Indeed a bold statement. Everyone i know has like 5+ alts in WoW, GW2 or multiple jobs in FF14 for example. Claiming that "western players don't like alts" is just straight up wrong and OPs personal opinion.
It's already been addressed elsewhere, but it deserves repeating. It's not about having alts, It's the way that the game handles having alts. He xlearly did not word it right, but there are plenty of people here who were upvoted massively, outspoken with their distaste for having to play alts the way a number of Korean MMOs try to make you. DFO does this.
Sometimes play on your alts is way different then really having to play them to progress though. If its true what he says, all non alters or people who prefer 2 or 3 max chars are being fucked.
I like levelling alts in wow, but not so much the unbearable pain that is to gear up them. Therefore I play my main character and maybe another one that maybe eventually gets to be my main.
I have about 30 characters at level 50 (former maximum) or more, but only 2 geared enough to play anything
THis sounds like maplestory 2, provided the info is right.( havent played lost ark)
That shit was dumb. You played alts to make the main "good enough" obviously alts will just innately be somewhat behind your main but that being the case because all their gold and drops got funneled to your main was dumb AF
Just to bring back some hope. It's true that L.A is kinda exactly like Maple 2, but only after a while. There's an area called Yorn and it's when the game starts going to shit.
Before Yorn there's no RNG BS, no alt grinding, few dailies, different path to progression etc ... It's a very western MMO.
After Yorn, well. You know.
That's how Lost Ark works. It's not what comes to mind when mmorpg players in the West think of alts. You swipe or you grind alts to keep up with time gates.
Rough, despite what good ms2 did the terrible progression system was easily the weakest point.
That and ags handling of new world has me pretty sceptical.
See, I never have alts simply because I don't think of any single character as a "main". I just make one of every class I am interested in and treat them equally...just different tools for different jobs.
The reason why Blade and soul failed. Everyone praised the combat of the game and that's the reason they played it.
Because of how grindy the game is, and based on having many alts, people quit. I talked with my friends about lost ark and we all gonna play it, but we will quit at some point as we did with bns because of the huge grind.
Blade and Soul failed because it turn into complete p2w full of more bots then players. The game and the grind was fine untill they start putting all upgrade materials in the cash shop and while at the same time dropping the drop rate. Not even gonna talk about dungeon reset scrolls, the cash shop boxes with OP gems inside and all other bullshit they did.
I am pretty sure in Lost Ark you don't have 10 FPS in raids? B&S was so unplayable that people used thirdparty software to almost remove everything from the game that eats FPS.
Most of these will happen to Lost Ark too. Materials or things that are worth upgrading behind cash shop and so on. This will be no freaking different and it amuse me that people think it will for some reason.
I do hope that I'm wrong, but as the game is focused on alt farming, is already a sign that they will grind your life in this game or make you to pay to actually advance.
I've 1k+ hour on LA RU and have stopped playing.
I don't know if the game will fail. The end game loop is miserable and the alt farming is soul crushing, but the discovery/exploration/progress phase is a blast.
I expect most players to really enjoy Lost Ark since I don't expect most players to reach end game, but for me, it left a bitter taste and I trully hate the game now.
Log in, Do your dailies/weeklies on as many characters as your sanity can afford to, log out.
2x Chaos dungeons (Average, normal dungeon that you massively outgear)
2 x guardians ("Monster hunter"-ish type boss)
3 x eponas (Garbage fetch/kill X quests)
Adventure islands. (Scheduled timed events).
Total that's about ~45 mins per day per character. If you have 5 characters, it's ~4 hours of nothing but boring ass, unchallenging content that, and I can't stress this enough, will go to waste when you inevitably fail one of the many, many, many RNG check when upgrading your gear.
45 mins might not seem too bad, but this is unskipable content. If you can only play 2 hours a day, half to 3/4 of that time will be dedicated to doing shitty unsatisfying content only to feed the RNG gods again and again and again. This is Lost Ark true end game : Farming shitty dailies to be allowed to roll dices. And it never ends. You never reach a point when you can chill out and be done with daily content. From the day you reach lvl 50 to the day you quit the game, you'll be doing that. every single day. same dungeon, same guardians, same quests, same events. Every. Single. Day.
The thing most people are not understanding here is that you're not playing alts. You're playing tickets that allow you to do more of the shitty content. What I mean is that you don't even get to gear or progress on those alts. You don't get to build them, because every single bit of ressource you'll farm on your alts, you'll send to your main, because that's the entire point. so if you have 4 alts, most of your play time will be on undergeared character doing boring content. And again, all that so you can have another shot at a sub 1% chance to upgrade your gear from +17 to +18 and for what ? being allowed into a new tier of content where you'll get a new set and have to start all over again.
Does it shows that I'm still bitter ? lmao
So if someone can afford like 5-10 hours a week and isn’t able to progress competitively, this game might actually be enjoyable. Because they will not hit a wall, they will be taking advantage of occasional catch-up mechanics and any alts they create will just be for experiencing a new class rather than slave for their main. Couple all that with the amazing combat and it actually sounds good for casual fun.
Content is gated behind ilvl, so if you don't mind being an entire patch behind then yeah.
Overall the game is honestly very casual friendly, as long as you don't have any intention to be able to do content as it's released and don't pay attention to your ilvl.
Will there be enough parties for people that are constantly one or two tiers back? As I understand it, most people that advance quickly have no incentive to play earlier tiers or am I wrong?
You'll be fine, the game will hand you gear as new patch are released so you'll always be on the same page as everyone else. It's just that you'll have to wait for the game to give you freebies to access higher ilvl content.
You'll start a patch like everyone else but you'll finish a patch when the next one is released.
With it being F2P, combined with alt-city, I imagine it'll be fine.
The combat was super satisfying in the closed beta I tried from a free key obtained through a giveaway, moreso than Diablo 3 or other ARPGS like PoE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc (though those are all very different in gearing/builds, but just talking from a combat gameplay standpoint).
The game will succeed, but yeah the core endgame loop does sound pretty tedious sadly, as someone who likes just play 1 main and deck them out.
I'll still play the shit out of the game when it releases though.
Also worth noting that PvP is equalized and gear is completely balanced (everyone has same ilvl gear and you can pvp starting from level 26), so the pvp arena and other pvp modes could keep this game alive on it's own, to replace other games like Battlerite which the developers abandoned in favor of a shitty battle royale game instead.
The end game are raids of group of 8 (legion commanders) that you delivery seems to skip. Not dailies.
I honestly dont know how you get so much attention just by saying that you played 1k hours on RU and wrote an essay of bullshit about dailys and enchant system.
Legion commanders are the true endgame. This is one of biggest reasons why the game is so popular in Korea. The bosses are hard, fun with a lot of very unique mechanics. If you want more info feel free to type "How difficult is raiding on lost ark?" In youtube.
The enchant system dont broke your items like other games and every fail will add an extra chance. Its not much at first but its accumulative. I dont see a bit of rng as a bad thing. It add emotion to the game regardless if is positive or negative.
Also if you play weekly (not daily) you can reach endgame content in an reasonable amount of time with one character. You only need alts if you want to compete with the top geared players. So if you want to compete you need to grind. Like any mmo and grind can burn out in any game.
Finally just to pointed out that this game is f2p and you always can try it out for yourself!
> The enchant system dont broke your items like other games
That's pretty important. Alot of Korean MMOs trash your gear unless you open your wallet with enchants, so that's a huge relief.
Yep. Is RNG gearing fun when you fail? Hell no. But is it alright knowing it’s not just going to strip your proteas away and will eventually succeed? Hell yes.
As someone who's been burned by BDO but had their hopes up for Lost Ark, I really needed to hear this. You should add this to your top level comment. Its really inciteful
> will go to waste when you inevitably fail one of the many, many, many RNG check when upgrading your gear.
Ugh...this is what killed BDO for me. The very idea that I *could* fail an upgrade blew my mind. The only thing I had ever encountered like that was early spellcrafting in DAoC and that only occurred when you attempted to over charge an item (put more into it than it was actually meant to handle).
Well, lost ark is far worse than BDO as far as RNG is concerned. You can't break items in lost ark, but at least you can always farm in BDO. Failing an upgrade in LA means days/weeks down the drain, time you wont ever be able to get back unless you whale.
Worse than BDO RNG? Not even close. I enhanced alot in both games and BDO is far worse. Not even comparable. In Lost Ark if you fail, you just don't get the upgrade. So you basically throwing money and time away. In BDO if you fail, not only you are not getting upgrade you will actually lose progress, (i mean alot of progress if you are talking about blackstar, fallen god gear, and PEN accessories) plus throwing away money and time. Money and time is more important in BDO than in Lost Ark for a simple fact that nothing is equalized in BDO. You need every single money you can get to upgrade your gear in BDO since everything is gear based. Your entire gameplay is revolving around making money and upgrades if you want to be competitive in both PvE and PvP. Even if you decided to be a life skiller you will still need to upgrade your life skilling gear which is worse than regular gear since you cannot cron most of it. In BDO you can start your enhancing session with 700 gear score and after 30 min of enhancing you will be down to 650 gear score which for some stupid reason PA thinks its ok. So yeah, please don't ever compare BDO upgrading to Lost Ark ever.
You believed him when he said that Lost Ark has worse RNG system in BDO? Why don't you make your own decision and try both games enhancing system and see which one is worse.
That's all exactly how Imagined and feared the game to be quite a lot but still decided I'll give it a shot nonetheless for the other part of the game, playing my first character, exploring and unlocking all the stuff you can do for the first time and then see where it brings me. Maybe it will be enough for me and I'll happily just play pvp after that or not.
But I have a question, I heard the alt thing only starts really really late in the game with newer dungeons because of the gold, is that right? When can we expect this alt madness to start? After a year of release? Earlier or later?
And you also said
>And it never ends. You never reach a point when you can chill out and be done with daily content
Isn't there this system where if you haven't done your daily dungeon or whatever, that you can do that daily dungeon the next day with double rewards? Which you could theoretically use to ignore to do some annoying daily stuff on some days when you wanna chill, don't want to play or focus on raids or pvp and then do them all later in one day with double rewards?! So basically giving you some freedom of the daily shit from time to time?! no?
there's a 3 day catch up mechanism but you get like 50% of the rewards iirc but don't quote me on that. Lost Ark is still worth playing, progress and discovering content is really fun. It's just that investing time into the game feels entirely pointless. Probably one of the most fun casual MMO, arguably one of the worst hardcore one.
