Recent reviews by furiouslog

TLDR: Lost Ark is like working at a joyless company that pays less than $3/hour filled with toxic douchebros where you are constantly required to attend boring and abusive meetings one after the other in order to get your weekly paycheck. Whether you are a casual or an hardcore endgame raider, don’t play this game.

Now, here’s why:

1. The game becomes very boring. Lost Ark is full of, and depends on, the daily completion of extremely boring and repetitive tasks – including guardian raids, chaos dungeons, world bosses, and pretty much all scheduled island content. There are also “one-off” repetitive tasks, such as the “infinite” damage walls to access certain collectibles and very low RNG collection drops. Bot farmers have basically coded the entire game into a set of scripts, which shows how meaningless and soulless most of the actual content is. Regular players sometimes use these scripts for certain activities, which are freely available on Github.

2. The community is terrible. This is the most toxic MMO I’ve played. There are exceptions in the form of friendly leaders who tie the health of the game with the ability to attract and engage new players, but finding these people is really difficult. When I pug, I’ve often been ganged up on for making mistakes in raids. It’s not a lack of understanding of mechanics – I know them, but occasionally I just goof. I’m human. The rash of toxicity that flows out of these impatient and childish bullies usually falls into one of the following themes: “your build sucks”, “this raid has been out for 2 months wtf”, “you whale but obviously don’t play”, “you are an idiot”, “how can you not get this it’s easy”, and “I didn’t know this was a prog”. Early on, this was not an issue, but as the player base trends lower, the remaining stressed out gigachads are getting more and more pissed that they can’t clear a complex raid in less than half an hour, and they throw the largest hissy fits I’ve seen in 30 years of online gaming.

3. The combat system is overly complex and unbalanced. There is a serious lack of build variety. Your abilities are dependent on 5 basic elements:

a. your gear level, which you “hone” to raise in a complicated RNG scheme,
b. your engravings, which contain base combat stats as well as special abilities, improved both through the collection of engraving books as well as attributes from dropped accessories,
c. your accessories, which contain random values for stats/engravings,
d. your gear quality, raised through a RNG scheme with diminishing returns that costs a lot of gold, and
e. your card set, which provides different buffs and abilities when equipped, and is dependent on collecting cards though drops as well as cards purchased in game.
f. runes, which provide buffs.

More than 99% of the accessories that drop in the game are useless by virtue of their combination of base stats and engravings. They have no actual application relative to the meta. The benefits that various engravings provide are not equalized in gameplay value, and as such, only certain engravings are even relevant to gameplay, and if you do not spec your characters out with the perfect combination of stats and engravings, you might as well not play at all, because you will constantly get gatekept. The market for engraving recipes is proof: despite the “equalized” rarity of combat engraving drops, the most expensive one is over 10K times the cost of the cheapest one. If these two had equivalent gameplay value, they would be a lot closer in market cost. It leaves no room for theorycrafting, which is supposed to be one of the fun parts of an MMO. No thought, no curiosity is required or even welcome, you are enslaved to the meta far more than other MMOs.

4. The game is overrun with bots. Smilegate has a bot issue that they have been attempting to mitigate since launch, and their approach to combat bots directly hurts player progression, especially new players.

5. PVP is a mixed bag. There are two flavors here, an equalized PVP experience, and an open world PVP experience. The open world content is not fun because of the lack of gear balance, but that content is also the most interesting. The balanced stuff is limited to 1v1 or 3v3 arena content. If the gear were normalized or capped, it would be far more interesting, not to mention that it would reward talent instead of wallets.

6. There are multiple technical issues with the game. For the past 5 months, there have been a crazy number of game disconnections - there are fewer now, but for weeks there it was just truly awful. Considering the time and effort it takes to get a party together, that you can get disconnected and lose your raid rewards is disheartening.

7. Raid content is poorly designed. There is an overwhelming reliance on one-shot mechanics to increase difficulty, combined with being forced to use the chat box to imperfectly communicate some of these complex raid mechanics issues. One raid basically requires Discord to stream a screen if you want to run it smoothly. There is no resurrection in most of these raids, so if one person makes a mistake before you hit a mechanic that is dependent on the entire raid, you wipe and restart. You cannot rally. Sometimes these mechanics are placed deep into the fight.

