As the announcement notes, they began servicing the game since September 2020.  As is pretty much standard boiler plate PR for Pmang (when it comes to announcements like this), they noted that after discussions with the developer (Smilegate RPG), they determined that it would be difficult to provide the level of service that would be satisfactory for their player-customers.  This is pretty much a nice way to say that the player base has dwindled to a point where it’s no longer sustainable (to both players as well as Pmang).

This also isn’t surprising to me though.  For one, Japan gaming is still more heavily dominated by console.  It’s been a constant challenge for PC MMO’s outside of domestic created ones (like the ones in the Final Fantasy franchise) to gain traction/have staying power.  Blizzard never released an actual Japanese version for World of Warcraft (Japan was never a major demographic for Blizzard because their own research probably revealed what’s actually popular there across various platforms).  While there is no official Japanese client, people can still play the game (they just need to play on one of the other regions servers).  But because one of the biggest PC MMO’s was never really a big thing in Japan, it didn’t drive that sort of gaming in Japan (plus MMO’s in general, tend to require a lot of dedicated time which doesn’t really jive with a country that has a work culture environment that emphasizes “long hours” even if some of that is just “air”).

Ironically, Diablo II was huge with a specific demographic in Japan (those who were heavily into D&D, rogue-likes, and dungeon crawlers).  And when a Japanese company purchased the rights to the Wizardry franchise, that also turned into a hit with a cult following.  Basically, adventure/fantasy/role playing with really simple elements, are still popular even today because of how old school JRPG’s were designed (the ones that were heavily text based with a lot of decision tree branches in the game play).

Then you have to also factor in mobile which is a natural in the county because it’s a perfect form factor for a population that’s “on the go” with the high utilization of public transportation (due to the ubiquitous nature of the rail system in many major cities).  Then there’s also the type of games that are popular; it runs the gambit like any other country including first person shooters, fighting style titles, visual novels, adventure story and role playing games, etc.  Another consideration are the design/systems in a KMMO.  Generally speaking, Lost Ark doesn’t have certain elements in it that would grab the less than hardcore niche in Japan (where the “kawaii” cute factor comes into play).

There’s a reason why another PC KMMO was popular in Japan for a decade and had staying power until the very end.  I am talking about TERA.  It wasn’t just solely the Elin; it was also the cosmetics.  While in the west, some of this was derided (the connotations of the race being synonymous with a young girl while a lot of the more recent cosmetics and mounts being immersion breaking in nature), the race was seen as cute (and fits in with the kawaii culture in the country).  It’s hard to explain to those who aren’t into the country but look at how things like items/food are depicted (often times a cartoon with a smiley face), or how cities have their own “yura-kyra” or character mascots that represent something of importance to the area.  This visually softer imagery permeates graphic design in the country.  The wacky costumes across all the different races and immersion breaking mounts just added to the whole unserious nature of the game where it just resonated with a niche demographic (and sustained the game until it’s closure in April 2022).

Though the Japan region was the last one to close for Elyon in September 2023 (also from Krafton/Bluehole), it didn’t last long in Japan because while it simply lacked just so many things that would be appealing to a general MMO player, the game was also devoid of that quirky thing that TERA happened to have (it also didn’t that the game play itself was really generic and unmemorable when compared to TERA’s combat).

While Lost Ark has some of this, it just doesn’t come across the same way (the isometric camera doesn’t help any either).  And some of my personal grievances about the game that I’ve noted on this blog, applies to the Japanese server where it’s not going to attract and retain this other demographic who want some RP aspects of the game to come across as more immersive in nature.  Lost Ark does not really do that well plus the time commitment for end game that was required during the months following the launch window phase of the game, isn’t the sort of thing that would resonate with many.  Yes, I know I am generalizing to a degree, but there are these very subtle behaviors that aren’t easy to explain unless you’ve lived/been part of gaming in the country for a few years (and yes, there are also differences between city dwellers, those who live in the suburbs, and those who live in the country in terms of what is consumed for entertainment).

