If you were still unsettled by the mild controversy over Lost Ark’s planned dungeon difficulty balancing update, well, continue being unsettled, as those changes are live as of last night and servers are back in business as of this morning.
So what exactly is the issue? Well, Amazon and Smilegate had proposed essentially nerfing the difficulty of T1 and T2 guardian raids and abyss dungeons, noting that fewer than 10% of the game’s players had actually completed many of them. Today’s patch notes implement that nerf, accompanied by a lengthy explanation for the decision.
The studio argues that T1 and T2 content was endgame content for a long time in other regions like South Korea, before T3 had been released. But here, all three tiers launched together, meaning that players aren’t spending a lot of time churning around in T1 and T2 waters and therefore those tiers in the west aren’t really working as endgame content.
“With the different purpose of Tier 1 and Tier 2 in our regions, there were some overly difficult Guardians and Abyssal Dungeon encounters left behind. This balance update isn’t about simply adjusting the difficulty as whole. Rather, the focus is to improve some of the difficult patterns to better prepare players as they progress through each Tier and work their way toward Tier 3 endgame content. We are aiming for players to ramp up into more challenging and complex content as they progress in their journey. There’s a variety of challenging future Tier 3 content that has yet to be infused into the western release – stay tuned for our roadmap article that will share what you can expect in the coming months. These upcoming encounters will serve as the hurdles for players to challenge themselves, master systems, and learn complex mechanics. Even Argos, arriving this month, will be an unforgiving opponent ready to test the mettle of the so-called heroes infesting Arkesia.”
Grumbling aside, it actually makes a lot of sense and isn’t out of line with what many MMORPGs do over time.
