Lost Ark Online

I've slowed down, i still log in every day for dailies etc but the fail rate in T3 just makes the mind go numb and im like "well got my fails in ill log back in tomorrow and try again".

BoozeCube said:

The positives about the game is that the combat is clean and responsive. The raiding content is pretty fun but right now there is so little of it and you only get to do it once a week unless you have other characters up to 6.

I have still yet to see a gold map, gold book, or anything of value though so while others are sitting on 1mil gold and 1490 ilvl and shit, I got about 25k.

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This might be my biggest complaint about the game.

I really enjoy the abyss dungeons, especially with the guild. But they're locked to once a week. Your most fun content is once a fucking week? Oh, and then things like Vold won't participate because his hard mode ones share the same lockout timer.

BOOOOOO!

Gravel said:

I haven't quit, but man the t3 grind is a really massive misstep by either AGS or Smilegate.

I basically don't even want to play my main anymore because I just fail and fail some more. Log in to do an hour of dailies for mats and flush them all down the toilet in 20 seconds.

This seems like one of those classic "wring out short term gains but lose out on long term ones" after they milk the whales but drive the regular players away.

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While AGS/SG did fuck up by not adding in the honing changes, some of the mat sources like heroic guardians, etc. I still think people have to understand that at its core, this is an MMO that you play in "spurts". Log in, do your dailies/progress your weeklies, maybe do an abyss dungeon or raid, then log off and play/do other shit. It feels like a "grinder/juicer" game for right now, because you have 3 years of content to sift through. Once your characters are "capped", the game changes pretty significantly in terms of how you play it.

In essence, you're slowly going to get your roster/account "caught up" via horizontal and vertical progressions to the point where Lost Ark has trouble becoming a "main" game if you're someone who has a lot of time on your hands. If you're someone who only has 2-3 hours/day to devote to it, Lost Ark is pretty perfect for that playstyle.

Xexx said:

I've slowed down, i still log in every day for dailies etc but the fail rate in T3 just makes the mind go numb and im like "well got my fails in ill log back in tomorrow and try again".

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This is pretty widespread and legitimate. In KR, Smilegate's philosophy has always been that casual (read F2P) users should be able to access content on day #1. With the accelerated version of the game we received, there was always going to be a huge pain point where things stop flowing and this was going to be felt by the playerbase. When we heard what was going to be released (starting with T3), we were all a bit shocked (we expected to be getting T2 around this point). Thus the failure rate would have been nowhere near present experiences, albeit the scarcity of mats would still turn some folks off. This was a far better strategy imo, as we'd have 8 player abyss dungeons to go through (even if those dungeons are pretty meh).

But since we're in T3, we needed additional methods of not hitting this wall as hard as we did. There are two ways of doing this that is already in KR's version, specifically;

1- Additional ways of obtaining materials
2- A honning buff (the mythical 20% increase that people thought we'd get with Argos).

Neither of these were implemented and you get players that are frustrated. The end result however is that while everything feels bad now, April's release will bring in the start of the best content that the game has to offer AND one if not both of the above. I would just say that if you're not enjoying the wall that is the 1340 --) 1370 fail train, play from time to time and forget about logging in every day for your dailies. It's ok. You'll be doing yourself a disservice if you burn yourself out before the good stuff arrives, which is less than a month away. If you're still enjoying the game, I'd also suggest simply working on your other forms of progression at this point. It's going to matter a lot more later on when you have multiple days of raids to attempt / progress through.

Voldeth said:

This is pretty widespread and legitimate. In KR, Smilegate's philosophy has always been that casual (read F2P) users should be able to access content on day #1. With the accelerated version of the game we received, there was always going to be a huge pain point where things stop flowing and this was going to be felt by the playerbase. When we heard what was going to be released (starting with T3), we were all a bit shocked (we expected to be getting T2 around this point). Thus the failure rate would have been nowhere near present experiences, albeit the scarcity of mats would still turn some folks off. This was a far better strategy imo, as we'd have 8 player abyss dungeons to go through (even if those dungeons are pretty meh).

But since we're in T3, we needed additional methods of not hitting this wall as hard as we did. There are two ways of doing this that is already in KR's version, specifically;

1- Additional ways of obtaining materials
2- A honning buff (the mythical 20% increase that people thought we'd get with Argos).

Neither of these were implemented and you get players that are frustrated. The end result however is that while everything feels bad now, April's release will bring in the start of the best content that the game has to offer AND one if not both of the above. I would just say that if you're not enjoying the wall that is the 1340 --) 1370 fail train, play from time to time and forget about logging in every day for your dailies. It's ok. You'll be doing yourself a disservice if you burn yourself out before the good stuff arrives, which is less than a month away. If you're still enjoying the game, I'd also suggest simply working on your other forms of progression at this point. It's going to matter a lot more later on when you have multiple days of raids to attempt / progress through.