The prior roadmap that highlighted both Pleccia and Voldis, is also responsible for the the bump in botting activity where the higher November average is likely due to the increase in bot accounts (which occurs when there is a demand for gold by those who engage in RMT, a whack-a-mole issue that AGS has been treading water with where these botting operations now have a roadmap for ramping up that activity for the next few months).  While these numbers are still good, it still represents a downward trend over time (click the “All” button on the Steamcharts page to see this where even this recent bump, is barely a blip).  The point is that it highlights a player retention issue (furthermore, the game really isn’t new player friendly; the “catch-up mechanics” are mostly utilized by veteran players when a new class comes out).

The longer-term issue with this retention (over time), is going to continue to be this slow bleeding since this is turning out to be the typical KMMO, one that it is primarily veteran player churn.  I also don’t see Smilegate RPG pivoting away from this fixation with pushing item levels where it even locks out the ability to experience the story quests for newly introduced continents until appropriate catch-up gear is provided (or really casual players who return to see the next part of the story, find they need to engage in the end game raids and item level chase first).  As it currently stands, you need to do raids (even for story progression) to get the mats to craft ancient gear in order to get to 1520 item level (to do the Voldis main story quest).  The power pass that was provided as part of the Souleater class release, only gave relic gear as the catch-up gear (which gets you to 1490 where the expectation is to do the Brelshaza raid in order to craft ancient gear; you gear transfer your +15 relic to this ancient gear in order to continue honing it with the cost reductions from the express pass).

Since I refuse to go down this honing rabbit hole/raids, I know that I would get hard stuck at 1490 once I got to +15 on this relic gear unless I forced pushed a few of those pieces to +18 to get to 1520.  From a gold, fusion material, and honing shard perspective though, that would be costly.  Unless the next power pass gives ancient gear in the catch-up box, even the main story quest progression will be gated behind higher item levels that the more casual players, will find off putting.  But Smilegate RPG/Gold River (temporarily serving in this interim director role) never really cared about catering to this demographic anyway, and the entire Lost Ark development team is in-line with Gold River’s vision (which is this item level treadmill design).  So even though a new director is slated to be selected, the design objectives won’t vary that greatly for a while.   So, it is what it is.

December 20th UPDATE: and this new elixir system (new power creep) really seals the deal for me.  Since it requires ancient gear (that is at least 1525 item level) from the Akkan raid, that at least tells me that a future catch-up box will contain ancient gear from the Brelshaza raid (but you’ll be power limited w/o the elixir imbuement until getting the Akkan ancient gear and doing all of the tasks for elixirs).  Hard pass on all of this.

With gold, if you aren’t lucky with Fate Embers or the Blooming Mokoko event, you need to grind out Abyss Raids (but also need to be aware you’ll also need gold once you hone past +15 on gear).  I’ve yet to get any Fate Embers since this jump-start went live so yes, you are still subject to the standard RNG with them dropping during your runs (and then if they do drop, your chances of it being gold will be low as well).  As for honing, I constantly am running out of destruction stones (weapon) from honing failures (I’m trying to hit 1460) since I’m missing the stronghold buffs.  I blew through most of my fusion mats from honing failures with my armor (only one of them was a one tap going from 1445 to 1460 while every other slot was failure until almost close to pity).  And I need to hit each item level mark for the super express to get the rewards (more stones, more fusion mats, etc).  If I run out of fusion mats, my alternatives are Mari’s Shop (where I only have a few blue crystals or I could get more by swiping) or fishing a lot so that I can craft (but I’ll also need to complete the research and also need gold to craft them).  Thus I know what I need to grind to get there.  But explain to me how that RNG failure aspect is actually fun to a player who is COMPLETELY NEW to the game (and potentially runs into poor RNG).  Newsflash:  it is not.

