Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG have released instructions to the Lost Ark Gold community. They acknowledge falling short in a number of ways but invest in improvements on bots, the standard of living changes, and alleviating frustration for brand new players and also the overall player burnout. There will also be a brand new roadmap update coming in a few days.
The letter to the community is open because the teams both promised greater transparency and communication moving forward after the Western launch. “We notice that we’ve fallen lacking accomplishing our desired relationship”, they acknowledge, and explore how they expect to do better.
One of the major problems may be the ongoing battle against botting. During the newbie, the team makes efforts, including massive ban waves for bots, in addition to making adjustments towards the game as well as the rewards and economic climate to try and stop the supply of early gold making botting less appealing. Since this is a burglar issue, there are not many details, however, they say that over 55 billion bot gold continues to be removed by their efforts and there’s a 99% reduction in bot activity.
When you are looking at new (or even more casual) players, there’s a degree of frustration along with a feeling of not being able to keep up, for some reason. One is really a faster content release cadence compared to the original Korean version, meaning there’s a great deal to do, constantly. Another is in some of the multi-layered requirements for honing and also the need to replay content to advance. Both of these are going to be addressed, with work to create collecting such things as runes, cards, and gems easier, to enhance efforts to create honing more possible.
Some other changes will lessen the repeated content and improve access for alts, in addition to letting players use battle items free of charge in early-tier Guardian Raids. The additions with frequent content updates imply that there are a lot more feelings of gatekeeping and difficulty with so a lot more to memorize and don't forget and complete, they want to reduce repetitive content and they're going to have more down the road on what this can mean.
Another change doesn't be surprised to see later would be to stop delaying events that were already happening (or higher) in Korea and instead make newer and more effective events happen simultaneously, whilst sometimes having simple Western exclusive events.
Since there is lots of work to become done, they're taking a look at late summer to be seduced by the bulk of it, however, they plan to implement whatever is complete when it is done. There will also be a large roadmap update part 2 coming in a few days, so we'll begin to determine just how this may look, along with what else is originating in 2023.
The letter towards the community is really a long one, however, it hits a wide variety of points and plans it's important to go through if you are interested whatsoever in starting—or returning to–lost ark gold.