It's wrong and right, whales alone generally won't sustain it simply because a whale won't play a game without f2p peasants to lord over.
So companies generally strike a balance to entice F2P to keep logging in and whales to keep spending.
Something Blizzard decided to not do with Diablo and only catered to the whale giving the F2P and even low spenders nothing to look forward too.
Lost ark gives a lot of free goodies, particularly events to keep even the free people engaged more.
Logically something can't be wrong and right. It's one or the other. Case in point immediately after you declare it's wrong and right you state that whales don't by themselves sustain the game. You've taken a stand. The previous poster is in your opinion wrong because they stated whales do sustain games.
It's ok. Pick a side. You don't have to put up some facade of being the Switzerland of the forums.
idk I look at steam charts and there it is, Lost Ark 80% down from peak, yet on the top 5 highest concurrency games on whole steam. So I would say the game is doing just fine.
Every F2P, and even P2P MMO is haunted by botting, and the best botting schemes will be the ones will be the ones you don't really get to notice them.
I played this game allot when it first came out, put in 493 hours and was probably one of the first few to hit 1300+
When I hit the 10% honing rates that was enough for me, no amount of extra materials from events help to overcome these types of failure rates.
Assuming the majority of players play 3-4 hours /day it would take them 4-6 months to hit this wall, I think you're seeing that now and with the bot bans the population is dropping fast.
As for whales sustaining a game that's only true when they have plankton (non-whales) to feed on. Once the majority of people stop playing they have no one to play with or lord over.
I am a 3 hour a day player who hit 1370 on my main at the four month mark though I did purchase the Crystaline Aura, spent all of my gold gems from my Platinum founders pack and bought the first level of battle pass.
This additionally allowed me to get two alts over 1310.
I think I'm done now, not because of the bots, they never bothered me, not the "P2W" either, rather I've run out of meaningful progression goals since I don't raid and the "collection" aspects of the game aren't that interesting to me.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
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Lets be honest. Bad game and even worse monetization system. But hype did its own. Kind of like New World.
Games like this should be forgotten as fast as possible for the sake of gaming.
Yeah, hype is a helluva drug.
Reminds me of other Asian MMOs that takes a while to come out in the West like Blade and Soul and PSO2.
People talk constantly about how much they want the games and how they've been waiting YEARS to play them and when they do come out they are a big steaming pile.
NCSoft could learn from this. Lineage 3 or Project TL or whatever it is will be the "next big thing" that everyone wants to play so they should wait like 5 years or more to bring it out in the West.
When it finally does release it won't matter what the game is like people will flood into it with wallets open.
While it's nice that AGS/Smilegate have finally tackled the bot situation. It took them far too long and the queues pushed too many away possibly for good. There are also a fair number of multiboxers playing who currently aren't treated as bots. These inflate active player numbers as well.
Holding off on releasing classes for marketing reasons was also quite dumb. Not only are players being kept from having the best possible experience, they also have no incentive to buy skins before their main class is available.
Anyone paying attention will realize the game is actually not in a good spot at all. We've passed the point where the Koreans said the game improves drastically and was "saved". And guess what, the game is still mostly just boring dailies and some challenging weeklies where finding support classes is a pain.
I expect them to lose another decent chunk of players when WOTLK classic and Dragonflight release. And people that play it as their ARPG of choice will have D4 and Last Epoch available next year as well as POE2 likely in 2024.
The future is not bright for this game in the west.
Lost Ark is still the third most played game on Steam. It has proven to have found a very comfortable place in the mmo landscape in the West. The hype proved well placed on this one because it is still pulling numbers. People can deny all they want to but the numbers speak for themselves.
IDK man, the numbers seem pretty suspect to me if a bot ban results in such a drastic drop in just a couple of weeks. The main question in my mind is did they get them all or are the current numbers still counting a lot of bots?
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“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
It has a nice presentation for what it is, but does a really awful job with keeping players playing.
I also believe a large chunk of people came into Lost Ark with a misconception of what type of game this is; because it's really not Korean Diablo; although it can look like it sometimes.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013 Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005 Fishing in RL since 1992 Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
It's been awhile since I played so bare that in mind. But I quit because 3 dailies a day, 3 hours grinding for either 1 or 0 collection drops. I don't raid or even generally group and forcing me even into the solo act of it to get my gear up to snuff for the next region meant more than 7 days of grinding mats, with half of them going into the /failure bin.
I just stopped WANTING to log in, there was a wealth of content to do, but I wasn't really allowed to do it.
Whales lack the throughput, they game hop by nature and never focus on any one title while it may bring in short term cash in the end there will always be a new shiny isnt that the nature of wealth keep buying new crap to fill the void that is their lives leaving them unfulfilled.
I thought this game would be a dream for me as an alt whore (i have every class in wow max level, same with everquest, etc.). Turns out that being required to play every alt every day is not the same as having all those alts available when they sound like a good time but never being required to log in to them to progress.
So, I'm fully burnt out on this game now. Amazon's/SGs class trickle and content trickle decisions didn't help matters, nor the massive bot situation. Overall a very disappointing experience and now back to waiting for a game that can deliver a proper mmo experience after following this one since 2018.
