much more alive

I'm so happy Asmon's biggest concern with LoA is the alt char issue. Main char only enjoyers rise up

Lost Ark was beyond saving when it released

Can you people not see the real core problem whit this game 1% honing success needs you to play more alts to feed the main. if they get 100% honing success at every level players would have way more free time to lose on legion raids this is how you fix burnout.if smilegate don't want to do this then they just only care about $$$ and the game is beyond saving they need to have the courage to do drastic changes. or make a new game or stop making games.

I have a suggestion for the chaos dungeon problem… Instead of 2x chaos dungeons per day Make it based off your 3 best chaos dungeon runs per week. Give grades based off performance such as time taken to complete, fail damage taken, and chained combat combos. Allow players to run as many attempts as they wish. Similarly for the guardian raids have a rotating 3 boss challenge every week with a similar system put into place. Have an option to cash out your rewards early for a reduced rate of materials with a lower multiplier for rare loot.

Guardians are heavily inspired by monster hunter aren't they. Why don't they make something like a calamity map, which changes each week and you can choose which Guardians you want to square up against that week, some might give extra leaps, others give more destruction stones or whatever. They would have to rebalance ALL Guardians for that, and that's a lot of work. But the main problem with Guardians really is that as soon as a new one drops you're gonna do that one for the next 4 months twice a day each.

This idea that developers need a long time to come up with a solution to problems that have been talked to death is asinine to me. If they have identified a problem, Smilegate and their 1,200 employees can develop a bandaid in less than 4 hours to alleviate the issue. Now if you want a complete overhaul redesign, sure that does take some time to properly plan out, but this isn't rocket science when several different counties worth of players are telling you the same critique. Patch a fix in ASAP, redesign over the next 3-5 months, implement when done. But do SOMETHING now.

It seems that they really lost the ark

Maybe, LA need Bahamut to cleanse the world, close the old server and re-open with a brand new system that not so hell grinding and homework.

damn the p2w kmmo went to shit like every other p2w kmmo who woulda thought

You constantly ask "who wants it?" and well that is the problem - Korean players want all of it. They don't want a reduction of homework and they pay attention to the stupidest things. And like with WoW a small idiotic group of players is the loudest one so like Blizzard SG caters to this group. They like skins, they like swiping, they like wasting their time. It is dumb I agree but that is the mentality in Korea.

no offense to zeals but this vid was just not very good at giving us the translated info since he skipped most of what was talked about

You can't have a 1 character gold limit in this game because of how it's set up, there would be overall less people in party finder for raids as the week goes on so it would be harder to fill and what will most likely happen is there will be people that wont be able to do their raids because most people will have done em.

Bro he actually look like a young version of Jackie Chan

what was the censorship did they replace all the corpses with loafs of bread?

Can't believe ppl still play this game, what a waste of time... You gotta have a slave mentality to do 2x guardians and chaos per day on 6 chars + all the raids ... Ultimate chore game

Daily guardian raids are what made me drop the game after only ~50 hours

Eliminate raid-wide wipe mechanics.

i dont think running chaos dungeons twice a day is bad. running it twice per character is bad. get rid of multi character progression and the problem is solved. boost loot drops and get rid of loot sharing. i have enough trouble remembering how to play one character after not playing for awhile. you cant expect me to remember how to play 16 characters. for guardians they need to do 4 things to fix them. add a health bar. make it perminently visable on map. reduce daily to once. and double the drops.. or triple.

It's funny to see the differences between eastern and western game devs. If Smilegate had a lawsuit for confirmed harassment and sexism they would probably seppuku themselves to death in a livestream or something.

3:30 if you don't have the gear, tripods, engravings, gems, cards, roster level, title*

The game died for me when I was sitting 5 hours in queue at 6 o clock p.m EU Time after a 9 hour work day - not once, or twice but for weeks. After they FINALLY fixed that we had to wait over a year for all the classes that where released so far at this point. All the set gear that you could get from the dungeons: Useless, since you grind only CDG and upgrade one set of gear. Idk what can save this game but they definitely need to make a lost ark 2

Even after all the apologies theres still no OCE region.

There would be many issues with 1 character gets x6 gold i feel; inflation is possible? the amount of raids that get ran across all legions get cut down by 6 times so it could be more lobby hell than it is. There are positives though; less time on raids, faster gold intake (they would have to make these scale to item or sync you down) maybe that would help with new players getting into raids.

hey dude, just look for a way to get me what i need to write, mostly my PC is a shithole lmao. i need something good to really wham on that keyboard. its flowing so freely and extremely deeply. its not funny the money we get rid of one day. just hook the guy up with a pc that can handle lightning fast typing and hopefully some hobbies when im feeling settled( OSRS and every other mmo thats inspiring as well) love ya man thanks for helping so much behind these scenes for 2 years

Failing to get into mario wipes the raid. Failing mario kills you, Failing to kill 3 of the correct color balls wipes the player that got the debuff.

yes... yes it is

the dude totally missed the point about the chaos dungeon. Gold river did not just say it needs a complete rework. He said initially people wanted to do more chaos dungeon (beginning of season 2) because there was lot of loot. but now those loots have become negligible so they need to work on how to make chaos dungeon more appealing

Such is the fate of every Korean MMO

"where tooki?"

Lost ark realm reborn

Yes vykass would exist because china had Publishing rights before the game even launched in KR tencent and SG relationship is very special because SG success came from publishing Cross fire their FPS game in China and Tencent was the publisher

Nah the game is toast. They will never fix the core issues. This is how alll Korean Games are. The game will never recover in NAW. And mark my words, the game will shutdown for NAW in due time.

can we start having huge patches and server maintenance at 4 AM instead of 10am to 6pm

They dun goofed

They need to stop hiding behind empty apologies and actually outline how they're going to fix the fucking game.

Guardian Raids should be more like Trials in FF. No running around trying to find/chase the boss, just a straight up boss fight.