Its not surprising Maplestory got more popular again once they introduced Reboot servers.

Here's my take. SG is making core money in Korea. Anything they make outside of Korea is gravy. If they put in minimal effort and still make money outside of Korea, it's a win for them. Look at Japan, they did the bare minimum, got some money, then cashed out when it dried up. They're going to do the same thing in Russia and China and with AGS. They're not going to dedicate developers to make a separate game for non-Koreans. They'll just take the money from AGS and China and Russia, and walk away. It's been their attitude since the beginning. We don't even get mentioned during LOA-ON except to say we're not getting the new thing in Lost Ark.

I see your point, I'm by no means defending P2W aspects of games, but in my honest opinion, it's not specifically the P2W aspect that's killing Lost Ark. It's the fact that AGS is not doing anything about the economy, see ex.: New World. Also a good example of a good Korean MMORPG, is BDO. The market is controlled by the devs, so it can't get out of control. Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't played it in a looong time. In any case, the core of the inflation are the bots, but they're not doing anything about it. Also as Cautty mentioned, there weren't really any good changes/events... - whatever you wanna call it - in place to make up for the goldsink, that we didn't need... except bots inflated gold, and we kinda did... but your casual player/majority suffers because of it. I get that BDO and Lost Ark are fundamentally different games, but goes to show that what happens when developers care about their game, and community. Hell, they even parted ways with Kakao Games, which was the cause of the cancer in the first place. P.S.: This text is just something that I had on my mind, nothing well built explanation, so don't lunge at my neck cause of it if you misunderstood my point, ty. :P

Whenever I come back I spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix Lost Ark but ultimately so many of the problems are just baked into the DNA of the game. Tbh I haven't even gotten to elixers yet, i'm just trying to get all my Akkan gear and still it's very rough. The cancelled NAW/NAE merge really killed my hype going forward

It's not just AGS, it's SG ... and the entire MMO Genre including the players. These games are designed around the psychological fomo cycle. Players buy into it. Period. In fact, it's the players that drive the speed of content, which drives out players while proving to these companies that it's a good business model for revenue. That's just how it is. Edit: Crazy but this is one of your better takes. :)

It's true indeed. The Korean MMOs are just being shipped over to the West without changing their core aspect that often revolve around having multiple intentionally designed inconveniences that could be mitigated / bypassed by paying real money, which is what we often refer to P2W. Those systems are much more acceptable by the Koreans but not so by the Western audience, and the publishers cannot really do major changes to those games either, so it always results in a stalemate situation. I've played multiple Korean MMOs and they always been like that. That being said, I still thing AGS are mismanaging the game too much though, so I partially hold them responsible for the current state of LA in the West.

Lost Ark west wont have problems in the future because there wont be enough player to keep it alive if Smilegate and Amazon doing this kind of content pace and system design.

Think the single biggest thing is the fact that the publishers are different. Same shit with western mmos KR and China. Im pretty sure that the only reason that lost ark is the biggest mmo in KR is because both WoW and FFXIV's publishers in that region are different and they recieve content at a delayed rate, the same way that the west receives content at delayed rates for all KR mmos. P2W is an issue but idk how big an issue it actually is when u look at how successful gacha games like genshin impact are in the west. people over here are willing to shell out a lot of money to p2w but it makes little to no sense to do that while also quite literally being second class players by default and getting content that has already been cleared for months by the time they get it.

I give lost ark 2 years then the game is extinct generally new players will get the ran if they don't change something about it alone through gatekeep many players will go for the 65k Players that are displayed on Steam are the real players only 10k the rest are all bots anyway as soon as echidna comes the game dies because only currently whales that are 1620+ are preferred

It's not about P2W or not, it's about how P2W it is and how they'd rather see the game die than hurt their bottom line. They only understand money, once the money dries out, they will find very quickly ways to improve the game. That's exactly what happened last year, everyone left, they made improvements. Just like Blizzard with WoW, it wasn't possible to change or improve the systems in Shadowlands, when everyone left, they found very quickly how to do so. It's just a matter or time. Personnally, I'm waiting to see how they intend to let support players solo the raids and how they intend to nerf elixirs. I did all my free elixirs, got scammed several and just took a week off, just tired of having 1-5% to get a decent elixir with MAYBE the right stats on it.

Been saying this since launch. All the changes that the west wants to see can only happen if there's a separate dev team focused on the western version. Otherwise, you're stuck getting dicked down by Korean p2w tactics

p2w and raid wipe mech in Lost Ark is that drives many people away. People in the West enjoy more casual experience. Also i sort of disagree dev and publisher could not do anything. If everyone stop playing tomorrow, i bet there will stream appologize right away and fix everything within a week, it is just people got addict so much into the game to do it 😂 Also , AGS is doing a piss poor job to manage the game look at 50k bots running last month and that is the problem.

I mean noone is preventing SG from having multiple development teams preparing game for specific regions based on feedback from publisher. I do not think that AGS need development team I think that SG need to pull their head from back pocket if they want to have some west version of game. I am fine with some level of monetization, but I am not fine with game throwing sticks after sticks under your feet in form of absurd rng systems and then sell you not even solution, but option to try your luck more often... whole idea "I will create problem and sell you fix" is just so toxic and horrible. Imagine this happening in every other industry, like restaurant would sell you salt because they did not put it into your food or you would have to pay extra for spoon, because you got just fork to eat your soup. Sounds absurd? That is KR gaming experience, they are literally destoying game which really could be globally extremely succesfull if they would be less greedy and monetize more on skins and things which are not making game worse.

I think Lost Ark is pay to access but not pay to win. There are ppl at 1630 with 40 set full 10s doing pretty mediocre DPS. However, they get first access to content which allows them to play newer content when it comes out even if they don't get the clear. Biggest issue is that Western version was not localized. Vertical progression costs needed to be improved, all they did was fuel 3rd party gold seller's sales. It is still a really fun game that is also very beautiful, but the game feeds on fomo + toxic player mentality. Mmos are grindy by nature, I think its also maybe shifting tastes in video game consumption.

also u should try femboi mode i think u would do well

Some people keep alts at 1580 and do clown>brel>kaya and funnel everything to 1 1620+ main. That way, they're always geared for content and have time to prog new raids. I dont understand how so many people expect to be catered to have 6 "mains" without spending either time, effort or swiping for it. Just pick one. If you have a change of heart, sell gems and funnel. 😂

bro u gotta get more sleepz

brah cheng quality tap-gear up tap-elixir-transcendence gold coste to silver game is fixed talking abou out of tuch XD it's not compelex at all

Somebody hasn't played some EA games Aware