Lost Ark

[Falconeer]

A month would be a lot of fun with one game. What's wrong with that? $25 for 1 month of fun is amazing value.

[Trippy]

Yeah but it's also free to play if you are willing to wait 2 more days.

[Trippy]

Thanks for the currency guide link.   I got a Pally to lvl 20 last night.  I paid for the $25 dollars thingy cause I am sure I can at least get 25 bucks O fun out of this.   To say the amount of information, currencies, items, character only, account only,  information flowing at me was overwhelming is an understatement.  I guess the bar for this type of stuff has seriously moved since I last paid attention?  

Yes this game and other recent games like it are crazy complex with a seemingly endless number of systems to learn.

[Velorath]

A month would be a lot of fun with one game. What's wrong with that? $25 for 1 month of fun is amazing value.

"25 bucks is a great deal for this free game."

[Falconeer]

Free to play games aren't really free usually. You pay with time instead of money. With the $25 you get a month of Premium sub which is about $15 plus some extra crap that you may or may not care for. For the most part by not paying the monthly premium subscription you are being hit with a time tax, hindering progress and taking some quality-of-life features away.

But regardless, I was mostly addressing Fraeg's issues with longevity.

[Lucas]

Gave it a try and yes, this might be the best (or smoothest) F2P MMO I ever played (not counting those which became F2P after starting as subscription based or something else).

[Trippy]

Apparently there’s a Founders Pack duping bug. I was wondering why there were some crazy offers on the currency exchange.

[Falconeer]

You may say I have an open feud with FF XIV (a game I have invested probably 200+ hours on and bought three copies of for various reasons), but the production quality of this game puts that one to shame. They clearly have a lot in common, being built on a very traditional MMORPG threadmill, and both have a hilarious amount of content, but in this one every single activity seems more fun and fleshed out and overall just of a much higher quality. Especially after they watered down some aspects of FF like gathering.

Also, I am really happy that they chose to go with the Guild Wars model for PvP. It's only arenas of different kinds, and you don't bring your gear and skills. Instead you build your ideal character from ALL the existing powers and invest points as you see fit. Truly even grounds PvP.

[Trippy]

PvP is apparently very neglected in this game. A streamer who speaks both Korean and English and was playing on the KR servers was saying the top discussions on KR forums are all about when will PvP be looked at. It's probably not a great idea to be playing Lost Ark just for the PvP.

Edit: just

[MediumHigh]

I prefer arena base PVP over any attempts to try and fail at open world, or mass pvp. So I guess I'll be trying Lost Ark.

[Falconeer]

PvP is apparently very neglected in this game. A streamer who speaks both Korean and English and was playing on the KR servers was saying the top discussions on KR forums are all about when will PvP be looked at. It's probably not a great idea to be playing Lost Ark just for the PvP.

Edit: just

Of course not.

But considering that in ALL the other Korean games I've played PvP is always based on how much real money have been invested in powering up your character, this one managed to rise at the top of my personal chart in about 4 minutes. I am not playing Lost Ark for the PvP, but if the arena stands as a side activity that follows the Guild Wars model, then it's great news.

[Fraeg]

Glad to hear it is Guild wars style arena where you just bring your build to the table.   Between my 17 sorc and 23 pally I am having a lot of fun.  The limit to 4 person groups is hurting our 5 man crew.... will probably roll with a duo and a trio so nobody gets left out.... was some Discord drama last night.   Well mid 40s polite Canadian drama 

[Trippy]

Servers still down. Literally unplayable.

Edit: apparently this is the tweet (Twitter isn’t working for me) announcing pre-launch maintenance issue so things will still be down for a while:

https://twitter.com/playlostark/status/1492178267138244609

[Draegan]

This game is dope. Already 50 and starting the gearing process.

Lots of system in this game. And it has some loot.

Best part is that once you hit 50, you get two free level 50 boosts so you can get alts up and running and doing dailies if thats your thing.

[Falconeer]

The Free to Play launch was today. 15 minutes before release they announced a delay due to "deployment issues". More than 5 hours later, the game is still offline, and no news.

EDIT: Online now. 5 hours and 15 minutes delay.

