Lost Ark Online

I'd love some gold too if you're shipping it off. On Azena. Character name is Cynnix

Cyni said:

I'd love some gold too if you're shipping it off. On Azena. Character name is Cynnix

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I support giving gold to Cynnix so that I can begin charging him for carries!

Voldeth said:

...You are not looking for an MMO. The genre has never allowed individuals to 'stay competitive' while only playing a single character for a few hours a day. Individuals who play 24/7 will always have a significant advantage. Lost Ark is a million times more friendly in that regards as the amount of content that you can grind is limited unlike an EQ where someone who can grind a billion more AAs than you.

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Endless, mandatory grind mechanics are bad for the long term health of a game, though. AA in Everquest are actually a great example. I'm heard they eventually changed them a bit, but at least for the few expansions following their introduction, it was pretty much impossible to ever catch up to people who just played the game 24/7. And the only way to get AA points was to just endlessly grind XP, probably the most boring fucking activity in the game. And on top of that, you lost XP during raids, so you not only had to grind AA but you also had to grind just regular XP buffer. As a result, you had this endless gameplay loop of needing to engage in boring content to endlessly grind points that in some cases, were pretty mandatory. And this leads to burnout and the playerbase disengaging from the game, especially when they feel like they will never, ever, catchup

I do agree that disguised grinds are better than “kill 10000 mobs” grinds. That is why WoW felt better than EQ1 in terms of grinding. The problem is disguised grinds take effort to design and mindless grinds are easy to implement

Chaos Dungeons & Guardian raids in Lost Ark are absolutely terrible. They are part of a philosophy that MMOs adopted long ago where they want people logging in every day because 'daily login metrics' and short term goals started to become more important to the genre than long-term retention. It's garbage design.

I still prefer them over how this is done in other games due to the fact that they at least drop an insane amount of loot. My character is almost 1600 ilvl (1596 atm), which means that I can effectively stop doing that content for the next year and I would still be able to participate in all content that gets released on the hardest difficulty. It isn't endless, it's just incredibly boring & feels like a chore --- they don't try to disguise it.

Elgacia incoming!

Since the topic came up in Discord relating to why I enjoy LA more than D4, I'll be streaming a full day's worth of LA content for those on the fence of coming back tomorrow for the reset in Discord. A few things to note;

1- There is no longer any P2W in the game. I'm serious. You'd have to spend a few thousand dollars to increase your ilevel beyond 1490.
2- There are no longer any bots. They get banned rapidly. The economy is significantly different as a result (stuff is cheap but gold takes awhile to earn).

I'll stream a full loop of content as a result and answer any questions, I won't hide the grind aspect of the game and will go through the boring content as well as result, this means that I'll be doing;

1- Chaos dungeons on 10 characters.
2- Guardian raids on 6 characters
3- Cube tickets on 6 characters
4- A full clear of Vykas/Clown/Brel (Hard) on 1 char and likely several additional clowns/brel normal on a few alts.
5- All Una's task
6- The new PVP zone / event (which sucks)

In essence, if you want to see how the game feels like at end game and ask questions, just hop in and ask. It's the best MMO on the market currently with a fuckload to do & brel hard will likely have a few wipes. The FOH guild is full from a roster standpoint but if any forums folks want an invite, just let me know. Hoping to see BoozeCube E elidib Daidraco Gravel & others come check see, specifically for the Brel hard at 8PM with the guild.

Kirun said:

"Endless" grinds are fine as long as your grind is engaging and fun. Chaos dungeons, guardians raids, etc. weren't "fun" content is the problem. So, the grind eventually starts feeling like a chore. And once a game starts feeling like a chore, wtf is the point of playing it?

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That was my biggest complaint with this game. The fun content was all time gated shit, mostly once a week. The unfun stuff was what you were allowed to do daily. Fuck that.

I wanted to run the group and raid content. But I guess me gearing up faster than someone who only gets to raid once a week is more fun for everyone?

Maybe they've fixed it? Don't care. Too late for me at this point, I don't come back to games.

And yeah, to Kirun 's other post, I've grinded the shit in BDO. I've done stuff like bred two dream horses, did months of sailing to get a carrack, and done stuff like the infinite HP pot. BDO values your time though and has fun combat.

I have now joined the 1600 club:

I did not realize they added a bunch more world leafs already until i randomly got a new one from an epic secret sapling tree. Of course i got a weakened clown card from one of the freebie leg packs.

Malakriss said:

I did not realize they added a bunch more world leafs already until i randomly got a new one from an epic secret sapling tree. Of course i got a weakened clown card from one of the freebie leg packs.

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Yeah, this was added a bit ago. They really do need a better way for people to catch up on LoS 30 -- for a returning player like Cyni this is a huge dps loss.

Elgacia exceeded my expectations by a good margin. The story was fantastic, the dungeon was absolutely epic and getting to remove one legion raids off my weekly to do list is a huge QOL. The only real downside from this patch is that me & Lumi are struggling due to the removal of the engraving support for the first boost.

Tower 50 completed:

You're a monster Voldeth. How do you even find the time! =]

I haven't logged in to do anything other than cycle my stronghold and make sure my guildies have tasks for the week since the run of Zelda/D4/SF6 launches and the half dozen other highly anticipated games coming out in the latter half of the year make it seem like that's going to be the only thing I do in the game for a while.

Voldeth said:

I have now joined the 1600 club:

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Chimney said:

You're a monster Voldeth. How do you even find the time! =]

I haven't logged in to do anything other than cycle my stronghold and make sure my guildies have tasks for the week since the run of Zelda/D4/SF6 launches and the half dozen other highly anticipated games coming out in the latter half of the year make it seem like that's going to be the only thing I do in the game for a while.

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I went semi hard on D4 for the first few days but it became obvious that I wasn't really enjoying myself and waiting for a few patches of QOL stuff to come in was needed. Zelda was an incredible amount of fun (and I suspect FF16 will be as well); I simply stop doing the chores when something like that gets released outside of pushing Vold (it's why my page 2 alts are so lackluster atm).

At the end of the day, my perspective on LA is pretty straightforward: I absolutely love the combat and raid design. It's superior to the alternative options available (WoW / FF / BDO) for what I look for in a game. There is also no upcoming MMOs beyond the Riot MMO that shows any potential so I've treated my playtime based on the fact that it's my long-term game. I stop honing when I have bad luck. I entirely skip out on Guardian's when there's a tier that I don't like and I don't feel a need to do Chaos dungeons every day on all my characters. When they release a patch (like Elgacia) my play time picks back up significantly and I push hard because that's how I've always played MMOs and I find the game by virtue of the combat incredibly fun.

That and my job also has about 4 hours of conference calls a day where my need to talk is <15 minutes so I've got to fill that time somehow. Add in the fact that I can playfrom my Steam Deck / couch and you've got a recipe for success.

Lost Ark has way too many insta wipe mechanics. Or they did, idk about now.

The game was frequently very poor in telling you what you did wrong or what caused the wipe. Couple that with one mistake = everyone dies and it becomes extremely frustrating

Even the final story dungeon for elgacia has a wipe mechanic that gibs casuals who don't know what to do, only saving grace is it lets you plume and resume.

But Kayangel is where the gatekeeping will kick into high gear if you haven't gotten the ancient brel armor since you won't be able to upgrade to set Lvl 3 or convert to akkan gear. Meanwhile bus prices are still high for HM and burnout is high until aeromancer maybe.