What I Learned from Lost Ark

I have to be honest- I was a little conflicted on what to write about for this article. “Gaming” is quite a broad topic to write about, after all, with a near-endless amount of areas to take inspiration from. Do I want to write about the recent Assassin’s Creed 15th Anniversary Live Stream (by God, has it already been 15 years since we’ve met Desmond and Altair)? The recently released Pokemon trailer for the next main-line game? Or maybe another list about Fallout Vaults that we’ve all probably read, or watched, at least 20+ times.

But, none of that really “stuck out” to me. My pen just wouldn’t write the words I need on paper for me. Sometimes, writing is less about the passion, love, and excitement for it, but rather about the discipline, like any other craft or hobby. When you have a fast-approaching deadline, especially in a professional setting, sometimes, in the most literal sense, you can’t afford to be at the mercy of inspiration or “writer’s block.” You must push past it, and create something, anything, everything that crosses your mind until you finally stumble onto a sentence that makes you say, “Hey, maybe I’m going somewhere with that!” and you run with it, until you have what you believe is something well-written and finished.

Except, despite my best efforts, this time, I couldn’t make it happen. So how did we get here?

My gamers, I can’t deny that these past few months have been rough. Serious health concerns, family fights, more than one close death, and a visibly waning performance at my “day” job. A series of events dramatic enough to belong in a YA novel, but also enough to affect nearly all aspects of my life, smoldering any creative will.

Whilst some people turn to certain substances or pleasures to cope with such emotions, I turned to video games, something that has definitely helped in similar circumstances in the past. I actually have a distinct memory of my mother, being disturbed by this reliance, exclaiming it to be “no better than doing drugs, since I’m seeking an escape.” This is something I intend to deeply research in the future, but that’s not the goal today.

More specifically, this time, I re-installed a game that I basically abandoned about 2-3 months ago- Lost Ark, So, why Lost Ark? Its repetitive, yet satisfying, real-time combat was easy to get into the flow of, its many, many goals to work towards and tasks to complete were easy to hyper-focus on, and the small sense of accomplishment when a particularly “grindy” task was finally completed triggers the “happy chemicals” in my brain, if only for a moment. So, I dove back in, and dove back in hard, becoming somewhat active in the community, working on projects to provide resources for the game, maxing out rapport, hunting down island souls and Mokoko Seeds, completing the Adventure Tomes available to us so far, and trying my best to essentially be a walking Lost Ark encyclopedia.

It was definitely an interesting experience.

I’ve played my fair share of MMORPGs since I was about 12, starting with Perfect World International, and I had engaged in “fandom” before, for multiple games. But nothing, at all, can compare to what I experienced, and am still experiencing, when it comes to this game.

Here are 7 Things I Learned When Playing Lost Ark 7 Months After Its Western Release

You have to use online guides, there is no way around it.

What you’re using the guide(s) for might be different from other players around you, or even change from login-to-login, but there’s a strong likelihood that MaxRoll is going to end up bookmarked in your web browser. With hundreds of hidden mokoko seeds to find without any in-game hints, “hidden stories'' on each continent to discover each part of on every continent if you want to complete its adventure tome, multi-part raid boss battles with mechanics to memorize if you don’t want to be the reason for a frustrating team-wipe, and, not to mention, learning how to build your character up “right”, online guides are practically mandatory to make your Lost Ark experience as least-frustrating as possible. Personally, I think it’s a little frustrating on its own that I have to rely on fan-made resources in order to have a full experience of a game, and I am hopeful that this is remedied in the future.

“Casuals vs. Hardcore” is a constant debate within the community, where no one wins.

This debate drives me up the wall. There is a not small number of players who believe that if you don’t have the perfect maxed-out character build, don’t have raid mechanics memorized and execute them flawlessly, etc., you’re a troll or just shouldn’t play the game in general. If you just happen to be bad at the game, even after you've looked up all of these guides and try your best their only suggestion is to either leave the game or to pay someone to get you through the content that you need to get through to progress. I strongly disagree with this, because I feel that everyone is allowed to play this game, or any game. Just because someone is not as good as you at a game, does not make them any less worthy of experiencing it.

There is this glorification of the grind of having 12 alts and spending all of your time between work and family doing all of your dailies and nothing else, and they feel this makes them better than other players who don't want to do this. I don't understand it because they seem quite unhappy with it, but they still choose to do this. This is a free game so there's not a subscription that's compelling them to keep doing this to get their money's worth out of it.

