crossposting from the reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/14zgxrs/14072023_loaon_followup_stream_tldr_via_saintone/

Gold River is working a lot more recently and seems to be a lot more hands-on as of late, being involved in things like planning the roadmap with the three leaders.

This livestream is mainly to follow-up on existing topics from the previous one, on stuff that they’ve been working on and what they can share with us since one 9 days ago. It’s meant to be more transparent with the players.

Brought up the gatekeeping culture, talking about cards. The gatekeep is usually LOS18 or higher which is too difficult to achieve as a brand new player. He mentioned that they can’t just… give free LOS18. Partially because of how many people spent real money to get there, those users would feel cheated by this.

• They’re looking into alternatives to help alleviate this (Deep Dive and Plan set are supposed to be examples of this).

• They are cooking something up to alleviate the card system as a whole. They will share this later.

• He asked if 4x3 from the engraving support system is sufficient to the live chat on YouTube. Player answer from chat is gatekeep that shit.

• He just had a random thought that card support within the express might be good as a new player temporary measure while they work on their cards.

Next topic, daily content fatigue/burnout.

• First, Chaos Dungeon. Doesn’t think simply just making it once a day is the right long-term solution.

• While they acknowledge that daily homeworks are important to address, right now their efforts are being put towards developing end contents (remember - this is the thing that KR community was most vocal about).

• They want to be careful about short-term bandages since they could have long-term effects/repercussions later on.

• They’re actively testing their current bandage solutions for improving Chaos Dungeon (things like aggro range and similar things that make it less annoying).

• Intending to improve the rewards from Chaos Dungeon further (e.g. potentially cards).

• Reiterating that their goal right now is to just make Chaos Dungeon less fatiguing. Speed it up and increase the rewards.

• Asked if the Gold/Red portal rewards are okay to the YouTube live chat. Chat is saying the rewards from those rooms aren’t exciting amount (gold amount is too low).

• Gold River shared that the gold from those rooms accounts for 3% of all gold generated in the game. He is saying it’s a lot (and chat is surprised it’s this high as well).

• Thinking of lowering the frequency of Red/Gold portal but increase the amount that you earn when it does appear, so it doesn’t feel like such a shit amount even though the amount is actually notable.

• They will try to implement improvements to Chaos Dungeon by August 2nd.

Next topic, Guardian Raids.

• As mentioned before, he wanted Guardian Raids to be somewhere between ‘daily quick and easy’ and ‘weekly serious’ content. But he had to convene with the three leaders.

• Same goal is in mind: make the content less tiring (as in compared to daily repetition) and increase the reward.

• He mentioned that even though it’s obvious what the problems are the game are, finding a good long-term solution is still challenging.

• What is 100% confirmed: daily guardian raids will definitely be removed. They will plan out this new version of guardian raid that you don’t have to do as often.

• This is still cooking.

• This will also be more concrete by August 2nd (same as Chaos Dungeon).

Regarding player fatigue and burnout, the main concern is actually weekly raid content (end contents) repetition.

• He asked YouTube chat how they felt about the most recent raid in Voldike, and how they felt about it as a homework. Chat responded it was mostly fine, just gate 2 can sometimes be shit. Chat mentioned Entropy is annoying in it so he started talking about Entropy.

• He mentioned that the intent is not to just make the game easier for Entropy, so they’re looking into alternatives for people who play this way.

• Concept of high risk high return for playing Entropy/positional classes.

• Or just fucking nuke it out of existence.

• They said they will definitely address the issue of Entropy in some way shape or form. It’s an important issue to players.

• Even making Entropy high risk high return can cause issues, but they’re seriously thinking about this because the game is gradually getting harder, mechanics are getting more complex, and patterns are getting faster, which usually impacts Entropy more than Hit Master playstyles. Keeping this in mind as they continue to develop new fights is challenging since each player will tackle these fights differently depending on if they’re one or the other.

Asking about the number of gates in raids, three or four. He’s asking YouTube chat for their opinion on what they like more.

