First things first, I am no longer heavily invested/engaged when it comes to playing Lost Ark (and nothing in this April 2023 community letter nor what was mostly not covered in this podcast, changes that). The game doesn’t even come close to being a “filler” given how little I play it now. As for this podcast, I’m familiar with DatModz (I watched him around the late 2012-2014 timeframe when he was streaming Diablo III) so I decided to watch this out of curiosity.
From what I could gather, it looks like AGS invited these two Lost Ark content creators/streamers out to their offices for this podcast to cover some topics that are relevant to the player community.
The community letter (linked above) has a large section regarding the new player experience. Any game (especially MMO’s) lifeblood is having a consistent influx of new players (doesn’t matter if they dip out once they reach endgame which is ALWAYS a pain point in a lot of these games) to supplant those who eventually stop playing. Unfortunately (IMHO), the points mentioned in this community letter (and glossed over in this podcast), are only bandaid fixes that won’t (IMHO) bring in a huge influx of new players (or get back those who played early on but quit).
Why is that? Because it doesn’t address the root level issue in Lost Ark which is it’s core endgame design of this item level treadmill. Some may say this is every MMO in existence. While that aspect is true, it’s the way Lost Ark focuses on it with most every major content update bringing new content that forces you onto this treadmill (if you want to be able to do that content). Not everyone has the same objectives though. In ArcheAge, I can and do potato (and I am not the only one). Some folks only do artistry and music as one example (ignoring gear, PvE, and PvP completely). Others like myself settled into housing (barely upgrading gear). And we’re ok (and enjoy doing what we do) with playing the game this way.
Lost Ark’s other systems outside of PvE, aren’t designed to be really engaging. They are there as support systems to the main objective. The entire stronghold (island housing) system is frankly a watered down experience because the isometric camera really holds back that immersive feeling (the game world IMHO would’ve been far more dynamic and a much more immersive experience had Smilegate RPG/Tripod Studio chosen a 3rd person camera or at least allowed that to be the view in city hubs and the housing area where you could also move with WASD). IMHO, this impacts the social experiences one would normally have (yes, I know there is the zoom in feature, but it isn’t the same).
And while Lost Ark has a life skilling system (which you would think would fill a niche for potatoes), it’s all basically not engaging (not to mention tool durability is a thing where it detracts you from utilizing the highest grade tools due to how “expensive” the restoration is; yes, part of it has a cash shop mechanic to it given the in-game grind to craft that item). In ArcheAge, I don’t like how the proficiencies are per character (Lost Ark does a lot of QoL correct by making most of this stuff roster bound on a server), but the life skilling “grind” to increase those proficiencies works well if you want to be a casual potato. In Lost Ark, I just don’t get that same level of enjoyment with its instanced housing, life skilling, and fixed view camera.
As for the item level grind, I don’t do it. My highest item level characters right now are my deathblade and artist (1445) with the latter getting there almost basically for free with the Hyper Express that came out with its release. I stopped doing the dailies grind a long time ago (the only thing I do is the weeklies for the Una’s tokens for gold, and that take just two days max). But with that said, for most long time players still playing, they are heavily invested in keeping up with this item level treadmill (which is about the grind for honing materials, silver, and gold in order to keep honing). And it is a daily regiment of daily tasks (aka homework) that involves your Una’s, chaos dungeons, guardian raids, and tackling the end game raids. A lot of this also involves alts (since that is a key design of the game where you funnel unbound mats to your main, and so on). Thus for those who enjoy raiding, Lost Ark is a perfect game for them.
But there’s such a wide demographic of players that Lost Ark (especially past the original MSQ) just does not appeal to once you start hitting tier 3 content (where the item level treadmill takes off). And Roxx (the community manager) touches on the tier 3 drop off they see (it’s at around the 20m50s mark). Tier 1 and 2 are now literally easy and free now due to the honing changes made awhile back. Tier 3 is easy until you start hitting the RNG fail past 1340 (unless you already have a 1370 character with the stronghold buff that reduces the cost and gives you increased honing success; the same happens at 1460 where you can unlock another buff like this; new players won’t have this so they will hit that pain point without something like a Hyper Express event).
Yes, most every Korean MMO has RNG fail stacks as a enchanting mechanic. In Lost Ark, most of your time isn’t spent chasing for better gear drops. It’s spent grinding for honing materials, silver, and gold to perform that enchanting (and this isn’t even touching on tripods, gems, cards, engravings, etc). So you run these array of dungeons and raids across your main and alts to keep pushing your item level to get past the item level gating (not to mention a lot of groups want characters well above the minimum item level gate). So for the games dedicated players, it’s a constant item level grind that is IMHO, just unfun. And the games other systems outside of that grind, aren’t good enough to keep players who are uninterested in that constant item level grind, engaged for long periods.