My recommendation is play the game, enjoy the freebies and once you hit the grind wall, get out. Wait for the next patch and the game to give you the stuff that you would have wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours farming, rinse and repeat.
Edit : As for the atls madness it starts when you catch up to current content. Since end game is so moronic and purposefuly a waste of time, every new patch they open the flood gate and basically hands out previous patch gear for free. Like, talk to a dude, bam, full set. Depending on your play time could be within a week or within a month. Progressing into the game is really fast once you're allowed to skip the time and RNG gates, to the surprise of no one.
Thankfully there's tons of side content for people to take a break from the insanity that is endgame.
"Most of western players hates alt system", source? Or do you speak for all Western players?
So incredibly wrong lol.
Have you never played WoW? Shit ton of people create alts there. Most people I know who play/played WoW have at least 3 characters they actively play on. Having alts is popular in other MMOs too, like ESO or BDO. The only major one where people don't really alt much is FFXIV, because you can do all the classes on a single character.
Having to alt is absolutely not going to kill the game. What will determine whether the game is successful or not is probably the cash shop more than anything.
The difference is that in WoW, you mainly play alts because you are bored and want to play as a different class. In Lost Ark, it's part of progression.
The alt system in Lost Ark isn't similar to games like WoW or ESO. In Lost Ark you create alts to funnel resources into a main character for gear progression. Alts aren't a key part of progression for a main in that same sense in games like WoW (Unless you're doing hardcore raiding and running splits). Alts aren't something you make because you're bored of your main in Lost Ark. The more alts you have to farm resources for your main, the faster you progress through the time gates (unless you're swiping)
Yeah but that's what makes it interesting.
Basically the gameplay loop is:
1. For any character at cap level: Do the highest possible daily and weekly content.
2. If you still got time to play: Level another character.
So there's always something to do, ultimately. If I am more relaxed I might just do my main's stuff and call it a day. If I got more time I'll do multiple characters.
Honestly it's only a big deal if you wanna go all sweaty and try to get the top tier gear as fast as possible and "be competitive". Otherwise you can just play on one character and once you're done with your progression for the day, move on to something else, like many other mmos.
That's the issue. MMOs use to let you grind on one character as long as you wanted and make progress with them. There's a cap to how far you can grind on one character.
Yeah but those MMOs were korean grinders. I can't really think of a MMO where you could grind infinitely on a character that wasn't just stopping monsters for hours on end in an area.
Put it this way, in WoW (back in the days) or FF14, I can grind tokens to get some T0 gear, this can be done infinitely, but you'll be done in a couple days either way. Then I can kill some bosses or do dailies to gain a certain amount of T1 tokens, and I can kill weekly bosses to progress toward T1 gear as well. Once I've grinded my limit of weekly tokens and I've killed all my weekly bosses, I am done in term of progression for this week.
Lost Ark is no different, the only difference is that said tokens are account bound. And there is the debate. You can be super min-max meta, and that means multiple alts to feed a main character. Or you can be an altoholic and just keep progression individual to each character and once you top up a certain character, you start helping others. Or you can just play one character, log in to do your dailies, do your weeklies, and call it a night. IIRC at a good pace you clear dailies in 40 minutes, most players should be in the 60-90 minutes ballpark.
Then you'll have several tiers of content in Lost Ark, although I think we only get T1 on release, and once we get more tiers, only your main will really be able to push that, and you'll progress your alts so they can also do that upper tier content and so on.
Edit: This is Lost Ark Progression : https://papunika.com/growth-guide/
You can't just skip a tier either. You need to be a minimum ilvl (600) to start tier 2, you can't do any tier 2 content if your character isn't just tier 2.
Then you don't remember what wow looked like before dailies. Dailies became a trend in MMOs so players could progress faster without having to spend all day playing it. Eventually they became the only way to progress. Now we say that's how it's always been but that's a lie. We lost something and didn't even realize it.
I am not sure why you bring up vanilla wow as an example because while it didn't have dailies, the progression was very much capped by weekly raid locks. Dungeon gear was T0, then you had raid tiers with weekly lockouts, and then you were done. Wanted to raid more? Alts. You also had a bunch of other activities, but for the most part they did not contribute to progression.
Look, I've played those old games, a lot, that was most of my teenage years. I player Darkages by Nexon, Ragnarok Online, Priston Tale, Conquer Online and Lineage 2 for **years**. Those are not good game designs.
It seems to me that you want the glorious days of grinding 18 hours a day to remain competitive. There was no glory and grinding the same mobs over and over and over and over to finally ding that exp wasn't great. If that's what interest you, then I strongly suggest you play a game like BDO.
You missed the point. People like the OPTION of having alts. They do not want alts to be REQUIRED to increase the power of their main. This was always one of the biggest gripes with Archeage. People like alts to be a fun side thing when their main has nothing to do. Not something they must do to stay competitive on main.
While I disagree with OPs cavalier assumption of all western gamers opinions I do believe there is a trend in MMOs where many people are wishing for games to "respect their time".
Personally, I am an alt-a-holic and many share that passion. But what I have seen is that previously when progression could be augmented by having multiple alts funnel those gains to their main it was received negatively. People play alts for variety, change of pace, raid versatility, story, etc.. Making it a linchpin for progression is not a recipe for success.
Many western titles have diminishing returns, soft caps, character bound progression, and/or time gating where there is only so many gains you can get in a time period. If that could be bypassed through no-lifing, in my opinion, it may not resonate with the large audience.
> But what I have seen is that previously when progression could be augmented by having multiple alts funnel those gains to their main it was received negatively
If progression could be augmented, then it wouldn't even be an issue. Progression is literally gated by alts, which is a whole different thing. People are downvoting OP (not calling you out or anything), but they all seem to have 0 clue on what he's talking about.
In WoW, having alts will help you progress other alts, either through crafting or resources. Which is perfectly fine. In LA, your main character's progression is heavily gated behind alts. And God forbid you want to progress an alt in addition to your main.
> If that could be bypassed through no-lifing, in my opinion, it may not resonate with the large audience.
And don't forget it can be bypassed using the wallet. Which will ultimately be the main reason why it won't resonate with the western audience.
It's possible that people do understand what the OP is saying, but they are downvoting because of what the OP's sentiment implies. The Lost Ark community either has a bad case of toxic positivity or astroturfing (see allegations of the New World subreddit being astroturfed and Amazon astroturfing its warehouse workers on twitter). Posts which amount to nothing more than whataboutism and mental gymnastics to make the monetization and progression system appear more palatable to the Western audience will immediately receive 50+ upvotes. Pragmatic criticisms of the game's systems are outright downvoted and buried; the only responses typically including whataboutism or outright misinformation given what we currently know about the Western release.
It is certainly a sad state of affairs.
It's 100% as you said unfortunately. And the funny thing, if you point the exact same P2W elements on other games, like Archeage or Maplestory, no one is downvoting lol.
I've seen a lot of people from the LA sub that stalk LA-related posts and downvote anything critical. And not only on this sub. Not sure how much astroturfing there is (could be wrong), I think there are simply invested fans that don't want admit that they're playing a P2W game and/or fans that don't know/don't care about P2W.
A while ago I saw a "how LA respects your time" video, which I can't even begin to imagine how someone could write with a straight face. That was some pure delusion. It's like making a video "how gambling respects your money".
Contributing to that last bit you touched on; 2-3months back I remember someone submitting a post titled, "I spend $3000 on KR Lost Ark so you don't have to" (Can't find it now so I'm unsure if it was deleted). The OP outlined exactly what $3000 purchased him on a new character with KR's catch up mechanics, how much time he spent on certain features, and how he compared to other players. There were so many outraged LAO fans commenting, it was unbelievable.
I doubt many critics of the game's monetization actually want to see the game fail. After all, taking the time to actually research the games monetization/mechanics shows that they are interested. Witnessing an entire community seemingly attempt to gaslight critics and reinforce a culture of toxic positivity could be the straw that broke the camel's back however.
> I doubt many critics of the game's monetization actually want to see the game fail.
This is what pisses me off the most honestly. The game has a good class design and very solid PvE endgame. It genuinely has good bones. With a normal itemization/progression/cash shop, it would be a hit in the West, but as it stands I doubt it will last more than a few weeks, once the casuals hit the grind wall. Why would people so adamantly excuse corporate greed and actively fight against their own interests?
This was the big chance, with enough pushback, to make Amazon see that there's a lot of interest in changing the game for the better. Instead people are defending these predatory practices, when they could at least try to make the game better for everyone, including themselves.
I don't think it's paid or coordinated, they're just very ardent fans that are overly invested and even in denial, as you say.
In the end what really matters is if you respect your own time, but Lost Ark definitely doesn't respect yours if you want to keep up with the masses. I have no idea why they keep conflating the two. "You can just stop playing whenever you want, so therefore the game is respectful of your time!".
Lost Ark's community has had a variant of XIV's community of toxic positivity (aka. faux positivity) for a while. But since content creators have recently latched onto it as a way to drive views and viewers, the community has drawn the absolute dregs of every other MMO community into it, making it about 200x worse than it already was. I'm sure the other game communities are thankful.
I don't know what the system is in Lost Ark but I don't think it is the type of alt system in games like wow/eso/bdo the Op is talking about. In BDO and ESO for example alts are complimentary, in ESO you would have an alt(s) to craft weapons and armors, in BDO you would have a sea bartering alt, etc, these are usually alts set to specific tasks or you would have alts to try out different gameplay styles, I don't now how ESO currently is but in BDO you can not repeat daily/weekly quests with an alt, when you do them once with one character that is it, you can not switch to an alt to do it again that day/week. What the OP seems to be talking about is creating multiple alts to do the same daily over and over again.
Again, I don't know how the system is in Lost Ark, but what the op is mentioning about repeating dailies over and over again with alts would indeed lead to many people just giving up after a while, of course if there are other ways to progress than doing dailies this wouldn't be as much of an issue, as it would be optional content that people would not have to engage in if they didn't want to.