• The opinions from the live chat on YouTube is pretty mixed regarding three or four being the magic number.

• Gold River said Thaemine has to be four gates. But he also mentioned that Brelshaza was kind of a mistake, and six gates was too much (Saint: at the time we thought it was fucking cool, but how bad that came back to bite us in the ass later on).

• Valtan was 2 gates, people enjoyed Valtan.

• Vykas was 3 gates, but statistics showed that it was a more difficult raid than Valtan and Kakul (number of clears vs. number of player deaths).

• Maybe remove first gate from Kayangel. Just thinking in regards to how the ‘homework’ of it can be removed, and the bird is less… important? Than the other three gates of it.

• From the chat, it seems most people prefer three gates.

• Gold River feels that in general, raids should be a mix of 2, 3, or 4 gates (never more than 4). Not just always a specific amount of gates.

• He also referenced Onyxia from World of Warcraft, how it’s just a single gate and a single boss fight (maybe Lost Ark can do that in the future too). You can also think of how bosses in Final Fantasy 14 are how it’s just a singular boss encounter room.

• To sum it up, that’s probably the direction they’re going with. After Thaemine, they’ll think of raids as either 2, 3, or 4 gates, or even entertain the idea of a single boss gate encounter. They won’t make the Brelshaza mistake again and they want to mix it up.

• A point that I missed is that by doing raids with lower gate counts, it may also require less resources which can help speed up development.

Regarding equalized contents.

• Hell Guardians will be un-equalized. They mentioned this in a previous livestream - people aren’t really doing Hell Guardians.

• 98% of players have not entered Hell Caliligos.

• The issue of having to stop DPS in a raid (e.g. gold meteor in G6, or Akkan extra gate).

• This is still a work in progress (fixing).

• He asked YouTube chat if they really want Hell Hanumatan to be an equalized raid.

• Their answer doesn’t really matter, it’s already not going to be equalized.

• About Challenge Guardian/Challenge Abyss weekly content.

• They have been considering just nuking it out of existence.

• Only 37-38% of players are actively doing it (Saint: I’m part of the problem).

• Mainly citing that these contents are considered uninteresting for new players and homework for existing players. And it not being an attractive content for new players is worsening the card gatekeep problem because a lot of new Mokoko players aren’t even doing one of the contents that earns you cards.

August 2nd, Extreme Valtan (?).

• Think of Hell Valtan but non-equalized.

• If you’re already a Hell enjoyer it’s gonna be easy.

• If you’re not a Hell enjoyer it’ll probably fuck you up. 1580 and 1620 scaling.

• It will have rewards.

• They’re hoping this can help entertain players until Thaemine until September in addition to everything else that was already planned.

• Giga juiced players will obviously have an easy time, but the content should still do a good job of putting players in their place who haven’t done the mechanics properly in a long time.

More about gate # and retention

• He really wants to remove some of the existing gates from raids, like the G1 Kayangel thing from earlier, or removing some gates from Brelshaza (just getting rid of them and relocating their rewards into the other gates).

• Seems pretty likely for those two raids.

• In order to enjoy endgame contents, he feels new players HAVE to learn so many mechanics from so many raids that they HAVE to progress through, which is very burdensome in the new player experience (like studying for an exam, 20 different raids with however many mechanics). He thinks this is a big problem that stands in the way of new players getting to catch up with where existing players are now.

• Cited that Oreha Abyssal Dungeon was a good content that most players managed to get through just fine.

• Cited that on the other hand, Argos didn’t do as well in terms of player retention.

• Just thinking about the earlier times of Lost Ark Season 2, before Legion Raids and alts started piling up, when the game’s contents didn’t feel like homework. He wants to return to that time.

QOL & Gold Inflation

• Mentioned that there were some really good recent QOL (he talked about the ocean liner improvements for example) that the three leaders added and they will continue to add more.

• Something… something… more battle item improvements (they just removed character-bound battle items and now they’re all roster bound in a recent patch)… something…

• They need more time to address the issue regarding the six character gold reward lockout.

• Let cook.

• Next, gold inflation topic.

