Lost Ark devs open up about future updates in transparent post
Following growing concerns regarding pay-to-win, botting, and unfun grinds, Amazon Games address the games' hottest topics
A new - surprisingly transparent - post addressing Lost Ark progression, future updates, and botting has been posted on the official Lost Ark news page. Providing a fairly clear and concise roundup of what’s coming on the horizon for the popular free-to-play MMORPG and its players, certain key changes that’ll affect both the casual player, and the hardcore portion of the base.
The vast majority of the post focuses on those first two points - progression and future updates. It’s been revealed that a vast majority of players have been progressing through the games’ Tier one and two content at their own pace - exploring islands, levelling alts, farming the adventure journal, picking up makoko seeds, etc… Context provided in the post establishes that plenty of early tier content in addition to challenging tier three content was added to appeal to both casual and hardcore players alike.
However, this approach has apparently led to an unfortunate side effect. In the March update, the Abyss Raid Argos was released, requiring a lofty item level that only those with a lot of time, or money, could reach upon release. This has led to a belief among some players that Lost Ark players, which according to the post is a thought the devs would like to remove.
“We made a mistake releasing the March game update too quickly after launch. Data we analysed 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. Together, our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG are continuing to gather data on play patterns in the western version to better inform our future content roadmap.”
From here, the post goes on to state that future updates will focus on getting players through pre-existing content and pushing them towards the higher tiers, rather than adding on more top tier content for a smaller, ultra-dedicated portion of the playerbase. While there is still a surplus of end game content to come, it’ll be coming alongside new classes, islands, and continents too.
new skins and classes
In addition, the post establishes that new cosmetic skins and advanced classes are sorely desired additions that the community wants sooner rather than later. While they note that new skins are tricky to bring at an accelerated rate, and that they “are releasing skins at a faster rate than they were originally in Korea”, feedback on this is something the team is keeping tabs on. As for new classes, these will be added at a faster pace, with some new options coming soon.
Bots and material shortages
As briefly mentioned above, there’s a shortage of tier three materials in the game at the moment. However, this is a problem made worse by bots, leading to skyrocketing prices and rising barriers to endgame content.
To remedy this, additional sources of materials are being added throughout the game via pre-existing sources (guardian raids, The Cube, etc) and new events such as the Grand Prix and a new event guardian raid that is meant to be a more relaxed version of the mode. In addition, steps to combat botting have been taken through mass bans in hopes this will reduce prices and lead to a better user experience.
Free gifts
Finally, as a sort of thank you to the community for sticking with the game, all players who log in during the week of March 21 will receive a care package filled with goodies. These include:
- New Animal Skin Selection Chest
- Mokokon Pet Selection Chest
- Moko-board Mount Selection Chest
- Lost Ark United Structure
- Appearance Change Ticket
- Pheons x132
- Menelik's Tome x5
- Legendary Card Pack Selection Chest x2
- Jukebox songs that will be provided when Jukebox content is released in the future.
All in all, this post was a great surprise to wake up to this morning as a Lost Ark player. Acknowledging issues that grind the gears of the playerbase, while also setting out what’ll change is a good way to make people feel like they’re being listened to. Throwing a bunch of free stuff their way is nice too, of course, but more importantly it goes a long way in validating the players who’ve stuck with Lost Ark after the launch hype has died down a bit.
For more Lost Ark coverage, you may be interested in our recent report of the hardcore players who were mistakenly caught in an anti-cheater ban wave, and the game recently passing 20 million players earlier this month.