Heroes of Arkesia,
Our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG recently met to discuss player feedback, share insights, and discuss next steps for Lost Ark West. The dust has not yet settled and our team still has a lot of work to do to enable these conversations, but we would like to share our thoughts and plans with you.
Before we begin, we want to start with a huge "thank you" from both of our teams. The love and dedication shown by so many people while playing Lost Ark has been inspiring. While we're very happy to see the excitement that comes with the recent update, we understand that you are still experiencing inconveniences and pain points.
Last year, our priority was to bring content to the western coast of Arkesia at the right pace to avoid burnout, work to drive quality of life (QoL) change, and wage war against bots. Now, our goal is to continuously improve the experience of the Lost Ark while adding exciting content that is yet to come. There are many updates and changes that will take to get there, and that's only half of it – in our ongoing efforts to create better games, we need to listen to our player base and make sure your ideas are heard so we can build better games together. We recognize that we have failed to achieve the relationship we want. Just like the game itself, our current goal is to continue to evolve, improve, and nurture better connections.
As we work to set the best route for the rest of 2023 and beyond, you'll find some of our ideas and plans below. These focus on player feedback and targeted target areas, rather than Arkesia's content in the coming months. While you may still find a spoiler or two, we'll be sharing these plans with the 2023 Roadmap – Part 2 next week.
War with robots
One of our top priorities last year was solving the robotics problem. Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games have both worked hard to implement changes together to limit the financial benefits of bots using the system. During this process, we realized that new players may be hindered, such as not having enough gold to hone. We will keep a close eye on these unwanted side effects and actively work to address them.
Material accumulation by robots also requires action. We have been working hard to ban millions of robot accounts, but the material they produce is still at risk of inflation. We will continue to take tough action against RMT participants and will take future action based on production data for gold and other materials.
Many technical measures have already been developed and tested, and we will continue to invest in future measures. For security reasons, it is not possible to disclose specific policies, but we can assure you that we are closely monitoring bot activity patterns and are ready to respond to their modified activity. While it's hard to completely remove bots from Lost Ark, we've made significant progress in limiting their impact on gameplay and the economy. Through new measures and an ongoing wave of bans, our changes have resulted in 55 billion robot coins removed from the game and a 99% reduction in bots interacting with the economy.
After we implement other changes next month, we plan to share an article with more updates on our progress and approach.
Open doors to new players
Thankfully, we still have new players starting their first adventures in Arkesia every day. However, the pace of vertical content updates in our version is significantly faster than in the Korean original, and we noticed that it was difficult for new players to catch up with the content level. One year after release, new/returning players have a hard time adjusting to Battle Level 50, learning Clan Raid modes, and setting raid requirements. To address this, we're reducing "non-essential" content that exhausts new and returning players, starting with:
1) Low-level improvements
- In order to enjoy Legion Raids, 4 equipment upgrade steps are currently required (Tier 1 301, T2 802, T3-1 1302, T3-2 1340). Too many honing steps overwhelm both new and casual players. Duplicate rigging processes don't seem necessary, so we plan to consolidate them into 2 tiers.
- Guardian's first playthrough and tower rewards will be enhanced to rival integration, so players won't have to play each tier of content multiple times.
2) Horizontal Content Improvements
- So far, we have mainly focused on improving and alleviating honing difficulties. However, new players also struggle with collecting horizontal content. To improve their experience, we plan to make it easier for everyone to collect runes/tripods/cards/gems.
- To reveal some of our thoughts, new "rare" runes will be added in the early stages of progression to help players acquire and use runes more easily.
- The collection difficulty of the new "Dives" and "You Have a Plan" sets will be increased and the cards/card XP needed to complete the set will be provided.
- Sailing content will change, improving co-op missions and increasing rewards.
3) Alt progress improvements
- As you may know, we introduced the "Silver Honing" system in our March update. We will be constantly expanding the levels covered by the system to ensure that players can easily progress on new classes and ALTS. The expanded Silver Honing system will be available at the next course release. We've also lowered requirements for the two most needed materials (Silver and Honor Fragments) to make equipment upgrades easier. Going forward, we are currently considering ways to increase the difficulty of the carving/gemstone setup for ALTS and will let you know (when decided) what we have developed.
4) Quality of life updates
- We recently made Triport activate roster binding, so once Triport is activated, every character in the roster can benefit from it. Going forward, we will also work to reduce other unnecessary and time-consuming activities while advancing ALTS. For example, having to do story quests after completing them with the protagonist is a problem. 'Knowledge Transfer' is meant to allow players to skip this inconvenience, but it is difficult for real new players to use due to a lot of restrictions. To address this, we are working to mitigate restrictions.
