izigame.me

Will not recommend to play this game in 2024, despite having over 5k hours in the game. There are just too many cons about the game that ultimately led to me quitting.
combat gameplay 9/10
graphics 8/10 (characters, skins and sfx look good despite being on UE3)
class diversity 8/10
story 1/10 (story is ok but presentation to players is trash)
personal base/stronghold system 6/10 (nothing useful to do in strongholds except to make feasts and showoff some accolades)
I'll start by listing the pros then the cons of the game.
Pros:
1. Great character customization. From the facial details to the amount of skins and dyes that are made available to the players who play consistently, there is a wide variety of things one can do to customize and create their own unique character appearance.
2. Good amount of depth in terms of game, class, gear and raid mechanics. Just to understand how all the classes work with each other in raids alongside grinding for gear upgrades to attempt harder raids can easily allow players to have hundreds of hours of playtime.
3. A hardcore free to play player can actually grind and keep up with pay to win players if they only focus on one main character.
Cons:
1. Bad monetization model. As the game is free to play, smilegate has decided to monetize mainly on game progression. This causes a series of problems in the game's economy as more and more rng progression systems are being added into the game.
2. Multiple layers of rng gated progression systems. For an endgame player to be able to get accepted into raid parties, one has to be able to bypass several layers of rng checks despite after playing for hundreds of hours. One has to have sufficient card set levels, gem levels, gear score, weapon level upgrade, passive card bonuses aka demon dmg %, elixirs, transcendence and much more to come as we get further updates similar to the korean servers. Each individual system requires player to dedicate a set amount of time, usually in terms of months while cards can set one back for years if you do not spend money or gold to actively purchase card packs.
3. Gold is king in lost ark, it is also a poison because of how useful it is. As each player would require an absurd amount of gold in order to progress a single character into end game, gold is required in almost every action that leads to progression in the game a.k.a. game is heavily pay to win. As such, the NA server that i played in was severely infested with bots so that they could generate and sell tons of third party gold.
4. With the influx of botted gold and rmt, it causes inflation to the auction house and blue crystal prices. As many players are rmt-ing and abusing the system, blue crystal prices are so high that most normal f2p players cannot afford to spend blue crystal unless they halt or delay their account progression.
(For new players who are unaware, blue crystal can be bought with in game gold through cash shop exchange. It can be used to buy some cash shop items like skins and premium service for account wide monthly bonuses without needing to spend real money in game.)
5. Difference between 1 tap upgrades and pitying gear at endgame is too huge. As thaemine raid is approaching, a +25 weapon is somewhat required if you to be able to join pugs and compete against the veterans as well as whales and rmt-ers. Between a 1 tap +25 vs 100% pity can somewhat be calculated to at least 3 million gold. A normal player who does all his raids would only gain an average of 200k gold per week. If your friend 1 taps and you pity +25 weapon, your progression would be 15 weeks apart, of course none of that matters if you decide to spend money into the game.
6. After you pass all the gear check, card check, rng check, roster level check, you are still at the mercy of gatekeeping by randoms for all sorts of stupid reasons simply because some raids require either too much teamwork or are too punishing if one player dies. As a result of that, the game's player pool does not grow much and its mostly the same group of veterans who would stick to this game.
7. Hard mode and normal mode raid design system is just bad. In Lost Ark, the endgame pve raids are mostly your legion raids that are being classified into two main modes. Normal mode for people who are slightly more casual and cannot keep up with progression due to not having enough time commitment, being unlucky with gear upgrades or other reasons. Hard mode for the more hardcore audience who wants more challenge and can afford to either spend more time playing the game or more money to buy progression. Due to this system, it causes it a huge divide in players because there are weekly lockouts and usually players who have reached hard mode progression would not play with players in normal mode due to a significant difference in raid rewards.
8. Too much elitists in the game because the game punishes players on several different levels. As the game requires players to generate significantly more gold as new patches and gear thresholds are introduced. It becomes pivotal for players to be able to finish their weekly raids and claim the max amount of raid gold in the shortest amount of time. Due to this, many players would only opt to play with the same few people that they know to save time. These people would gatekeep new players as they are less geared or have less experience in raids and thus have a higher tendency to cause raid wipes and would largely extend the amount of time required to clear raids. 3rd party dps meters are also available in this game and it just makes the whole situation even worse.
9. Main reason why i quit the game was because my own friends who stuck to this game won't even raid with me. I quit the game once after the first year of release at 4.4k hours. At that time brelshraza hard was the end game raid, came back and played for 2 months when voldis and souleater were released. I have a roster level of 290+ and los30 card set that was naturally built up just by playing the game for almost 1 and half year. (Even after quitting at the 1 year mark, id still login every once in a while to claim free event legendary card packs.) Most veterans in the game are too focused on being efficient in generating gold as they do not want to spend unnecessary money into the game for progression. As such, they just end up isolating themselves in their own social circle. So after going back to lost ark in year 2, it just made me realise that the only ones left playing are either whales or veteran tryhards left in the game who cant afford to quit the game due to sunk cost fallacy.
Ending notes:
This is a good game for people who have no self control and severe gambling addiction. The whole game is designed like a casino for players to throw money to AGS or buy 3rd party gold to gamble and risk getting banned. Oh and one more thing, not playing the game is actually a net positive in terms of character progression. As the game is bleeding new players, the devs approach is to keep giving free event stuff for new players to catch up. A good example would be my newly created character that has only been played for 2 months could almost catch up to the progression of another player that has stuck to the game for 1 year+. The devs would continue to push out freebies to new players and beat their own rng traps that they have laid for whales to spend money onto the game. If they don't do so, then the game would ultimately just bleed to death and server closure would be impending.