Despite being a free-to-play MMORPG, it is easy to lose a lot of money to it.

It's really subtle how you start to lose your money to this game. When you start, there's nothing really to spend your money on for the first several hours that you are playing. You find all of the resources and currency that you need, for that time, in the game itself. However as you reach what is currently late-game content, You find yourself low on silver, gold, life energy, crafting materials, and generally anything else that you never found yourself low on previously. This is especially the case when it comes to honing materials. In order to experience some parts of the game, your equipment must be at a certain level and, to reach this level, you have to hone your equipment which is based on a luck system. As you reach these higher levels honing costs more resources and currency, but you find the likelihood of successful honing to be dwindling. Despite this admittedly low chance of successfully honing your gear, you lose these resources and currency, even if it fails. Because of this, and the amount of time you have already invested into Lost Ark, it becomes easy to put in $10, here and there, to buy more gold and honing materials but it adds up over time.

Bots are a fact of life.

As long as there is a way for them to make money with this method, there will always be a bot presence in Lost Ark. Real money transactions are currently banned in the game. However this does not deter the programmers behind these bots, especially since there is a currency exchange function in the game. This currency exchange function allows you to exchange gems for gold and vice versa. You can get gold by selling items in the market or by engaging in other in-game content, such as adventure Islands or una's tasks. Gems can be used in the game store similar to a premium currency. Lost Ark has taken measures to reduce the bot presence, however the programmers behind the bots seem to adapt and are able to circumvent each attempt, although, admittedly, the bot presence has been reduced significantly from what it was before.

Maintenance is also a fact of life.

Each week, on Wednesday mornings at midnight PST, Lost Ark goes down for weekly maintenance. This maintenance can take anywhere between a few hours to an entire day, depending on what needs to be done. However, maintenance can also happen randomly, kicking players out of the game for hours at a time, frustrating many especially when this is during "prime time" on the weekends. Admittedly this doesn't happen often, only when there are serious issues or bugs, but it is an unpleasant surprise, nonetheless. Maintenance will also frequently be extended past the initial estimates, increasing frustration among the community, and further fracturing trust between players and devs.

For the sake of your experience, you have to choose who you interact with!

If someone is giving grief, block them. If your guild is dead, leave it and find a better one. If someone is genuinely trolling in a random raid, leave the raid and join a different one. Basically, don't allow yourself to be miserable in a game that's supposed to be fun. One of the benefits of finding a quality guild, is that you don't have to randomly matchmake in raids, potentially subjecting yourself to other toxic players or situations. I found myself quite lucky with my current guild, who is kind enough to hold my hand, and patiently give me tons of tips with things that I have struggled with in Lost Ark, such as builds or higher level raids.

The forums can be quite hit or miss. I have found that most of the time, people don't completely read your post before commenting, and on the rarer and less pleasant times, people become quite hostile, sometimes at the prospect of even just sharing resources among the community, so that no one else could have any potential advantage that they wouldn't have.

I was also lucky enough to find a small community of other players who are similarly enthusiastic about the lore of the game, whom I have chosen to spend my time discussing Lost Ark with, over the forums.

Despite my negativity, I have lots of hope for the future of this game.

I absolutely love this game. I love the story, I love the characters, and I love all of the unique mechanics to it. I have always been adamant that not every MMORPG will be for everyone. For example, Elder Scrolls Online is catered for people who are looking for a more story-based experience. In contrast, New World was catered for people who are looking for a more community-based, PVP experience. I would say that it's nearly impossible to make an MMORPG that is catered to every kind of player, but I could see how Lost Ark is trying to attempt this. It has a very strong story and exploration mechanic, and a NPC rapport system that is unique, at least among the west. However, as we see more updates, and additions to the PVP and guild system, it is growing a strong focus as well. It is absolutely not perfect, no game is, and we're still waiting on a lot of content that is only available in Korea at the moment. But the only thing I feel with that fact, is just excitement.

I think the one thing that the Lost Ark community just needs to remember is that everyone involved here, except the bots of course, is human. This includes the community managers on the forums and social media accounts that have to announce that a sudden maintenance is happening, as well as the developers behind the game, and the players around them. As players of the game, there is a lot of insight going on behind the scenes that we just aren't going to know about. As the consumers, I do believe that there are some things that we are entitled to, and we all certainly are entitled to our own opinions of the game, some of which that will undoubtedly contrast my own, but I do believe we owe it to everyone, including ourselves, to be a little patient here, and allow ourselves to be excited for the future of this game.