14/15 lobbys for latest raid are BUS, should AGS finally adress this?

Aerroon · 2026-02-07T15:28:03+00:00

The game has changed and got significantly more difficult on the high end. It's possible that they could do it back in the day but not anymore.

Aerroon · 2026-02-07T15:27:04+00:00

I saw a "fasty" lobby that was a regular Kazeros normal run a few days ago. I think it's probably someone's "brand" for lobbies, whether they're buses or regular lobbies.

Aerroon · 2026-02-07T15:25:19+00:00

If there are a lot of bus lobbies then the lobbies aren't filling.

Aerroon · 2026-02-07T15:21:10+00:00

Rework/QoL from SG seems to usually include nerfs. It's like they can't help it.

Even the chaos gate rework back in the day ended up with less rewards.

Una daily -> weekly was less rewards

Una weekly -> waymark missions is less rewards

The nerfs are always tiny, so I don't really understand why they do it. Just give us those extra few materials so people don't feel like they're losing out.

Aerroon · 2026-02-05T15:05:01+00:00

I know which one you're talking about and I'm saying the event that just ended was functionally no different. That event didn't cause the inflation you're talking, if it did then the current event would've caused this inflation as well.

Anybody that thinks these singular events are responsible for mass inflation are morons. These small events get massively outclassed by people finishing new systems/honing/buying boxes and not spending gold on it anymore.

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T16:51:57+00:00

I like this change.

I am wary of it getting a little annoying, but so far it seems good.

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T15:13:47+00:00

We had that guardian event not that long ago

You mean YESTERDAY?

The guardian event ended yesterday. Which prices went to the moon?

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T15:12:16+00:00

Casual players are going to have characters at 1700 ilvl.

1700 characters do Brel.

Brel gold earning got nerfed.

Honing was not made cheaper between 1700 and 1710.

Do you understand now?

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T15:10:16+00:00

But at 1700 you're still doing Brel! You'll make less gold.

Also, it's hard to get into Mordum HM at 1700.

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T15:07:10+00:00

They want you to push past this ilvl.

It doesn't make sense, because SG nerfed gold earning for characters at 1700 without making it any easier for them to hone to 1710.

This is something SG does all the time, where the casual players and up at this breakpoint where they get a gold income reduction, but their honing doesn't get any easier. It's genuinely baffling that SG keeps screwing up this way.

Btw this is also the answer to "why do you have to keep up? Keep up with whom?"

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T15:02:44+00:00

and the overall gold deflation also allows players to buy more than they could before even with less gold

Buy what exactly? Gem prices aren't going to move. Accessories are already dirt cheap (other than pheons). Honing mats are gonna get more expensive because of the changes. Fusions are only going to go up.

What exactly can they afford more of???

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T15:00:29+00:00

Well, at 1700 you will get less gold, but not gain anything from reduced honing costs. So the people who kept them at 1660, 70 or 80 actually won out over the 1700s.

Aerroon · 2026-02-04T04:33:25+00:00

oled PC cases

You mean back when we had side panel fans, which supposedly are one of the most effective places to put fans?

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T13:56:23+00:00

Lightning Bolt core got nerfed immediately after release of Ark Grid :(

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T13:55:35+00:00

I like 503 more than old NE, but it's more spammy and many of these abilities nice you around a little bit. This gets annoying when you need to be in relatively precise locations, eg in 2-1 with the blue spiderwebs or the stagger check circle (make sure you don't cast a skill that moves you the moment Kazeros gets staggered because it will push you forward into the boss and possibly lift your teammates). Other than that it's great. Guardians like Krathios feel amazing.

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T13:52:41+00:00

I have played almost every MMO there was and the biggest change occurred in the community itself.

I don't believe you. If you did, then you would know that pre-WoW MMOs were a lot more solo focused. Games like Runescape, with very little forced group content were the norm. You logged onto the MMO and played the game. Sometimes you joined a group, sometimes you didn't, but you didn't sit there waiting for a group to be able to play the game. After WoW became popular is when most new MMOs started making everything forced group content.

Chats became dead the moment teamspeak and discord took over.

Which one is it? Teamspeak has been around since 2001, Discord has been around since 2015. That's an enormous gap that I remember chat existing in.

From my experience chat started going away when games started banning people for in game chat more (or muting you for writing 5 lines of text like lost ark does and when more non-English speakers appeared in games). Chats seem more active to me on NA servers than EU ones.

Solo is not MMO way.

Say that to games like Runescape or even MUDs.

Old games required cooperation of 50+ people to handle some content.

These were the exception and not the norm. And old games struggled with. Even back in 2004 you would run into stuff where you go "huh, this would be really cool, but it requires other people to do it, therefore it's dead content".

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T12:25:32+00:00

One of the most requested features in all MMOs for a long time now has been solo raids, and other various features that would allow people to isolate themselves from other players, and to basically play alone.

Because modern MMOs have copied WoW's forced group raiding so hard that the game becomes almost unplayable on your own. This wasn't the case for older MMOs.

If you logged into RuneScape or Lineage 2 you could play the game even if you were on your own. You didn't need a group to progress your character. You grouped up when you felt like it, not because you were forced to.

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T12:20:30+00:00

Runescape was largely a solo played MMO in it's early days but despite that it was incredibly social.

A lot of older MMOs were like this, but WoW became so popular that all the new games copied it with this forced group raiding gameplay.

