Interview: Chatting Lost Ark's Jump Start Servers, Balance And More With Amazon's Soomin Park
Lost Ark has been out in the West for some time now, and with the most recent updates the team has launched new Jump Start servers, among other updates to the MMOARPG. Alongside the Western updates, the Korean version of Lost Ark received its Thaemine raid, with players rushing for a world-first completion back in September. Lost Ark feels primed to have a great fall, heralded by those Jump Start servers.
We had the chance to chat with Soomin Park, the Franchise Lead on Lost Ark from Amazon Games to chat about the recent updates, class balance, and much more. A massive thank you to the team over at Amazon and Smilegate for chatting with us.
MMORPG.com: From a community standpoint, Lost Ark has gone through a little bit of a tumultuous time in both the KR and NA/EU region. With fresh start servers receiving great praise in the West, what’s the current atmosphere over at Smilegate?
Soomin Park, Franchise Lead: At Amazon Games, the Jump-Start Servers represent a major milestone in what has been a year of collecting feedback from Lost Ark players, both current and lapsed. Throughout 2023, we’ve been making continuous changes to the player experience, while releasing new content every month. And over time we’ve chipped away at so many of the pain points that lapsed players mentioned were keeping them from coming back, along with fixing areas that the seasoned players asked to be improved. We reduced the amount of grind and homework players needed to put into daily activities like Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids, and now they yield greater rewards while asking for less time for players to complete. We’ve consolidated item tiers so getting into endgame content isn’t as daunting as it once was. We’ve made the early instances of
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