Lost Ark Will Reduce Repetitive Content, Help New Players, and Even Get Western-Exclusive Events

mmorpg.com:

Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG have released a letter to the Lost Ark community. They acknowledge falling short in several ways but commit to improvements on bots, quality of life changes, and alleviating frustration for new players and the overall player burnout. There will also be a new roadmap update coming next week.

The letter to the community is open, as the teams both promised greater transparency and communication going forward after the Western launch. “We recognize that we’ve fallen short of accomplishing our desired relationship”, they acknowledge, and delve into how they plan to do better.

One of the major problems is the ongoing battle against botting. During the first year,  the team has made efforts, including massive banwaves for bots, as well as making adjustments to the game and even the rewards and economic system to try and cut off the supply of early gold and make botting less appealing. Since this is a security issue, there aren't many details, but they say that over 55 billion bot gold has been removed by their efforts and there’s a 99% decrease in bot activity.

When it comes to new (or more casual) players, there’s  a level of frustration and a feeling of being unable to keep up, for a few reasons. One is a faster content release cadence than the original Korean version, meaning there’s a lot to do, constantly. Another is in some of the multi-layered requirements for honing and the need to replay content to progress. Both of these will be addressed, with work to make collecting things like runes, cards, and gems easier, to complement effortsto make honing more possible. 

Some other changes will reduce the repeated content and improve access for alts, as well as letting players use battle