https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/jump-start-server-update
It looks like they will be running them for at least six months before merging them into the existing servers. IMHO (and as stated before), this really won’t bring in many new/returning players, let alone retain a fraction of them because the accelerated vertical/horizontal progression is going to mainly result in churn from the existing player population that has stuck with the game (because these folks are mostly satisfied with what exists). Furthermore, fresh starts with their own economy, needs a significantly large population to sustain that independent setup over the course of that servers run.
The focus nonetheless is still mainly on item level progression (versus making the rest of the non-gearing related parts of the game, more appealing to the demographic who don’t really care for end game raiding). Backing up a small bit, I did give the changes they made (to reduce the whole dailies/weeklies grind like with guardian raids and chaos dungeons) a try (since I was still logging in to do the summer event for the last of the Mokoko transformation toys).
With guardian raids, they reduced the weekly soul harvest amount from 6 to 3 (with rested bonus, you can harvest two after completing a raid). And you can only do one guardian raid per day for soul harvesting (though you can re-run the raids as often as you like in the case of practicing/learning runs) so it now takes just two days of guardian raids to complete the weekly (whereas prior, required 3 days; made a mistake, previously you could do two guardian raids to get 4 soul harvests each day with rested bonus so it still took two days but just required more runs of the raid across those two days. With chaos dungeons, they did make them go faster, but the whole “carrot on a stick” reward change they made (to incentivize players to run them w/o feeling like a dailies chore), is still lacking.
Previously, you could occasionally get these “secret” rooms in the second zone; one of them could be a red portal for a boss (that dropped nice rewards) or a gold portal where killing this easier mob, would give you gold and materials. This prior setup was RNG (the few times I got them, I’d get a couple of hundred gold). With this newer revision, Smilegate wanted to make chaos dungeons (specifically the tier 3 ones) feel more rewarding by replacing these portals with a drop called Fate Embers. When this dropped, it would have a brilliant ray of light as well as marker on the map.
Here’s the problem though; their drop rate is also RNG. I ran tier 3 chaos dungeons across 8 different characters, and only my reaper had a modicum of success with seeing a Fate Ember drop during every run (most of my other characters saw only one or two over the course of a week). The initial dopamine fix was there (when I first saw/heard the drop), but that turned out to be short lived. The other problem is what you are rewarded with (gold drops and their quantity is lower weighted compared to say cards). None of my Fate Embers was anything highly desirable like gold after a weeks worth of runs so it turned out the carrot was missing from the stick (and I stopped running chaos dungeons), thus negating the entire dopamine aspect.
On a separate side note, I learned that AGS did run a player survey to get feedback about the game. What was asinine about this was that it wasn’t even posted on their main web site (I learned it was posted on Reddit back in August). This again is a failure of their entire community outreach/engagement (and not having important things like this coordinated across their entire social media presence). I shouldn’t have to troll through Twitter, Discord, Reddit (all of these I rarely use) for something like that.
On another side note, while I no longer find Lost Ark the game appealing, I am a fan of part of their Mokoko branding; Smilegate RPG could make a lot more money off of someone like myself with the actual physical collectors merchandising for example (but that IMHO is just another lost opportunity) since the following is some of those collectibles that I have (and I would get them all if they were easily available to those outside South Korea):
Regardless, I continue to see this game as one that won’t be going away anytime soon, but will continue this slow downwards trend with player retention (which this fresh start servers won’t help with) until they diversify out of this item level treadmill (something I do not see happening given how/where they obtain their feedback from).