5) Improve the experience of battle items
- While looking at the various recommendations that our players have given us, we noticed an issue with acquiring/using Battle Items in earlier tiers. We believe this is a key issue, and after discussions with the developers, we plan to change the system to allow players to use battle items for free in the early Guardian Raids. Our goal is to implement this change before summer arrives. Along with the free provision of battle items, we will also add guides to help players use battle items correctly. Thank you for your important suggestions – we are always open to more ideas.
These will take some time to develop, but we hope to be ready by late summer or early fall. We will implement the improvement as soon as it is completed, and thank you for your patience.
Player fatigue - study with daily missions
In addition to the things mentioned above, frequent content updates can lead to fatigue and an increase in goalkeepers, making it difficult for new and returning players to play. With dozens of patterns to memorize, the burden on new players can add to the burden of trying to learn. To address this issue, we are preparing the following updates:
- Argos Abyss Raid
- The best way to help progress is to provide appropriate content for the player's current level of play. From this point of view, Argos is a very difficult raid, as it is one of the first raids that new players encounter and does not have enough time to adapt to Arkesia.
- When the process adjustments listed above occur, players will have access to the game's Argos Raid earlier, so the burden on mechanics in the Argos Abyss Raid must be lightened.
- We will reduce the number of patterns in the raid to ease the learning curve and change most of the "erase" mechanics to normal damage handling mechanics. In this way, players can overcome mechanics and modes by using appropriate skills/battle items/reaching relevant item levels as well as enlisting the help of other party members. We don't want players to go through too many situations where one player's mistake causes everyone to fail early in the game.
- The Smilegate RPG's R&D team is also considering applying similar changes to earlier Legion Raids such as Valtan and Vykas. Considering that they are designated as top-level late-game raids, not all erasing mechanisms will be adjusted. We'll be sure to share more details about these changes as they become available.
With these changes, we hope that every player in Arkesia will experience the joy of trying out the final game raid without too much stress, while understanding the types of patterns and mechanics they can expect to see in harder final game content.
Similarly, we know that community discussions around Dailies are a hot topic today, and we are aware of the dissatisfaction with Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and Una's quests. Currently, these daily activities are essential for acquiring the materials needed to upgrade their equipment, and are something for hardcore players to gain every day – so reducing them is not a simple issue. We need more time to think about it, but we understand the repetitive nature of the content, and Smilegate RPG is working in-house to discuss solutions. In the meantime, to help reduce workload, we'll be launching Ebony Cube – a new campaign that combines Boss Rush and Dimension Cube – in May.
When plans to further reduce daily newspapers are confirmed, we will ensure that more detailed information is shared. Until then, QoL updates like Ebony Cube will be implemented in our release as soon as possible.
Content cadence and events
We know that players have expressed some doubts and concerns about the current pace of content releases. Catching up with new final game content is important for us and our players, but there are two issues with speeding up the process; Localized timelines and player burnout. If content is localized too quickly, overall quality may suffer. Regardless of the localization schedule, there is still the issue of having to digest too much content at the same time, or constantly feeling the pressure to reach the next desired item level, which is related to the aforementioned exhaustion and the problem of the catch-up mechanic for new players.
Our goal is to launch content as quickly as possible without these issues. However, we know this is not satisfactory for players. Therefore, we promise to update the new courses (at least) as soon as possible. New Worlds and Legion raids must be updated sequentially, while classes do not have the same restrictions. We're excited to share our roadmap for the next 4 months with you next week and hope you'll hear from us when the content plan is announced.
Another thing we plan to integrate at a faster pace is in-game events. The events in our version are mostly old events from Korea, which is not ideal. Going forward, our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG plan to introduce more simultaneous events across versions, including events similar to the recent April Fool's Day event in South Korea. Of course, some of them will be exclusive to the West, and some will happen simultaneously with South Korea. We are open to suggestions!
expect
We still have a long way to go and understand that a letter is not a magic band-aid (or even a magic elemental life potion), but we hope that this letter becomes the first step on our path towards more open communication and a positive game-changer. To thank you for your continued support and dedication to Lost Ark, we have prepared a gift for all our players that will be sent with this letter. As a first-time login bonus, you'll find the following items in your product inventory:
- Mokoko skin selection box
- Moko pet selection box
- Mokoboard selection box
- Collective Battle Item Box x10
- Silver x1,000,000
- Relic Relationship Selection Box x3
- Phoenix x50
Anyone who logs in to the game before May 19 can claim these items.
As we enter 2023 and beyond, our priority is you, players of Lost Ark. We plan to bring you closer to our Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG teams and engage with you more step by step. We'll see you next week in Roadmap 2023 – Part 2, which has some exciting surprises.
Thank you for your patience and dedication last year. We will constantly strive to exceed your expectations.
- Amazon games and Smilegate role-playing games