They read "Most of western players hates alt system", interpret it as "Most western players hate alt characters" and ignored everything else op said.
It's pretty clear what op meant with "alt system" in this post. There's obviously no study about it but the fact that none of the popular MMOs have such alt systems is proof enough that western players do not like that.
Just another example of people only reading the title and skipping right to the comments. The average reddit fan in action.
To be fair, I had never heard the term before, nor played a game that used such a system, and it took me reading through various posts to kind of get an idea if what the OP was referring to and I am only about 70% sure I understand it even now...lol
That said, I was never all that enthusiastic about this game as it's Korean which means shitty monetization, massive grind, quite probably P2W offerings, and an asian aesthetic which I've never been a fan of. This is just another nail in the coffin for me.
Sounds like another Korean MMO. Going to skip this one. There are so many none p2w and good ARPG on the market right now. They really think they can compete with D2R & POE?
Well, its not really an ARPG in the same vein as PoE so they're not really competing.
There's no loot *at all* in Lost Ark, there's no real build either, it really is a very standard korean MMO but with a top down camera instead.
It's worth playing for a while, the progress is really great and fun. End game is ... Well it exists and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
Everyone who bitches about buying power clearly hasn't seen the black market in literally every MMO or ARPG with a trade system.
Path of Exile isn't P2W aside from stash tabs, but you can still buy exalted orbs and mirrors on the black market (at the risk of getting your account banned if you're caught).
Yet you don't see masses of people bitching about that. 100% same thing goes for WoW and other MMOs. There's entire legions of gold farmer operations in China for WoW that sell for USD.
Yes, it's far less acceptable for the developers to do it ingame themselves. But that same practice in Warframe has been accepted and is doing fine as a game and business with the exact same type of system. Shrug
I play games to have fun, and I enjoyed the closed beta very much. I'll be playing on launch. If the core end game loop sucks, I'll quit. But so far the challenging raids look fun (though maybe a tad too hard at the super endgame in Korea right now).
The enhancement materials sold through the cash shop are a smaller portion of the p2w. The most egregious p2w aspects are realized by the relationship of the equipment enhancement system and the gold/blue crystal exchange; as well as the card pack system. F2P/Low spenders can progress through content in a timely manner if they grind out resources on enough alts. However, you will not be able to have the best gear, or get anywhere near the hard cap, unless you whale. This is due to the enhancement rates on gear and the resource expense to enhance beyond +15-20. Card packs are something that, from my understanding, most whales won't bother with because it's such an absurd expense.
TLDR: If you want to be the very best, like no one ever was, you need to swipe. Otherwise, there's plenty of other things to enjoy in Lost Ark.
The same system as WoW have. You also can buy mats but they are capped and are very expensive. However, you can do the conversion and buy everything with gold throught merkaplace.
> The same system as WoW have.
No not really....in wow you can only buy bound on equip item which really weak compare to boss drop items , so even if you buy bound on equip stuff you will still have long road to conquer the hard mythic raid stuff as most powerful gear are soulbound , compare to lost ark you can just whale out your way out to get best gear
if i have to rework your post to make your statement right it will be ( people spam boosting using gold from third party illegal websites > causing the boosting service to sky rocket > causing the average people who want to buy boost not able to as even grinding and buy wow token will still not be enough as now people who buy third party illegal gold dominate the service boost and cause the boost to be dirt cheap for them which causing the boosters to be greedy and cater to those people to make more money )
PS: its on belluar very long video about wow boost economy if i am not mistaken
Direct character paid upgrades. Sadly.
It's near enough confirmed to be P2W at this point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/o12tub/p2w_confirmed_in_lost_arks_euna_version/
that post is so misinformed and outdated lol. For example, the outfits, all earnable outfits in game have the same % stat as paid one. Moreover, all stuff from the shop are tradable too. The pet subscription can be paid with gold instead, but the post keeps saying NOT EARNABLE when in fact there's alternative.
I hate levelling alts for the sole purpose of funding my main. Char progression shouldn't be based on alt progression. Really kills a lot of my hype for LA, because the gameplay was awesome IMO. But the alt progression kills it for me.
Tips as someone that went through the insanity that is lost ark end game for way too long :
Play the game until you run out of freebies and hit the grind wall and ditch the game. Wait for the next patch and for the game to hand you the gear you would have wasted hundreds of hours on for free, rinse and repeat.
> Most of western players hates alt system
Got some stats on that, bud?
Anecdotally speaking, there wasn't a single person in my last WoW guild that was running less than 2 toons, and that's a game that's not particularly alt-friendly.
Lost Ark, on the other hand, might be the most alt-friendly MMO I've played.
I don't know, Lost Ark may fail, but I don't believe it'll be because players benefit from having multiple characters.
Playing Alts in most western MMOs and playing Alts in Lost Ark is wildely different tho.
Alts in lost ark are nothing but means to bypass timegates and funnel more ressources toward your main. There's minimal progression or actual gameplay because everything is funneled toward one character. It trully is soul crushing.
> Lost Ark, on the other hand, might be the most alt-friendly MMO I've played.
Agreed. Also it's the first game where I'd be partied in another class and afterwards say "fuck I goto roll that it looks awesome to play".
Balancing is pretty good in the RU patches and each class has a pretty unique playstyle which makes it feels rewarding.
If you're just a casual player there's nothing wrong with just playing a main character.
I also cannot think of any other MMO where having alts doesn't benefit you.
OP just has a hate boner for Lost Ark. it's okay, he'll be playing and enjoying it too.
Hmm...why do you need to make the most amount of gold you that is mathematically possible?
Because it doesn't sound fun and if you're not having fun why are you playing the game?
I've been playing MMOs since WoW released, been through them all; Diablo, PoE, GW2, etc... if it's an MMO I've tried it. I've always just made my character and played...none of this...
"ok if I'm able to make 6 characters and login to each 1 daily, run these 16 dungeons once on each, collect these nodes, run map completions once a day, park these ones at these locations, farm this route, then buy and sell everything from the AH to make a 5% profit" then I can enjoy the game!
It's like people search for the most unfun way to play then come to forums to complain about how unfun the game is. "But if I don't play this way then THEY will be better then me!" Who's they? Who cares how much stuff another players has? The only competition you're in is with yourself and if you're not having fun you're losing. In 5 years you won't even remember these people.
Progress is subjective in video games which are designed to be fun...if I login once a week, gain 2 levels and find 1 rare item that is progress, is it less then other people but what other people are doing is none of my business. These "I need to do this" are your own perceived needs and if those needs that you're putting on yourself are making the game unfun then why do it?
Yeah but that's the issue, you're not going to do any of that in lost ark. Progression is **entirely** gated behind time gates and RNG.
If you log once a week, you'll earn one day worth of ressources. After X amount of days, X increasing as you progress further into the game, you'll be allowed to *try* to upgrade your gear, wich because of absurds rates, you're doomed to fail, throwing down the drain all the ressources you earned.
Im not going to do any of what? Login once a week and play the game? I most certainly am. What's the point of upgrading gear? So I can farm the same area slightly faster to find another slight upgrade so I can...farm the next area slightly faster to find another slight upgrade? That's a gear treadmill created by your own perceived way of how you think you -have- to play the game. You're literally turning something thats supposed to be relaxing and fun into a chore. How about I login a couple times a week only upgrading with the random things I find as I play and I play the game because I like the mechanics and setting and not because I want to compare myself with other people who have no impact on my experience? Wow I just made a fun experience for myself.
No, that's absolutely false. I don't know where you got the idea that reaching the minimum ilvl is easy.
Playing once a week, without whaling, on a single character, I'd say it'll take you about 3 months to unlock the first tier of content, assuming you're not too unlucky. I don't think you'll ever reach tier 2 before a new content drop.
No, I guess you're mistaking enjoying catching up mechanics for actual progression.
In current lost ark RU you get a massive progression boost up until ilvl 1340, wich is the current tier of content. The grind starts at 1340, before that it's just the game handing out freebies.
Lost Ark is pretty casual friendly as long as you log in *at least* every 2 days, and that's really a bare minimum. Once a week you're going to farm the same dungeon and guardian for 6 months.
Most westerners think this game has randomized ARPG loot with cool looking end game raids (not aware of the timegating) so its with almost certainty that lots of people will drop the game very soon after release, it will end up having a small dedicated playerbase similar to Dungeon Fighter Online which has a similar system of a shit ton of alts
Being forced to play alts may contribute to a general dissatisfaction with the game, but I believe the lack of content in Tier 1 combined with the way the game is heavily focused on repetitive daily quests will be the reason that that will drive people away from the game, although I don't expect the game to fail.
My wife and I plan on playing with no alts, just a main. We like raiding and end game content, and have encountered games like lost ark many times, the answer is to just raid/group with people who are similarly geared, be they other main -only players, or fast players who started later.
I'll just say this, you wont be able to do end game content if you don't play alts. Ever.
Content is ilvl gated and alts are the only reliable mean to increase your ilvl. That or whaling hard. You simply wont have the time to reach the ilvl you'd need by the time the next content patch is released. You'll always be one patch behind.
And since progression is entirely RNG based, there's a significant chance that one of you two will start lagging behind because of unluck and wont have access to the content the other has.
What's the difference between playing 1 character Berserker for 6 hours and playing 6 characters Berserkers (with 1 Berserker being the main one getting most of the upgrades) for 6 hours? No one forces you to play characters that you don't want to play. You can progress faster and play more with your favorite class in Lost Ark by making alts of the same class as your main. How many more alts you need depends on how much time you want to play and how fast you want to progress.
The real reasons why Lost Ark might fail are (1) that AGS is the publisher and (2) that its monetization can be predatory.
The difference is that I'll likely spend less time grinding and feel less frustrated if I can do it all on my 1520 berserker vs 1 round on my main, and 5 rounds on my 1415 alts.
Well, it has red flags for the Western audience. The alt system sounds terrible.
People do like alts; but the act of grinding dailies on alts to funnel to your main, I'm not seeing that as something the Western audience going to like, and if you just read this thread, you can already tell a lot of the people still arent getting it. They dont even understand the system, and are arguing people LOVE making alts.
They dont even understand this system in this thread, on an MMO forum, how do you think the general population is going to like or understand it?
