Smilegate performed a major balance/tuning pass update (with a ton of bug fixes) for LOST ARK (KR), touching every single subclass in the process as they looked through player data in deciding what needed to be buffed and what needed to be nerfed. Their patch note (link below) is absolutely huge and detailed enough where machine translation does a fairly good job at conveying most of the changes.
http://www.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4820/657
Their analysis of player data (which encompassed virtually everything) as well as carefully parsed player feedback, also resulted in major changes to some of the difficulties of completing various sailing and island quests.
What is probably more important is the developers own message regarding the reasons for the changes that were made in this update. Machine translation gets most of the points across (November 30th is translated wrong and should say December 30th; which is when they plan to provide more details about how they plan to make the game more alt-friendly).
http://www.inven.co.kr/board/lostark/4820/661
They acknowledge that playing alternative characters is currently inconvenient with having to do the entire story line again (since parts of the main quest are required to get mandatory emotes and songs in order to continue progression) as well as re-grind Island Hearts (a post level 50 mechanic that unlocks additional content/provides future progression) and other similar systems, and that they want to provide a solution to this.
They provided some small details including making adventure book achievements account wide. Every zone has achievements which can be earned where at certain percentages of completion, some very nice rewards can be collected (these include permanent skill point increases, special mounts, crate of gems which are usable for cash shop purchases, special emotes/songs, etc).
They are looking at the current NPC affinity system (which past two levels, turns into a pretty hardcore grind especially for affinity items since songs and emotes don’t make much of a dent) and also looking to make this account wide where alt characters will automatically gain the highest affinity already earned from another character. This affinity will be important in the future when player housing (private islands) is unlocked.
One of the more important notes was regarding Island Hearts for alt characters. They noted they are working on a solution to allow your other characters to quickly earn those same hearts that were unlocked by another character on your account. I think that on paper, the decision to make this character bound looked like a good thing (it would create a feeling of adventure and exploration as you leveled new characters) but the implementation boils down to sail from this one place to another, travel to an NPC somewhere on that island or continent, perform the necessary objective(s), sail back (or to another location), rinse and repeat. Players instead came up with optimal routes turning the game play into a mechanical routine that defeated the original objective. Myself, I tried not to follow any of those guides and found the game still did a relatively decent job of not sending me all over the place (I’m currently working on obtaining the 11th heart and need 15 to unlock the west side of the map to access the islands there).
Another system they are looking at is gear progression for alts based on the progression of the accounts highest item level character. They mentioned something about account bound items. I’m personally kind of the fence here since the only place where this might be relevant are accessories that can be gotten from Mokoko seeds (which can currently only be claimed on one character) as an example. I think it’s fine if a piece of gear is obtained from that character and can be shared to an alt on your account (but I don’t think they should go to the extent of allowing an alt to quickly attain the same item level as the main).
Confirmed updates they will be deploying are improved match making, increased storage space, addressing progression issues within certain item level bands, and a transmog acquisition shop (acknowledging that some armor and weapon designs from questing gear have some nice looks which can promote more personal customization; something the game majorly lacks at this time).
The level of detail (even if in Korean Hangul), says a lot about the design and development team at Tripod Studio (the Smilegate development subsidiary behind the game). This is why I wrote that rant about some misplaced notions that this patch (or the prior one), would be the official release (don’t care if it was even attempts to troll, it’s how rumors get out of control). The game is still far from perfect and even with these planned changes, won’t be since they will uncover more issues once they roll out their initial implementation. They already spent years in actual development and then 3 separate closed beta tests that happened in 2016, 2017, and 2018 with the year spent between them, in making changes. Players in Korea were naturally frustrated with the radio silence after each of those but the end result was this rather successful open beta launch by handling things systematically.
The point is they aren’t going to rush the transition to official launch in Korea (since that is their highest priority). It’s why I don’t expect any official announcement (where they give an estimated date) of a western release until they’ve transitioned to full release in Korea and have that service completely stabilized. Only then will they sit down and discuss their next priority (and we have no idea if that still has the China service with Tencent as the publisher, next in line especially if they were pre-approved before the current moratorium).