• It’s not possible to just lift the restriction for unlimited characters. It’s doomed if they do that (Saint: It used to be that way. Think doing 3 raids on 24 characters - some people actually did that).

• Some players are recommending 18 raids that is roster-shared instead of 3 for 6 characters (same amount of raids as now).

• Says it could be an option. But this topic is still cooking as well, so it’s W.I.P. There isn’t anything concrete here yet.

Q&A Stuff

Saint: Unsurprisingly, a lot of stuff is still cooking, but there’s a few confirmations on this stream of stuff they will do, and a few confirmations of stuff that they definitely won’t do. If they keep doing these livestreams and keep updating on stuff like this, it’s a good thing.

• YouTube chat asking about increasing the max roster level from 300 (it’s been 300 for like, 2-3 years now).

• They haven’t discussed about this at all yet internally.

• Some people in chat are shittalking Gold River (he’s reading it). He doesn’t seem to mind.

• He’s asking chat if he scheduled a livestream too soon, because they don’t have that many new confirmations of stuff they’re doing since the last livestream 9 days ago.

• He said that from now on, all event feasts will be implemented the way they just did in the latest update.

• Basically, there’s no RNG on event food anymore. You get to pick if you make event speed food or event defense food, so no more crafting the same food over and over.

• Number of character slots (current max is 24 but the amount of classes is going to exceed this).

• He’s assuming it will be increased with Souleater.

Saint: He’s kinda fuckin’ around a little bit since he’s trying to pick out questions/comments from the YouTube livechat. It’s a more lax livestream compared to the previous one.

• Someone asked about skins for transformation classes.

• They talked about this on a previous LOA ON, but all he could say is they’re still working on these types of skins, no ETA.

Saint: Is he practicing for a livestreaming career in case this gig doesn’t work out?

• He’s saying third Awakening isn’t quite what players think it’s going to be. He’s wondering if players might be disappointed that it’s not literally a third choice for Awakening skill.

• He says it’s not just a skill like that, but it’s own vertical progression system.

• Talking about Abyssal Loop, which was an island that was like Mario Party (you moved around a board and there was a bunch of different mini-games, like Argos on top of Valtan’s platform tower).

• They’ve restarted development on this content.

• It will likely not be just a mini-game one-off island anymore, but related to progression of the character.

• The Souleater trailer will be posted on the official website after the broadcast.

• About scheduled recurring contents (e.g. world boss, Chaos Gate, etcetera).

• Just thinking about what they can do with it, internal discussions. But they’re looking into if they can make changes to it (Saint: I’m actually not sure if this refers to the content or the scheduling).

• Make some adjustments to the existing events (because there are some issues such as the mobs dying too quickly for people to tag for rewards).

• He was asking players what they want in the Hot Deal, like what kind of items (Saint: It’s like a fire sale, like a deal that’s only available for a couple days to buy - KR players were Madge that the last one was 50 Stones of Chaos + 300 Blue Crystals last time).

• He showed the stuff they’ll add in the Cash Shop in tomorrow’s maintenance for the Hot Deal. The outfits are event things we’ve gotten before, so I suppose it’s like getting another copy of it if you really want it.

• He brought up the three-legged crow controversy from Anikka.

• The guy who designed it quit the company long ago.

• He mentioned that he didn’t even know this was an issue and they didn’t mean disrespect by it being there.

Saint: Context, people found a three-legged crow symbol in Anikka. Three-legged crow is a revered symbol in Korean culture. Anikka is a Chinese themed continent (in Korea, this continent is called Anihc officially, which is China backwards). People were outraged because they found this during the time of the CN service launch controversies even though it’s actually been in the game for 5 years already but no one ever noticed until just now.

• To apologize for the issues, they’re giving out a copy of the new summer outfit to all players for free.

• <This apology is for KR region only.>

• Anyone in chat also Madge about three-legged crows all of a sudden?

• He hinted towards a special in-game event (in the past, there were extra special events where his in-game character Igu Baba appeared).

All credit goes to Saintone & to u/Crayten