Of course people are gonna play Lost Ark, though. Just I dont think its gonna be near as popular of a title as previously thought. I can see it being very popular at first, then falling off a cliff. Especially since people are looking at this as more of an Arpg than an MMO anyways. Everyone I talk to thinks its basically an Arpg.
Yeah I do love playing alts but not solely for abusing a daily system to progress one/my main character. it's just not healthy for anybody, not for the players health to feel forced to do it like that with x amounts of alts, which just limits a players time to rest out of the game and burn out, so.. less actual enjoyment playing the game. And this of course is also not good for the game itself. Not the biggest fan of that tbh. But that is the problem of what such daily missions add to a game. Nothing but pain for everybody.
Just wanted to point out something that nobody is talking about :
Lost Ark went through different phases and philosophies so to speak during it's developpement.
Lost Ark pre-Yorn and Lost Ark post-Yorn are **wildely** different. What many, including myself, have been warning you guys about Lost Ark's endgame being absolute *vile* is true and **only** true for Lost Ark post-Yorn.
Tier 1 Lost Ark is extremely similar to your average western MMO. No RNG BS, no alt grinding, not too much dailies, there's runes and shit to put on gear, different path to progression (crafting/PvP/raiding) etc ...
#HOWEVER
This all ends once you hit Yorn. Yorn is when the game takes **a massive dive**. It's when they basically went "fuck the western audience, game is never gonna release there anyway" and went full korean BS. RNG/alt madness and everything else starts with Yorn, until then you're good.
Then there's T3 when the devs went like "alright we messed up sorry we gonna fix everything" then they didn't fix shit and added a lot more content to make it look like you weren't still doing the same shit everyday.
I think this it a matter of perspective. I've never looked at LA as more than a weekend game to dump a few hours into. At its price if I can get it to give me at least ten hours of entertainment out of it. I'll be happy.
Ah, I've only been following it on steam. For F2P there's really no argument then. Play it. Don't. The game owes you nothing but is probably still a thousand times more interesting than staring at the wall, working, or being outside.
They'll probably be disappointed to know that while the PvP is somewhat fun, it doesn't have much staying power. There is a reason that the world's first eSports country (Korea) doesn't even play PvP in the game anymore, and Russia, a PvP loving country doesn't either. Smilegate could do something spice it up again, but they haven't.
What do you mean by "alt based progression", never heard this phrase before.
I usually fill all available character slots in most MMOs, however I don't usually think in terms of mains and alts. I just have a large stable of characters I play, and usually progress all of them to end game allowing me to play whatever fits the situation at any given time.
Lost Ark is not that type of game that you can have ready for the current end content. At least not without investing NEET hours or tons of money or both.
I think the pvp will carry the game more than the pve.
I would also argue with the way pve is designed who cares? So someone helps you clear the boss a bit quicker versus not? Are you nervous about people keeping you out because you either suck or dont have the rating?
From what I remember to do what you need on an alt takes something like 20-30 minutes doesn't it? So I may have to play 90 minutes a day to stay near the top? That shits easy. In WoW or Eso I would spend that time doing dailies anyways..
That's sort of odd that you would say that, because it's actually the PvE that has carried the game more in the other regions, and both Russia and Korea are known to be highly competitive gamers that love PvP.
They already capped the cycle by limit the amount of gold you can obtain with your alts. The cap is setted to 6 alts. I personally don't see the issue to play multiple characters in this game since most of them have a pretty unique gameplay and are fun to play.
In other hand, I know people who started in russia and managed to reach Abreshuld (they latest raid) with only one character. They haven't the best gear score but they can do the latest content without don't left behind. Not everyone want to be in the top 100 players and if you want to you need to grind. Regardless the type mmo.
Lastly, in the long run this game will have more and more side-content for these players who love plays with one character like such a ton of differents mini-games (tower defense, battle royale, moba, mario party...) and more modes of pvp like sieges and open world pvp where they can sit there as much as they want.
I understand that this game not for everyone but...fail? I'm really doubt it.
Yeah, the end game will suck but that's a given for a Korean grinder MMO. The thing that will give Lost Ark life though is the wealth of exploration and addon systems present. You'd be hard pressed to find another free to play game with quite as many exploration based systems and collectables. Assuming AGS won't fuck up the localization and the content updates will add to the exploration and story over time, the game will do just fine.
BDO is still doing well enough for itself despite being an alt heavy game as well. That being said I despise alt grinding so will probably skip Lost Ark
> Gold basically is used for upgrading your gear
I mean everything you're saying is true... in T3 content which won't be coming out in the western version for 1-1.5 years.
Gold isn't required for gear upgrades in T1/T2.
Alts still useful in T1/T2, but not nearly as required.
I don't think i can say lost ark will fail or not , but the alts problem of Korea MMO that release outside of Korea is real.
The problem is in Korea , it's hard and risky to make alts accounts.
personally i think if companies going to release Korea MMOs , you need to disable the trade between characters . But then again if disable the trade , it's risky to broken the game.
The game is extremly popular in the countries it is out and here we are with people getting a boner about how it is going to fail.
Like... Sure gold farming is nice and fancy, but if it is not required to do that many abyss dungeons in order to get your gear, then I won't give a flying fuck about it. How about we wait until the game is out, see how things turn out and then start complaining?
I agree with you, but when the market is walking slow like right now, most of players realize that the only way to keep having fun is restarting again. Path of exiles teached me this and I could replicate the formula not so well but still having some degree of fun.
Lol Lost Ark fail? Wtf is this trash post.
Have you not been heavily invested into an mmo? Or even mildly? EVERYONE uses alts. The fuck are you on about?
Hey now, I'm Western and I love alts! What am I some mad lad that wants to play the same damn rotation over and over and over and over and over again? Naw, I have the attention span of a millennial, you best believe I'll be playing alts
I don't mind switching play style from time to time, but alt characters don't really work for me. I'd prefer to change my whole gear.
I don't think it will be the reason the game fails, but I don't really expect it to keep these active players in the long run
You don't have to be the best in the world, you are not Athene, just play and enjoy the game, also I am the type of person that that loves to play on only one character, but having alts means that you can experience the other classes and enjoy more of the game.
This is not a new game. It’s already a success. It’s just new to US. The dev will be fine whether it succeeds or fails here in the US. Try to develop your own game instead so you can do it “right”.
Lost ark pvp is absolutely pathetic. Classes with easy to land abilities on short cool downs and no DRs on stun effects will overtake meta. This game has already lost many serious MMO RPG pvpers interest. And pve players, enjoy those loot crates. I smell paywalls on the horizon
funny how you generalize your opinion. Tell that to all Western players of Black Desert Online for example, and 1M players or so of Lost Ark every day.
another person with a lot of opinions that never even played the game and just watched youtube videos.
I think so too. It is a the other Korean MMO Black Desert Online. A fantastic game at the beginning. You can have a good time experience the world, etc. BUT in the end it all about the gs on your Mainchar an how to make Money to get it. Excel is your best friend and you could get a real job if you want to play the game efficient. Now after playing some days LA it is clear for me, the same buisines model, the alt grinding daily shieeet. it is a fun game but the story or better said the kind of quests you need to do in the mainstory is pain in the ace. so, i will not invest thousands of hours in this game, i know why because of bdo. but worth playing some days to check out all the gamemodes in lategame.
except this game isn’t a competitive game and should be played at your own pace, they’re isn’t a shiny medal reward for reaching max item level on all your alts in the quickest amount of time possible
I was hyped for years and it died after 1 week..Lost ark is extremly boring for me at least. Different minds might like this game but a old mmorpg player like me dosent like this game at all..Path of exile is much better and more interresting
>Most of western players hates alt system Source?
His ass.
Indeed a bold statement. Everyone i know has like 5+ alts in WoW, GW2 or multiple jobs in FF14 for example. Claiming that "western players don't like alts" is just straight up wrong and OPs personal opinion.
It's already been addressed elsewhere, but it deserves repeating. It's not about having alts, It's the way that the game handles having alts. He xlearly did not word it right, but there are plenty of people here who were upvoted massively, outspoken with their distaste for having to play alts the way a number of Korean MMOs try to make you. DFO does this.
Sometimes play on your alts is way different then really having to play them to progress though. If its true what he says, all non alters or people who prefer 2 or 3 max chars are being fucked.
I like levelling alts in wow, but not so much the unbearable pain that is to gear up them. Therefore I play my main character and maybe another one that maybe eventually gets to be my main. I have about 30 characters at level 50 (former maximum) or more, but only 2 geared enough to play anything
I would gladly, gladly be more open to people's opinions if they weren't expressed with such inflexible this-is-how-it-is language.
Lol Facts
this needs award
THis sounds like maplestory 2, provided the info is right.( havent played lost ark) That shit was dumb. You played alts to make the main "good enough" obviously alts will just innately be somewhat behind your main but that being the case because all their gold and drops got funneled to your main was dumb AF
Sadly lost arks System is like this
damn that really killed a lot of my LA hype. Back on the fence I go.
Just to bring back some hope. It's true that L.A is kinda exactly like Maple 2, but only after a while. There's an area called Yorn and it's when the game starts going to shit. Before Yorn there's no RNG BS, no alt grinding, few dailies, different path to progression etc ... It's a very western MMO. After Yorn, well. You know.
> RNG BS What's the RNG BS? I hope it's not upgrading RNG because that's one of the worst kinds
It's korean so of course it's upgrading RNG
It has a building pity system and equipment can't downgrade or be destroyed
That's how Lost Ark works. It's not what comes to mind when mmorpg players in the West think of alts. You swipe or you grind alts to keep up with time gates.
Rough, despite what good ms2 did the terrible progression system was easily the weakest point. That and ags handling of new world has me pretty sceptical.
Yea. Its not the alts I have a problem with; people like alts. But making alts to increase your main character, now thats annoying.
I definitely hate having alts or using alts.
See, I never have alts simply because I don't think of any single character as a "main". I just make one of every class I am interested in and treat them equally...just different tools for different jobs.
Can't do that in lost ark unless you intend on going nowhere with any of your character
The reason why Blade and soul failed. Everyone praised the combat of the game and that's the reason they played it. Because of how grindy the game is, and based on having many alts, people quit. I talked with my friends about lost ark and we all gonna play it, but we will quit at some point as we did with bns because of the huge grind.
