Feeling the heat (and probably seeing actual numbers on their end of steeper than expected drops in engagement (concurrency, login time, etc), AGS and Smilegate RPG put out an pre-emptive note about the recent community drama regarding end game progression.
https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/amazongames-smilegate-rpg-message-from-the-team
One of the key acknowledgements was having moved some of the content around (to 1370 item level) due to player feedback from the closed technical alpha and beta. In other words (as I mentioned previously), they listened to the wrong people (that’s also why they increased the health pool for guardian raid bosses as well across all tiers), resulting in this scuffed version of the game.
It’s not surprising they are also seeing a slower rate of item level progression than they expected; the lack of materials as you progress through the higher honing levels where RNG failure increases even at the 80% success rate mark (it’s still a coin flip if you are successful or not), is an issue. And they also acknowledged releasing the March update (Abyss Raid with Argos) too soon. Again, part of this was listening to the wrong feedback from the wrong people early on including folks that played in other regions (where they eventually thought it felt too easy after having completing it after awhile).
AGS and Smilegate RPG tried to attribute this (launching the March update too soon) to prior data from other regions but they failed to also attribute this to launching NA/EU with T1-T3 where they knew we were also starting from level 10 (doing both vertical and horizontal progression). Data is GIGO (garbage in garbage out) if you parse it the wrong way.
Basically as I mentioned prior, all of this was self-inflicted by both AGS and Smilegate RPG. They will be addressing part of this with more materials (honing chance will not be changed at this time) including enhancing the Arkesia Rally event rewards (and providing more tokens from the event) as well as providing some compensation in the form of gifts (since as they learned, everyone likes gifts). We’re receiving the same rewards the KR region got due to the success (in terms of CCU) of the NA/EU launch. They are also adjusting the time table for the release of Legion Raids (and will base the release of that on item level progression data).
Overall, they are at least trying to make the right moves to rectify the concerns of the player base (it won’t satisfy everyone though).
