Lost Ark Online

Gravel said:

I think part of our fucked up expectations is that you're 1382 (wtf man) 1370, and we recruited a few super hardcore people from outside FoH that are also in the 1350+ range.

The reality is I saw a Reddit post saying the only people that were 1340+ at this point are whales (which isn't true, obviously). But that's the perception. We just have the opposite skewed perspective that it should be easier than it is.

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The FOH guild is so far beyond an accurate representation of the game as a whole. As I was able to hit max and complete the guild weekly prior to the first reset (this was painful) and we have several members that continue to double donate, we are quite literally the highest guild that I've seen. Since I never removed us from the public guild listing, we attract a fair number of the highest ilvl players that are without a guild (our shop allows for more mats -- this will be amplified this week when we level up again before most people). I get constant tells asking to join (when we hit lvl 5 ahead of basically everyone, it was 20+ tells within a few hours, including some hysterical ones claiming we were a whale guild) but I've always responded that we're a casual forum guild that will probably have one raid group, that I will remove if forum folks are looking for a spot, etc. They still want to join and, if they're 1340+ and donating, I see no reason to turn them down (heck, we added some that also hang out in Discord now and it's nice to have active players on at all times). Daidraco can comment on this as I got upset at him when he invited folks while there were forum users still looking, which turned out to be a good decision now and I may owe him an apology!

With that being said, your Reddit poster is pretty accurate. when I first hit 1370, 90% of the folks that were doing night fox with me were clearly whales / gold buyers. They didn't even attempt to hide it and would spend the first 5 minutes in chat annoying the fuck out of me talking about how much it cost them to whale. It's gotten a bit better now but there are/were a limited number of us who had an amalgam of;

1- Having played alternative versions of the game
2- Having dedicated a stupid amount of time
3- Having played the economy to profit from whales (if you look back when the game was launching, I specifically mentioned that the real game for me would be the economy). I made an absolute killing on items that I knew would attract the whales and often priced things at silly levels, which were bought by the aforementioned whales due to the fact that I was so far ahead I was the only one selling them at the time. This snowballed so that when I hit T3, I was able to push even further ahead. I'm still sitting on a mountain of gold and could probably push to 1425 -- having only spent cash for the plat & gold packs.

The reality though is that, most people are still in T1/T2. We have a great group of folks who are able to help / push others through but really, I show up to 8 mans wasted and needing Kythik to yell at me to get into the correct circle position. I hope that everyone is treating this as a fun MMO with content / the ability to play with forum folks rather than getting frustrated at the prospect of keeping pace. We're in a good spot and in the coming weeks, we'll have a lot more 8 mans to do and enjoy as a guild, which I know appeals to a lot of folks. Just need to avoid the burnout and pace yourself to get there.

Mahes said:

That is because it should be. This game makes it's money off the whales mainly. Most players do not spend anything. Once I have seen all the content I can see, I will most likely move on. I do not wish to play a game that caters to the " Log in over playing" mentality that is the daily grind. Alts kind of help because you get to try another fight style but in the end it is still the same game. I do not feel like it was a waste as I have enjoyed what I have played to at this point. I just know that once it gets to the ridiculous portion of the game, my time will be spent elsewhere. I am not a fan of dailies. I am a fan of playing the game. I still want to try Elden Ring. Hell, that game makes me want to buy a PS5 just so I can play it on my 75 inch TV.

This game requires an obscene amount of time to get to the top. The last 5% taking 5 times longer than the previous 95%. That is where the game fails.

Games should be fun to play. This game has been but it does get repetitive. It comes down to what people enjoy. Some enjoy spending real money to get ahead and artificially impress other online people. That is kind of why Online games are popular. The bragging rights. This game almost gets it right.

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Once you get to 1340, unless you're a whale, it's best to take a step back and just play super casually. Wait for login and event rewards to pile up, do your dailies/weeklies enough to get your weekly gold bag, and upgrade slowly or wait til we get the 20% honing boost and the other content that we should have already that gives you upgrade mats. Otherwise it's just super frustrating. Game is only as grindy as one chooses to make it really.

I got my Sorc to 1345 and then started selling the mats I get daily and working on my alts. Until Scouter or Reaper is released I don't really give much of a shit about progressing beyond that. And it's prolly gonna be a good 6 months before that happens cuz AGS is stupid. Of course, my case is different, since I've already experienced all this shit on RU, and I can still log over there whenever I want.

