Lost Ark

[Typhon]

Do you think they deliberately made the engraving system (specifically the part where you are faceting the rocks) to enrage the user, or are they just not very good at game design?

[Falconeer]

Also, once you complete Yorn (where the musical takes place) and if you've gotten your stronghold to lvl 22ish, you can research two things which make honing on alts WAY easier (+20% chance of success, -20% honing cost).  Try to wait on ginding up your alts till then

My stronghold is level 23 but I did not notice that. Could you be more specific so I can find it? Also, how does it only affect alts?

[SurfD]

It should show up as an option after you hit 802 gear level (the baseline for Yorn Chaos dungeons).   It basically only affects alts because in order to unlock it you effectively have to have to be done with the T1 grind on the first character you hit the milestone with, which is assumed to be your "main" at the time.   Unless you have been running multiple characters through T1 content trying to keep them all honed to the same level, in which case you basically wasted a lot of mats the discounts otherwise would have saved you.

[Falconeer]

I am iLevel 1000 on my main so I don't know how I haven't noticed this yet. Thanks though.

[Draegan]

Don't level alts without it.

[Trippy]

News from today: https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/amazongames-smilegate-rpg-message-from-the-team

Skip down to "ECONOMY: BOTS & HONING MATERIALS" for the interesting stuff, plus gifts at the bottom:

ECONOMY: BOTS & HONING MATERIALS

Another area of player concern we’ve seen is around honing. We know that for every triumphant yell as a player succeeds a low percentage hone, there are other players frustrated with their attempt failing, leaving them without enough materials to try again. As players focus on their first character, we’ve seen that there are a lower number of alternate roster characters to help feed main characters (and the economy) with high level honing materials.
A shortage of Tier 3 progression materials, coupled with problems introduced by bots, have made honing materials too expensive and a burden for players. To combat this, we will be supplying more progression materials for players to earn through fun in-game events, injecting more gold into the mid to end-game, and continuing our hard stance against bots.

BOTS

Bots have been a problem for us since launch. Even though we banned them as quickly as we could, they kept springing up. Thanks to the mass ban of bots around the timing of the Argos update and the removal of early-game gold that attracted them in the first place, we’ve seen a steep decline in bot activity and bot-farmed gold that was used to inflate the prices of honing materials. We will continue to take a hard stance against the remaining bots to make them inefficient, while ensuring active players can access gold, to create a better experience for all.

INJECTION OF HONING MATERIALS

In next week’s update, we will provide additional Grand Prix honing rewards, introduce a new casual Event Guardian Raid to supply players with more honing materials, and kick-off the first season of Competitive Proving Grounds!

Event Guardian Raids

In this event, you can enjoy Guardian Raids in a more casual way. Relax, play, and get honing rewards. Similar to the Grand Prix, you can enter once a day (per roster) and earn event specific coins to spend on rewards at a new vendor. This vendor can be found in major cities, alongside the entrance to this new activity.
In this event, ‘Scale of Balance’ is applied to change the character's stats to match the Guardian's level, and the difficulty is adjusted according to the number of participants in the raid. Players will be able to challenge Helgaia, Frost Helgaia, Lumerus, Ur’Nil, Vertus, Chromanium, Nacrasena, Dark Legoros, Icy Legoros, Calventus, and Levanos! This event will last for roughly a month, and players with item level 250 or above will be able to participate. We'll reiterate the details of this event in next week's update notes, but are excited to spoil the surprise as players look to earn more honing materials.

Arkesia Grand Prix Adjustments

We’re adding Tailoring Books and Metallurgy Books to the reward table for players to increase their honing rates, and we’re increasing the number of event coins earned to help players get items easier than before. We hope these new rewards will help players as they look to progress to T3 and beyond.

[SurfD]

Interesting changes, but really not enough.

Thing is, we basically JUST got the Argos raid.  One month after "launch".  From what I have been told, they have effectively compressed 3 years worth of content from the game into an ~1 month release window for the US / EU Amazon release.  But they have included NONE of the "catch up" mechanics that exist and were present in the Korean version of the game to compensate.  They literally expect us to do the full T1 and T2 grind ONTOP of the T3 grind, when the T1 and T2 shouldn't even exist, but should instead be a pointless formality you simply breeze through on the way to the actual end game content of T3.

Someone who was a longtime KR player commented on the LA forums that at around the time that about 9 months after Argos released, KR had what is referred to as the 7/7 patch. Basically after they added T3 Raid content, they had a massive drop in player count because the Ilevel requirement to get in to that content (you need to be 1370) + the crazy rate of honeing fails at that Ilevel  + the absolutely punishing grind to advance through T1/2 with alts to feed mains was just too much for people.

For reference, this was a slide from a LA dev conference on the state of the game a month or two before the 7/7 patch hit:


The 7/7 patch was basically a "quality of life" relief patch to allow people to get into T3 content easier.  Among the changes was a MASSIVE nerf to T1 and T2 honing bullshit:


This was apparently suppose to be in the Amazon Release.  It got pulled a bare few weeks before launch.  Pulling that patch basically exists purely to punch people in the dick and to allow Amazon to squeeze as much profit as they can from the whales who will pay anything to get past the artificially enforced T1/2 grind so they can rush T3.

Like, look at that shit.  100% reduced t1 / 2 exp costs + 2 level increases on a successful hone probably effectively cuts your resource requirement to 1/4th of what it currently is.  With zero chance to fail.   I would have been futzing around in T3 content a week ago instead of stuck grinding the last few I levels to unlock the second half of t2 right now.....

It's freaking infuriating knowing that I am being forced to spend multiple days grinding to unlock access to content that basically should be a footnote on an easy path to endgame because Amazon is intentionally attempting to artificially gate access to T3 to milk money out of the people they know will pay to get to it faster.   if you are going to release your game and cram 3 years worth of content into a 1 month release period, the least thing you could do is not force us to grind through the meaningless shit like it was all still "current" content.

Edited to clarify the timeline on the 7/7 patch.

[Trippy]

Interesting, didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.

[Draegan]

T1 and T2 were barely a grind. If that list had gone in, you'd be done with the game's content outside collectibles in a few weeks.

The bullshit is between 1340 and 1370 and lack of material sources. Everything until 1340 was fine.

Note:
I got to 1340 without alts feeding my main character. It wasn't much grinding, just casual play every day.  Doing all the islands for all those mats made it super easy.

[Setanta]

I enjoy the game, but honing can go fuck itself. Between that and no Oceanic servers, I can't see myself getting much further than ilevel 1100. Playing 200 ping on a US server sucks, and the "unofficial" Aussie server gets hit with maintenance in our play time.

I'm hitting the point where I'd rather buy a new game, or spend money on Warframe or Destiny 2 than put money into Lost Ark. Buy skins? Absolutely. I like to contribute if I am enjoying the game. P2W? Nah.