izigame.me

Happy anniversary!
I quit Lost Ark because of burnout about 4 months ago, and as time passes I miss it less and less after seeing its pain points continuously getting worse.
However, before I dunk on it like everyone else, I'd like to mention reasons why you would want to play this game, and even vastly enjoy it with the right company:

Combat is one of the best in the MMO market, if not THE best. Everything is fluid and responsive. Skill VFX and SFX are fantastic, over the top and impactful. You feel like a god from level 1 and it only gets better from there as you unlock more skills and get better gear.
All classes have their own distinct playstyle and identity, and combined with the action combat make up for a very fun time. The class engraving system further expands on this by splitting each and every class into 2 playstyles the player can choose to go for as they play the game.
The Raids and Dungeons have wonderful presentation and are very fun to go through for the first time. The developers took advantage of the top-down angles to pan the camera towards scenery when fitting, giving a much more cinematic experience to everything. In terms of effects, they really pushed UE3 to its limits all things considered, even if many models look dated nowadays (but that's a given for most MMOs).
The game is F2P, technically no single piece of content is locked behind a necessary pay wall.

This is about where the positives of the game end. Those are quite important, mind you. They are enough to give the game an AMAZING core to work with.
What the developer and publisher chose to do with that core is where everything went wrong.
Smilegate RPG, the developer of the game and publisher in Korea, are a Korean developer. That means that the player's relationship with the game and the company is bound to be abusive. Smilegate are definitely no exception to this fact, and thus prove that by making the experience of progressing through the game miserable to anyone who isn't playing this game as a first (not second) job, or doesn't swipe 3-4 figures every month. To be more precise:

The game is riddled with P2W and time gated systems that consist of layers upon layers upon layers of RNG that make even gacha games shudder. The majority of the playerbase will expect you to have those systems maxed out, or you will be gatekept from content new and old.
The progression materials you can earn without swiping are about enough to progress at a reasonable pace, IF you do your dailies across all your characters that can take up to 2 hours, and additionally play one and a half dozen raids every week, across multiple characters. Needless to say, that's a big time investment, considering each raid can take about 20 minutes for the older ones, up to an hour for the newer ones, and obviously even more if everything doesn't go smoothly. And I don't want to claim that having to spend a lot of time on an MMO is a problem; the real problem is that if you ever leave this treadmill for even a few weeks, you will inevitably fall behind the active playerbase, which in turn will gatekeep you from most of the relevant content. And you won't be able to catch up to it if you don't swipe. Hell, even if you never leave the treadmill, all it takes is for you to be pretty unlucky (which will statistically happen at some point if you play long enough) and even with your maximum efforts you won't be able to reach the next raid on release. And if you're a new player, you will always be at the bottom of the totem pole and will never be able to catch up to veterans.
The game does not offer any meaningful casual raiding content or solo content. Everything is midcore to hardcore, there are no easy versions of Raids that offer progression. This is not only bound to turn off many players trying to get into the game to begin with, but also further incentivize overgearing content, because Raids do not have item level sync. That means overgearing them can neuter a lot of otherwise dangerous mechanics, or even outright skip them. You can NOT join 95% of PF lobbies on item level (as in no one will accept you into their group), unless it's literally week 1 of the Raid's release.
All the aforementioned points naturally lead to an impatient, toxic and elitist playerbase. I don't really have much else to say about this, it just sours the experience for everyone.

Those were only the points that apply for all versions of the game, or at least Korea and Global. However, the Global publisher, Amazon Games Studios (whose version you will be playing here on Steam, as the Korean version is IP and SSN blocked), have furthermore brought additional pain points to the table:

The game is optimized like balls even compared to its KR counterpart, because it is a frankenstein build of some (not all) of the content of KR. Its anti-cheat system, EAC, is also seemingly implemented like balls; everyone gets countless errors due to it and its implementation makes the game need 3 minutes to open. What is more, the game very often has server issues that can last for months at a time without being addressed.
Bots and RMT are rampant, obliterating the economy for everyone playing legally. AGS doesn't give half a shit about RMT-ers, giving them small holiday breaks at worst as punishment. Bots get banned too slowly.
The Global version of the game, being a lot newer than the KR one, doesn't have the same endgame content as KR. AGS are trying to catch us up to KR, which is great, but with an accelerated pace for this grindy of a game there should also be more rewards. Except there aren't. We have double the pace with the same (or sometimes even fewer) rewards, something that furthers the pain of the treadmill point mentioned earlier. Most progression events are pitiful for anyone who isn't super new to the game.
Nearly everything in the store is terrible value and disgustingly overpriced, something that can lead new players into wasting money, and veteran players to RMT.
AGS are completely and utterly incompetent and out of touch. The global playerbase's complaints basically never get addressed, the community managers make comments that only add fuel to the fire, news posts always have conflicting and straight up wrong info, every patch that comes out has several bugs. They stagger balance patches and QoL and present them as content for whatever damn reason.
Oh also if you're in Asia/OCE, poor company Amazon didn't make servers for you. Have fun playing at 200+ ping.

Does this inspire you any hope for the Global version of the game? It definitely doesn't inspire me, and Lost Ark's steamcharts confirm this, where the only player increases nowadays are surges of bots. If the game's systems weren't already greedy, our version is even worse, with more bugs, server issues, fewer progression materials and a destroyed economy compared to its KR counterpart.
Even if I absolutely love the core of the game and truly believe it had the potential to be a 10/10, the next big MMO that could compare to the giants like WoW and FFXIV, it saddens me that in the end it was only used as a means to milk quick buck. In the closing of its second year the game has already faded into obscurity in the West, and everyone outside its now small playerbase refers to it as I do: "combat and raids Good, everything else Shit" and they're right.
I can only recommend the game to:

Someone who wants to go through the MSQ for a few dozen hours because the combat looks cool.
Someone who has a premade, 8-person static that wants to progress through the raiding content together.

If neither of those things apply to you, you're better off elsewhere.