My whole circle of friends loves Lost Ark, but no one plays it – why actually?

Lost Ark is dead, long live Lost Ark! Well, it’s not that extreme. Nevertheless, the entire circle of friends of MeinMMO author Mark Sellner still celebrated the release of the MMORPG and played a lot, but only continued the former. Why is that like that? An attempt at an explanation.

The hype was huge: Before the big MMORPG Lost Ark was released here in the West on February 11th, or February 8th for pre-orders, the hype was simply gigantic. Since the first trailers in 2014, my friends and I have been full of anticipation to finally play this awesome game.

And that’s exactly what our first few weeks in Lost Ark looked like: We were permanently online, accumulated over 500 hours of play in a very short time and absorbed everything the MMORPG had to offer. Played different characters, leveled together and alone and brought our guild further forward. I was even annoyed that I couldn’t spend more money.

We organized a LAN party for the release and had sweaters printed. Lost LAN was a roaring success and for the first week after release we all did literally nothing but play Lost Ark. But where has this hype gone today?

Who writes here? Mark Sellner is an MMORPG author at MeinMMO and has already provided you with countless news from Arkesia. He is well informed about Lost Ark and always up to date. But even today he hardly plays anymore, despite the great anticipation.

Where did the group go? Initially we threw ourselves into the fray of Arkesia with about 20 people. Some noticed right from the start that the game wasn’t quite for them. But with about 12 active people, we spent the first few weeks after the release successfully and daily in Lost Ark.

If I look at my friends list on Steam today, the result looks sobering. Exactly one of my starting group is still actively playing. A handful of people, including me, still look into the game sporadically or do daily quests. Meanwhile, the others have completely disappeared.

If you look at the number of players, that should be the case in some circles of friends. The increasingly negative ratings on Steam are also an indicator of this. What is particularly exciting, however, is that no one in my group has anything to complain about in the game. None of us really know why he’s not coming back to Arkesia anymore.

But one reason sounds as strange as hardly any other to stop with an MMORPG. Because some of my friends come to an absurd conclusion: too much content. And I can relate to that too.

The new Legion Raid Vykas is intended for people in the endgame:

I don’t have time for Lost Ark anymore

Too much content: That sounds confused at first, but surprised some fans in my immediate vicinity. Once you’ve reached level 50 in Lost Ark, the game basically just begins. From now on, the MMORPG will surprise you with daily tasks, dungeons, grind, bosses and a variety of islands, quests and more.

If you don’t organize yourself here, you’ll have to struggle for hours every day just to complete your daily quests. That was the first place where our group lost people. Some found the game too grindy, others didn’t feel like the timegates. Above all, people who only wanted to play Lost Ark casually and as a “side MMORPG” quickly lost interest here.

“I want to keep playing, but I just don’t have time for Lost Ark right now” is a sentence I heard more than once when I asked my friends why they quit. The sentence “I didn’t stop at all, I just can’t get around to it right now” was often said.

So the time commitment seems to be a point, but true tryhards and especially the Lost LAN folks shouldn’t be put off by that. We wanted a lot from the game, so what happened to us?

Change in game mechanics: Personally, I put myself in the category of people who would say they haven’t quit the game at all. But if I look in Steam, it’s been over two weeks since I last started my actual favorite MMORPG.

For me, what was actually a small point was the decisive factor in my losing the desire to continue playing actively. This crept into the MMORPG from the Rohendel area. In open-world games, I’m someone who likes to pick up all the collectibles the first time I visit so I don’t have to come back. That went well in Lost Ark, with a few exceptions, until Rohendel too.

Now the game annoys me with the fact that I constantly have to complete things before I can even take collectibles like Mokoko seeds with me. The same MMORPG that previously forced me to backtrack a maximum of 10 times across 4 continents now does it more often in just the first map of Rohendel.

So while I’m leveling with Grind, Gearscore and co. had no problems, I simply didn’t enjoy exploring the world anymore. That’s why I’m now standing around somewhere lost, want to continue playing and then catch myself losing interest again after a few minutes.

And that’s sad because I haven’t actually stopped playing Lost Ark. At least that’s what I tell myself, because I think the MMORPG itself is great and I can still recommend everyone to try it out.

How does it look for you? Do you still play Lost Ark yourself or have you already quit, and if so, why? Are your friends still there, or are you the last one left wandering lonely through Arkesia? Feel free to write it to us in the comments here at MeinMMO, we look forward to the discussion!

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