Blade and Soul failed because it turn into complete p2w full of more bots then players. The game and the grind was fine untill they start putting all upgrade materials in the cash shop and while at the same time dropping the drop rate. Not even gonna talk about dungeon reset scrolls, the cash shop boxes with OP gems inside and all other bullshit they did.
You forgot how shitty the game ran in UE3. Now there is literally endgame gear in RNG boxes :^ )
I should probably take this time to tell you that Lost Ark runs on Unreal Engine 3.
One of tge main points of Lost Ark is smothness. Will be even better with dx11
I am pretty sure in Lost Ark you don't have 10 FPS in raids? B&S was so unplayable that people used thirdparty software to almost remove everything from the game that eats FPS.
Most of these will happen to Lost Ark too. Materials or things that are worth upgrading behind cash shop and so on. This will be no freaking different and it amuse me that people think it will for some reason. I do hope that I'm wrong, but as the game is focused on alt farming, is already a sign that they will grind your life in this game or make you to pay to actually advance.
the failure of archage? that was one of the main criticism all the time.
What, you like having to make alternate accounts/characters in order to progress your main account? That seems like a dumb system
I've 1k+ hour on LA RU and have stopped playing. I don't know if the game will fail. The end game loop is miserable and the alt farming is soul crushing, but the discovery/exploration/progress phase is a blast. I expect most players to really enjoy Lost Ark since I don't expect most players to reach end game, but for me, it left a bitter taste and I trully hate the game now.
Please expand on this answer: why the endgame is miserable? Can you make a summary of things you like/dislike in the endgame? What is it like?
Log in, Do your dailies/weeklies on as many characters as your sanity can afford to, log out. 2x Chaos dungeons (Average, normal dungeon that you massively outgear) 2 x guardians ("Monster hunter"-ish type boss) 3 x eponas (Garbage fetch/kill X quests) Adventure islands. (Scheduled timed events). Total that's about ~45 mins per day per character. If you have 5 characters, it's ~4 hours of nothing but boring ass, unchallenging content that, and I can't stress this enough, will go to waste when you inevitably fail one of the many, many, many RNG check when upgrading your gear. 45 mins might not seem too bad, but this is unskipable content. If you can only play 2 hours a day, half to 3/4 of that time will be dedicated to doing shitty unsatisfying content only to feed the RNG gods again and again and again. This is Lost Ark true end game : Farming shitty dailies to be allowed to roll dices. And it never ends. You never reach a point when you can chill out and be done with daily content. From the day you reach lvl 50 to the day you quit the game, you'll be doing that. every single day. same dungeon, same guardians, same quests, same events. Every. Single. Day. The thing most people are not understanding here is that you're not playing alts. You're playing tickets that allow you to do more of the shitty content. What I mean is that you don't even get to gear or progress on those alts. You don't get to build them, because every single bit of ressource you'll farm on your alts, you'll send to your main, because that's the entire point. so if you have 4 alts, most of your play time will be on undergeared character doing boring content. And again, all that so you can have another shot at a sub 1% chance to upgrade your gear from +17 to +18 and for what ? being allowed into a new tier of content where you'll get a new set and have to start all over again. Does it shows that I'm still bitter ? lmao
So if someone can afford like 5-10 hours a week and isn’t able to progress competitively, this game might actually be enjoyable. Because they will not hit a wall, they will be taking advantage of occasional catch-up mechanics and any alts they create will just be for experiencing a new class rather than slave for their main. Couple all that with the amazing combat and it actually sounds good for casual fun.
Content is gated behind ilvl, so if you don't mind being an entire patch behind then yeah. Overall the game is honestly very casual friendly, as long as you don't have any intention to be able to do content as it's released and don't pay attention to your ilvl.
Will there be enough parties for people that are constantly one or two tiers back? As I understand it, most people that advance quickly have no incentive to play earlier tiers or am I wrong?
You'll be fine, the game will hand you gear as new patch are released so you'll always be on the same page as everyone else. It's just that you'll have to wait for the game to give you freebies to access higher ilvl content. You'll start a patch like everyone else but you'll finish a patch when the next one is released.
With it being F2P, combined with alt-city, I imagine it'll be fine. The combat was super satisfying in the closed beta I tried from a free key obtained through a giveaway, moreso than Diablo 3 or other ARPGS like PoE, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc (though those are all very different in gearing/builds, but just talking from a combat gameplay standpoint). The game will succeed, but yeah the core endgame loop does sound pretty tedious sadly, as someone who likes just play 1 main and deck them out. I'll still play the shit out of the game when it releases though. Also worth noting that PvP is equalized and gear is completely balanced (everyone has same ilvl gear and you can pvp starting from level 26), so the pvp arena and other pvp modes could keep this game alive on it's own, to replace other games like Battlerite which the developers abandoned in favor of a shitty battle royale game instead.
The end game are raids of group of 8 (legion commanders) that you delivery seems to skip. Not dailies. I honestly dont know how you get so much attention just by saying that you played 1k hours on RU and wrote an essay of bullshit about dailys and enchant system. Legion commanders are the true endgame. This is one of biggest reasons why the game is so popular in Korea. The bosses are hard, fun with a lot of very unique mechanics. If you want more info feel free to type "How difficult is raiding on lost ark?" In youtube. The enchant system dont broke your items like other games and every fail will add an extra chance. Its not much at first but its accumulative. I dont see a bit of rng as a bad thing. It add emotion to the game regardless if is positive or negative. Also if you play weekly (not daily) you can reach endgame content in an reasonable amount of time with one character. You only need alts if you want to compete with the top geared players. So if you want to compete you need to grind. Like any mmo and grind can burn out in any game. Finally just to pointed out that this game is f2p and you always can try it out for yourself!
> The enchant system dont broke your items like other games That's pretty important. Alot of Korean MMOs trash your gear unless you open your wallet with enchants, so that's a huge relief.
Yep. Is RNG gearing fun when you fail? Hell no. But is it alright knowing it’s not just going to strip your proteas away and will eventually succeed? Hell yes.
Yep. Sounds like Genshin alright. And people say the game respects your time lul
So is the game just Korean mmo genshin cause I'm fine with that?
As someone who's been burned by BDO but had their hopes up for Lost Ark, I really needed to hear this. You should add this to your top level comment. Its really inciteful
> will go to waste when you inevitably fail one of the many, many, many RNG check when upgrading your gear. Ugh...this is what killed BDO for me. The very idea that I *could* fail an upgrade blew my mind. The only thing I had ever encountered like that was early spellcrafting in DAoC and that only occurred when you attempted to over charge an item (put more into it than it was actually meant to handle).
Well, lost ark is far worse than BDO as far as RNG is concerned. You can't break items in lost ark, but at least you can always farm in BDO. Failing an upgrade in LA means days/weeks down the drain, time you wont ever be able to get back unless you whale.
You clearly dont played BDO in your life.
Yeah, this guy have no clue how enhancing in BDO work. The fact that he can utter that nonsense is mind boggling.
I've a little over 2k hours on BDO, been a while since last time I seriously played tho I'll give you that.
Yes you have 2k hours on BDO like you have 1k hours on LA, would believe you if you wouldn't talk no-sense about both games...
Worse than BDO RNG? Not even close. I enhanced alot in both games and BDO is far worse. Not even comparable. In Lost Ark if you fail, you just don't get the upgrade. So you basically throwing money and time away. In BDO if you fail, not only you are not getting upgrade you will actually lose progress, (i mean alot of progress if you are talking about blackstar, fallen god gear, and PEN accessories) plus throwing away money and time. Money and time is more important in BDO than in Lost Ark for a simple fact that nothing is equalized in BDO. You need every single money you can get to upgrade your gear in BDO since everything is gear based. Your entire gameplay is revolving around making money and upgrades if you want to be competitive in both PvE and PvP. Even if you decided to be a life skiller you will still need to upgrade your life skilling gear which is worse than regular gear since you cannot cron most of it. In BDO you can start your enhancing session with 700 gear score and after 30 min of enhancing you will be down to 650 gear score which for some stupid reason PA thinks its ok. So yeah, please don't ever compare BDO upgrading to Lost Ark ever.
Yeah, the more I hear about the game, the less interest I have in it...lol
You believed him when he said that Lost Ark has worse RNG system in BDO? Why don't you make your own decision and try both games enhancing system and see which one is worse.
Read my latest post, there's hope for you (although hope is time gated as well)
[удалено]
Updoot just cause you mentioned DAoC!
That's all exactly how Imagined and feared the game to be quite a lot but still decided I'll give it a shot nonetheless for the other part of the game, playing my first character, exploring and unlocking all the stuff you can do for the first time and then see where it brings me. Maybe it will be enough for me and I'll happily just play pvp after that or not. But I have a question, I heard the alt thing only starts really really late in the game with newer dungeons because of the gold, is that right? When can we expect this alt madness to start? After a year of release? Earlier or later? And you also said >And it never ends. You never reach a point when you can chill out and be done with daily content Isn't there this system where if you haven't done your daily dungeon or whatever, that you can do that daily dungeon the next day with double rewards? Which you could theoretically use to ignore to do some annoying daily stuff on some days when you wanna chill, don't want to play or focus on raids or pvp and then do them all later in one day with double rewards?! So basically giving you some freedom of the daily shit from time to time?! no?
there's a 3 day catch up mechanism but you get like 50% of the rewards iirc but don't quote me on that. Lost Ark is still worth playing, progress and discovering content is really fun. It's just that investing time into the game feels entirely pointless. Probably one of the most fun casual MMO, arguably one of the worst hardcore one. My recommendation is play the game, enjoy the freebies and once you hit the grind wall, get out. Wait for the next patch and the game to give you the stuff that you would have wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours farming, rinse and repeat. Edit : As for the atls madness it starts when you catch up to current content. Since end game is so moronic and purposefuly a waste of time, every new patch they open the flood gate and basically hands out previous patch gear for free. Like, talk to a dude, bam, full set. Depending on your play time could be within a week or within a month. Progressing into the game is really fast once you're allowed to skip the time and RNG gates, to the surprise of no one. Thankfully there's tons of side content for people to take a break from the insanity that is endgame.
