Lost Ark's Early Endgame Content Is Being Nerfed

Some of Lost Ark's Tier 1 and Tier 2 endgame content will be getting a little easier in an upcoming update, as Amazon and developer Smilegate RPG have outlined various balance changes and fixes coming to the free-to-play MMORPG.

A total of six early Guardian Raids and four Abyss Dungeons will see their difficulty downgraded to be made easier. Amazon states the change is based on data and feedback, which showed that some of this content was giving new players a hard time and resulting in low success rates.

"We understand that people can practice and improve at the game over time, but for early game content in particular we want to ensure that new players are having fun learning and advancing instead of getting frustrated and giving up," Amazon writes. More specific details on what exactly will be changing will come with patch notes for the update. While early endgame content is getting nerfed, Amazon states that Tier 3 and later content will still be challenging, and does not want to "drastically alter this core experience."

Amazon has also outlined a number of issues currently affecting Lost Ark and steps that are being taken to improve them. Bots and gold selling accounts are a particularly annoying problem, and Amazon states that it is making improvements to the game's anti-cheat and anti-spam tools to combat the issue. Additional measures, such as limiting the game's area chat to characters above level 30, have also been taken, which should limit gold sellers from being able to quickly make new accounts and carry on with their spamming. Amazon is encouraging players to report spammers and suspected bot accounts using the in-game report feature.

Other issues, like missing store items and matchmaking problems, are currently being addressed, but don't expect server queue times to get any better in the Europe Central server region. As Amazon has previously stated, adding more servers to the region is not currently possible, nor is the ability to transfer characters to another, less-crowded server. As a result, Amazon is looking to improve server stability to "ensure players there have the best in-game experience possible."

On the topic of server maintenance and downtime, Amazon makes clear that for the "immediate future," maintenance may happen more frequently than normal as the team looks to fix problems as quickly as possible. Looking ahead, maintenance will become more predictable and happen at times that are not "cutting into prime gaming hours."

Lost Ark will be receiving a significant content update in March as Smilegate RPG and Amazon look to bring more content from the Korean version to the West. While the March update won't include new classes, there are a number of classes that could come to Lost Ark in the future.