A new message from Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG arrived yesterday, March 16, 2022. This release is intended to address the main concerns players have had with the current state of Lost Ark. In case you missed it here’s the biggest takeaways from the post.
Table of Contents
You can read the full release notes by following this link here:
Message From the Lost Ark Team
“We made a mistake releasing the March game update too quickly…”
Free Gifts
Coming the week of March 21, after the weekly update and maintenance on March 24th, there will be the following free gifts:
- New Animal Skin Selection Chest
- Mokokon Pet Selection Chest
- Moko-board Mount Selection Chest
- Lost Ark United Structure
- Appearance Change Ticket [Reskin Ticket]
- Pheons x132
- Menelik’s Tome x5
- Legendary Card Pack Selection Chest x2
- Jukebox songs that will be provided when Jukebox content is released in the future.
A number of these items are single use Selection Chests. You’ll want to be able to preview everything to make a decision beforehand. Here’s a video from ZealsAmbitions to all view all the items you can get from this gift box!
Addressing Bots
They have banned many bots, and continue to ban them; and removed early game gold rewards. This was used to inflate honing material prices. But haven’t explained exactly how they balance that out so that active players can access gold. Doesn’t look like there is a permanent fix for bots, as with most F2P games it will continue to be a game of Whack-a-Mole.
Progression
The developers explain that the majority of players are currently progression through Tier 1 and Tier 2. They state that this is “Mid-Game” content intended to set the stage for players to learn the many systems in Lost Ark. They confess that the previous March update with Argos was a mistake; being launched too early.
A lot of players are focusing on horizontal progression (i.e. collectibles) instead of vertical progression (i.e. Honing). This factor (among others) leads to a decrease in supply of honing materials, thus increasing their price, and making it harder to progress to and in Tier 3. They are therefore injecting a new supply of honing materials through events to make it easier to increase iLvl.
More Supply of Honing Materials
Three sources of more honing materials will be added.
- Event Guardian Raids
- Repeatable once per day per Roster; 1 month duration; iLvl 250 minimum.
- Casual Friendly: scales players power to guardian’s level.
- Arkesia Grand Prix
- Adding bonus rewards:
- Tailoring Books, Metallurgy Books: which improve honing failure rates.
- Adding bonus rewards:
- PvP Rewards
- Competitive Proving Grounds: Weekly honing materials rewards