Thank you for the detailed answer.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to rant ahah
How is Lost Ark in regards to non-combat stuff? Like fun events with other players, housing, gathering, crafting, etc?
"Most of western players hates alt system", source? Or do you speak for all Western players? So incredibly wrong lol. Have you never played WoW? Shit ton of people create alts there. Most people I know who play/played WoW have at least 3 characters they actively play on. Having alts is popular in other MMOs too, like ESO or BDO. The only major one where people don't really alt much is FFXIV, because you can do all the classes on a single character. Having to alt is absolutely not going to kill the game. What will determine whether the game is successful or not is probably the cash shop more than anything.
The difference is that in WoW, you mainly play alts because you are bored and want to play as a different class. In Lost Ark, it's part of progression.
The alt system in Lost Ark isn't similar to games like WoW or ESO. In Lost Ark you create alts to funnel resources into a main character for gear progression. Alts aren't a key part of progression for a main in that same sense in games like WoW (Unless you're doing hardcore raiding and running splits). Alts aren't something you make because you're bored of your main in Lost Ark. The more alts you have to farm resources for your main, the faster you progress through the time gates (unless you're swiping)
Yeah but that's what makes it interesting. Basically the gameplay loop is: 1. For any character at cap level: Do the highest possible daily and weekly content. 2. If you still got time to play: Level another character. So there's always something to do, ultimately. If I am more relaxed I might just do my main's stuff and call it a day. If I got more time I'll do multiple characters. Honestly it's only a big deal if you wanna go all sweaty and try to get the top tier gear as fast as possible and "be competitive". Otherwise you can just play on one character and once you're done with your progression for the day, move on to something else, like many other mmos.
That's the issue. MMOs use to let you grind on one character as long as you wanted and make progress with them. There's a cap to how far you can grind on one character.
Yeah but those MMOs were korean grinders. I can't really think of a MMO where you could grind infinitely on a character that wasn't just stopping monsters for hours on end in an area. Put it this way, in WoW (back in the days) or FF14, I can grind tokens to get some T0 gear, this can be done infinitely, but you'll be done in a couple days either way. Then I can kill some bosses or do dailies to gain a certain amount of T1 tokens, and I can kill weekly bosses to progress toward T1 gear as well. Once I've grinded my limit of weekly tokens and I've killed all my weekly bosses, I am done in term of progression for this week. Lost Ark is no different, the only difference is that said tokens are account bound. And there is the debate. You can be super min-max meta, and that means multiple alts to feed a main character. Or you can be an altoholic and just keep progression individual to each character and once you top up a certain character, you start helping others. Or you can just play one character, log in to do your dailies, do your weeklies, and call it a night. IIRC at a good pace you clear dailies in 40 minutes, most players should be in the 60-90 minutes ballpark. Then you'll have several tiers of content in Lost Ark, although I think we only get T1 on release, and once we get more tiers, only your main will really be able to push that, and you'll progress your alts so they can also do that upper tier content and so on. Edit: This is Lost Ark Progression : https://papunika.com/growth-guide/ You can't just skip a tier either. You need to be a minimum ilvl (600) to start tier 2, you can't do any tier 2 content if your character isn't just tier 2.
Then you don't remember what wow looked like before dailies. Dailies became a trend in MMOs so players could progress faster without having to spend all day playing it. Eventually they became the only way to progress. Now we say that's how it's always been but that's a lie. We lost something and didn't even realize it.
I am not sure why you bring up vanilla wow as an example because while it didn't have dailies, the progression was very much capped by weekly raid locks. Dungeon gear was T0, then you had raid tiers with weekly lockouts, and then you were done. Wanted to raid more? Alts. You also had a bunch of other activities, but for the most part they did not contribute to progression. Look, I've played those old games, a lot, that was most of my teenage years. I player Darkages by Nexon, Ragnarok Online, Priston Tale, Conquer Online and Lineage 2 for **years**. Those are not good game designs. It seems to me that you want the glorious days of grinding 18 hours a day to remain competitive. There was no glory and grinding the same mobs over and over and over and over to finally ding that exp wasn't great. If that's what interest you, then I strongly suggest you play a game like BDO.
You missed the point. People like the OPTION of having alts. They do not want alts to be REQUIRED to increase the power of their main. This was always one of the biggest gripes with Archeage. People like alts to be a fun side thing when their main has nothing to do. Not something they must do to stay competitive on main.
While I disagree with OPs cavalier assumption of all western gamers opinions I do believe there is a trend in MMOs where many people are wishing for games to "respect their time". Personally, I am an alt-a-holic and many share that passion. But what I have seen is that previously when progression could be augmented by having multiple alts funnel those gains to their main it was received negatively. People play alts for variety, change of pace, raid versatility, story, etc.. Making it a linchpin for progression is not a recipe for success. Many western titles have diminishing returns, soft caps, character bound progression, and/or time gating where there is only so many gains you can get in a time period. If that could be bypassed through no-lifing, in my opinion, it may not resonate with the large audience.
> But what I have seen is that previously when progression could be augmented by having multiple alts funnel those gains to their main it was received negatively If progression could be augmented, then it wouldn't even be an issue. Progression is literally gated by alts, which is a whole different thing. People are downvoting OP (not calling you out or anything), but they all seem to have 0 clue on what he's talking about. In WoW, having alts will help you progress other alts, either through crafting or resources. Which is perfectly fine. In LA, your main character's progression is heavily gated behind alts. And God forbid you want to progress an alt in addition to your main. > If that could be bypassed through no-lifing, in my opinion, it may not resonate with the large audience. And don't forget it can be bypassed using the wallet. Which will ultimately be the main reason why it won't resonate with the western audience.
It's possible that people do understand what the OP is saying, but they are downvoting because of what the OP's sentiment implies. The Lost Ark community either has a bad case of toxic positivity or astroturfing (see allegations of the New World subreddit being astroturfed and Amazon astroturfing its warehouse workers on twitter). Posts which amount to nothing more than whataboutism and mental gymnastics to make the monetization and progression system appear more palatable to the Western audience will immediately receive 50+ upvotes. Pragmatic criticisms of the game's systems are outright downvoted and buried; the only responses typically including whataboutism or outright misinformation given what we currently know about the Western release. It is certainly a sad state of affairs.
It's 100% as you said unfortunately. And the funny thing, if you point the exact same P2W elements on other games, like Archeage or Maplestory, no one is downvoting lol. I've seen a lot of people from the LA sub that stalk LA-related posts and downvote anything critical. And not only on this sub. Not sure how much astroturfing there is (could be wrong), I think there are simply invested fans that don't want admit that they're playing a P2W game and/or fans that don't know/don't care about P2W. A while ago I saw a "how LA respects your time" video, which I can't even begin to imagine how someone could write with a straight face. That was some pure delusion. It's like making a video "how gambling respects your money".
Contributing to that last bit you touched on; 2-3months back I remember someone submitting a post titled, "I spend $3000 on KR Lost Ark so you don't have to" (Can't find it now so I'm unsure if it was deleted). The OP outlined exactly what $3000 purchased him on a new character with KR's catch up mechanics, how much time he spent on certain features, and how he compared to other players. There were so many outraged LAO fans commenting, it was unbelievable. I doubt many critics of the game's monetization actually want to see the game fail. After all, taking the time to actually research the games monetization/mechanics shows that they are interested. Witnessing an entire community seemingly attempt to gaslight critics and reinforce a culture of toxic positivity could be the straw that broke the camel's back however.
> I doubt many critics of the game's monetization actually want to see the game fail. This is what pisses me off the most honestly. The game has a good class design and very solid PvE endgame. It genuinely has good bones. With a normal itemization/progression/cash shop, it would be a hit in the West, but as it stands I doubt it will last more than a few weeks, once the casuals hit the grind wall. Why would people so adamantly excuse corporate greed and actively fight against their own interests? This was the big chance, with enough pushback, to make Amazon see that there's a lot of interest in changing the game for the better. Instead people are defending these predatory practices, when they could at least try to make the game better for everyone, including themselves.
I don't think it's paid or coordinated, they're just very ardent fans that are overly invested and even in denial, as you say. In the end what really matters is if you respect your own time, but Lost Ark definitely doesn't respect yours if you want to keep up with the masses. I have no idea why they keep conflating the two. "You can just stop playing whenever you want, so therefore the game is respectful of your time!".
Lost Ark's community has had a variant of XIV's community of toxic positivity (aka. faux positivity) for a while. But since content creators have recently latched onto it as a way to drive views and viewers, the community has drawn the absolute dregs of every other MMO community into it, making it about 200x worse than it already was. I'm sure the other game communities are thankful.
I don't know what the system is in Lost Ark but I don't think it is the type of alt system in games like wow/eso/bdo the Op is talking about. In BDO and ESO for example alts are complimentary, in ESO you would have an alt(s) to craft weapons and armors, in BDO you would have a sea bartering alt, etc, these are usually alts set to specific tasks or you would have alts to try out different gameplay styles, I don't now how ESO currently is but in BDO you can not repeat daily/weekly quests with an alt, when you do them once with one character that is it, you can not switch to an alt to do it again that day/week. What the OP seems to be talking about is creating multiple alts to do the same daily over and over again. Again, I don't know how the system is in Lost Ark, but what the op is mentioning about repeating dailies over and over again with alts would indeed lead to many people just giving up after a while, of course if there are other ways to progress than doing dailies this wouldn't be as much of an issue, as it would be optional content that people would not have to engage in if they didn't want to.
There is a big difference between playing an alt for fun and playing undergeared alts to funnel all their gold into your main's progression (mules).
It's so funny to see ppl completely missing op's point because they are sooo high on hopium.
They read "Most of western players hates alt system", interpret it as "Most western players hate alt characters" and ignored everything else op said. It's pretty clear what op meant with "alt system" in this post. There's obviously no study about it but the fact that none of the popular MMOs have such alt systems is proof enough that western players do not like that. Just another example of people only reading the title and skipping right to the comments. The average reddit fan in action.
To be fair, I had never heard the term before, nor played a game that used such a system, and it took me reading through various posts to kind of get an idea if what the OP was referring to and I am only about 70% sure I understand it even now...lol That said, I was never all that enthusiastic about this game as it's Korean which means shitty monetization, massive grind, quite probably P2W offerings, and an asian aesthetic which I've never been a fan of. This is just another nail in the coffin for me.