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Oh whats coming in April?

BoozeCube said:

I wish I knew if they planned to add additional character slots later when new classes are released, I mean I can always delete a character if needed but it does feel like a waste to do that

And making another steam account like others have done to double up their gold farms and shit is just a set I don't really want to take to be honest. Even though I would like to try a few more characters to see how they play and if I will enjoy them.

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Game companies that sell character slots have this tendency to treat those slots like some kind of holy grail. Smilegate has never given them away, and it's the only thing (other than shit like name change tickets) that they haven't. They do like to expand the maximum number of slots you can have though. I think it's up to 24 now.

And the slots are $10 because AGS more than doubled the prices of skins and slots in the cash shop, as I reported back when the beta happened. They are supposed to cost like $4.

Caliane said:

mokokos is a good point, and shows the issue or even back to the EQ farming. do you see me complaining about mokoko collecting? or the chaos dungeon skins? hell no. thats great.

lets say I have 1 hour to play/day, and 7hours to play on friday. I can farm the shit out of mokoko or eq on friday. 1200 mokokos to collect. and I can collect 400 on friday if I want.
But now, imagine mokokos are limited to 7/day. I'm straight up fucked, on mokoko collection, unless I log on every day, and collect my 7/day.
it turns the game into a job. its the exact opposite of no life farming. you CAN'T farm. The daily limits were intended to stop farming, but created a much bigger problem.

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Whats stopping you from just not collecting mokokos? There is no time limit to get them.

If you want to log in and collect mokoko..do so. If you want to take a 6 month break amd start collecting mokokos....its not like your progress resets.

Same.with all the other tasks you mentioned. None of those are time gated. Need 2 more dailies for your reward? Take a month off and do 2 more dailies and get it. Not like your time was wasted.

The way you approach the game is the problem, not the game itself. People have been bitching about having something " meaningful " to do to progress their toon even if they can only log in 30 mins a day...and here you can do that too.

If you no longer have fun, quitting is certainly the right thing to do. Change your mindset that you have to log in and have everything this instant and the game, much like many others, are more fun.

Stop trying to chase a crowd that you will never catch up to. Once I got out of that mindset I started to enjoy games much more.

Pyros said:

Hmm decided to do some math and calculate how much I need to get Astray and sailors, and apparently I have enough to get a fairly decent setup, not enough for the whole thing but can get the boat(300k pirate coins), the upgrades to 5 at least, relic blackfang(8k sun coins), relic wilhelm(144k pirate coins) and epic wilhelm(36k pirate coins) and then I kinda need to wait to get 14k sun coins for relic barakas and wait some for the stronghold stuff too(need more mats, and also RNG to get it to spawn there). As long as I stick to doing pirate coins adventure islands I should be able to get everything done next week or so minus the stronghold stuff. Surprised I had that much but that's nice, might switch, just have to figure out the gifts for blackfang rapport since that's the one thing I'm still missing to get the Astray itself. The setup I'm going for is heavy on resists and not as fast, but relic blackfang compensates that with her fast charging sailing boost, so I figure it'd better to just stack wilhelms and get the resists pumped up super high.

But first I have to run this bitch sorc through Yorn, fucking quests, I don't want to do them but I don't want to use up all my knowledge transfers before they add chars I care about, in case they decide to not have power passes that go high enough for this shit.

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As soon as I started really researching that shit - I stopped spending Pirate coins cold turkey. So many fucking "Guides" and youtuber's out there that are like "oh herp derp, go do this and that with your coins." I get it, if you want to progress Item Level and thats your main focus, by all means - spend those pirate coins on mats. But ffs, the amount of pirate coins you need to get some of the crew and shit is just MASSIVE. If I would have known this shit from the beginning, I never would have cared about the handful of mats that you get with damn near 20k pirate coins each week.

BoozeCube said:

Actually I still need a forum bro who really understands all this shit to help me with the finer points of this tripod shit and what is BIS to aim for, same with engraving and shit and what to sell. There are so many so called guides out there that aren't worth a fuck bit of shit.

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This is what is driving me up the wall the most about the game. There is just so much GD misinformation out there, or bad advice in general, that its aggravating as fuck to look back at the poor advice Ive followed. I do my little pittance of hones a day from Guardians and Chaos and any casino gems I got from islands, but I never should have followed some fail boat shit out there and like a parrot, I was telling people that same bad advice not knowing what was further on down the line. I thought "ok, this guy has been playing for years. He should know best." and it turns out that just because they played for years, means fuck all about how good of a player they were. Hell, Im starting to believe some of them gained a small bit of popularity just because they speak English and thats it.

