TLDR: Lost Ark is like working at a joyless company that pays less than $3/hour filled with toxic douchebros where you are constantly required to attend boring and abusive meetings one after the other in order to get your weekly paycheck. Whether you are a casual or an hardcore endgame raider, don’t play this game.

Now, here’s why:

1. The game becomes very boring. Lost Ark is full of, and depends on, the daily completion of extremely boring and repetitive tasks – including guardian raids, chaos dungeons, world bosses, and pretty much all scheduled island content. There are also “one-off” repetitive tasks, such as the “infinite” damage walls to access certain collectibles and very low RNG collection drops. Bot farmers have basically coded the entire game into a set of scripts, which shows how meaningless and soulless most of the actual content is. Regular players sometimes use these scripts for certain activities, which are freely available on Github.

2. The community is terrible. This is the most toxic MMO I’ve played. There are exceptions in the form of friendly leaders who tie the health of the game with the ability to attract and engage new players, but finding these people is really difficult. When I pug, I’ve often been ganged up on for making mistakes in raids. It’s not a lack of understanding of mechanics – I know them, but occasionally I just goof. I’m human. The rash of toxicity that flows out of these impatient and childish bullies usually falls into one of the following themes: “your build sucks”, “this raid has been out for 2 months wtf”, “you whale but obviously don’t play”, “you are an idiot”, “how can you not get this it’s easy”, and “I didn’t know this was a prog”. Early on, this was not an issue, but as the player base trends lower, the remaining stressed out gigachads are getting more and more pissed that they can’t clear a complex raid in less than half an hour, and they throw the largest hissy fits I’ve seen in 30 years of online gaming.

3. The combat system is overly complex and unbalanced. There is a serious lack of build variety. Your abilities are dependent on 5 basic elements:

a. your gear level, which you “hone” to raise in a complicated RNG scheme,
b. your engravings, which contain base combat stats as well as special abilities, improved both through the collection of engraving books as well as attributes from dropped accessories,
c. your accessories, which contain random values for stats/engravings,
d. your gear quality, raised through a RNG scheme with diminishing returns that costs a lot of gold, and
e. your card set, which provides different buffs and abilities when equipped, and is dependent on collecting cards though drops as well as cards purchased in game.
f. runes, which provide buffs.

More than 99% of the accessories that drop in the game are useless by virtue of their combination of base stats and engravings. They have no actual application relative to the meta. The benefits that various engravings provide are not equalized in gameplay value, and as such, only certain engravings are even relevant to gameplay, and if you do not spec your characters out with the perfect combination of stats and engravings, you might as well not play at all, because you will constantly get gatekept. The market for engraving recipes is proof: despite the “equalized” rarity of combat engraving drops, the most expensive one is over 10K times the cost of the cheapest one. If these two had equivalent gameplay value, they would be a lot closer in market cost. It leaves no room for theorycrafting, which is supposed to be one of the fun parts of an MMO. No thought, no curiosity is required or even welcome, you are enslaved to the meta far more than other MMOs.

4. The game is overrun with bots. Smilegate has a bot issue that they have been attempting to mitigate since launch, and their approach to combat bots directly hurts player progression, especially new players.

5. PVP is a mixed bag. There are two flavors here, an equalized PVP experience, and an open world PVP experience. The open world content is not fun because of the lack of gear balance, but that content is also the most interesting. The balanced stuff is limited to 1v1 or 3v3 arena content. If the gear were normalized or capped, it would be far more interesting, not to mention that it would reward talent instead of wallets.

6. There are multiple technical issues with the game. For the past 5 months, there have been a crazy number of game disconnections - there are fewer now, but for weeks there it was just truly awful. Considering the time and effort it takes to get a party together, that you can get disconnected and lose your raid rewards is disheartening.

7. Raid content is poorly designed. There is an overwhelming reliance on one-shot mechanics to increase difficulty, combined with being forced to use the chat box to imperfectly communicate some of these complex raid mechanics issues. One raid basically requires Discord to stream a screen if you want to run it smoothly. There is no resurrection in most of these raids, so if one person makes a mistake before you hit a mechanic that is dependent on the entire raid, you wipe and restart. You cannot rally. Sometimes these mechanics are placed deep into the fight.

