Amazon Games (AGS) posted a more detailed article regarding the actual update and the jump (fresh) start servers that will be going live after the September 13th maintenance. Original founders pack purchasers will receive another package (only claimable on the fresh start servers) sans the royal crystals, while the items themselves will be roster bound (versus tradable as the original packs were).
IMHO, this small detail will juice the numbers a bit since this is an easy way to get the additional cosmetic items/mount/pet (I have yet to open those original boxes from my Platinum pack; I’ll probably look at selling my Cerberus mount box for example). I wasn’t planning to have anything to do with this fresh start, but am now going to claim this pack and utilize the power pass and hyper express to boost a character. I’m also going to create as many free characters as allowed, using whatever available number of character slots being made available on this fresh start server (since these additional characters could be utilized later after they are merged into the original servers unless they make it that you’ll need to have character slots unlocked on the older servers to access them).
While it could run for up to six months, AGS plans to monitor the health of this server to determine if it needs to be merged sooner. IMHO, I doubt this fresh start will last longer than 3 months because even hardcore veterans are viewing this as an easy way to get another alt they can use post-merge (and these folks will chew through the accelerated horizontal/vertical progression quickly to where they hit the same dailies/weeklies game play loop as their regular characters).
As for what would constitute a decent sized population blip? They would need at least double the concurrency from the previous major update (the one with the aeromancer class) to show a small bump on the long term chart (they actually need to hit low six-digit concurrency again, and to maintain that for at least 75% of the next 30 days, to make a dent in the long term downwards trend).
September 13th UPDATE: we’re able to create up to 6 characters (the same default) on this fresh start server so if the characters remain unlocked post-merge without the actual character slots unlocked on the original servers, this is a “free” way to get around that.
Peak concurrency (56K as of this update) post-patch is also not indicative of a lot of players returning (or actually new) to the game since with the aeromancer update, peak concurrency was only around 43K post patch, and never really exceeded that number before trending back below 30K over the next 30 days. This weekends numbers (when more players will be in-game) will be more telling, but the type of concurrency they really needed was to at least hit the average that was back earlier this year like when it was closer to 104K back in April).
In other words, this slight bump is going to be mostly churn with the hardcore base (and casuals like myself who are just claiming the additional Founders packs and power passing/hyper expressing a character just to make use of it). Yes, the server itself will initially transfer over where it will share instance match making and the region auction house, BUT it will eventually have to be merged with a legacy server because the population on these will not be able to sustain itself (which is why you don’t want the larger part of the population to be mostly just veteran player churn).
NOTE: Yes, they (Smilegate RPG and AGS) are trying, but they are missing the mark by a mile because everything is centered around easing the initial item level treadmill grind (for gear progression), and not actually fixing the root problem which is the actual core design being centered around that item level treadmill that makes having an alt-army beneficial (requiring this dailies/weeklies game play loop), VERSUS making a lot of the other parts of the game (like the non-raid parts including rapport and lifeskilling) more fun/engaging.
Just throwing this power pass/hyper express and materials at a player (especially if they actually are a new player), doesn’t address the root core design issue with the game (and from what I can see, that isn’t going to change). All it does is accelerate how quickly one of these players will end up quitting because they’ll see the problems a lot faster.
NOTE #2: This gear acceleration from a fresh start reveals the glaring issues since you have such a limited amount of honing materials to start, and no level appropriate alt-army to feed materials (unless you buy a power pass to quickly get alts to max level). Like in my case, I failed on my weapon enough times trying to get to 1445 where I ran out of destruction stones (from what the playtime rewards and Super Mokoko Express gave) so you are already forced to grind what you can. One also has to level up their stronghold in order to research all of the honing buffs for tier 3.
Then once you get to +15, gold is going to be extremely limited unless you get lucky with the Blooming Mokoko event and/or hit the jackpot with the Fate Embers from chaos dungeons. As I noted in this other posting, if you are unlucky with RNG like I have been, Fate Embers aren’t going to be dropping that gold most of the time. But this RNG failure honing (since you are starting at +10 on the Relic gear provided in the express) really isn’t the way you are going to appeal to actual new players who might be trying this, only to run into all of these walls which they need to find ways to climb over. Sure it’s better than the original grind, but all that does is highlight just a tiny part of why Lost Ark still has trouble onboarding AND retaining players once they hit the tier 3 portion of the game with its item level grind.
NOTE #3: This is so half-assed bad when it comes to the horizontal progression being so out of whack with this starting 1415 item level. Strongholds ought to be unlocked period, but they aren’t; the guide quest in Luterra Castle isn’t even showing up either for the unlock (you have to actually go into the guides section of your quests, and accept the appropriate quest from there which a completely new player probably won’t know about). A lot of songs and emotes you need to go through the entire island grind to get them. Basically, it’s so all over the place which again, highlights this concentration on only the item level part of the game. This jump-start is not even close to being new player friendly except to get players to 1490 a lot quicker/lower cost.
