In my “first two weeks” thoughts regarding the game, I mentioned that I felt it was a mistake to release tier 3 because it added to this “rush” to get from T2 to T3 which would only lead “to more dysfunctional forms of game play”. The main issue that many players who have been trying to reach the 1370 item level (for the Argos raid that I also felt was being released too soon), is the combination of the lack of materials and the failure rate for honing. So it has led to dysfunctional game play in terms of infinite Chaos dungeon runs, some resorting to swiping in order to get more crystals to buy from Mari’s shop, or converting to gold in order to buy what they can from other players who are listing their mats on the auction house.
The issue goes much deeper than that though; this 1340-1370 dead spot existed in KR and was resolved. For whatever reason, decisions were made to not deploy these changes to NA/EU version. This is no different than AGS taking the feedback from the closed technical alpha/beta regarding how easy T1 content was where the guardian raid bosses were given higher health pools on our release. For reasons known only to AGS and Smilegate RPG, they decided to listen to the completely wrong feedback.
The AGS version is missing a bunch of T3 content that would’ve addressed the honing material drought (which has led some players to swipe, leading to even more anger about these changes being pushed by AGS to make more money). Here is the thing though. Smilegate RPG has long been fairly protective about Lost Ark in regards to what gets released. They are the developers who make the actual coding changes so they do bear responsibility for the messed up version that we have.
South Vern and Heroic Guardian Raids are content that should’ve been launched prior to the Argos raid (EDIT: I got this part wrong since both of these seem to be the lead-in for Legion Raids) (and pushing some content from 1355 to 1370, made no sense at all). IMHO, both AGS and Smilegate RPG messed up by trying to deviate from a solution that ended up working in the other regions. It’s called learning from your past mistakes, and not repeating them. Instead, they made things worse in the process by releasing the Argos raid too soon (or even T3 the way they did).
Myself, this is all still irrelevant since I just hit item level 1000 on my main. And even there (again, not try hard grinding), the main constraint are materials first, and then RNG fail that eats up material (which is going to increase for these next 5 honing tiers). I pretty much consumed several days of honing materials (including the ones purchased from the grand prix event shop for the first week) going from 980 to 1000. Again, doing infinite Chaos dungeons (to get enough currency to exchange for mats) is not my idea of fun, but is an avenue until you hit the point of diminishing returns. And this is only for T2 with trying to get to T3 where the RNG fail rate is higher (you are pretty much consistently building fail stacks all the way to hitting the guarantee pity); which is what a lot of the complaints have been about since the release of the Argos raid last week.
I believe in KR, T1 and T2 are now 100% success rate (or close to it at the higher honing tiers). But that change (aka catch up mechanic) made sense after they launched T3 there (where it’s a designed progression). The way they released T3 in NA/EU, breaks this designed progression (which was a learning experience for Smilegate RPG from the original KR release). This is why I stand by my earlier assertion that launching with T3 was a mistake versus having the first month capped at T2, and then last weeks first content update should have been the designed T3 progression from the other regions where the April update could’ve been the Argos raid. Instead, they now have this self-created mess on their hands. Again, this change must have been approved by Smilegate RPG (and we have no idea which person at AGS convinced them this would be good for our region).
It says a lot when even KR players are flummoxed by this when they themselves went through this original 1340-1370 dead zone (they are the game data along with RU and JP). It’s a completely self-inflicted mistake that should’ve never happened (and something that both AGS and Smilegate RPG are now trying to figure out how to resolve hopefully without Frankensteining our version even more than it already is).