8. The game is expensive in time and money. Let’s do a quick “back of the envelope” analysis of time spent in game. The game encourages and requires running content on alts in order to progress. If you efficiently run essential content on 6 toons, at full rested bonus, you’re running:

a. 18 raids per week at an average of about 1 hour per raid (with a mix of Vykas, Clown, and Brel), presuming that you have efficiently scheduled static times with seasoned players and don’t have to wait for hours in lobbies. 18 hours.
b. 15 Lopang/Chaos Dungeons/Guardian Raids per week, at about 6 minutes per, including login/queue times (with running Chaos Dungeons solo). 4.5 hours.
c. 7 Adventure Islands at 15 minutes each. 1.17 hours.
d. Event Stuff: maybe 15 minutes per day, on average. 1.75 hours.
e. 6 Boss Rush/Cube per week, 2 hours.
f. GVG and GVE once per week, 2 hours if you compete directly, 1 hour if you do stuff like Tranquil for GVG.
g. Chaos Gates (with maps) at 15 minutes each: 1 hour.
h. World Bosses at 15 minutes each: 1 hour.
i. Character management: 2-5 hours.

That gives us a minimum of 28 hours/week playing Lost Ark, assuming that you have scheduled your time perfectly with other people who also schedule and utilize their time perfectly. The average American has 5 hours of leisure time per day, leaving 7 hours left in the week to do any of the other things I enjoy to ensure that I keep up with the Lost Ark population in order to be eligible to run the latest raids.

Let’s say you want to start the game today. At current exchange rates (NAE), $1 buys you about 1200 gold in the currency exchange. To get 6 toons to 1520, Maxroll has a range of 314418-1195138 gold with an average of 614416/toon. That equates to $534/toon on average, with a lowest possible spend of $262/ toon to a highest of $996/toon. Add gear quality upgrades and other purchased materials in order to satisfy raid requirements (e.g. card packs)., and you’re either looking at over $3000 to start playing with your friends immediately, or you need to grind for approximately 1700 game hours to get to that point, provided that you do it efficiently.

Now, you make gold in game as well, both through actual gold, sales of items, and through the gold equivalent value of the mats you receive as rewards. The baseline if you have 6 1520 characters comes to 16K gold per week per toon, or 96K for the roster, for an $80 dollar equivalent, or $2.85 per hour earned for your effort.

In conclusion, this game was fun for a bit, but then turned into a joyless and mind-numbing grind, and I wish I’d never started it in the first place.