8. The game is expensive in time and money. Let’s do a quick “back of the envelope” analysis of time spent in game. The game encourages and requires running content on alts in order to progress. If you efficiently run essential content on 6 toons, at full rested bonus, you’re running:

a. 18 raids per week at an average of about 1 hour per raid (with a mix of Vykas, Clown, and Brel), presuming that you have efficiently scheduled static times with seasoned players and don’t have to wait for hours in lobbies. 18 hours.
b. 15 Lopang/Chaos Dungeons/Guardian Raids per week, at about 6 minutes per, including login/queue times (with running Chaos Dungeons solo). 4.5 hours.
c. 7 Adventure Islands at 15 minutes each. 1.17 hours.
d. Event Stuff: maybe 15 minutes per day, on average. 1.75 hours.
e. 6 Boss Rush/Cube per week, 2 hours.
f. GVG and GVE once per week, 2 hours if you compete directly, 1 hour if you do stuff like Tranquil for GVG.
g. Chaos Gates (with maps) at 15 minutes each: 1 hour.
h. World Bosses at 15 minutes each: 1 hour.
i. Character management: 2-5 hours.

That gives us a minimum of 28 hours/week playing Lost Ark, assuming that you have scheduled your time perfectly with other people who also schedule and utilize their time perfectly. The average American has 5 hours of leisure time per day, leaving 7 hours left in the week to do any of the other things I enjoy to ensure that I keep up with the Lost Ark population in order to be eligible to run the latest raids.

Let’s say you want to start the game today. At current exchange rates (NAE), $1 buys you about 1200 gold in the currency exchange. To get 6 toons to 1520, Maxroll has a range of 314418-1195138 gold with an average of 614416/toon. That equates to $534/toon on average, with a lowest possible spend of $262/ toon to a highest of $996/toon. Add gear quality upgrades and other purchased materials in order to satisfy raid requirements (e.g. card packs)., and you’re either looking at over $3000 to start playing with your friends immediately, or you need to grind for approximately 1700 game hours to get to that point, provided that you do it efficiently.

Now, you make gold in game as well, both through actual gold, sales of items, and through the gold equivalent value of the mats you receive as rewards. The baseline if you have 6 1520 characters comes to 16K gold per week per toon, or 96K for the roster, for an $80 dollar equivalent, or $2.85 per hour earned for your effort.

In conclusion, this game was fun for a bit, but then turned into a joyless and mind-numbing grind, and I wish I’d never started it in the first place.

There is simply not enough space to clearly articulate everything that is wrong with New World. But I'll try to summarize the things that upset me most about this unfinished game.

1. It has the most grind of any MMO I've played. So much of your time is spent gathering sparse resources, micromanaging inventory and resource placement, and endlessly repeating content to glean small increments of gear progression. I'm almost 1000 hours into this thing, and I figure that I've got probably somewhere between 25-70 days at 6 hours a day to close the gaps in my character's gear requirements just to get to the point where I can be competitive in PVP. One of the reasons for this is that AGS, once realizing that people were progressing too quickly, started ham-fistedly adding in more time and resource gates to slow people down. Normally, this would not be a big deal, except for the fact that large populations who did insane grinding at the beginning are already there. To close the gap with them now takes even longer.

2. Game breaking bugs have plagued New World since the start. The worst ones involve gold and item "duping", wherein players could take advantage of a number of game design flaws to endlessly replicate their coin, resources, and gear. Even though the worst offenders who used these exploits were banned, the trickle down effects of their exploitation had a profound effect on server economies, the upshot of which is that traders and early adopters indirectly benefited from the cheaters, and still remain unbelievably wealthy today, another gap which is impossible to close.

3. PVP combat is both slow and bug-ridden. Press buttons during a fight - you're lucky if anything happens as planned. Skills don't fire, potions remain unconsumed, weapons are unswapped. Skills that show as available in your UI do not match what you actually have available to use. In large scale engagements, such as wars, which are necessary to win territory, there are frequent lock ups. You're there, and then 8 seconds later when your screen resolves, you're dead. This is not fun.

4. AGS makes constant changes in response to both complaints and their dearth of content. It's nice when they fix bugs. Much appreciated. But sometimes they do things like: shut down the traders for days on end, killing server economies. Disallow furnishing trading for weeks forcing furnishings to pile up in your inventory. Some mobs drop too many resources? Turn off those drops for weeks on end without replacement, while the prices for those resources skyrocket and slow down crafting progression.

