Today’s Lost Ark update was postponed after the team found “a critical issue with the build”, and instead, held downtime to address any issues that happened when staging the update. There’s no new date yet, but the update, when it does land, will bring some quality of life updates, fixes, Stronghold updates, and will set the stage for the first round of server merges and big content update set for later in September.
Among the quality of life updates in the patch are changes to the content status UI to make things clearer. There will be new settings, like a full-screen option and an icon to show whether you can get gold from a particular piece of content, and an indicator that shows which content you can’t get gold from.
The promised updates to social and chat systems will come in the patch, including automatically setting your ban list roster-wide, the ability to write announcements in global chat, and to search past messages. This patch will add a guild group chat system, where each guild can have up to five chat rooms. They’re also planning to add filters for combat messages and content, and consolidate a few chat tab groups like currency and loot into one called “Obtained (Consume)”. Inventory also gets an organization boost with the introduction of a content storage tab in the inventory that will hold event tokens and materials, exchange materials, and skin material, like dyes.
Strongholds get a few big changes. Stronghold quests are replaced by the weekly missions in the new Stronghold Activity Notebook. A new “Save Stronghold” button in the HUD lets you save some to return to later, but also serves as an incentive for those who get likes, since there are rewards for this. Most of the other changes here are designed to streamline the process, with the ability to invite others while in your Stronghold, the “Visit Stronghold” button in the friends and guild UI always active, and a system that makes item placement for prop themes simple.
Overall, this now-delayed update has many fixes as well, as this update is all about housekeeping and a few functional changes before late September’s major content update, server merges, and the introduction of the Machinist.