[b]TLDR[/b]: Lost Ark is like working at a joyless company that pays less than $3/hour filled with toxic douchebros where you are constantly required to attend boring and abusive meetings one after the other in order to get your weekly paycheck. Whether you are a casual or an hardcore endgame raider, don’t play this game. Now, here’s why: 1. [b]The game becomes very boring.[/b] Lost Ark is full of, and depends on, the daily completion of extremely boring and repetitive tasks – including guardian raids, chaos dungeons, world bosses, and pretty much all scheduled island content. There are also “one-off” repetitive tasks, such as the “infinite” damage walls to access certain collectibles and very low RNG collection drops. Bot farmers have basically coded the entire game into a set of scripts, which shows how meaningless and soulless most of the actual content is. Regular players sometimes use these scripts for certain activities, which are freely available on Github. 2. [b]The community is terrible.[/b] This is the most toxic MMO I’ve played. There are exceptions in the form of friendly leaders who tie the health of the game with the ability to attract and engage new players, but finding these people is really difficult. When I pug, I’ve often been ganged up on for making mistakes in raids. It’s not a lack of understanding of mechanics – I know them, but occasionally I just goof. I’m human. The rash of toxicity that flows out of these impatient and childish bullies usually falls into one of the following themes: “your build sucks”, “this raid has been out for 2 months wtf”, “you whale but obviously don’t play”, “you are an idiot”, “how can you not get this it’s easy”, and “I didn’t know this was a prog”. Early on, this was not an issue, but as the player base trends lower, the remaining stressed out gigachads are getting more and more pissed that they can’t clear a complex raid in less than half an hour, and they throw the largest hissy fits I’ve seen in 30 years of online gaming. 3. [b]The combat system is overly complex and unbalanced.[/b] There is a serious lack of build variety. Your abilities are dependent on 5 basic elements: a. your gear level, which you “hone” to raise in a complicated RNG scheme, b. your engravings, which contain base combat stats as well as special abilities, improved both through the collection of engraving books as well as attributes from dropped accessories, c. your accessories, which contain random values for stats/engravings, d. your gear quality, raised through a RNG scheme with diminishing returns that costs a lot of gold, and e. your card set, which provides different buffs and abilities when equipped, and is dependent on collecting cards though drops as well as cards purchased in game. f. runes, which provide buffs. More than 99% of the accessories that drop in the game are useless by virtue of their combination of base stats and engravings. They have no actual application relative to the meta. The benefits that various engravings provide are not equalized in gameplay value, and as such, only certain engravings are even relevant to gameplay, and if you do not spec your characters out with the perfect combination of stats and engravings, you might as well not play at all, because you will constantly get gatekept. The market for engraving recipes is proof: despite the “equalized” rarity of combat engraving drops, the most expensive one is over 10K times the cost of the cheapest one. If these two had equivalent gameplay value, they would be a lot closer in market cost. It leaves no room for theorycrafting, which is supposed to be one of the fun parts of an MMO. No thought, no curiosity is required or even welcome, you are enslaved to the meta far more than other MMOs. 4. [b]The game is overrun with bots.[/b] Smilegate has a bot issue that they have been attempting to mitigate since launch, and their approach to combat bots directly hurts player progression, especially new players. 5. [b]PVP is a mixed bag.[/b] There are two flavors here, an equalized PVP experience, and an open world PVP experience. The open world content is not fun because of the lack of gear balance, but that content is also the most interesting. The balanced stuff is limited to 1v1 or 3v3 arena content. If the gear were normalized or capped, it would be far more interesting, not to mention that it would reward talent instead of wallets. 6. [b]There are multiple technical issues with the game.[/b] For the past 5 months, there have been a crazy number of game disconnections - there are fewer now, but for weeks there it was just truly awful. Considering the time and effort it takes to get a party together, that you can get disconnected and lose your raid rewards is disheartening. 7. [b]Raid content is poorly designed.[/b] There is an overwhelming reliance on one-shot mechanics to increase difficulty, combined with being forced to use the chat box to imperfectly communicate some of these complex raid mechanics issues. One raid basically requires Discord to stream a screen if you want to run it smoothly. There is no resurrection in most of these raids, so if one person makes a mistake before you hit a mechanic that is dependent on the entire raid, you wipe and restart. You cannot rally. Sometimes these mechanics are placed deep into the fight. 8. [b]The game is expensive in time and money.[/b] Let’s do a quick “back of the envelope” analysis of time spent in game. The game encourages and requires running content on alts in order to progress. If you efficiently run essential content on 6 toons, at full rested bonus, you’re running: a. 18 raids per week at an average of about 1 hour per raid (with a mix of Vykas, Clown, and Brel), presuming that you have efficiently scheduled static times with seasoned players and don’t have to wait for hours in lobbies. 18 hours. b. 15 Lopang/Chaos Dungeons/Guardian Raids per week, at about 6 minutes per, including login/queue times (with running Chaos Dungeons solo). 4.5 hours. c. 7 Adventure Islands at 15 minutes each. 1.17 hours. d. Event Stuff: maybe 15 minutes per day, on average. 1.75 hours. e. 6 Boss Rush/Cube per week, 2 hours. f. GVG and GVE once per week, 2 hours if you compete directly, 1 hour if you do stuff like Tranquil for GVG. g. Chaos Gates (with maps) at 15 minutes each: 1 hour. h. World Bosses at 15 minutes each: 1 hour. i. Character management: 2-5 hours. That gives us a minimum of 28 hours/week playing Lost Ark, assuming that you have scheduled your time perfectly with other people who also schedule and utilize their time perfectly. The average American has 5 hours of leisure time per day, leaving 7 hours left in the week to do any of the other things I enjoy to ensure that I keep up with the Lost Ark population in order to be eligible to run the latest raids. Let’s say you want to start the game today. At current exchange rates (NAE), $1 buys you about 1200 gold in the currency exchange. To get 6 toons to 1520, Maxroll has a range of 314418-1195138 gold with an average of 614416/toon. That equates to $534/toon on average, with a lowest possible spend of $262/ toon to a highest of $996/toon. Add gear quality upgrades and other purchased materials in order to satisfy raid requirements (e.g. card packs)., and you’re either looking at over $3000 to start playing with your friends immediately, or you need to grind for approximately 1700 game hours to get to that point, provided that you do it efficiently. Now, you make gold in game as well, both through actual gold, sales of items, and through the gold equivalent value of the mats you receive as rewards. The baseline if you have 6 1520 characters comes to 16K gold per week per toon, or 96K for the roster, for an $80 dollar equivalent, or $2.85 per hour earned for your effort. In conclusion, this game was fun for a bit, but then turned into a joyless and mind-numbing grind, and I wish I’d never started it in the first place.