5. The time you spend in the game is usually not a good time. You will spend hundreds of hours staring at a screen while your toon chops down trees. It's fun the first few hundred times, but eventually, it's a massive bore to the extent that I often literally fall asleep at my PC doing these endless farm runs and mindless chest runs. Expedition runs are challenging, but keep getting overtuned to prevent people from sailing through the content. In one patch, you might clear, next one, you don't, then the next one, you can again somehow, In order to grind expeditions, you also need to grind and craft keys to access them, which take forever to make and costs a lot - on our server going for a dungeon run means paying someone 2,500 in coin, which takes hours to grind, and then unless you've run it a few times and understand the mechanics, you're probably also going to spend 1-2K coins in repair bills. Other MMOs, when you want to queue up for a dungeon, you find a team and just go. In New World, you might as well not even bother because you'll just lose time and money for little to no reward, going through content whose mechanical difficulty is based primarily on a variety of nigh-invincible damage sponges.

6. I'm a governor of a pretty large company on Ys, and all of our players were just behind the curve of people who benefited from the early exploits and simpler progression curves. We have 80 players and a number of friendly companies to work with, and territory moves no where, because we don't have the gear and cash to fund more wars, much less win them. Managing a company is done all outside the game - AGS does not even allow you to track transactions going in and out of the company coffer. There are no tools to help - and that pretty much goes for the rest of the UI. You learn recipes, but there is no easy way to track them. The UI for the trader has a clunky and inefficient design. The game has a serious lack of tools to manage your play.

7. Tickets submitted to AGS do not get addressed. They just don't. At all. It's incredible.

I think I might be about done with this game. It has been the largest waste of time I've ever spent in my entire life. If you are thinking about picking this game up and starting it, don't. You will end up frustrated and angry. Three years from now, when they've figured out their problems, listened to their consumers, and implemented all of the lessons that they should have ALREADY LEARNED from the past 20 years of MMO development, this might be a good game. Right now, it's a toxic pool of quicksand that will draw you in with its magical graphics and immersive soundscapes, and then it starts pulling you down, eating away at your soul with each patch hastily designed to put more and more roadblocks in the way of your progression, and as your sunk costs increase, it gets harder and harder to get off the treadmill of chop chop chop chop chop *ding* chop chop chop *ding* chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop *ding* chop chop chop *ding* chop chop chop chop *ding* chop chop chop chop CHOP.

Don't buy it. Don't even think about buying it.

I'm editing this review, based on some changes that have been made since I originally wrote it. Long story short, ZOS has really turned things around with their customers.

Two things made me turn the corner on whether or not I'd recommend this game. The first is that I tried other MMOs during an ESO break, and none of them were better, with even more bugs and flaws.

Although ZOS still has opportunities to improve on the communication of their plans and approach to the game, there were things that they did this past year that really showed an acknowledgment of the player experience and demonstrated consumer empathy. The largest of these was to implement curated drops on top of the stickerbook, which considerably reduced the grind, a point about which I and many others complained endlessly when it came to their game.

Despite combat issues in Cyrodiil, which they are doing a full court press to finally fix this year, I recommend the game, and if you have never dropped in to ESO, now is the time.

Start of original review:

I've played this game since beta, and as an endgame player for about two years now. I have just about 6000 hours invested in the game since the start. Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:
1. Elder Scrolls IP (if that is something that appeals to you).
2. Beautifully designed graphics with an immersive quality (particularly newer content)
3. Multiple ways to play the game with highly customizable build options that are very accessible to newer players.
4. Very flexible for single player and multiplayer content – there is something for everyone here.
5. Combat is very dynamic and requires some practice and skill to master.
6. Your abilities in the game are not contingent on paying any additional money. The only thing investment gets you is inventory control convenience and cosmetics.
7. The community is, on a whole, very friendly, and the guild options make it possible to meet people who engage with the game on a variety of levels and interests.
8. There is a very active and creative third party addon community.
9. There are many ways to engage with the game, including the housing features, single player, multiplayer for 4 player and 12 player content, role play, and a number of PVP options.
10. The quests are very good, much better than most MMOs, with good writing and some top-notch voice acting.

