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February 2022 marked Amazon Games’ biggest release by a significant margin. We’re, of course, talking aboutLost Ark, the Korean MMORPG from Smilegate that launched with a peak concurrent player count of over 1.3 million. This was Amazon’s second venture into the genre, with the western MMORPG New World coming out the fall prior. The difference was that New World was a brand-new property developed in-house at their Orange County studio, whereas Lost Ark was an already established property overseas, having a few years of content to reference, and being a PVE-focused experience. Because of this, there was even more hype around its release.
And rightfully so. While there was a deep grind at the endgame, something that continues to this day, it was apparent that the established world was this majestic combination of fantasy and steampunk, and the combat was some of the best in the genre. It was a launch like we’d never seen before. Cut to today, 32 months after its release in the west. While updates to Lost Ark remain at a steady pace, it has faltered significantly over these many months, and a good portion of it can be contributed to Amazon Games’ mishandling of the product.
Lost Ark Suffers Game Changing Exploit
Players found themselves with unlimited resources overnight.
The First Domino
The first major blunder on Amazon’s part is without doubt Pheongate. This occurred in the first year of the game’s release, specifically November 2022, where Amazon mistakenly gave a gift to players, but instead of it being one per account, it was given to every single character on your roster. The initial gift wasn’t anything spectacular (ten Pheons) but it was still a nice little bonus from Amazon if you had multiple characters.
Unfortunately, the way Amazon handled it was atrocious. While we’ll never be a fan of Pheons as they’re essentially a tax when buying items off the marketboard or trading, they’re still essential to Lost Ark as a whole. Buying your Relic accessories was costly back then because of it, so even getting a few Pheons like this helped propel the player base significantly by allowing them to properly build their character a little better.
It was not meant to be, though, as Amazon went back on their gift and actually removed the Pheons from everyone’s accounts. This means that if you had already spent the gifted Pheons, you were looking at a negative value in your currency. There was no better opportunity or layup to show you care about your players than accepting the mistake and making them feel loved at the end of the year and yet Amazon blew it.
This was the first poor decision to blow up in Amazon’s face. I was just getting back into Lost Ark at the time and even I had heard about this issue. It soured the relationship of a lot of players with Amazon and sent Lost Ark on a downward trajectory.
There was no better opportunity or layup to show you care about your players than accepting the mistake and making them feel loved at the end of the year, and yet Amazon blew it.
Bots and Bans
At Least It’s Somewhat Effective
The next major event actually happened a couple of months after the events of Phoengate. While everyone was still reeling from what could only be considered a betrayal of trust, Amazon began their fight against bots. This isn’t something unique to Lost Ark as it plagues virtually every MMORPG. There will be bots running around and the main goal of most of them is to earn as much gold as possible to sell in illicit real money transactions (RMT).
In January 2023, Amazon launched their initiative to flag bots and ban them automatically. In theory, this was a great plan as it’s hard to look through thousands of reports of bots and determine how legitimate they are. Unfortunately, this backfired immensely.
Like a rogue AI, we began to see not only legitimate players getting hit, but also bans on players who hadn’t even logged on in almost a year. On top of the various reports, we knew a couple of players who had played Lost Ark when it first launched and decided it wasn’t for them and uninstalled, and they received bans on their accounts. Worst yet, this ban would show up on your Steam account. While not as bad as getting hit with a VAC ban, it still could affect specific games based on when you last received a ban for another game.
While there were issues here and there from the false bans until now, Amazon actually improved their track record over 2023 and 2024. They’ve done good work fighting the bots, but RMT remains rampant. Thankfully, nothing monumental would deter the experience, at least not until October 2024.
Tier 4 Bugs
Messy Start to an Exciting New Saga
It’s hard to believe that Amazon Games delayed Tier 4 by two weeks, because even with the extra time, the biggest update since its release was a buggy mess. While we won’t go every bug that was found, it’s safe to say there were a lot of unhappy players. Right out of the gate, the first major bug was that the main story was completely inaccessible. It took more than 24 hours before Amazon was able to rectify the situation and Tier 4 would finally be let loose.
The second bug was fortunately less of an issue because Amazon was able to calculate and reimburse players for their time, but Chaos Dungeons were giving incorrect amounts of Destiny Shards. This was important early on because players were looking to quickly push to the Aegir raid as quickly as possible, even though it was two weeks out, and considering the bottleneck so early on would be shards, it put a damper on things.
Speaking of Aegir, there were players in Europe who had access to the raid even before it had become available to the masses. This was because the raid itself was in the game, but was presumably locked behind a timer. And unfortunately for Amazon, that time ended up being before their scheduled server maintenance, so we saw some players getting in before the reset.
There was also a bug in Gate 3 of Thaemine that affected the third clash, and finally, those who decided to buy the Tier 4 Platinum Starter Pack were receiving the incorrect number of Royal Crystals. There were more bugs when Tier 4 launched, but these are just some of the examples of the issues Amazon faced. Thankfully, players were properly compensated, but these are things that should have showed up in testing.
How to Get Tier 4 Gear in Lost Ark
Gear up for another couple of years of raids!
Ignite Server Exploit
A Lose-Lose Situation Turned Bad
This brings us to without doubt thebiggest debacle Lost Ark has ever seenand the most recent. Maybe not the biggest in terms of how many players it reached, as Pheongate without doubt takes that crown, but its effect and implications on its player base and economy are significant.
This was a bug that had been found out very early on in the Ignite Server’s existence, but it took nearly two weeks before it was brought to the attention of the masses and Amazon Games. At this point, Amazon swiftly locked these boxes down, essentially stalling any progress for new and returning players, which no doubt damaged their experience greatly in the couple of days this took place, but they would later announce therepercussions of opening these boxes.
