On February 11, 2024, Lost Ark turned two years old in the West. The MeinMMO editorial team had the opportunity to ask the developers some questions about the development of the online role-playing game and their long-term plans. It was about bots, overwhelmed players and proud moments.
Lost Ark’s second anniversary is already a few days ago, but we’ll just use the MMORPG’s newly released March update as a reason to serve you an exciting special. Let’s first look at the most important new features of the patch, which was released on March 20, 2024:
The full patch notes for the March update can be found on the Lost Ark website.
Lost Ark in two minutes:
Everything you need to know about the MMORPG Lost Ark – in 2 minutes
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Turbulent two years
Now for our promised treat: We were allowed to ask Community Manager Roxanne Sabo a few questions about the first two years after the West release, the status quo of the MMORPG and the long-term plans for Lost Ark.
Roxanne Sabo’s first answer underlines that the Lost Ark team can look back on a turbulent time. The highlights clearly include the incredibly successful launch, with more than 1.3 million players simultaneously playing the world of Arkesia on Steam.
At the same time, it was a huge challenge to manage such a large number of players and have enough teams working around the clock to provide the best possible experience. The developers are still struggling with another construction site:
As for the additional challenges, it probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that dealing with bots was something we struggled with. While we’ve made great progress in this area and continued to expand and improve our methods to prevent bots, the botters are also continuing to upgrade.
Roxanne Sabo in an interview with MeinMMO
The team was able to record another major success with the introduction of the Jump Start servers last year, which meant that “tons of players” played Lost Ark for the first time or as returning players.
Your feedback sets the direction
Lost Ark has changed significantly since its release in February 2022, and that’s thanks to the constant feedback from players – combined with data from the developers. One topic in particular ended up on the designers’ table again and again.
In all the feedback we collected from fans in the West over the last year, the biggest commonality was that fans felt fatigued by the fast pace of the content. Fans expressed frustration with the amount of homework required to advance their characters along with the new content requirements, and that this was becoming increasingly frustrating.
Roxanne Sabo in an interview with MeinMMO
This feedback resulted in numerous changes that landed on the live servers over the past year. Some of the innovations from March also aim to better respect players’ time and reduce frustration and fatigue.
Anyone who wants to prepare their character for the current endgame can do so in a comparatively short time and with very little effort thanks to various simplifications, shortcuts and catch-up events.
In addition, the tough Legion raids are no longer as frustrating and punishing thanks to various adjustments. This way, new players shouldn’t lose motivation when learning new mechanics and boss strategies.
The future of Lost Ark
A topic that will continue to concern the developers in the future revolves around the aforementioned bot users and trading with real money. According to Roxanne Sabo, the coming measures should take effect exactly where they originate.
So with the botters themselves and not with the misused gaming systems. The aim is for legitimate players to not feel penalized by the measures and to continue to have the best possible gaming experience.
In addition, there will continue to be targeted events in the future that will help you make progress more efficiently with your main character or your twinks – for example when new classes or raid challenges are published.
In addition, the developers would like to further refine the process for processing player feedback in order to be able to make timely adjustments where many Arkesia heroes are struggling.
Last but not least, the community manager explained that we have only experienced a small part of Lost Ark’s story so far. Many other storylines are already being worked on. There are also regular new challenges for the endgame. Lost Ark should therefore be quite well positioned for the future.
By the way, Lost Ark is still one of the MMORPGs with the most viewers on Twitch:
The 5 MMORPGs with the most viewers on Twitch in February 2024