Lost Ark was the most popular MMORPG on Steam at launch, on February 8, garnering up to 97% positive reviews. However, the game now stands at only 60% positive impressions in the last 30 days and has fallen to a balanced rating. But what is the reason for that? We at MeinMMO summarize.
How did it start? The launch of Lost Ark was phenomenally successful in the West. The game went live on February 8 and was able to attract over 1.3 million simultaneous players, securing a solid 2nd place on Steam, just behind PUBG. This is impressive, especially since the head of the game only expected around 200,000 players.
Despite massively overcrowded servers and long queues at the start, the atmosphere was as excellent as the player numbers. With 97% positive reviews, Lost Ark was even the most popular and best-rated MMORPG on Steam for a while. While this figure dropped to around 85% in the first two weeks, Lost Ark remained very popular among genre fans.
What is the current status? By the evening of June 9, Lost Ark slipped into the “balanced” rating on Steam. This happens when a game receives more than a third of negative reviews. Currently, Lost Ark has 60% positive feedback in the last 30 days, based on 5,760 individual reviews from last month.
Looking at the total 163,523 ratings, there is still a glowing blue “mostly positive” on Steam. However, this has drastically decreased compared to the launch. Currently, only 74% of all reviews are positive. So the MMORPG has also dropped by about 10 percentage points here.
Why was Lost Ark so successful at all? You can see 5 reasons in our video:
Amazon and Communication
Why did reviews drop right at the start? After the good 97% start, the general reviews began to decline within the first two weeks. This was mainly due to communication from Amazon. Fans had issues with bugs, queues, and the future plan, but the publisher remained silent on these topics for a long time.
With the first major update, the Argos raid was introduced and once again evoked mixed feelings in the community. The raid came too quickly for many fans and sparked Pay2Win discussions among players. The accusation was that only those who paid for upgrade materials could run the new raid.
After this incident, the situation regarding communication from Amazon improved significantly.
What is the current status? The Amazon team releases monthly team updates where they discuss current issues, tasks, and new features. These announcements usually include something new about the upcoming updates, which is well received by fans.
However, the fact that communication has not been consistently improved became evident just last month. In the May update of Lost Ark, there were things in the game that were not announced in the patch notes. There were also pieces of information in the notes that were not present in the game. Although Amazon apologized for this, it also resulted in a small wave of new negative reviews.
The Problem with Bots
What is driving the ratings down currently? Lost Ark has been facing a massive problem with bots in the game for months. These bots continuously farm gold and sell it to real players, a practice known as RMT, or Real Money Trading. Initially, Amazon fought successfully against waves of automated accounts and even banned over a million of them.
However, the problem seems to be getting worse again. Lost Ark currently has over 800,000 simultaneously active players, and even we in the West are experiencing queues when logging into the MMORPG. And this is despite the fact that there has been no content update. The flood of bots is currently hard to stop and is no longer ignorable even in the endgame.
These are not just wild characters running amok in low-level areas, as was the case when the game started. Bots have now made it to the endgame and are significantly affecting the economy there. The satisfaction of players in the high gear score area is dropping just like that of new players, who sometimes hardly get to fight any monsters due to the many bots.
Scenes like these have unfortunately become commonplace and are not a rarity:
How is Amazon responding to this? As a player, it feels like the publisher currently lacks answers to this problem. Although they recently announced in the forum that they would also punish buyers of gold more harshly, this has not yet shown any effects.
Amazon has also attempted to remove some gold sources in the game to deny bots the opportunity to quickly acquire gold. However, this led not only to a reduction in the bustling characters but rather to even more bots in the MMORPG.
Additionally, honest players are also being deprived of the same sources of income, which could lead to them resorting to RMT more quickly, as many fans fear.
How this front will develop is currently an open topic, which annoys many players and is currently leading to negative reviews.
Bug Fixes Are Missing for Weeks
What else is causing frustration? Hotfixes for bugs disrupting gameplay were the norm in the early days of Lost Ark. While there were regularly unplanned server downs, players were not angry about it because the errors in the MMORPG were quickly resolved, and usually, there were even compensations for the downtime.
Currently, however, that is not the case. An annoying bug, where the user interface gets stuck on your mouse cursor and you can no longer move because of it, has been in the game for over 3 weeks. It’s particularly frustrating when it happens during a raid. Fans have thus demanded compensations for lost loot due to failed dungeons and raids, but so far in vain.
Here you can see the bug in action, even though the player can still move here. This is not always the case:
Additionally, a serious bug that caused your character to get stuck in a loading screen and could only be saved by contacting support persisted for over 2 weeks in the MMORPG. Other, smaller bugs have been present for even longer in Lost Ark.
How are the fans reacting? They are currently angry and frustrated that seemingly small errors take so much time to resolve. Time and again, the “time bug” is mentioned as an example. This bug involved incorrectly displayed times in the in-game calendar. This error persisted for 2 months in Lost Ark and generated resentment, even though it hardly had any real impact on your gameplay.
Fans can be seen sporadically on Reddit and in forums, turning their backs on the MMORPG after over 1,000 hours of gameplay. Many of these postings paint a sad yet hopeful conclusion.
Lost Ark is Still a Good Game
Why are the ratings just a snapshot? Currently, many things are going wrong in Lost Ark, and this is also reflected in the fallen Steam ratings. However, that does not mean that the MMORPG is inherently a bad game – on the contrary. Lost Ark captivates its fans and draws them in because the basic game mechanics simply feel really good.
This is also evident in the fact that many of the negative reviews on Steam are written with a heavy heart and resonate with the sentiment “I’m having so much fun with the game, please don’t continue as you are now.”
Some of the negative reviews come from players with over 500 and even over 1,000 hours of gameplay, who simply hope that Amazon will address the current issues sensibly so they can play their favorite MMORPG with full enthusiasm again.
What do the fans say? We would like to quote some of these exclusively negative reviews for you. They all come from the Steam page of Lost Ark:
- ZomgSquirrel writes after 906 hours: “I’m writing this while sitting in the queue. The game is fun, and there is truly a lot for every type of player to do, but the constantly growing bot population and the outrageous RMT make it impossible to play normally. […] Unless much harsher measures against bots and RMT are taken, I’m afraid I can’t recommend playing the game. Thanks for your time.”
- tatjanat writes after 522 hours: “I love this game, but I feel Amazon doesn’t care about real players anymore.”
- vee writes after 899 hours: “The best combat system I have ever experienced in an MMORPG. Great raids with unique mechanics and excellent horizontal progression. Sadly, the game is currently plagued by bots and poor management. […] None of this has been worked on, even after months.”
- otomeanzu writes after 1,059 hours: “Right now, the game is just unplayable because of bots and a publisher that just doesn’t care. The game is unbelievably successful in Korea and Russia and it could be here too. Lost Ark is a great game, but Amazon is doing too much wrong here.”
What do you think of the current situation of Lost Ark? Are you still playing, or do you see it the same way as the authors of the negative comments? Do you also feel that Amazon needs to do more, or can you not understand the flood of negative reviews? Feel free to let us know in the comments here at MeinMMO.