Zindan said:

I was pretty hyped for Destroyer, but not so much now that I've watched some vids. Good overall class, but it seems very, very dependent on hitting a mob perfectly to get the most out of the high dmg skills. Perfectly in that you need to actually hit the mob with the edge of the hammer head (its flat face?), which will give an auditory cue if successful. This guy/vid speaks briefly about it at around 4:10m into the vid:

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I actually prefer big hitting, "impactful" skills. Like I said, I enjoy classes that have "weight" to them. For Destroyer, it's really just the one skill that you have to land "perfect". But, even if you don't, it's still doing some damage.

Classes like Soulfist just get straight fucked if the mob takes a trip to Africa when their Spirit Bomb goes off.

Voldeth said:

The FOH guild is so far beyond an accurate representation of the game as a whole. As I was able to hit max and complete the guild weekly prior to the first reset (this was painful) and we have several members that continue to double donate, we are quite literally the highest guild that I've seen. Since I never removed us from the public guild listing, we attract a fair number of the highest ilvl players that are without a guild (our shop allows for more mats -- this will be amplified this week when we level up again before most people). I get constant tells asking to join (when we hit lvl 5 ahead of basically everyone, it was 20+ tells within a few hours, including some hysterical ones claiming we were a whale guild) but I've always responded that we're a casual forum guild that will probably have one raid group, that I will remove if forum folks are looking for a spot, etc. They still want to join and, if they're 1340+ and donating, I see no reason to turn them down (heck, we added some that also hang out in Discord now and it's nice to have active players on at all times). Daidraco can comment on this as I got upset at him when he invited folks while there were forum users still looking, which turned out to be a good decision now and I may owe him an apology!

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A whale guild? lol Are hardcore gamers mythical creatures now? Or are people just so used to watching lazy streamers swipe/get carried by their viewers that they think that's the only way to progress quickly?

Raes said:

Once you get to 1340, unless you're a whale, it's best to take a step back and just play super casually. Wait for login and event rewards to pile up, do your dailies/weeklies enough to get your weekly gold bag, and upgrade slowly or wait til we get the 20% honing boost and the other content that we should have already that gives you upgrade mats. Otherwise it's just super frustrating. Game is only as grindy as one chooses to make it really.

I got my Sorc to 1345 and then started selling the mats I get daily and working on my alts. Until Scouter or Reaper is released I don't really give much of a shit about progressing beyond that. And it's prolly gonna be a good 6 months before that happens cuz AGS is stupid. Of course, my case is different, since I've already experienced all this shit on RU, and I can still log over there whenever I want.

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1000% this. People are going to kill themselves and their wallets trying to "whale" to 1370. AGS is 100% going to introduce honing buffs once all the Veruca's have whined loud enough on the forums. Get into T3, sell the fuck out of your mats, get a nice big gold stockpile going from the whales, and enjoy all the other games out currently. Go outside, enjoy nature, etc.

You're an absolute fool if you're "rushing" in a Korean MMO.

I guess hitting 1340 is like being full TET in BDO, in the sense that any further increases will be expensive and take awhile to get. I still think that LA's enhancing is just as bad as BDO, in terms of time at least. I do find that LA's gearing is much more interesting though, mainly due to the Tripod system.

Kirun said:

That's because people in the West are spoiled fucking children. They're Veruca Salt and they WANT IT NOWWWW!!!! This game has been out for 3 fucking years and people are bitching that it's "P2W BULLSHIT!!!" because they haven't "beat" the game in a month. The SAME shit happened in BDO - "Oh yeah, well you have 700 gear score because you're a WHALE!! THIS GAME IS P2W!!!!!!!".

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No, the west has less tolerance for paid bullshit and boring grinds.

Virtualy every single Korean MMO with these mechanics follows the same pattern:

1) Game is released. Players love the combat and great graphics. The honeymoon phase

2) game matures. More players are now hitting the “whale walls” - some swipe a little, some a lot. Even more don’t want to swipe

3) gap between whales and non-whales widens. Players begin to get disillusioned because they realize they can never “win” unless they swipe

4) population dwindles, whales decrease because there are less plebs to show off to

Pyros said:

Honestly it's not THAT expensive to whale to 1370 if you buy RMT gold. Although yesterday's patch kinda fucked that up, but when 1k gold was .4$, it was fairly attainable for anyone not living paycheck to paycheck to afford to whale to 1370 if they wanted to spend a few hundreds on a game, which is reasonable when you think ppl buy collector editions and other shit like that constantly. Obviously the true whales are even higher(there's a 1490 guy somewhere I think?).