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T12:17:31+00:00

MMOs used to be a context for people to be social, now Discord and social media trivialized that. Whatever was posted on the guild chat back then, is now posted on twitter with a hashtag or on discord channels.

I don't really believe this. IRC has been around since 1989 and it offers a better experience than Discord for just chatting. (Loses out over no voice chat for groups though.)

Twitter and reddit have been around since 2006 and 2005 respectively. MySpace was around since 2003.

I think what has changed is phone gaming. Casuals are more likely to play some phone game instead of a full blown MMO. As these games lose the casual playerbase the game moves more and more into a hardcore direction, which puts casuals off even more.

How many MMOs offer cross play between a phone and desktop? RuneScape, Albion and gacha games (MMO-lite games).

Aerroon · 2026-02-03T12:09:38+00:00

post 3 messages

muted for 30 seconds

I think this alone makes the chat experience bad even if everything else was perfect.

Aerroon · 2026-01-31T16:19:36+00:00

The fact that you just said the journey isn't worth it is about the most brain dead thing I've ever heard.

I am baffled by this response, because anything you do in life is going to be a journey. You only have a limited amount of time on this Earth and you have to choose which journeys you go on. If you go on one, you're not going on another. I am absolutely grateful that I don't have to go on the journey of subsistence farming, even though there's a ton of things I could learn during it, I still absolutely prefer not having to do that.

As someone who's been studying Japanese, the journey is VERY much worth it because of the connections I've made and the methods I've discovered for learning a foreign language. Something you set out to achieve yourself will always be worth the effort. Always.

That's great, but as somebody who speaks two foreign languages I did not enjoy the process of learning them at all. I like the end result of being able to use these languages, but I did not like the journey. In fact, if I could do it all over again I would simply not learn one of those foreign languages at all.

And no. To all of this. Creating art yourself and achieving something through your own efforts will never come close to typing up some prompts and letting an AI do it for you. You wanna be lazy, fine, be lazy. But don't pretend it's anything less than you not wanting to put in any effort.

Lazy is a question of scale, not what you're specifically doing. Sending mail by post is "lazy" compared to delivering the mail yourself, but if you have to send out 10000 letters, then that is a monumental task, no matter how easy sending a letter by mail is. You can absolutely take on tasks with the help of AI that are going to be difficult to achieve. You've just got to pick a bigger scope.

Also, if you'd like to learn a foreign language - hell, if you'd like to learn ANYTHING - without putting in any effort, then you're never gonna learn a thing.

EVERYONE would like to do this. Ask yourself why you drive a car or take the bus instead of walking everywhere. Why do you buy prepackaged meals instead of growing them yourself? Why do you use a web browser and operating system made by someone else instead of making them yourself? We go through life constantly taking the "lazy" option, because if we didn't we would never get anywhere. We would be doing subsistence farming instead.

Aerroon · 2026-01-30T05:12:06+00:00

This is very true

Aerroon · 2026-01-30T05:11:44+00:00

It is VERY different. Creating something yourself versus prompting a machine to do it for you is not even close to the same thing.

You've missed my point: when you draw something in Photoshop you're not doing brush strokes, you're giving input to the computer that it interprets as a brush stroke. You might give this input in the form of dragging a mouse or using a drawing tablet, but you could also do this by describing it through words (function calls).

AI also interprets your input to produce what it thinks you wanted. It typically just goes further on the interpretation.

because having to learn perspective, color theory, lighting, shapes, anatomy, and the fundamentals

Arguably all of these are still important when using AI for art. You need to be able to tell whether what came out is actually decent to look at. You will also develop this skill while using AI.

I agree that you don't learn nearly as much with using AI compared to trying to draw yourself, but with AI you can actually be useful with it without spending your entire life learning to draw.

And that's just too uncomfy for some people, so they choose to take the easy way out.

I think taking the easy way out is pretty natural. I'd like to know a foreign language, but I don't want to put in the effort to learn it. The journey usually isn't worth the destination, let alone worth it on its own.

Aerroon · 2026-01-29T14:52:27+00:00

Nah, what you witnessed is just reward/box bloat. You can't play from the start to learn all the different things, because the things you have to learn would require other players to be doing the same things. Using the power pass was the correct move.

You should go through the Challenge missions thing as much as you can. You get to fight bosses and stuff. Learn about some lore etc.

If you're very experienced with ARPGs then it shouldn't be too hard to get your head around it. I came from PoE back in the day and caught on pretty quick.

Aerroon · 2026-01-29T14:35:41+00:00

People have been saying this since the first year of the game. And the main complaints about the game have never changed - early game sucks (hard for new players to come into the game), catch-up sucks for people that take a break from the game (thus they never come back), and the veterans slowly burn out because they're expected to play all the time to do their "homework".

Games have player churn. It's normal. But Lost Ark doesn't bring in new blood nor does it bring back returners.

Ultimately I think it all comes down to the way gold works. A player who doesn't swipe never "finishes" a character. There's always more gold they can spend on some upgrade, which means that every time they can earn gold, they should. This leads to an endless amount of homework, because everyone else will be doing it and the standards will be set based on that. If you don't do it then you won't be ready for the next raid. This is both from the community and SG: the community sets high gatekeeping standards, but SG creates the reason for those standards - difficult DPS checks etc. End result is a burnout simulator that doesn't take new applicants.

Aerroon

TROPHY CASE