Cons:
1. Constant changes and tweaks to gear, gameplay, and mechanics make it near-impossible to settle down and hit your stride. Once you get used to playing a certain way with an optimized build, the rug gets pulled out from underneath you and you are starting over.
2. Viable participation in endgame is locked behind so many grindy requirements that it can take a new player months to get to the point where they are even teachable for veteran trial content.
3. The combat system mechanics are inscrutable and difficult to learn. In order to understand your characters and their builds, it literally takes hours of research on third party sites to get to the point where you comprehend the interplay of character stats and how that affects your in-game performance.
4. The PVP offerings in the game are broken. Cheaters are not rampant, but definitely present, and the game design does not make it easy for ZOS to put walls in place to prevent exploitation. Each third party script or bot that gets produced needs to be individually researched and the code re-written to prevent cheating, so it’s prevalent. Furthermore, performance of PVP with respect to the servers is truly awful. Lag is such a bad problem that ZOS has literally been running player tests for months wherein mechanics are drastically changed in pursuit of identifying the root cause of the lag, and after all of that, they still have not figured out what the problem is. During some battles in Cyrodiil (a large PVP zone), the lag can get so bad that it almost acts like turn based combat.
5. Many of the changes that ZOS makes causes considerable harm to the veteran player and their gaming experience, because the changes are meant to accommodate newer players and make endgame more accessible. The principle of accessibility is not the problem – it’s that after you have played for a certain time and achieved a certain level, you are not guaranteed to retain what you have earned in the game, forcing regrinds of content you’ve done over and over again just to get at parity with where you were prior to the change.
6. The game is almost unplayable without the addons that the player community provides. You can technically play it, but the time wasted without the addons is such that it would be ridiculous to make an attempt to play without them.
7. The “crown crates” that drop various cosmetic items are a third party currency gambling black box. ZOS does not provide any transparency on drop rates, but the community has stepped in to publish these data, which are not comprehensive and whose calculations are based on sample availability.
8. If you run a guild, the cash outlay to provide offerings to your guildmates (such as crafting stations, practice dummies, and various conveniences) can run into hundreds of dollars. You don’t have to do that, but people who want to run a successful guild by providing attractive offerings to retain membership need to be aware of the stakes. If you run a trading guild, an enormous amount of time is required to manage gold inflow, alliance management, and competitive intelligence in order to be able to reliably secure a trader.

Despite the positives, I’m not recommending this game because, ZOS as a company does not listen to their customers. When changes are made, it’s obvious that part of their motivation is to force more seasoned players to keep grinding over and over again to recapture what they had prior to the change. They keep moving the finish line, both to attract new players, while also willfully and needlessly punishing veteran players for their loyalty in the name of increasing veteran player screen time in order to increase the probability of cosmetic sales. These players are essentially exploited. Cults take advantage of their adherents by using the “sunk costs” heuristic as a disincentive to leave, and ZOS ruthlessly abuses their loyal players in the same way without empathy or explanation.

The so called “community managers” do not address player concerns head on. Any public face for the game is purely promotional in nature. Decisions about game design and mechanics are ostensibly listened to when those changes are placed in testing, and they ask for feedback, but they do not respond to or address any of the feedback even when it is universally negative, given that ZOS’s apparent business objectives of creating more grind constantly trumps the enjoyment of the loyal player’s gaming experience.

In short: if you care long term about what happens to your character’s abilities in game as a result of changes, this game is not for you. Game play changes are constant, unyielding, and with no end in sight. Furthermore, the player’s PVP experience is permanently broken due to its terrible performance, which is largely driven by ZOS’s lack of investment in adequate hardware resources combined with their terrible and outdated engine, and there are no plans to ever address either of those issues.

The only reason I still play is due to the excellent friendships I have made in the game, so at least I have some cool friends to suffer with as we experience a shared misery of unending chaos and uncertainty. Together.

If you love the story and world of Elder Scrolls, and want a single player experience with casual multiplayer engagement, then none of this will matter, and I’d recommend the game. But given that it is an MMO, whose ultimate objective is to better your play to a point where you can clear difficult content and/or play against excellent players in a competitive setting, the disappointing and frustrating destination is ultimately not worth the journey.

This game is a great space sim that brought back a lot of nostalgia for the original Elite that I played as a kid. However, I do not recommend it, because it allows player-based slave trading in the game, and the way that slave trading is implemented is both completely insensitive and incentivized within the game due to its relative profitability, which has created a cult-like atmosphere of promoting and defending slavery, simultaneously creating a haven for white supremacists that ultimately makes the game distastefully unenjoyable. I backed this game at Kickstarter, and did not play it until 2 months ago, and I was shocked and disturbed by the pro-slavery sub culture emerging from the community, which is reinforced by the fact that many space trading games allow players to fantasize about the good old days of slavery, but in space.

I'm not sure how Elite got a Teen rating from the ESRB on their game given this content, but I think it should be re-reviewed. I would not want my 13 year old son playing this game in a vacuum without providing adequate instruction and context about the history of slavery in the United States and its echoes with which we live today, because the game basically teaches you that humans are disposable cargo commodities, the trade of which is highly profitable and exciting to participate in, rather than treating it as the abomination that it is.