Lost Ark is one of the most well known MMORPGs: a massive multiplayer role playing game. Lost Ark was released in Feb 2022 with Tripod Studio Smilegate collaborating through Amazon for Global release, sparking a surge of support.

Early February, a new South Korean MMORPG Lost Ark, was released. Players surged to make a character and experience the new talk of the trend. 700,000 players simultaneously playing in a massive, multiplayer, online roleplaying game which has not been catered in for the past years. Lost Ark has been consistently releasing limited cosmetics: outfits and weapons. Tripod Studio Smilegate (company that made Lost Ark) became a well known name throughout the MMORPG communities’. 

Choosing a server, you’ll see the beginning of designing a character, Warrior, Martial Artist, Gunner, Mage, Assassin and Specialist. These are the base classes’ while choosing you have paths called “unique classes’, in the Specialist category the Aeromancer and Artist.

Here comes the most important part of the game, character design. Players treat this part as one of the most important essentials because this is the character you’ll be playing. Almost every part is customizable although all classes are locked in categories: female, male, age etc.

As people prolong their playtime they soon reach the end game. This is divided into currency and mid-maxing. This is where many people start finding the game intricate at first but then the flaw. One essential item for every player is gold. Gold is used in a public market where people buy and sell everything and anything. The game is developed so that there is a limited amount per week. To maximize this gain you can make a roster of different characters. The flaw being every character going through the main story. One playthrough being fifty-five hours and multiplying that by 5 is 200+. 

When mid-maxing you have to spend more time weekly clearing resets. Chaos dungeons, guardian raids, and Abyssal raids, this is where you defend/attack against enemies until the completion goal is reached. This takes time but not only that many veterans find flaws with unessential mechanics in the design. In every wave of Chaos dungeons’ mobs take seconds to spawn (with over 10+ cycles per dudgeon). To maximize the potential resources needed to mid-max, all players cycle the dudgeon/raids for resources.

With the game being this time consuming, players have led to using bots to farm. Bots are well designed to do almost everything and anything so that the player can prioritize their time elsewhere. Not only this but the skill-ceiling is high for abyssal and guardian raids making the community unfriendly towards newer players. This is because these raids require all four people to contribute; guardian raids taking a maximum of 20 minutes and time to finish. These reasons contribute to Lost arks’ downfall. Now the main question, is Lost Ark dead?

Short answer no. On Lost Arks’ release in the EU and NA regions it peaked with 1.3 million concurrent viewers on Twitch correlating to the players. As the games’ time prolongs updates are roughly in the time span of 3 months. And even though the player drop has been significant, Lost arks’ playerbase is above average.