Today is the last day of the open beta, so I jumped in to give it one last look (at least for now. Supposedly there will be another beta in December.)
Lost Ark shares a few things with just about every MMO out there. For one, you’re always treated like “The Chosen One.” You’re the only one who can save the world. You’re the only one who can kill the big bad beast. I laugh at the quests where a level 60 guard is asking you (a level 10 scrub) to go kill a giant boar that has killed or wounded 45 guards and he wants revenge. Dude, you got 50 levels on me plus plate armor and a broadsword, I’m wearing a beach towel and I can make sparkles come out of my fingers. If an entire regiment can’t turn this thing into pork chops then what chance to I have? Then I run in and kill it without breaking a sweat, and I want to run back to the guard and say, “Okay, the problem here is that YOU ALL SUCK!” Sadly this is never a conversation option. Let’s not even get into the “go fetch that for me” quests where the thing they need so desperately is ACROSS THE ROOM. Okay, I get it, you’re dying and your legs are broken in 12 places, but there are 10 other people in this room! It’s like the mission in Half Life where you walk across the room and throw a switch, and the lab tech says “Wow, that MIT degree is really paying off.” Believe me, my skills in hurling lightning are not going to give me an advantage called “picking up small objects +2.”
Speaking of killing stuff... yes, fear not, Lost Ark is full of “wipe out all wildlife in a 2 mile area” quests. Those birds are just such a threat to the kingdom, and again ONLY YOU can save us! Well, only you and 25 other players running around stealing kills from each other. Way back in the early days of WoW, killing was first come, first serve. Whoever did damage to an enemy first (“tagged” it) got credit when it died, even if someone else killed it. This led to problems, where someone with the ability to attack from a distance and damage multiple targets at once would run in and dominate an entire area preventing anyone else from completing their quest. (Among dicks, the point of the quest was not just to complete the quest first, but to make sure no one else could do the quest.) So the game was changed so anyone could tag an enemy and get credit for it, regardless of how many people fought it. This, as expected, led to more abuse. Idiots would run through a quest area, wait for someone else to get into a fight, then the idiots would tag a bunch of enemies and sit back while everyone else did their work for them. In most cases, the loot drop was inconsequential, you just needed to kill a certain number of them. If you did have to collect something from them, you just wait until they are all dead, then you go back and collect all the stuff you didn’t earn (especially when you could loot one and it would loot everything in the area.) I noticed a lot of that in Lost Ark. People would just run through, tagging a bunch of enemies, then keep running. So far, I haven’t seen a way to use the tactic I would use a lot in WoW: some idiot would rush through and tag a bunch of enemies, then stand back while I kill them. A hunter has an ability to fake death (or for a mage you have Invisibility) which means the enemies stop attacking me and go after the other guy who attacked them. En masse. While the guy is unprepared and probably away from his keyboard grabbing another bag of Cheesy Poofs. Idiot returns to find himself dead and me laughing. But there is one thing that holds true for testing - the people playing it are usually pretty considerate and genuinely helpful to others. During the closed beta of World of Warcraft Classic, there was a lot of conversation about how it was so nice to see helpful people who would ask if anyone else needed to kill a quest goal before rushing in and taking it from people who were there first. Then the game went live and it was taken over by the selfish 12-year-olds who don’t care about anyone but themselves. Lost Ark has a lot of people who jump in and help out if another player was overwhelmed. I imagine that will change once the game goes live.
The community can make or break a game. Are they polite and helpful, or do they go out of their way to make life miserable for everyone? With free to play games, it’s usually the latter. They aren’t paying for it, so there is no incentive to be nice to people. If they get kicked off, they just create another account. There were people complaining about the chat filters; naturally swears and racist words were censored, but the game was blocking words that made no sense to block. Someone said they couldn’t say “ass” and to him that was a reason not to play. Meanwhile the game was blocking the word “camera” for reasons yet to be explained other than “it’s being put out by Amazon.” So you can’t say “camera” but someone can run around with a name of “Thunderphuckx.” Okay first of all, they were allowed to make a name “Thunderphuck” but worse, they had to add an x at the end because someone else had already used that name. Sigh.
And of course there is the whole naming thing. Sometimes one of the hardest things about creating a character is finding a name that hasn’t already been taken. Lost Ark was heavily populated by people who think that putting “xxx” after a name somehow makes it unique. There is a conversation going on in Steam Discussions about whether or not to allow accented characters in the English release. I voted no - if you’re German, sure, you need those characters for your alphabet, but if you’re American, those letters are not part of our words and you don’t need them for a name. It just says “I really really had to have the name of my favorite anime character, but someone beat me to it and I am too lazy and unoriginal to come up with something else.” Then there is the whole “self-glorification” thing. When you’re naming a character, you need to give it a NAME. You mean to tell me you grew up with a name of “Mestabyoo?” And you JUST HAPPENED to become a rogue? What are the odds that someone named “Bighealzx” at birth actually became a healer decades later? Maybe I put too much thought into it. Growing up playing Gold Box games, you sometimes had the option to create a back story for your character. It didn’t add anything to the game, it was just for role playing. It helped you get more into the character. I imagine that would be a waste of storage space in the average MMO asking someone called “Bluntsmker” for their history.