[Trippy]

I'm impressed Steam's patching service didn't explode again.

[Falconeer]

I have a theory that the free to play system will certainly bring in a looot of players, but when it comes to day 1, the large majority paid to be there so today it's not gonna be bigger than the 8th.

[Trippy]

It won't let me in my server. Oh well. More accurately it thinks I haven't created characters on any server and my server is locked to new character creation.

Edit: at least I'm not the only one: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1599340/discussions/0/5034464604296998957/

[Falconeer]

Same. Hahaha.

[Trippy]

Servers going back down to fix issue:

https://twitter.com/playlostark/status/1492267186185900033

[Ashamanchill]

I plan to check this out, but I am going to do something I rarely do, which is wait a month or so for the hub-bub to die down, and give the jutting metal edges a chance to be sanded down.

I can feel everyone having fun around me lol, but I shall still stay strong.

[Soulflame]

That might be true, if they could, I dunno, even log in.

[Falconeer]

It's really odd considering it's 2022 and the servers are supposed to be handled by Amazon, but this could be the absolute worst launch of any MMORPG ever. I may be forgetting something, but almost 7 hours in and no game yet.

[Ashamanchill]

Didn't you just play New World and it's 900 year queues?

[Trippy]

I prefer this to server crashes, character wipes / rollbacks, etc.

[Falconeer]

Queues suck only if you have to endure it. This is a black void of nothingness that cannot be avoided.

[Trippy]

They are up with characters restored! Go go go!

[Falconeer]

Every single early access server is locked, so all our friends who just got in cannot join our servers. We were on the least populated EU. Feels bad, because it happened in New World too. Basically the lesson here is: stop participating in headstarts if you have friends who join later.

[Trippy]

It's even worse than that. KR Lost Ark doesn't have server transfers and NA/EU will not either.

Edit: also founder packs are bound effectively to servers and not accounts so people with opened Founder Packs don't want to switch either. Amazon is giving a few of the exclusive items to people who opened packs who move but it's not a complete replacement for the original stuff.

[schild]

2022
1998

literally no difference

[Falconeer]

It's even worse than that. KR Lost Ark doesn't have server transfers and NA/EU will not either.

Edit: also founder packs are bound effectively to servers and not accounts so people with opened Founder Packs don't want to switch either. Amazon is giving a few of the exclusive items to people who opened packs who move but it's not a complete replacement for the original stuff.

Luckily the lock has been removed this morning. It looks like they have been reasonable and it was there just to force people to scatter at the very early opening of the flood gates.

[Falconeer]

8800 in queue at 2pm today. OK.

[Hoax]

yeah this is far from the worst but it still seems like nobody ever has learned anything in 2-3 decades of the same mistakes being made every time.

if it were me i would have been throwing out ideas like: heavily cap how many people could create on each server each day of the 3 days of early access to try to force people to spread out over regions instead of creating single super servers. either that or plan for and designate the super server and set it up to handle that designation if the tech can do that, since that shit always happens in the twitch streamer era. if you make a character on a server and get them to level X (25 lets say in lost ark) you are given 3 invites to the server you can give out that will dodge server locks.

then you make it clear that 10-14 days after launch you are going to allow 1 free server xfer within a region per account started on/before launch week for an entire weekend to let people re-sort themselves onto less populated servers and when that window opens start imposing really heavy queue times to the bigger servers for that weekend to incentivize people to fuck off to smaller ones.

idk. but instead i see zero evidence at all that devs ever try to do anything to head off these issues. its nbd to me, i made on USwest (Mari), the server was locked from new creation a little bit on Friday but i think its ok now probably.

[Khaldun]

It's a design problem too, though. Meaning anybody who has played a MMO knows that there's frequently a major premium to being the first to powerlevel up in terms of access to resources, loot, knowledge about mobs or bosses, etc., and even if there isn't, starting a month later than everybody else often means that there's fewer people to group with or do content with. We all know what it means to be on the forward wave of content progression, however the game handles that in terms of grouping--whether there are public areas where folks have to work together when an event triggers or instanced content that requires a group, if you're out of synch with everyone else you're fucked.

[Ashamanchill]

You guys win. The FOMO got to me.