Tag: Lost Ark

Next Lost Ark update adds new class and faster leveling

The next Lost Ark update is coming up fast, and it’s bringing a new class and a chance to level up faster – for a limited time

The next Lost Ark update is coming up fast, and it’s bringing a new class and a chance to level up faster – for a limited time. The update goes live on May 10, 2023, and it adds the Slayer class to the MMO’s roster, a gender-locked female version of the Berserker class that specializes in powerful melee combos.

The Slayer has a broad range of skills that keep enemies close, launch them, knock them down, and generally make life pretty miserable for them. The downside is, of course, that you have to be near foes to use most of these abilities, which is fine during the main story or leveling, but rather more difficult in raids and endgame content. A mixed party with ranged attackers and a bard is a good idea to keep yourself alive longer.

A new Punika Powerpass and leveling event will be available for the update’s duration, from May 10, 2023, through Aug. 9, 2023. It pushes your character to Item Level 1340, but there’s a catch. New players who created their account for the free-to-play game after December 2022 have to earn trusted account status to prove they aren’t just bots farming gold. The process is straightforward – you can just use Steam Mobile Guard, for example – but just bear that in mind if you’ve got your eye on the Powerpass.

The new Hyper Express event helps take one character to the next milestone, Item Level 1460, and gives them plenty of refinement materials to keep leveling after that. Finally is a new engraving system that gives one character four engravings in the Hyper Express event. Normally, you only get two.

Amazon promised a bundle of QoL updates and new events as well, though the team is still keeping details under wraps on those for now.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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Lost Ark’s Witcher crossover event begins this month

Geralt, Yennefer, and other characters from The Witcher will make appearances in the MMORPG.

Lost Ark, the isometric MMORPG sensation, is crossing over with The Witcher series later this month – and when finally know when it’s all going down.

The Lost Ark x Witcher event starts on Jan. 18 and runs until Feb. 22, 2022. During that time, Lost Ark players can team up with characters like Geralt, Yennefer, Ciri, Dandelion, and Triss from The Witcher to uncover some sort of interdimensional plot. It’ll all take place on an event island that you can access by speaking with Guild Investigators in one of Lost Ark‘s major cities.

Naturally, there’ll be loads of Witcher-themed cosmetics to earn, including Witcher Potions, three Jukebox songs, and a card set featuring five Witcher characters, among other neat doodads.

There’s also a pretty slick trailer coinciding with the event, which you can check out below.

Lost Ark came out in North America early last year and quickly became a phenomenon. The hype died down a smidge over time, though Lost Ark is still regularly among Steam’s most popular games every month. Right now, it’s still only available on PC, though Amazon Games and Smilegate aren’t ruling out console ports – there just needs to be more demand for it.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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5 best Lost Ark Dawn Collection Armor Skins

The Dawn Collection has been a highly anticipated skin set for Lost Ark, so we’ve ranked the very best looking armor skins.

Lost Ark’s May update added lots of fun new raids, challenges, and even a new class, but one of the most anticipated additions is something new on the in-game store. The Dawn Collection is a set of skins for both the weapons and armor of each class. These skins are very beautiful, with the light versions mixing white, gold, and red to fantastic effect, while the dark versions use black, silver, and red for a more fearsome look.

Each skin costs 25,800 crystals or 900 royal crystals, so you may only have the budget for one or two. If you’re someone who only plays a specific class then that’s no worry, but if you like to mix things up, then you need to know what’s worth spending your currency on, so we’ve put together this ranking of the very best Dawn Collection skins to help you out.

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Lost Ark: 5 biggest changes in the Destined for Destruction update

Lost Ark’s May update brings new raids, new challenges, and all kinds of bug fixes. We’ll talk you through the biggest changes.

The anticipation has been building all month, but the moment is finally here as the Lost Ark Destined for Destruction update has been unleashed. This is a big content update featuring two new raids, a new type of raid, a new class, a new event, and so much more. No matter how regularly you play Lost Ark, this update is going to keep you occupied for a long time.