Amazon Games claimed that 2,300 players had participated in this, with only around 1,100 having opened the boxes. And yet, on the precipice of their highly-anticipated new raid tier, something that would help propel players into the exciting Ark Passive system, the two days after the bans, the numbers plummeted by four to eight-thousand players (according toSteam Charts).
The problem then came at the two-week mark when the first wave of bans was allowed back in. Agree or disagree, we think two-weeks and the removal of all items seemed like a just dessert for those who did this once. Amazon even suggested they would calculate the items that were used and deduct their values from the player’s gold pool, which only seems fair. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to do that correctly. This is where things went off the rails.
When players began to hop back on, they may have noticed, while most of the items were taken from their inventory, there were still some left behind, and not only that, their gold was the same as it was before, minus the 5,000+ bound gold they received from the boxes. Amazon had quickly taken note of this, and later that day, virtually every single unban had been reverted and given an additional two-week suspension.
This is the biggest lunacy we’ve seen from Lost Ark. They were called “edge cases” by the publisher, yet every single person we had talked to who received the initial two-week punishment was hit with another. Looking at the entire situation and talking with a bunch of players, in our opinion, we think Amazon Games just didn’t understand the scope or time it would take to filter through every account, and so the initial two weeks weren’t enough. Instead, they pushed an additional penalty for, what seemed like, their poor management. They claim they were using the October 6 update to finalize the removal of all items, but we can’t find anyone to verify that because they’re all still on vacation.
I’ve never witnessed a company’s inability to take corrective action more so than Amazon Games. They had all the means of tracking and taking items out of accounts, and reducing gold from anyone who may have used materials they weren’t supposed to. And yet, when the first wave of bans was lifted, we saw no punishments inflicted outside of time off. Everyone else should feel upset, not necessarily at the players (well, maybe those who were bragging about it), but at Amazon Games who failed to do their duty. And because of this, we believe they passed the buck onto the players with the additional two-week suspension, putting them into the pool of basically those who exploited it to the nth degree.
Now, we’re not saying those who partook in the exploit should be given pity by any means, as even if they were curious or didn’t understand the ramifications, they still should be met with some sort of disciplinary action, but it’s Amazon Games' handling of the entire situation that has left us with a bad taste in our mouths.
…it’s Amazon Games' handling of the entire situation that has left us with a bad taste in our mouths.
The Mokoko Bootcamp Event
With a little work, this could be the best thing for Lost Ark
Finally, let’s talk about the current Mokoko event that has players all hot and bothered. On paper, the latest Mokoko event is a phenomenal idea. This allows newer and returning players to hop into existing raids and have fewer gatekeeping experiences. This is because any group that takes a character who has this icon will be given a new form of currency at the end of every gate that can be exchanged for exciting rewards such as honing materials or a Relic Engraving Selector, which is immensely valuable (for example, one Adrenaline relic book goes for upwards of 300,000 gold at the time of writing). As you can imagine, this is a fantastic idea that helps with arguably the biggest problem Lost Ark has: attracting new faces.
Unfortunately, the parameters for qualifying for the Mokoko Leaf have been poorly handled. As you may imagine, this ties in perfectly with the Ignite Servers that went live two weeks before this event launched, but we’ve been seeing returning players who took advantage of the incredible new system not receiving the Mokoko Leaf. On top of that, there are veteran players who have this buff but clearly shouldn’t – such as those with a high roster level and even the Eclipse title. This means they’re locked out of the far more impressive rewards for some time while being able to feed their friends.
This is a far cry from the issues we’ve talked about in the article, but it just shows how Amazon Games continues to botch every good idea they come up with. With that said, Amazon Games can still recover the Mokoko Bootcamp and turn it into one of the best features in the game. All they need to do is modify the conditions to get the Mokoko Leaf, change the store every month or two and make it permanent.
Amazon can still recover the Mokoko Bootcamp and turn it into one of the best features in the game.
What Amazon Games Has Done Right
Are They Finally Listening?
I’ve said a lot of negative things about Amazon Games and their handling of Lost Ark, but that’s not to say they’re incompetent. Over the last year, we’ve seen an uptick in their engagement with the community, and they realized the western release needed to be handled differently from Korea.
They’re actively more involved with events, giving us a lot of materials and means to keep us coming back for more. Even looking at the Ignite Servers. While we still think they fumbled it for newer players, it essentially gave veterans a free Tier 4 character with minimal effort. We’ve also received nerfs to raids that not even Korea received; even though it’s only a Band-Aid for what the game needs overall to entice new and returning players, as a publisher, this is the most we could hope for when it comes to difficulty modifications. The overall experience players may have with Lost Ark is significantly better than it was two years ago, but that isn’t exactly saying much.
I don’t know what is next for Lost Ark. In terms of content, the Brelshaza raid should be out in a couple of months, and whatever Smilegate announces at their winter LOAON will indicate the direction we will see the game go. In terms of support from Amazon, after the latest debacle with the recent bans, we have lost quite a bit of hope for the game in the west. It’ll no doubt maintain a small, dedicated fan base, but with even that bleeding, content continuing to be stricter and stricter and Amazon’s clumsiness being shown in full force, the future has never looked grimmer for arguably the best-playing MMORPG on the market.
Amazon Talks Lost Ark Tier 4, Western Changes, Ignite Servers
We spoke with Amazon to get more information on Lost Ark’s long awaited Tier 4 release.
