Yesterday’s Lost Ark preview from Amazon and Smilegate focused on the big March update – content, lore, and islands. But what about everything players think is wrong with the fundamentals of the game as it stands right now? Well, Amazon’s put out a dev blog addressing that too. The whole list includes fixes for the crystalline aura (the buffs you get when subbing, store issues, and future downtime cadences, and there’s quite a bit on dealing with gold-seller spam and bots too, something players have been complaining about non-stop since launch.
“[S]pammers last an average of less than 10 minutes in-game before getting banned,” Amazon says. “However, it is clear that there are more actions we can take to put a stop to this problem.” Among those actions? Better anti-cheat and anti-spam tools, chat restrictions by level, and player reporting options.
Players will notice that several of the issues still revolve around European servers. Amazon is promising another login attendance reward round in the region following a snafu in which the studio granted a year of free sub time to some players; it’s also still working on queues in Europe Central.
“We are aware that server queues in the Europe Central region have remained lengthy, but as we have previously mentioned, unfortunately we cannot increase the number of players that each server can hold,” the studio explains. “Additionally, adding more servers is not possible based on the complexity of the game systems and how they work with each other.” In other words, it’s probably not going to get better until more people quit or move voluntarily.
Finally, no matter what server you’re on, you should probably peek through the planned changes to guardian raids and abyss dungeons, as Amazon and Smilegate say they are “adjusting the difficulty of some T1 and T2 content in order to make it a bit easier for players.”
“These adjustments are based off a collection of data and feedback, including game data that showed very low success rates for participants (with some raids and dungeons completed by less than 10% of players). We understand that people can practice and improve at the game over time, but for early game content in particular we want to ensure that new players are having fun learning and advancing instead of getting frustrated and giving up. Looking forward, this change is not an indicator that all future content will be made easier. We know that much of the appeal of T3 and late game content is its unique and challenging mechanics, and we do not want to drastically alter this core experience.”
We've compiled another round of top issues that we're working to address.
❗ Matchmaking Issues
❗ Difficulty Adjustments
❗ Gold Seller Spam & Bots
❗ Europe Central Server QueuesAdditional issues below!
🗒️https://t.co/GiI5qjstdL pic.twitter.com/ihbd4yK32K— Lost Ark (@playlostark) March 2, 2022