Since the game does not provide alternative methods to acquire gear past the relic grade (from the hyper express pass; if you don’t use the pass, you can only get epic grade Dimensional gear from tier 3 chaos dungeons; after that, you need to run Abyss dungeons for legendary tier, and then the initial legion raids for relic grade gear), you need to run Brelshaza legion raids to get that ancient gear (to gear transfer your +15/1490 relic gear so that you can lower the honing costs/better success rate until you hit +15 with the ancient gear; at that point, gold is also required).  I mean I get it; this entire design is meant to drive players into a specific content flow.  That is one of the problems with Lost Ark’s item level treadmill/raiding push design though.  It’s their primary focus while mostly ignoring everything else (including “jump starting” at least portions of the horizontal progression to match this compressed vertical gear progression).  Veteran players (what comprises most of these fresh start servers) know about this BUT completely new players are going to drown in learning about all of the horizontal stuff they need to do in order to optimize their characters.

Let me put this a different way using Guild Wars 2 as an example.  If ArenaNet mainly prioritized raiding and fractals and constantly gated gearing/character optimization behind these, that prioritization would DEVALUE the other parts of the game that many players find fun (like it’s exploration, it’s crafting, it’s open world events and metas).  I don’t have to do raiding/fractals in order to enjoy playing Guild Wars 2 (where there are so many other things to do when it comes to PvE, WvW, achievements, renown [even though I don’t really care for systems like this], crafting, exploration).  Guild Wars 2 is far from perfect either (a lot of annoying story quests, annoying mob aggro, ton of bugs/glitches, etc).

My point is that Smilegate RPG/Gold River is overtly focused on legion raids and very little else besides some of the story aspects (which is of average quality IMHO), and that shows in the challenge they are running for the Thaemine legion raid in Korea (the first 10 clears will have their names in a sort of “hall of fame” leaderboard on the KR Lost Ark site and in-game special title/icon; after those clears, the raid will be nerfed, and continue to see nerfs over time) by overtuning it to where KR leviathans are finding it difficult with their mega-swiped characters (lot of teams are disbanding in just the first few days).  I’m talking about the following where they (Gold River and some of the designers) talk about this stuff.

As soon as I watched this (with a english translation transcript), more so has this game dropped down on something I intend to play with any frequency (because they are so narrowly focused on raid challenges and methods to make it easier over time for players to meet those item level requirements).  Anything else of consequence including most of the other systems in the game, are just seen as a means to an end versus trying to make those other systems more fun/engaging for demographics who don’t want to constantly have to be doing this item level grind.

AGS themselves aren’t any help because their community engagement is similarly narrow focused (most of the folks they end up engaging with and getting feedback from, are those who have stuck with the game, and enjoy the raids/game play loop).  Newsflash: A LOT DO NOT ENJOY THIS WHEN IT IS THE PRIMARY FOCAL POINT (it’s hard for those who do enjoy the raids to understand this differing point of view though).  As I noted before, they did put out a player survey on Reddit back in August, but failed to make note of that on their own official site/notifying players via e-mail (I get some of their other marketing stuff, but it is always inconsistent when it comes to updates, and never have I gotten an e-mail asking to voluntarily fill out these surveys).  Thus I only learned of that after the fact.  So when their outreach is lousy like this, it’s no surprise they aren’t going to get a broader amount of feedback (especially from those who have lowered their engagement level with the game but not completely quit/uninstalled).

So after seeing the above, I am more so convinced that the core issue with Lost Ark, will never be addressed because a lot of this is Gold River (he’s a great communicator but his vision for the game is fairly narrowly focused).  The concurrency numbers for this past weekend also spell this out (unsurprising to me because you aren’t going to gain back a lot of casual players who found the game off putting once they got into tier 3).  I noted in my prior postings that they really needed to peak at close to the CCU’s they had back in April (the peak however was only around 56K where it is slowly tapering off) in order to at least show a marked reversal of the declining trend over time.  One month in, I do expect the CCU numbers to cave (and I expect AGS to merge the server into the general pool within the first 3 months).