With so many additions and changes, including extensive rebalancing, quality of life changes, and plenty of bug fixes, it can be difficult to know where to start. That’s where we come in, as we’ve gathered up all the biggest changes you need to know about so you can go straight to the fun stuff.

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Man counts one Lost Ark bot every 8 seconds

In a five minute span, our man here sees 37 bots, 36 of which are the exact same class, with the same gear. They’re all easily identifiable by their nonsense names, lack of titles, and completely identical walking pattern. That’s a bot every 8 seconds.

Giga-successful MMOARPG Lost Ark is not without its issues. As we noted yesterday, its player numbers are still pretty ludicrous. However, one reason for those numbers? Bots.

First, here’s a vid that outlines it all.

Short version: in a five minute span, our man here sees 37 bots, 36 of which are the exact same class, with the same gear. They’re all easily identifiable by their nonsense names, lack of titles, and completely identical walking pattern. That’s a bot every 8 seconds.

Botting is a problem for any online game – as the video says, even something like League of Legends has people botting accounts to give them playtime and passive gains in currency. It’s a sliding scale as a game becomes easier to automate, with PvE-focused MMOs being at the top of the list.

Lost Ark is a prime target for many reasons. It has RMT elements and is free-to-play, so making accounts and giving them value is easy. It has, or at least had, a massive playerbase, so lots of potential purchasers of whatever the bots manage to gather, and lots of unscrupulous individuals willing to use them. It is ludicrously massive and grindy, so plenty of bits and pieces to sell off, including just entire accounts.

It also has some unique problems. It’s relatively easy to play and thus automate – which, fair enough, the same is true of games like Diablo 2 & 3. But it was also developed, originally, for a gaming ecosystem where to create an account you had to present your government-issued id number. This is how online gaming is regulated in South Korea, the game’s country of origin.

The western version of Lost Ark isn’t completely lacking anti-cheat (indeed, one of the most common smaller complaints is the game’s glacial load time due to Easy Anti-Cheat). However, clearly it’s vulnerable, and even the most basic steps to counter-act it aren’t being taken. You could ban thousands of bots a day just using the method outlined in this video, nevermind if you actually had back-end access, analytics tools, and so on.

Anecdotally, I saw plenty of gold selling ads while playing Lost Ark, as well as a few packs of bots. Nothing on this sort of scale though, and as outlined above, this is proving damaging to the game economy. It’s also skewing player numbers and perception, with things like class pick rates, busy areas, and so on.

And, of course, those Lost Ark player numbers. Do I think a significant number of those 500k concurrents are bots? No, probably not, but it’s really not a good look. And the second someone finds themselves in a human-deserted area or unable to find players to do content with, it’s going to increase annoyance. Plus, these bots are taking up server and queue space, meaning legitimate players maybe can’t get online, or play with their friends. It’s been called a “top priority” by the devs – but that could mean a fix tomorrow, or in 6 months.

It’s also remarkably easy to get your hands on a boting tool. As usual, they’re hosted on the most scammy looking sites on the internet, but they’re not exactly hard to find. I could have installed two in the time it took to write this post, and they’re effective in some of the very highest levels of content. No doubt if and when Amazon and SmileGate come down on this, those same forums will be packed with people saying they were doing nothing wrong – it’s always the way. Hopefully it happens sooner rather than later.

Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.

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The concurrent players staying power of Elden Ring and Lost Ark is incredible

Elden Ring and Lost Ark are two massive successful games which have managed to keep their playerbases around long after they would drop of other games. How?

Not a week goes by without some news of a new, high-profile release that has lost 50-99% of its player base in just a few weeks. Some drop-off is expected, but there’s been many a big-name triple-A powerhouse in the recent past that has lost an awful lot of players awfully quickly. Here are two games where that isn’t remotely the case, as the biggest releases of the past few months – FromSoftware’s giga-RPG Elden Ring and Amazon’s MMOARPG Lost Ark – continue to go strong.

As usual for this sort of thing, SteamDB’s player charts are the best place to get numbers. For Elden Ring that means you can probably triple-or-more these figures for PlayStation and Xbox players. We’re decidedly lacking in active user and concurrent player counts for those platforms since the shutting down of gamstat but you can guarantee both platforms are stacked.

