The Inven boards for Lost Ark seem to be on fire after the recent update also included a new cash shop item; a raid completion ticket (which comes straight out of the mobile MMO design playbook).
It’s the ultimate in pay-to-convenience since you can just plunk down cash and auto-complete content. Since the games Guardian Raids are pretty much part of the end game item level grind, this ticket really sends the wrong signals to players.
Some of the threads have this ●▅▇█▇▆▆▅▄▇ It represents a person lying down (or more specifically, a dead person) so basically those threads with this is the normal graphic used by Korean players to state the “game is dead”. While not a lot of threads are using it (since moderators have been removing them), there’s a lot of less than positive feedback about this including drawings (hero exchanging crystals for the reward being handed over by the dragon) being used as memes.
This sort of system again isn’t new. Epona’s Request in Lost Ark could always be auto completed with a similar cash shop voucher once they were completed manually at least one time. MU Legend has auto subjugation of some of its content including interdimensional rifts, endless tower, etc (though not the highest end dungeons and also only a percentage of the rewards compared to if you had completed them yourself). Bound Redzen (which can be earned in-game) and cash shop Redzen can be used. Devilian had invasion tickets (earned in-game or purchasable in cash shop supply crates) that allowed going directly to the boss room for regular (normal, heroic, and hell) dungeons.
Mobile MMO’s of course use auto-combat, auto-pathing, and auto-completion of quests, dungeon/raids as a core part of their designs. Part of that is why I could not get into mobile MMORPG’s. It gets to a point where there is no point in playing. I just can’t believe Smilegate would think doing this for raids would be healthy for the game at this juncture (it’s an admission that the current design teams end game content is far too time/item level gated and limited where they felt it was alright to offer up a ticket where you can simply bypass some of this repetitive grind).
UPDATED Info: Like Epona’s Requests, a raid needs to be completed at least once in order to utilize this ticket. Additionally, this auto-completion can only be done once per day for that particular raid. Even with these limits in place, I still don’t agree with using this type of ticket system as a “catch-up mechanic”. As much as I do not care for MU Legend, Webzen created a returning players system which you play through the objectives in order to acquire rewards that help with leveling and gearing up.
