To progress in Lost Ark, you need to become a honing master. Oh, wait, the game doesn’t allow you to do that. Lost Ark’s honing mechanic is slightly outdated per se, considering the deliberate release of the Abyss Raid: Argos, urging players to rush their way to 1370 ilvl, which indirectly pushes them to use real money.
For all that story, Amazon Games released a new statement revealing their plan for honing materials, admitting the rushed release of the latest content, Argos, which indirectly caused players to spend real money on acquiring more honing mats. Get this right, as a Lost Ark player, you’re meant to reach choke points between tiers so that the game tricks you into purchasing mats. Not that it’s not a free-to-play game. Call it an intelligent use of human nature. Everyone wants to get there as soon as possible and spend as less time as possible on grinding.
Honing Compensation and Huge Gifts
To combat this deficit and stop further player frustration, the company released a statement regarding the honing materials. As it’s planned, the compensation will come through various events, including the most recent Arkesia Grand Prix, which will grant more honing rewards. Together with it, the first set of Competitive Proving Grounds will be released,
Economy: Bots & Honing Materials
Another area of player concern we’ve seen is around honing. We know that for every triumphant yell as a player succeeds a low percentage hone, there are other players frustrated with their attempt failing, leaving them without enough materials to try again. As players focus on their first character, we’ve seen that there are a lower number of alternate roster characters to help feed main characters (and the economy) with high level honing materials.
A shortage of Tier 3 progression materials, coupled with problems introduced by bots, have made honing materials too expensive and a burden for players. To combat this, we will be supplying more progression materials for players to earn through fun in-game events, injecting more gold into the mid to end-game, and continuing our hard stance against bots.
Bots
Bots have been a problem for us since launch. Even though we banned them as quickly as we could, they kept springing up. Thanks to the mass ban of bots around the timing of the Argos update and the removal of early-game gold that attracted them in the first place, we’ve seen a steep decline in bot activity and bot-farmed gold that was used to inflate the prices of honing materials. We will continue to take a hard stance against the remaining bots to make them inefficient, while ensuring active players can access gold, to create a better experience for all.
Injection of Honing Materials
In next week’s update, we will provide additional Grand Prix honing rewards, introduce a new casual Event Guardian Raid to supply players with more honing materials, and kick-off the first season of Competitive Proving Grounds!
Event Guardian Raids
In this event, you can enjoy Guardian Raids in a more casual way. Relax, play, and get honing rewards. Similar to the Grand Prix, you can enter once a day (per roster) and earn event specific coins to spend on rewards at a new vendor. This vendor can be found in major cities, alongside the entrance to this new activity.
In this event, ‘Scale of Balance’ is applied to change the character’s stats to match the Guardian’s level, and the difficulty is adjusted according to the number of participants in the raid. Players will be able to challenge Helgaia, Frost Helgaia, Lumerus, Ur’Nil, Vertus, Chromanium, Nacrasena, Dark Legoros, Icy Legoros, Calventus, and Levanos! This event will last for roughly a month, and players with item level 250 or above will be able to participate. We’ll reiterate the details of this event in next week’s update notes, but are excited to spoil the surprise as players look to earn more honing materials.
Last but not least, players will finally get to experience the rewards pushed in Korea. As per the developer, the gifts below will be delivered to players throughout the week of March 21.
The gift includes:
- New Animal Skin Selection Chest
- Mokokon Pet Selection Chest
- Moko-board Mount Selection Chest
- Lost Ark United Structure
- Appearance Change 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.
It seems that we’re finally going to get to Abyss Raid: Argos, sooner or later.