And again, it is obvious most of it is churn from veterans (existing ones and ones who quit after previous raids; the number of actual new players is not enough to sustain these jump-start servers and does little with addressing the overall retention issue because you cannot half-ass the jump-start aspect by only doing the vertical portion, and mostly ignoring the horizontal portion).  Yes, some folks are enjoying this jump-start since they’ve been able to take part and learn raids they were never able to do before (since it hasn’t reached the gatekeeping stage yet, but expect that to change in the next week or two).  While it is easy to construe these posts as being negative, it is me being realistic regarding why this game has problems with retention (I didn’t expect Lost Ark to become this narrowly focused end game where most everything else is just a devalued means to an end).

(*) Yes, I know Tripod Studio is working on a horizontal revamp that will be released in KR first.  But there aren’t specific details on what that will entail (like it if will be just making them less of a grind/removing portions of it, or actually making some of it fun for even casuals to enjoy/giving this demographic activities to keep them engaged).  The point is that for something like a jump-start, they should’ve also automatically unlocked more of that horizontal content such as various island related content (songs/emotes/souls) and giving your stronghold a more appropriate level/accelerated research that at least gives you the T3 honing buffs from the get go.

NOTE: 0 Fate Embers since the jump-start went live.  Gave their fresh start a shot but it’s just not fun.  I think I am done with Lost Ark for awhile.

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.

This is a “bust the budget” sort of cinematic trailer on par with Blizzard Entertainment ones.  I recall the Legacy of the Void trailer (and how long [~1 year] it took their animators and cinematics team to complete that final rendering).  Of course, hardware and software tech has continued improving since then, but it still takes a lot of money to get something like this through the production pipeline.  And this trailer is 6 minutes long (the Legacy of the Void opening cinematic was half that length).

With that said, the in-game isometric camera REALLY does a disservice to how good the game world (and game play) could’ve been (yet another LOST opportunity) especially taking how important the development of Elgacia was to Lost Ark’s previous director, Keum Kang Seong Hyung (Gold River) (who remains in an acting advisory/PR role until a permanent replacement is found).  But that decision (fixed quarter view isometric camera) was his (and this affects everything including how graphical assets are made, how controls, combat, mob AI, pathing is done, etc).

While doing the summer event, I did finally complete the Elgacia MSQ (on my aeromancer), and wasn’t really impressed by it (the story was a typical “everything is not what it may seem to be” sort of trope where what you thought was right, might not be because of what you’ve learned/what higher level propaganda was pushed onto you).  The limitations of Unreal Engine 3 (despite all of the custom extensions Tripod Studio had to write to make the client present what it did) really shows with the engine generated cutscenes (not to mention the client FPS drops in various parts of the zone).  And then you have the above type of cinematic (meant to generate hype) that is a far cry from what the current game engine can present unless they utilize something like Bink to show a non-game engine rendered clip.

I said it before; Smilegate RPG/Tripod Studio really should invest that money into moving to a modern engine (and as part of that, reconsider the isometric camera or make it an option along with a 3D camera/WASD control; that is doable since Mythos showed that such a design was possible back in the mid-2000’s).  That game started with an isometric camera view with click to move/combat/actions, but after a few quests, you unlocked the ability to change the camera view to 3D where you could move with WASD (see this video near the ending).  Lost Ark’s earlier precursor Devilian was planned to have a similar capability, but that work was never completed (it had both mouse and WASD control, but the camera could not be independently moved while fully zoomed in since that aspect had not been implemented).  But lot of the assets were completed inside/outside for that possibility (like the inside of this house structure).

I used to be a fan of isometric style camera games (especially when I was mainly into ARPG’s), but both TERA and ArcheAge really changed my view when it came to world immersion and exploration (later Guild Wars 2 and Genshin Impact really highlighted how explorable verticality really opened up that part of the game play).  Which is why Lost Ark (as an MMO-ARPG) continually feels lacking and more like an ongoing lost potential (which the above cinematic cannot compensate for).

