Lost Ark was a cool game and honestly has a lot of stuff other MMORPGs should learn from, at the same time the gay ass FOMO reward style, cash grab stores, and 1 player fuck up insta wipe mechanics for both this and WoW are some of the worse design features ever.
I don’t know how the game has changed since I quit but if they ever bust out a new server launch I might give it a go again.
The list of changes is way too long but your complaints are valid (minus the cash grab stores -- not sure I've used the cash shop for anything than cosmetics in a
long time). I'm a broken record but someone like you (who enjoyed the raids/gameplay and wasn't a total retard) would get a lot of fun by running the content you've missed (Brel, Kayangel, Akkan, Ivory Tower normal, Thaemine normal). It would essentially be ~2 months of really fun MMO game play before the wall hit you but you're not dumb and would just quit rather than spending cash. A new server would be a terrible idea though, these crumble and are filled with people who are trying to create characters that will transfer to an OG server later on and make a lot of gold, resulting in a shit experience.
I agree with all that, but I'm not sure I'd revisit this one ever. Just thinking about having to do all that shit on my account again sounds like AIDS.
It was definitely fun for the time I played it though.
Almost all of the stuff you're thinking about would be handed to you for free within 15 minutes of logging in. The game put in the catch up mechanics for vertical content some time ago and it would probably place you further along than you were previously. It takes you to a point where you have everything and the only stuff to 're-do' is if you're trying to 100% continents in order to get 10% more purify proc chance.
I can’t get back into this because when I login there are a million icons all over the screen and I have no idea what anything means.
More than fair. It's an MMO with years worth of content and this applies to the genre as a whole once it reaches this point. Logging into WoW is similar. The only way to really do it is to either read/watch Youtube guides (the boring shit way), not give a fuck and be the retard player while you figure it out, or just ask in Discord. I recommend the latter.
I love how his defense essentially boils down to..
"Yeah, pop went down because this game has a fuckload of bots, not because of Thaemine!" - just lol.
The Paladin in this game is still, without a doubt, my favorite support I've ever played in an MMO. I also didn't even mind the "one-shot" style mechanics in a lot of areas other than the daily/weekly, non-raid shit. It's too bad this game was ruined with dogshit dailies, a fucking retarded amount of horizontal progression that makes getting back into the game so daunting most people don't bother, and the massive cash grab that was the AH.
Paladin was recently buffed and supports in Thaemine clear groups were the difference maker. The support classes as a whole are no longer about just maintaining brand and tossing a heal from time to time, they actually require the player to know the fight and use their CDs properly in order to support.
I think once they get solo raids in I might give it a go at some point to just run through content. That's probably like 6months away though right? So won't be soon, but I'm thinking at some point in 2025 I'll probably give the game a whirl for a month or so.
Road map will be released in July however 4-6 months is a fair estimate. We're getting Echidna this month and the content release cycle suggests we'll see Behemoth in August with the window for T4 & solo raids appearing starting as early as September (if you're hopeful), October/Nov (most likely) or December if you're a doomer.
On the population discussion: people have been talking about the game being dead for like a year and a half. I'm sitting next to an NPC for a daily quest right now (so not in a city) and there are 25 players around me with 5 channels of the zone up. Guardian queue times are <1 minute, cubes are instant and this is what the lobbies look like for Thaemine at 10:30 on a Monday (when 90% of the population has cleared and it's the least played day):
That stretches for quite a bit and most lobbys fill in 5-10 minutes. It's never going to have a million players (it never did) and bot ban waves represent a huge drop in steam charts because, surprise, a Korean MMO has a lot of bots. That doesn't mean that the population is struggling or that the game is dying, it has a really healthy population and the game is active with content updates that occur every month, a new raid that gets released every 2-3 months, and a new continent every 4-6 months. Unless you're a retard who has to play the most popular MMO, I'm not sure why you'd give a shit about this.