And yeah, there's a non zero amount of people who got to 1370 F2P(or well buying plat pack only). Largely people who were experienced with the game and with a lot of time. That said it's a very small amount, a lot smaller than the whales, which are already a very small subset of players, so yeah when you see randoms on reddit explaining how they got to 1370 2weeks ago F2P without having played the game before it's hmm yeah.

I think it's fine atm but they need to hurry with the side content we're missing, pvp for mats, challenge guardians and the other shit I forgot, that's content random ppl who aren't whaling for argos can do. Although as mentionned, a lot of the more casual playerbase is still in T2, especially since the 1100 wall is steeper than the 600 wall.

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The Grand Prix event will help a lot of people, the vendor is just sooooo good and buying it out each week is stupid easy.

Raes said:

A whale guild? lol Are hardcore gamers mythical creatures now? Or are people just so used to watching lazy streamers swipe/get carried by their viewers that they think that's the only way to progress quickly?

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It's pretty hilarious but yes. If you look at general chat, lots of folks claiming you need to RMT to hit T3+ and that anyone who claims to be 1370+ that didn't RMT is a liar.

Meanwhile the guild has like 25 players in T3. We're just able to do many of the things that others don't have access to (we run carries, extra runs for alts, provided a lot of guidance early on, etc) so it doesn't make sense to Casual Joe who is playing solo and doesn't have access to Google apparently. Easier to say that we're buying gold and hookers on the downlow.

Cybsled said:

No, the west has less tolerance for paid bullshit and boring grinds.

Virtualy every single Korean MMO with these mechanics follows the same pattern:

1) Game is released. Players love the combat and great graphics. The honeymoon phase

2) game matures. More players are now hitting the “whale walls” - some swipe a little, some a lot. Even more don’t want to swipe

3) gap between whales and non-whales widens. Players begin to get disillusioned because they realize they can never “win” unless they swipe

4) population dwindles, whales decrease because there are less plebs to show off to

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I really wish people would stop doing this. LA is not your average Korean MMO and the circle of logic posted above should not be applied. Yes, the game is grindy at end game (it's an MMO - not sure why having things to do that can't be completed in a day / week at the endgame is a bad thing?).

If you look back 20-50 pages I was busy arguing with retards that were trying to define Mari's shop as P2W (because this is what they view the traditional Korean MMO P2W model as being) and pointing out what the real P2P (pay to progress) was (buying gold for the AH in order to buy materials). Again however, this isn't at all the same fashion as your standard Korean MMO, where the casual player is going to look at the whales and say, "I can never keep up with you!!!".

Here's what's going to happen: the current gap between regular folks and whales (we'll define whales as being those that have pushed to 1425, which is still within 100 ilvl of some casual FOH folks) is going to appear large. Within a month from now, Smilegate is going to release multiple methods of getting additional materials in HUGE abundance (see the poster above talking about the weekly reward vendor? There's going to be another 4-5 sources like that, only in greater volume). They'll probably even increase the honing percentage by 20% with legion raids and South Vern (which is in April -- not far away now). Here's the real kicker though: all the added method of obtained those mats? it's going to be equalized content. Average ilvl Joe is going to be able to enjoy the content and play it at the same pace and same reward as the whales, with absolutely no advantage for the dumbfucks who are RMTing. In short, people will slowly catch back up (without being deprived of content) and the whales will have had a whole 3 weeks of looking impressive. They will, of course, begin to whale even harder so that the open world content will be their new playground. Too bad nobody will actually care about that content since it isn't the good stuff that provides rewards. As the harder content comes out, it's going to follow that exact same model. It's going to be equalized. Whales will not be the superstars that they think they are -- they're going to be the idiots who spent 500$ to clear P2/P3 of Argos 3 weeks ahead of others.

Go ahead. Mark this post. It's going to hold up in the same hilarious fashion as re-reading me face palming to the people who were saying Mari's shop is P2W presently does.

Ok, so this is the guy that whaled - (and this was several days ago.)

Cybsled said:

No, the west has less tolerance for paid bullshit and boring grinds.

Virtualy every single Korean MMO with these mechanics follows the same pattern:

1) Game is released. Players love the combat and great graphics. The honeymoon phase

2) game matures. More players are now hitting the “whale walls” - some swipe a little, some a lot. Even more don’t want to swipe

3) gap between whales and non-whales widens. Players begin to get disillusioned because they realize they can never “win” unless they swipe

4) population dwindles, whales decrease because there are less plebs to show off to

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I still donate silver and do the daily increase of research. for the guild. I only have 8k gold and so I am cheap about that part. The epic books used to be a nice way to occasionally make gold but those days are now gone.