Daidraco said:

This is what is driving me up the wall the most about the game. There is just so much GD misinformation out there, or bad advice in general, that its aggravating as fuck to look back at the poor advice Ive followed. I do my little pittance of hones a day from Guardians and Chaos and any casino gems I got from islands, but I never should have followed some fail boat shit out there and like a parrot, I was telling people that same bad advice not knowing what was further on down the line. I thought "ok, this guy has been playing for years. He should know best." and it turns out that just because they played for years, means fuck all about how good of a player they were. Hell, Im starting to believe some of them gained a small bit of popularity just because they speak English and thats it.

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Playing for years is the heart of the problem. They have zero idea how to handle starting out fresh on this version of the game. Sure, they know what's important to shoot for and start early, but they never had to actually do it until now. The original game was completely different than it is now, and other than Season 2 launch, most shit was introduced gradually. For most people, trying to simultaneously complete all this shit in the most efficient way possible is just going to lead to burnout. Fucking boats. The only time I've ever gone after a boat was when a stronghold level up opened a new dispatch slot and I was a boat short. And the only time I even use the full dispatch is when I'm too lazy to craft shit.

There's a reason why I take months long breaks from this game. I basically have 3 modes. If there's new content or a new class I'll play hardcore for a like 3-5 weeks, doing all my alt accounts and playing long hours every day. Then I'll start to lose interest and only do my dailies and a few quick Urunil kills for my Una bag and do whatever event is going on. After 2-3 weeks of that I don't log in for 2-3 months.

Underneath the good combat there's just nothing really there. All the min/maxing for builds has already been done, and there's no strats for raids. It's just, do the paint-by-numbers mechanics or fail.

This is also another reason why not just launching with all the available classes was a mistake. Playing a class you really like is a decent hook for the game and would tend to keep people's interest longer. Yeah, I know companies like to use new classes as "content" but this isn't some imported old game that's on life support. Smilegate is (and will be) still releasing new classes or gender unlocked versions every few months. It was a dumb move just like every single decision AGS has made for this version of the game. I challenge anyone to name just one change they've made that was for the better. I really wish someone else had been the publisher.

Raes said:

Underneath the good combat there's just nothing really there.

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Pretty much perfectly describes BDO as well. Typical of most Korean MMOs. Fun as fuck to play for a few months at a time, but it's easy to take the same amount of time on a break.

Kirun said:

Pretty much perfectly describes BDO as well. Typical of most Korean MMOs. Fun as fuck to play for a few months at a time, but it's easy to take the same amount of time on a break.

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Yup. They started moving away from the "asian grinder" a while back, but they did that by just throwing a bajillion borings quests at you, because that's what they thought people wanted. Then they inevitably realize they've made a mistake and either streamline the questing and/or offer (paid) skips. BDO, LA, and FF14 have all done this. Yeah, a lot of people like the story in FF14, but even they admit the Reborn MSQ is a slog.

The Koreans are still at least a decade behind us in MMO design, and if they weren't also light years ahead of us in graphics and combat/animations no one would play their games. That's not to say that Western MMO design is in a good place right now, but a lot of that has to do with things beyond just game design.

Time gated shit never feels good. I'd rather it be omega RNG personally and after playing for a week or so I saw what it becomes and it's just not that enjoyable of a game for me to keep plugging daily, let alone make a bunch of alts for the purpose of boosting one character. It's just not that fun.

What a weird event. It's literally just a random character on your roster logs in for battle chests?

Anyway, glad they're fixing the timer. I haven't done islands in two days outside of Tooki.

• Fixed an issue that prevented unbound Uncommon (green) and Rare (blue) HP Potions from being tradeable.

I love how a stupid AGS decision is now just "an issue." lol

Event rewards shouldn't have had an ilvl req in the first place, but at least they are removing it.

Fever TIme rewards are lame. Why? Because they're nerfed for our version, as usual. Here's what RU gets:


March, 6

• Blessing of Ninav, 3 days.
• Blessing of Beatrice, 3 days.
• Experienced Healer's Supplies x1

March 7

• Code of Order, 3 pcs.
• Greater Defense Crystals Pouch x10
• Pouch of Greater Weapon Crystals x5

March 8

• Special Strongbox with a Legendary Gift, x3
• Craftsman's Essence, 7 days, 3 pcs.
• Chest "Secrets of Kalatura", 1 pc.