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).

August Update Patch Notes

I already posted my detailed opinion regarding the roadmap for the remainder of 2023 (which encompasses this update).

The key metric to watch is any concurrency increase (percentage wise) occurring after the update goes live (where it should create a noticeable bump in the following graph).

As I wrote previously, I highly doubt any of this roadmap will have a significant impact on this downwards trend with concurrency.  The game will do fine with its existing base (end game raiders + whales) but isn’t sufficient to retain the more diverse demographic that runs the gambit from ultra-casuals, RPer’s, and those who have only a few hours to play each week.

I’ll be leveling up an aeromancer, but using the express pass on my deathblade main (which is parked at 1475). <- I changed my mind, and will be using the express pass on the aeromancer since the new South Vern pass gave a better gear set to start off from (compared to what my deathblade has).  I don’t expect this update to hold my attention for long though (none of the priors ones have).

August 17 UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, the update did not see a drastic increase in concurrency.

Source: https://steamdb.info/app/1599340/charts/

The peak remained below where the average CCU’s were back in May (and well off the six digits monthly average the game saw during its first year in operation in the west).  The 30 day average will be more telling though (but this already isn’t a good sign as far as attracting interest again from previous players, or getting a lot of completely new players).

Source: https://steamcharts.com/app/1599340

It’s hard to see them reversing this downwards trend even with the roadmap 2023 changes.  Additionally, the fresh start servers will not resolve this.  Matter of fact, it will highlight the games core issue with being unable to attract and retain new players.

If the fresh start population is primarily churn from already established veterans (who decide to try playing on them), this is going to be just like ArcheAge fresh starts (it’s been this veteran player churn for years where the first weeks look good, but then the steep drop off occurs where group content becomes a struggle due to the lack of population).  With Lost Ark, it is worse due to the fact that the marketplace and auction house economies will be barren and stale (the current East/West split for NA highlights this), and most end game activities (all of the raids) will be impacted.

I suppose we will need to wait until they provide more details on these Jump-Start (fresh start) servers especially as it relates to how long they will be running (and how mergers will be handled).  But without a significant bump in existing CCU’s, I don’t see these fresh start servers helping with increasing the new player population, or making a dent in retention.

September will also introduce the Lost Ark version of “fresh start” which they are calling Jump-Start servers (one will be available for each region).  The basic premise seems to be around the new and returning player experience (where everyone playing on these servers, start off from on equal footing).  Unlike other fresh start experiences where you literally have to level and progress all over again, the “jump-start” is appropriate since players will automatically receive a South Vern pass that gets them to item level 1415 from the get go.

This will also work in conjunction with other express events that will provide fast progression with the whole item level chase that is core to the game.  Again, part of this is to try to appeal to new and returning players.  However, the focus is still on the item level treadmill (this server along with the express event, will just allow players to hit item level 1580 without as much pain points/gold costs).  It is basically the same microcosm that is being replicated (just with faster vertical and horizontal progression).

Eventually at some point in the near future (heading into item level 1600+), the players on these jump start servers will run into the same item level grind (because the jump start servers do not address the core design of the game that focuses on end game raiding as the primary content; it does nothing to bring up the other parts of the game like life skilling, NPC rapport, etc).  Basically, I believe their focus group (and however they are getting their feedback) is from a narrow demographic.  And by consistently listening to this group, they will have trouble with player retention.   What is unclear yet is whether or not these are temporary servers (where the characters there will eventually need to transfer/be rolled over to the existing servers).

Two new continents are also on tap; Pleccia (item level 1475) in October and Voldis (item level 1520) in December (again, highlighting how high item level also gates access to new questing/story content).  This formula will always mean the need to utilize express events and power passes as catchup mechanisms (where the original 1-50 main story quest is left to stagnate).  So no, just like with their previous attempts of trying to figure out ways to attract (and then retain) new/returning players, this isn’t going to do it either (IMHO).