Amazon and Smilegate delivered a joint address to the Lost Ark playerbase late last night, though whether it sufficiently assuages the core community concerns is up for debate. The studios begin by reiterating their design goals for tier progression and their and acknowledges players’ cries that the new Argos abyssal raid is pay-to-win and rushes players to endgame content.
“We made a mistake releasing the March game update too quickly after launch. Data we analyzed alongside Smilegate RPG from their previous launches projected that a larger portion of players would have reached the level required to challenge Argos. However, we overlooked certain variables, such as players spending more time on horizontal content and the price of honing materials increasing due to bots and real-money transactions. These factors contributed to a scarcity of T3 honing materials. […] After analyzing data and listening to player feedback across all our community channels, we believe that an update that helps adventurers progress with the content currently in-game is more important than releasing new end-game content.”
In other words, Amazon and Smilegate are planning to slow down the rollout of new content to make sure the game economy has caught up to the content level, with more details on the roadmap “in the near future.” On the flipside, they’re releasing skins and cosmetics at a faster rate than in Korea, bolstering the game with progression materials and gold through in-game play, continuing to fight bots by making gold too efficient to farm early on in gameplay, and offering more casual game routes through some content. The companies are also giving everyone a hefty stack of freebie gifts next week, including a mount, pet, and currencies.
In other Lost Ark news, this morning’s weekly update has adjusted DST triggers for events, compensates players with Arkesia Grand Prix tokens, retroactively grants crystal bonus pack bonuses, and promises to compensate players for the bugged Tytalos Guardian raid.
Finally, Amazon admitted that some of the accounts that were auto-suspended as part of the studio’s crackdown on speed hackers were in fact innocent false positives. It’s now unsuspended and removed strikes related to those inadvertent measures; there’s no compensation, but the studio did offer an apology.