We’ll start there with Elden Ring. Lifetime peak just shy of a million, 150k in the last 24 hours, 240k easy at the weekend. Remember we’re talking about a primarily single-player game here. It has multiplayer features, including PvP, but the vast majority of players use them sparingly and it isn’t the kind of thing where you’re logging on with friends to do daily quests. It has an explorable world and a story with a start and end – and it’s still pulling in players in their hundreds of thousands on a daily basis to keep going. That’s GOAT levels.

Lost Ark, due to that MMOARPG nature, is on another level. It is currently gaining players by the day in the wake of the latest patch. 1.3 million and change were in-game simultaneously at launch a few months ago, and 560k were in-game at the same time yesterday. It bottomed out at daily peaks of around 350k a couple of weeks ago, then spiked up again recently. For the love of all that’s holy, as I write there are 24,000 people idling on the start screen while it’s down for maintenance.

Not to kick anyone when they’re down, but if you compare this to other recent major releases, it’s night and day. Ghostwire Tokyo, single-player RPG, down to three figures in just a month. On the MMO side, Amazon’s previous effort, New World, is looking at a 98% drop off and little impact from a free week earlier this month. Even something like Destiny 2, which I’d never claim to be not doing great, can’t match these numbers since the recent expansion launch. The less said about Babylon’s Fall, the better.

So, what’s the secret? It’s a mix, and marketing probably plays a greater factor than game quality, much as we’d love to believe otherwise. This is clearest with Lost Ark – it does some things very well, but we’re talking about an overlong, very complex, terribly translated, and grindy MMO. However, it’s been slowly gaining hype for nearly a decade at this point, and got positioned as the counter-culture to Diablo and Path of Exile as their popularity fluctuated for various reasons. The things it does poorly – storytelling, moment-to-moment gameplay variety, and enraging the community to the point where CMs had to ask them to calm down – are vastly outstripped by how cool it looks in motion and the ludicrous depth of content in the game as a whole. That gets people in and then keeps them playing, near-endlessly, especially in an age of Twitch. Plus, all your mates are playing it – that means you want to too, right?

For Elden Ring, its quality – which we’re definitely not going to deny – is a multiplier to the ever-growing popularity of FromSoftware since the release of Demon’s Souls way back in 2009. From, and particularly long-time publisher Bandai Namco, knows how to exploit that history of great games with specific appeal. The developer and publisher know that a cinematic teaser trailer is enough to sustain a slowly hollowing community for two years, and that when they bring whatever comes next, the entire world will pay attention. Bandai also knows that From will pull it off when it comes to to the final product, and likely had an inkling even back in 2019 that Elden Ring was huge. Nobody knew what a massive game we were getting going in, and even all the repeated content and similar dungeons isn’t a big turn off at that scale.

How do you make a successful game? Apparently, you’re best off building hype for 5-10 years, then releasing something with more content than most other entire trilogies. Simple, right?

Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.

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Lost Ark could come to consoles if there’s enough demand

Amazon Games isn’t ruling out ports on PlayStation and Xbox.

There’s no denying Lost Ark’s astronomical success on PC, and Amazon isn’t ruling out console ports.

During an interview with VG247, franchise leader Soomin Park discussed the possibility of PlayStation and Xbox ports of Lost Ark. While Amazon Games and Smilegate haven’t discussed porting the game to consoles publicly much, both parties seem open to the idea.

“If Lost Ark on consoles is something that fans really want, then I think it’s something both parties would consider,” Park said. 

While Lost Ark does indeed have controller support on PC, anyone that’s tried it (me) will tell you the implementation is pretty shoddy. Considering Diablo (the action RPG behemoth Lost Ark has a rivalry with) plays wonderfully on gamepads, it seems like an easy call. Especially since the MMORPG places such an emphasis on gameplay flexibility.