Whales lack the throughput, they game hop by nature and never focus on any one title while it may bring in short term cash in the end there will always be a new shiny isnt that the nature of wealth keep buying new crap to fill the void that is their lives leaving them unfulfilled.
whale will jump to the next big thing as soon as they can , so will do streamers
no, from my experience yes they are mostly bots. at times playing during off hours you would see 20x more bots than players. the game has a massive bot problem. I'm glad the devs finally cracked down on the bots. there is still some gold spam, but nowhere as bad anymore.
i havent put a single dollar in the game after launch, its very much a f2p friendly game so people whining about the cash shop probably don't play the game.
Bots don't just play games for reasons of their own without any real players who are also interested. Gold sellers need someone to sell their gold to. If a game has 50k or 100k concurrently active real players several months after launch, that's probably still a plenty successful game. It's not the same degree of successful as a game with 800k concurrently active real players several months after launch. But let's not conclude the dramatically shrinking numbers from waves of bot bans with evidence that the game is a commercial failure.
Bots don't just play games for reasons of their own without any real players who are also interested. Gold sellers need someone to sell their gold to. If a game has 50k or 100k concurrently active real players several months after launch, that's probably still a plenty successful game. It's not the same degree of successful as a game with 800k concurrently active real players several months after launch. But let's not conclude the dramatically shrinking numbers from waves of bot bans with evidence that the game is a commercial failure.
Two types of botters, commercial of course, but also players run bot trains.
I've run into player botters in several games, EVE in particular I met several who ran 30 plus mining ships at one time
No idea what the mix between the two types might be in LA though.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Bots don't just play games for reasons of their own without any real players who are also interested. Gold sellers need someone to sell their gold to. If a game has 50k or 100k concurrently active real players several months after launch, that's probably still a plenty successful game. It's not the same degree of successful as a game with 800k concurrently active real players several months after launch. But let's not conclude the dramatically shrinking numbers from waves of bot bans with evidence that the game is a commercial failure.
Two types of botters, commercial of course, but also players run bot trains.
I've run into player botters in several games, EVE in particular I met several who ran 30 plus mining ships at one time
No idea what the mix between the two types might be in LA though.
A player who runs 10 characters at once is still one real player, even if not ten. There's a whole lot of room to drop from 800k concurrent or even 200k concurrent before a game is really a commercial failure.
The game was a straight up copy of MU Legend. People hated that game because it was top down view. I'm not even surprised the hype for it down in months.
Bots don't just play games for reasons of their own without any real players who are also interested. Gold sellers need someone to sell their gold to. If a game has 50k or 100k concurrently active real players several months after launch, that's probably still a plenty successful game. It's not the same degree of successful as a game with 800k concurrently active real players several months after launch. But let's not conclude the dramatically shrinking numbers from waves of bot bans with evidence that the game is a commercial failure.
Two types of botters, commercial of course, but also players run bot trains.
I've run into player botters in several games, EVE in particular I met several who ran 30 plus mining ships at one time
No idea what the mix between the two types might be in LA though.
Pretty accurate. I used to know a few guilds back in my WoW days that ran bot trains to fund raids, so its really not all about rmt. LA can get pretty resource intensive at times so it wouldn't surprise me if many were player bot trains.
The game was a straight up copy of MU Legend. People hated that game because it was top down view. I'm not even surprised the hype for it down in months.
That's not why people hated Mu Legends, they hated it because it was shallow and P2W. Mu Legends was itself a copy of Devilian.
Comments
Logically something can't be wrong and right. It's one or the other. Case in point immediately after you declare it's wrong and right you state that whales don't by themselves sustain the game. You've taken a stand. The previous poster is in your opinion wrong because they stated whales do sustain games.
It's ok. Pick a side. You don't have to put up some facade of being the Switzerland of the forums.
Every F2P, and even P2P MMO is haunted by botting, and the best botting schemes will be the ones will be the ones you don't really get to notice them.
Games like this should be forgotten as fast as possible for the sake of gaming.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
This additionally allowed me to get two alts over 1310.
I think I'm done now, not because of the bots, they never bothered me, not the "P2W" either, rather I've run out of meaningful progression goals since I don't raid and the "collection" aspects of the game aren't that interesting to me.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Holding off on releasing classes for marketing reasons was also quite dumb. Not only are players being kept from having the best possible experience, they also have no incentive to buy skins before their main class is available.
Anyone paying attention will realize the game is actually not in a good spot at all. We've passed the point where the Koreans said the game improves drastically and was "saved". And guess what, the game is still mostly just boring dailies and some challenging weeklies where finding support classes is a pain.
I expect them to lose another decent chunk of players when WOTLK classic and Dragonflight release. And people that play it as their ARPG of choice will have D4 and Last Epoch available next year as well as POE2 likely in 2024.
The future is not bright for this game in the west.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I also believe a large chunk of people came into Lost Ark with a misconception of what type of game this is; because it's really not Korean Diablo; although it can look like it sometimes.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
Whales lack the throughput, they game hop by nature and never focus on any one title while it may bring in short term cash in the end there will always be a new shiny isnt that the nature of wealth keep buying new crap to fill the void that is their lives leaving them unfulfilled.
whale will jump to the next big thing as soon as they can , so will do streamers
i havent put a single dollar in the game after launch, its very much a f2p friendly game so people whining about the cash shop probably don't play the game.
I've run into player botters in several games, EVE in particular I met several who ran 30 plus mining ships at one time
No idea what the mix between the two types might be in LA though.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Pretty accurate. I used to know a few guilds back in my WoW days that ran bot trains to fund raids, so its really not all about rmt. LA can get pretty resource intensive at times so it wouldn't surprise me if many were player bot trains.