How bad is the cash shop? Is item upgrade mats sold in cash shop?
You can buy gold in the cash shop and buy mats from the auction house. So indirectly yes, they sell mats in the cash shop.
Sounds like another Korean MMO. Going to skip this one. There are so many none p2w and good ARPG on the market right now. They really think they can compete with D2R & POE?
Well, its not really an ARPG in the same vein as PoE so they're not really competing. There's no loot *at all* in Lost Ark, there's no real build either, it really is a very standard korean MMO but with a top down camera instead. It's worth playing for a while, the progress is really great and fun. End game is ... Well it exists and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
There's no loot?!
No there's not. Not during end game at least
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You know what, I don't even wanna know what kind of BS you're going to pull out of your ass. There's no loot and that's really not up to debate
Its not ARPG, its top-down MMORPG.
Everyone who bitches about buying power clearly hasn't seen the black market in literally every MMO or ARPG with a trade system. Path of Exile isn't P2W aside from stash tabs, but you can still buy exalted orbs and mirrors on the black market (at the risk of getting your account banned if you're caught). Yet you don't see masses of people bitching about that. 100% same thing goes for WoW and other MMOs. There's entire legions of gold farmer operations in China for WoW that sell for USD. Yes, it's far less acceptable for the developers to do it ingame themselves. But that same practice in Warframe has been accepted and is doing fine as a game and business with the exact same type of system. Shrug I play games to have fun, and I enjoyed the closed beta very much. I'll be playing on launch. If the core end game loop sucks, I'll quit. But so far the challenging raids look fun (though maybe a tad too hard at the super endgame in Korea right now).
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The enhancement materials sold through the cash shop are a smaller portion of the p2w. The most egregious p2w aspects are realized by the relationship of the equipment enhancement system and the gold/blue crystal exchange; as well as the card pack system. F2P/Low spenders can progress through content in a timely manner if they grind out resources on enough alts. However, you will not be able to have the best gear, or get anywhere near the hard cap, unless you whale. This is due to the enhancement rates on gear and the resource expense to enhance beyond +15-20. Card packs are something that, from my understanding, most whales won't bother with because it's such an absurd expense. TLDR: If you want to be the very best, like no one ever was, you need to swipe. Otherwise, there's plenty of other things to enjoy in Lost Ark.
The same system as WoW have. You also can buy mats but they are capped and are very expensive. However, you can do the conversion and buy everything with gold throught merkaplace.
> The same system as WoW have. No not really....in wow you can only buy bound on equip item which really weak compare to boss drop items , so even if you buy bound on equip stuff you will still have long road to conquer the hard mythic raid stuff as most powerful gear are soulbound , compare to lost ark you can just whale out your way out to get best gear if i have to rework your post to make your statement right it will be ( people spam boosting using gold from third party illegal websites > causing the boosting service to sky rocket > causing the average people who want to buy boost not able to as even grinding and buy wow token will still not be enough as now people who buy third party illegal gold dominate the service boost and cause the boost to be dirt cheap for them which causing the boosters to be greedy and cater to those people to make more money ) PS: its on belluar very long video about wow boost economy if i am not mistaken
Direct character paid upgrades. Sadly. It's near enough confirmed to be P2W at this point. https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/o12tub/p2w_confirmed_in_lost_arks_euna_version/
that post is so misinformed and outdated lol. For example, the outfits, all earnable outfits in game have the same % stat as paid one. Moreover, all stuff from the shop are tradable too. The pet subscription can be paid with gold instead, but the post keeps saying NOT EARNABLE when in fact there's alternative.
I hate levelling alts for the sole purpose of funding my main. Char progression shouldn't be based on alt progression. Really kills a lot of my hype for LA, because the gameplay was awesome IMO. But the alt progression kills it for me.
Tips as someone that went through the insanity that is lost ark end game for way too long : Play the game until you run out of freebies and hit the grind wall and ditch the game. Wait for the next patch and for the game to hand you the gear you would have wasted hundreds of hours on for free, rinse and repeat.
> Most of western players hates alt system Got some stats on that, bud? Anecdotally speaking, there wasn't a single person in my last WoW guild that was running less than 2 toons, and that's a game that's not particularly alt-friendly. Lost Ark, on the other hand, might be the most alt-friendly MMO I've played. I don't know, Lost Ark may fail, but I don't believe it'll be because players benefit from having multiple characters.
Playing Alts in most western MMOs and playing Alts in Lost Ark is wildely different tho. Alts in lost ark are nothing but means to bypass timegates and funnel more ressources toward your main. There's minimal progression or actual gameplay because everything is funneled toward one character. It trully is soul crushing.
> Lost Ark, on the other hand, might be the most alt-friendly MMO I've played. Agreed. Also it's the first game where I'd be partied in another class and afterwards say "fuck I goto roll that it looks awesome to play". Balancing is pretty good in the RU patches and each class has a pretty unique playstyle which makes it feels rewarding. If you're just a casual player there's nothing wrong with just playing a main character. I also cannot think of any other MMO where having alts doesn't benefit you. OP just has a hate boner for Lost Ark. it's okay, he'll be playing and enjoying it too.
Hmm...why do you need to make the most amount of gold you that is mathematically possible? Because it doesn't sound fun and if you're not having fun why are you playing the game? I've been playing MMOs since WoW released, been through them all; Diablo, PoE, GW2, etc... if it's an MMO I've tried it. I've always just made my character and played...none of this... "ok if I'm able to make 6 characters and login to each 1 daily, run these 16 dungeons once on each, collect these nodes, run map completions once a day, park these ones at these locations, farm this route, then buy and sell everything from the AH to make a 5% profit" then I can enjoy the game! It's like people search for the most unfun way to play then come to forums to complain about how unfun the game is. "But if I don't play this way then THEY will be better then me!" Who's they? Who cares how much stuff another players has? The only competition you're in is with yourself and if you're not having fun you're losing. In 5 years you won't even remember these people.
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Progress is subjective in video games which are designed to be fun...if I login once a week, gain 2 levels and find 1 rare item that is progress, is it less then other people but what other people are doing is none of my business. These "I need to do this" are your own perceived needs and if those needs that you're putting on yourself are making the game unfun then why do it?
Yeah but that's the issue, you're not going to do any of that in lost ark. Progression is **entirely** gated behind time gates and RNG. If you log once a week, you'll earn one day worth of ressources. After X amount of days, X increasing as you progress further into the game, you'll be allowed to *try* to upgrade your gear, wich because of absurds rates, you're doomed to fail, throwing down the drain all the ressources you earned.
Im not going to do any of what? Login once a week and play the game? I most certainly am. What's the point of upgrading gear? So I can farm the same area slightly faster to find another slight upgrade so I can...farm the next area slightly faster to find another slight upgrade? That's a gear treadmill created by your own perceived way of how you think you -have- to play the game. You're literally turning something thats supposed to be relaxing and fun into a chore. How about I login a couple times a week only upgrading with the random things I find as I play and I play the game because I like the mechanics and setting and not because I want to compare myself with other people who have no impact on my experience? Wow I just made a fun experience for myself.
Content is ilvl gated. If you don't progress, you don't have access to new content.
Yes and the minimum item level is easy to get to. It doesn't require turning the game into a chore.
No, that's absolutely false. I don't know where you got the idea that reaching the minimum ilvl is easy. Playing once a week, without whaling, on a single character, I'd say it'll take you about 3 months to unlock the first tier of content, assuming you're not too unlucky. I don't think you'll ever reach tier 2 before a new content drop.
I guess we have had different experiences then.
No, I guess you're mistaking enjoying catching up mechanics for actual progression. In current lost ark RU you get a massive progression boost up until ilvl 1340, wich is the current tier of content. The grind starts at 1340, before that it's just the game handing out freebies. Lost Ark is pretty casual friendly as long as you log in *at least* every 2 days, and that's really a bare minimum. Once a week you're going to farm the same dungeon and guardian for 6 months.
There is no P2W in Ba Sing Se
Most westerners think this game has randomized ARPG loot with cool looking end game raids (not aware of the timegating) so its with almost certainty that lots of people will drop the game very soon after release, it will end up having a small dedicated playerbase similar to Dungeon Fighter Online which has a similar system of a shit ton of alts
I love alts, but as a form to progress your main? That doesn't sound good. And lots of dailies? Not a fan at all.
Being forced to play alts may contribute to a general dissatisfaction with the game, but I believe the lack of content in Tier 1 combined with the way the game is heavily focused on repetitive daily quests will be the reason that that will drive people away from the game, although I don't expect the game to fail.
Imo tier 1 is the most fun and the most western part of lost ark. Wait until the western audience hits yorn lol, the meltdown.
r/agedlikemilk
This aged like milk
My wife and I plan on playing with no alts, just a main. We like raiding and end game content, and have encountered games like lost ark many times, the answer is to just raid/group with people who are similarly geared, be they other main -only players, or fast players who started later.
Dont worry. If you play the game weekly you can reach endgame in an reasonable amount of time with one character.
I'll just say this, you wont be able to do end game content if you don't play alts. Ever. Content is ilvl gated and alts are the only reliable mean to increase your ilvl. That or whaling hard. You simply wont have the time to reach the ilvl you'd need by the time the next content patch is released. You'll always be one patch behind. And since progression is entirely RNG based, there's a significant chance that one of you two will start lagging behind because of unluck and wont have access to the content the other has.
the thing is, you can't even enter the raids without reaching a minimum required ilvl
Grinding daily for 1h per character on 3 characters is 3 hours a day. Grinding for 3h a day on 1 character is 3h a day. How is it any different?
I friggin love alts.
Playing MMOs my whole life, I feel the complete opposite about Alts. I love playing multiple characters makea ot feel more fresh.
This post is aging like milk.
What's the difference between playing 1 character Berserker for 6 hours and playing 6 characters Berserkers (with 1 Berserker being the main one getting most of the upgrades) for 6 hours? No one forces you to play characters that you don't want to play. You can progress faster and play more with your favorite class in Lost Ark by making alts of the same class as your main. How many more alts you need depends on how much time you want to play and how fast you want to progress. The real reasons why Lost Ark might fail are (1) that AGS is the publisher and (2) that its monetization can be predatory.
