Lost Ark Review (ZephyrFox)
I used to play this. A lot, as you can see from the playtime. Most of the time I spent in the game was in 2022-23. I had a good group of people I played with and the servers were full of great people. We didn't really know what we were getting into, however, and eventually we all started playing less and less. Mostly because we realized that this isn't really a game. It's a job that you can pay your employer for the privilege of playing. You either pay to skip the grind or you perform ridiculous amounts of fetch quests and spam the 'G' (interact) key. I'm not kidding when I'm saying there are things that you need to do hundreds to thousands and tens of thousand times. There is an 'island soul' that has a less than 1% chance to drop from a pouch that has a less than 1% chance to drop from a mob. I don't know what the math on that works out to exactly, but googling says in the thousands of hours.
Gear 'honing' has abysmal success rates and you lose materials on every attempt. The honing materials are tiered and each level requires a different material so all your old mats are virtually worthless when you move up a tier. Drop rates for 'collection' items are extremely low and many mobs, bosses, events, and/or islands only spawn once or twice a day/week, so collection can take hundreds of hours for a single item.
Every system in the game is designed to take as much time as possible, every single day, unless you pay. Even if you pay, the time gates and drop rates stay the same, so you still have to grind. Beyond the currency bloat, there are also 4+ XP systems you need to grind.
I stopped eventually because of the sheer grindiness and utterly ridiculous currency and loot box mechanics. I came back recently because I heard some of the newer updates reduced the grind and simplified the currency. I thought I'd take a look and see whether it was worth coming back to.
I should not have. The grind is all still there and, if anything, is worse. The currency has been simplified a bit but it is still ridiculous. There is still silver, gold, crystals, royal crystals, pirate coins, open seas coins, pheons, shards, fragments, and probably others that I've just forgotten. There are six different 'profession' currencies that you have to collect and each of them has multi tiered rarities. You can convert between all of these at awful (like 10 to 1) exchange rates. There are sinks for all of them everywhere.
Despite simplifying some things, they've added whole new systems to make things even more grindy and confusing. These systems have new fetch and farm quests and use different materials that you need to use that have low drop and conversion rates. It's just more of the same.
Trying to play content from before the endgame is hit or miss because people are simply not there and the content is not accessible by just one person. You can ask in chat and you might get lucky, but there is very little incentive for an end-game character to help out with content that they probably haven't touched in years. There is a 'solo' mode option for some pre-endgame content, which can be useful, but it's a little laughable having a 'solo' mode anything in an MMO.
I could try to find a guild and try out discord to get some older, wider content done, but that doesn't solve the grind and loot box issues this game has. I don't mind grinding for an item, but grinding for just a chance at an item is a special level of hell.
There are some nice people still playing and you might be able to connect with them in game or over discord and get some things done if you are new or returning, but if you value your time, money, and sanity, don't. Pick another MMO.