“One of the things that makes Lost Ark unique is the massive amount of content that allows you to play how you want,” Park explains. “If you want to just have a solo RPG experience and play through the story, it’s easy to do so. One consistent aspect of the game is that the combat is designed to be satisfying whether you’re running solo or in a group. Lost Ark definitely scratches an itch for fans of ARPGs, and also implements MMO aspects so well that it’s appealing to fans of that genre as well.”

The content stream for Lost Ark has been pretty steady since launch, and the developers are open to criticism. So maybe in time, Lost Ark might make it on consoles.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Lost Ark class tier list: PVP and PVE classes ranked

All classes ranked for PVP and PVE play. The game is well balanced, but these characters have the extra edge necessary.

Lost Ark is a huge game that’s only set to become far bigger in upcoming updates. There’s a lot to take in before you get to the level cap and start grinding endgame content, but once you finally get there, you’ll start working on high difficulty raids and bosses, in addition to a bit of PVP play to keep things interesting in between.

You can absolutely tackle both PVP and PVE in Lost Ark with whatever class you have chosen thanks to the fact that Lost Ark is shockingly well balanced. Some characters are stronger than others, but regular patches and balance updates mean that things are always in flux, and what separates the range of classes is usually very minute. 

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Each and every class is perfectly capable of both PVE and PVP play, and doing well at it, but in this guide we’re ranked every class into two separate tier lists, one for PVE, and another for PVP. If you want to focus exclusively on one game style or the other, you can use our ranking below. Though, once again, keep in mind things can change rapidly.

Lost Ark gets PvP, new endgame raids, and more in March update

It’s March and Lost Ark is marking that milestone with a meaty new update.

It’s March and Lost Ark is marking that milestone with a meaty new update, including the addition of PvP battles and massive endgame content to get stuck into. If PvP and endgame raids are too intimidating for you, there’s also the Arkesia Grand Prix, available for a limited time.

In the limited-time event, two teams of seven have to race on the backs of dinosaurs and animals. Yeah. That’s a lot less scary than fighting other players, eh? Unfortunately, you need to already be level 50 to enter. 

Season 1 of Lost Ark‘s Competitive Proving Grounds is also kicking off later this month, offering seasonal rewards for those who beat other players. As long as you’ve played Proving Grounds and reached Tier 1, you’ll be able to compete. 

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On top of that, there’s a new story episode that tasks you with tracking down the first Guardian slayer, Kadan. There will be cutscenes, new locations, new enemies – you know the drill. And once you’re done with that, you can dive into the Abyss Raids, which pits eight players with limited respawns against a Guardian. You’ll want strong team composition and plenty of preparation before attempting this one. 

You can check out the full patch notes on the Lost Ark site. 

Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.

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Lost Ark developers address criticism regarding class limitations

Amazon Games is working with Smilegate on specific aspects of the MMORPG.

There’s no questioning Lost Ark’s monumental success, but its gender-locked classes and revealing female armor designs are garnering plenty of criticism.

Ever since Lost Ark came out last month, fans and critics alike have been disappointed about specific classes, such as the Berserker, being only playable on male characters. Some even claim the action MMORPG feels years out of date for doing so. 

In a report from Eurogamer, Amazon Games franchise lead Soomin Park states that changes are coming to address these complaints.

“Classes are tied pretty closely to their character models in terms of function and animation, so bringing opposite gender characters to a class takes more work than just making a differently gendered model available,” Park said. “However, Smilegate RPG is actively working on this; the female Berserker is the next class coming to Korea. While not every class in the game currently has a male and female counterpart available, we made an effort to include those that do in our launch class lineup.”

Park insists that Lost Ark will have more gender options for each class over time. Eventually, there’ll also be less-revealing costumes for female characters, though they won’t replace the gear already in the action MMORPG.

“As for armor sets, while we aren’t altering any of the original costumes from the game, we are making adjustments so that the more revealing options won’t be front and center in places like our marketing or the initial character creation screen,” Park explains. “We are also including in some new outfit options that are not quite as revealing, but these are an addition and not a replacement.”

There’s no timeline for when any of these changes might arrive. Right now, Lost Ark fans can look forward to the March Update, while Amazon celebrates the MMORPG passing 20 million players.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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