AGS and Smilegate RPG aren’t even close to getting that kind of feedback since most of what they see is coming from the folks who are engaged in the item level grind. They aren’t even getting a modicum of feedback from those who are really potato casuals (like the RP crowd as an example) because that group drops off even before hitting tier 3. Then there are those like myself who exist in the game that do our own thing, then log out until the following week. Thus this community letter (and podcast), isn’t anywhere close to addressing the elephant in the room when it comes to the game being able to attract and retain new players from a broad demographic (that is, the game at end game, is heavily focused on the raiding and item level upkeep for those raids while the other ancillary systems, are there to assist that grind, but aren’t improved on to make them more compelling for those who want to be a really casual potato). And this is a game designer decision over at Tripod Studio (the Smilegate RPG design studio subsidiary that develops the game) where the focus is on end game raid content.
That feedback loop itself is ALWAYS a point of contention because it is known that the majority of Korean development studios, pay little regards to the requirements of other regions (much of it is mostly lip service). Smilegate RPG seems better because they’ve done a better job at managing PR for years compared to a lot of their other counterparts. But IMHO, a lot of decisions are still domestic focused, where a lot of feedback from other regions (especially the western markets), ends up in the virtual wastebasket (where western community managers spend a lot of time managing that feedback, and how it is written to appease management that reports back to the overlords in South Korea).
This podcast didn’t dispel any of that negative take (the negative take being that most feedback gets filed into what is a virtual wastebasket) either since most of the changes that are coming (noted in the community letter), are things already implemented in KR (due to feedback from the domestic playerbase). Basically back in 2019 (with most Korean studios not really focused on PC MMORPG development), Lost Ark in South Korea was looked at as the last hope for that genre in the country. While subsequent years saw some small resurgent (PC MMO development), some of that was in relation to blockchain/NFT (which has fallen off due to other factors that affected the crypto environment), there are a few upcoming KMMO developments including Throne and Liberty (formerly Lineage Eternal, Project TL), Chrono Odyssey (which I haven’t mentioned yet), and ArcheAge 2 (which I have zero faith in given XLGAMES lousy development history with ArcheAge and also Kakao Games Europe B.V. who will be the western publisher). But I view most of this as being front loaded cash grabs that aren’t going to have any longevity.
With that said, Lost Ark is still doing relatively well in Korea (PC bang metrics), while the games concurrency on Steam for AGS, still has high 5-digits (yes, it is well off of the million player concurrency it saw during the launch window, and the subsequent six figure numbers in the following months). But again, this is mostly an endgame item leveling grinding raiding demographic that remains because of what I opined above. Additionally, some of this concurrency is the still large number of bots (you can easily see this activity in the lower level zones but they’ve long been able to get their way into tier 3 areas) that the game has. Unfortunately, the best AGS can do is manage what is a whack-a-mole situation. But yes, it’s an eyesore for the new player experience when you see more bots running around at the start than actual players.
The other longer term issue AGS will have is how the NA region is currently divided. Normally, publishers do not split NA into East or West. Furthermore, they normally disregard having specific regional servers for South America (thus usually, an NA regional server covers the entirety of the North American and South American continent [when there isn’t a publisher that has specific countries in that region covered], along with the Pacific and Oceania regions including Australia and New Zealand). As the population declines though, this split causes issues with the South American region, and NA East and West regions. Yes, there are latency benefits with this arrangement but eventually, there is going to be a point where AGS is going to have to look at eliminating at least the NA East and West split (and finding an acceptable co-location arrangement to handle the latency aspect).
Digressing, there will be a point where the game won’t age as gracefully (and will do the usual heavy bleeding of even this dedicated demographic) since the unknown variable is some newer title that manages to pull that demographic away (no, it won’t be Diablo IV). Basically, the focus of trying to get new players into Lost Ark to eventually get onto this item level treadmill where parts of that treadmill is made more tolerable to get newer players into current raiding content, is pretty much still focused on raiding as the key focus versus a broader one including casual potato activities that add value to other parts of the game. So yeah, I don’t see this niche being filled at all in Lost Ark (because that will require such a designer sentiment at Smilegate RPG/Tripod Studio in order to begin the process of analyzing and coming up with better designs that will be a lot more palatable to the casual potato demographic).
