Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG have released a letter to the Lost Ark community. They acknowledge falling short in several ways but commit to improvements on bots, quality of life changes, and alleviating frustration for new players and the overall player burnout. There will also be a new roadmap update coming next week.
The letter to the community is open, as the teams both promised greater transparency and communication going forward after the Western launch. “We recognize that we’ve fallen short of accomplishing our desired relationship”, they acknowledge, and delve into how they plan to do better.
One of the major problems is the ongoing battle against botting. During the first year, the team has made efforts, including massive banwaves for bots, as well as making adjustments to the game and even the rewards and economic system to try and cut off the supply of early gold and make botting less appealing. Since this is a security issue, there aren't many details, but they say that over 55 billion bot gold has been removed by their efforts and there’s a 99% decrease in bot activity.
When it comes to new (or more casual) players, there’s a level of frustration and a feeling of being unable to keep up, for a few reasons. One is a faster content release cadence than the original Korean version, meaning there’s a lot to do, constantly. Another is in some of the multi-layered requirements for honing and the need to replay content to progress. Both of these will be addressed, with work to make collecting things like runes, cards, and gems easier, to complement efforts to make honing more possible.
Some other changes will reduce the repeated content and improve access for alts, as well as letting players use battle items for free in early tier Guardian Raids. The additions with frequent content updates mean that there are a lot more feelings of gatekeeping and difficulty with so much more to memorize and remember and complete, that they want to cut down on repetitive content and they'll have more down the line on what this will mean.
Another change we can expect to see later is to stop delaying events that were already happening (or over) in Korea and instead making some new events happen simultaneously, while also sometimes having simple Western exclusive events.
Since there is a lot of work to be done, they're looking at late summer to fall for the bulk of it, but they plan to implement whatever is complete when it's done. There will also be a big roadmap update part 2 coming next week, so we'll begin to see just how this might look, on top of what else is coming in 2023.
The letter to the community is a long one, but it it hits so many different points and plans that it's important to read through if you are interested at all in starting—or returning to–Lost Ark.