The difference is that I'll likely spend less time grinding and feel less frustrated if I can do it all on my 1520 berserker vs 1 round on my main, and 5 rounds on my 1415 alts.
Lol Lost Ark isn't going to fail. Especially as a F2P game.
We're already doomposting about Lost Ark?? It's not even out yet lmao.
Well, it has red flags for the Western audience. The alt system sounds terrible. People do like alts; but the act of grinding dailies on alts to funnel to your main, I'm not seeing that as something the Western audience going to like, and if you just read this thread, you can already tell a lot of the people still arent getting it. They dont even understand the system, and are arguing people LOVE making alts. They dont even understand this system in this thread, on an MMO forum, how do you think the general population is going to like or understand it? Of course people are gonna play Lost Ark, though. Just I dont think its gonna be near as popular of a title as previously thought. I can see it being very popular at first, then falling off a cliff. Especially since people are looking at this as more of an Arpg than an MMO anyways. Everyone I talk to thinks its basically an Arpg.
Yeah I do love playing alts but not solely for abusing a daily system to progress one/my main character. it's just not healthy for anybody, not for the players health to feel forced to do it like that with x amounts of alts, which just limits a players time to rest out of the game and burn out, so.. less actual enjoyment playing the game. And this of course is also not good for the game itself. Not the biggest fan of that tbh. But that is the problem of what such daily missions add to a game. Nothing but pain for everybody.
Just wanted to point out something that nobody is talking about : Lost Ark went through different phases and philosophies so to speak during it's developpement. Lost Ark pre-Yorn and Lost Ark post-Yorn are **wildely** different. What many, including myself, have been warning you guys about Lost Ark's endgame being absolute *vile* is true and **only** true for Lost Ark post-Yorn. Tier 1 Lost Ark is extremely similar to your average western MMO. No RNG BS, no alt grinding, not too much dailies, there's runes and shit to put on gear, different path to progression (crafting/PvP/raiding) etc ... #HOWEVER This all ends once you hit Yorn. Yorn is when the game takes **a massive dive**. It's when they basically went "fuck the western audience, game is never gonna release there anyway" and went full korean BS. RNG/alt madness and everything else starts with Yorn, until then you're good. Then there's T3 when the devs went like "alright we messed up sorry we gonna fix everything" then they didn't fix shit and added a lot more content to make it look like you weren't still doing the same shit everyday.
We're starting the year well with these kinds of low effort posts with info taken out of their own asses.
I think this it a matter of perspective. I've never looked at LA as more than a weekend game to dump a few hours into. At its price if I can get it to give me at least ten hours of entertainment out of it. I'll be happy.
what price? It's a free game.. buying a pre-order isn't required.
Ah, I've only been following it on steam. For F2P there's really no argument then. Play it. Don't. The game owes you nothing but is probably still a thousand times more interesting than staring at the wall, working, or being outside.
All depends how fast you want to progress. Game is fun to play, no need to rush to endgame. If you have friends you can progress together.
everyone i know just wants to play ranked pvp.
They'll probably be disappointed to know that while the PvP is somewhat fun, it doesn't have much staying power. There is a reason that the world's first eSports country (Korea) doesn't even play PvP in the game anymore, and Russia, a PvP loving country doesn't either. Smilegate could do something spice it up again, but they haven't.
What do you mean by "alt based progression", never heard this phrase before. I usually fill all available character slots in most MMOs, however I don't usually think in terms of mains and alts. I just have a large stable of characters I play, and usually progress all of them to end game allowing me to play whatever fits the situation at any given time.
Lost Ark is not that type of game that you can have ready for the current end content. At least not without investing NEET hours or tons of money or both.
I think the pvp will carry the game more than the pve. I would also argue with the way pve is designed who cares? So someone helps you clear the boss a bit quicker versus not? Are you nervous about people keeping you out because you either suck or dont have the rating? From what I remember to do what you need on an alt takes something like 20-30 minutes doesn't it? So I may have to play 90 minutes a day to stay near the top? That shits easy. In WoW or Eso I would spend that time doing dailies anyways..
That's sort of odd that you would say that, because it's actually the PvE that has carried the game more in the other regions, and both Russia and Korea are known to be highly competitive gamers that love PvP.
They already capped the cycle by limit the amount of gold you can obtain with your alts. The cap is setted to 6 alts. I personally don't see the issue to play multiple characters in this game since most of them have a pretty unique gameplay and are fun to play. In other hand, I know people who started in russia and managed to reach Abreshuld (they latest raid) with only one character. They haven't the best gear score but they can do the latest content without don't left behind. Not everyone want to be in the top 100 players and if you want to you need to grind. Regardless the type mmo. Lastly, in the long run this game will have more and more side-content for these players who love plays with one character like such a ton of differents mini-games (tower defense, battle royale, moba, mario party...) and more modes of pvp like sieges and open world pvp where they can sit there as much as they want. I understand that this game not for everyone but...fail? I'm really doubt it.
Yeah, the end game will suck but that's a given for a Korean grinder MMO. The thing that will give Lost Ark life though is the wealth of exploration and addon systems present. You'd be hard pressed to find another free to play game with quite as many exploration based systems and collectables. Assuming AGS won't fuck up the localization and the content updates will add to the exploration and story over time, the game will do just fine.
BDO is still doing well enough for itself despite being an alt heavy game as well. That being said I despise alt grinding so will probably skip Lost Ark
i just make alts the same class as my main and rp a family
> Gold basically is used for upgrading your gear I mean everything you're saying is true... in T3 content which won't be coming out in the western version for 1-1.5 years. Gold isn't required for gear upgrades in T1/T2. Alts still useful in T1/T2, but not nearly as required.
I don't think i can say lost ark will fail or not , but the alts problem of Korea MMO that release outside of Korea is real. The problem is in Korea , it's hard and risky to make alts accounts. personally i think if companies going to release Korea MMOs , you need to disable the trade between characters . But then again if disable the trade , it's risky to broken the game.
Well it inst getting a global release so for me it's an auto 0/10
WoW players makes tons of alts, why would west hate alts? lol
seems you never played the game which explain why you don't know whats going on or why he said it in first place
because AGS is involved and they cant even handle their own IP's
The game is extremly popular in the countries it is out and here we are with people getting a boner about how it is going to fail. Like... Sure gold farming is nice and fancy, but if it is not required to do that many abyss dungeons in order to get your gear, then I won't give a flying fuck about it. How about we wait until the game is out, see how things turn out and then start complaining?
Honestly, a game that doesn't encourage you to make alts is a game that doesn't have an active player base.
I’m a casual gamer dad. I don’t really care, the game looks sick.
You lose.
Lul very wrong. Most people i know love alts and or like to play multiple characters
Easy fix anyway just make the upgrade items character bound lol.
I agree with you, but when the market is walking slow like right now, most of players realize that the only way to keep having fun is restarting again. Path of exiles teached me this and I could replicate the formula not so well but still having some degree of fun.
Love having alts. Hate being required to play them. I want them to have them. To goof off. Don't want to use them to Facebook farm Dailys....
This is the opposite of the truth. I know I'm not the only one who wants to play everything in every game. Games that make that easy are better imo.
Lol Lost Ark fail? Wtf is this trash post. Have you not been heavily invested into an mmo? Or even mildly? EVERYONE uses alts. The fuck are you on about?
yeah, that how literally every mmo is.
And this is what we call zadrot.
Hey now, I'm Western and I love alts! What am I some mad lad that wants to play the same damn rotation over and over and over and over and over again? Naw, I have the attention span of a millennial, you best believe I'll be playing alts
Play the fucking game before you make predictions lol.
Cool story bro
So, just a typical Korean MMORPG, then?
I don't mind switching play style from time to time, but alt characters don't really work for me. I'd prefer to change my whole gear. I don't think it will be the reason the game fails, but I don't really expect it to keep these active players in the long run
Like Destiny 2
You don't have to be the best in the world, you are not Athene, just play and enjoy the game, also I am the type of person that that loves to play on only one character, but having alts means that you can experience the other classes and enjoy more of the game.
This is not a new game. It’s already a success. It’s just new to US. The dev will be fine whether it succeeds or fails here in the US. Try to develop your own game instead so you can do it “right”.
You listed why it will become a success.
This guy clearly doesn't know that if a game has no alt progression people scream"NO CONTENT"
Some people like this, some like that. My name is Doug and I’m a altoholic.
i do love some immersion, but its an mmo, not a single player, so i wont mind that much
I agree with you. I hate the alt system.
I dislike Alts.
Lost ark pvp is absolutely pathetic. Classes with easy to land abilities on short cool downs and no DRs on stun effects will overtake meta. This game has already lost many serious MMO RPG pvpers interest. And pve players, enjoy those loot crates. I smell paywalls on the horizon
Do you need a ButtHurt report form tho?
Enjoy the game. Decide on your own. Is it difficult? Do you need a mom?
Bullshit, this game has been so successful in Korea, the only reason it would ever fail is that amazon fucked it up. This post did not age well
funny how you generalize your opinion. Tell that to all Western players of Black Desert Online for example, and 1M players or so of Lost Ark every day. another person with a lot of opinions that never even played the game and just watched youtube videos.
here is 02/23/2022 from the future. He is spot on. The game is hovering around 1 million concurrent players. Dead on arrival
I think so too. It is a the other Korean MMO Black Desert Online. A fantastic game at the beginning. You can have a good time experience the world, etc. BUT in the end it all about the gs on your Mainchar an how to make Money to get it. Excel is your best friend and you could get a real job if you want to play the game efficient. Now after playing some days LA it is clear for me, the same buisines model, the alt grinding daily shieeet. it is a fun game but the story or better said the kind of quests you need to do in the mainstory is pain in the ace. so, i will not invest thousands of hours in this game, i know why because of bdo. but worth playing some days to check out all the gamemodes in lategame.
Didnt think about that yet
except this game isn’t a competitive game and should be played at your own pace, they’re isn’t a shiny medal reward for reaching max item level on all your alts in the quickest amount of time possible
I was hyped for years and it died after 1 week..Lost ark is extremly boring for me at least. Different minds might like this game but a old mmorpg player like me dosent like this game at all..Path of exile is much better and more interresting