I think I will just sell T3 stuff the moment I hit T3. I might as well. I am seriously considering doing the same thing with T2 Alts. T2 material still goes for stupid amounts. I mainly want to hit T3 for higher chances on the legendary books. Those I will of course sell immediately.

Cybsled said:

No, the west has less tolerance for paid bullshit and boring grinds.

Virtualy every single Korean MMO with these mechanics follows the same pattern:

1) Game is released. Players love the combat and great graphics. The honeymoon phase

2) game matures. More players are now hitting the “whale walls” - some swipe a little, some a lot. Even more don’t want to swipe

3) gap between whales and non-whales widens. Players begin to get disillusioned because they realize they can never “win” unless they swipe

4) population dwindles, whales decrease because there are less plebs to show off to

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Except the "walls" you're referring to are artificially created by, "I WANT IT NOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW" mentalities in the West. If you just play the fuckin' game, relax, have a social life, play other games (holy shit, what a concept for an MMO that actively encourages you to not get "bored" of it!) and don't try to fucking speedrun an MMO in a month (lol, why even play an MMO?), you're going to have PLENTY of "catch up" mechanics coming down the pipeline.

On top of that, you'll be "progressing" the entire time. Are you going to fail your hones a ton? Yup, you will. And in the meantime, you're STILL earning progress, because every failure increases your chances that much further the next time.

I've spent roughly $50 on this game. I bought a bronze founder's and 2 of the $20 crystal packs. I'm sitting at 1320 GS. There's absolutely ZERO reason to "whale" or swipe past non-existent "paid bullshit". The only paywalls that exist are ones YOU create because of your impatience.

Pyros said:

And yeah, there's a non zero amount of people who got to 1370 F2P(or well buying plat pack only). Largely people who were experienced with the game and with a lot of time. That said it's a very small amount, a lot smaller than the whales, which are already a very small subset of players, so yeah when you see randoms on reddit explaining how they got to 1370 2weeks ago F2P without having played the game before it's hmm yeah.

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You are aware that there are (albeit not a large amount) of streamers who are 1385+ that have done so 100% on stream without buying gold, correct? I'm curious how much Gold you think is required to go from 1345 --) 1370. The path is there. It does require a crazy amount of time and pre-game knowledge but really, 1370 is not in some uber rare qualification.

Voldeth said:

'there's a non zero amount of people who got to 1370 F2P

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Oh? You only bought a bronze founder's pack?

I swear, people who pretend like they've spent ZERO dollars on the game are just as cringe as the people pretending like spending $1,000/month is the only way to progress.

I haven't even been focused on making gold (like Voldeth has) and have over 100k, my main is 1345, my gunslinger alt just hit 1100 this morning and my first alt account main is 1080. All I've done is sell all purple/gold engravings, all tradeable leapstones from Guardians, a couple legendary tool kit crafting things, and all my tier 3 mats for the past few days since I hit 1345. Oh, and I crafted and sold a few stacks of tier 3 fusions. I spent 14k when I was pushing my main's last few pieces to hit 1100, 14k on one of the new mounts, and bought 4 full skin sets the first week when they were relatively cheap. It's so easy to make gold right now. And people should be selling as much mats as possible. Those prices are gonna bottom out pretty quick in the next few weeks.

Edit: And my founder's pack that someone was kind enough to gift me was Bronze.

Kirun said:

Oh? You only bought a bronze founder's pack?

I swear, people who pretend like they've spent ZERO dollars on the game are just as cringe as the people pretending like spending $1,000/month is the only way to progress.

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There is a post on this very page which details which packs I bought. Once you've finished reading that post, go review the post that I was actually responding to. Let me know if it mentions that buying packs was off limits to the discussion at hand or, if perhaps, there is a comment made about THAT EXACT TOPIC. I'll go ahead and wait for you to catch up and then we can continue this discussion.

Kirun said:

Oh? You only bought a bronze founder's pack?

I swear, people who pretend like they've spent ZERO dollars on the game are just as cringe as the people pretending like spending $1,000/month is the only way to progress.

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Well, I've literally spent zero dollars on this version of the game. (Spent like $55 in RU because I needed slots for Scouter and Reaper) Getting 1370 by now isn't that difficult, nor does it require spending money. I could have easily gotten to 1370 if that was my focus. I instead spent my time/effort leveling the first 1.5 of my alt accounts, because I want to get all 4 to tier 3 before too long, since that is where they are most efficient. I've been doing that because I am more concerned with being able to generate gold continuously rather than just banking a stack now. And I'm in no big hurry to do Blargus.