The game's Pay to Win. Here's my comprehensive experience on LAO RU and LAO KR.

[Soul]

The game is pay to win. I'm not going to bother arguing with people about the definition of pay to win. However, I'm going to write everything I experienced in the game, so you can decide whether you want to play or not.

The game is action combat, like Tera/BDO/Diablo 3. However, the camera is Isometric, like Diablo 3.

During release, the game will be gated, so people can pay to increase their item levels faster, but if you play normally and do your daily/weekly farming, you can reach the same ilvl as the whales because ilvl is hard capped, meaning there's a max you can reach at the time.

However, once the hardcap is lifted, the next patch will bring you to the softcapped ilvl. If you did your daily/weekly farming as efficiently as possible for a week you might be able to get to 700-800 ilvl from 550. The problem starts here, there's no hardcap, so if you are a whale and wants to dump $10,000 to $20,000 into the game. You can reach the softcap which is about 1200-1300 ilvl in 1 week. Since the powercreep in LAO is exponential, it means someone with 1200-1300 ilvl will do 5-10 times the damage you do.

The problem is, in order to reach 1200-1300 ilvl without spending any real money, you are going to have to farm for about 3-5 years as the average player. There are some players that have 10 different accounts and they will farm on all of them to maximize their gold per day.

Other than gear, there are also food, potions, combat necessities which all cost gold. Another big thing is engravings. Engravings are something you put on your rings, they will then give you a passive buff that stay with you at all times outside of the arena.

Since there are whales they probably have the right engravings(which also cost millions of gold at this stage of the game btw and increase your damage in PVE by 20-30% for each engraving, you can have 2 active engravings at a time.) To put millions of gold into perspective, everyday you get 3 tickets to farm ingredients, whether for alchemy, fishing, hunting, whatever. With some luck, you can make a couple hundred gold per 1 ticket.

Now comes Season 2. The ilvl limit will increase once again as new gear/bosses comes out. On average the f2p players reached about 900-1000 when season 2 started. the whales once again reached 1500+ in the first week or two, hitting the softcap and becoming 10-15 times stronger than the people at 1000.

It's been 6 months or so since Season 2 released. The average ilvl is between 1200-1300 for the f2p people who aren't farming on multiple accounts. Which is basically the soft cap for f2p players.

Now I will explain how the soft cap works. After the first phase of the game. The game use a similar upgrade system as Black Desert Online. What this means is, every time you upgrade an item's lvl, its stats increases. However, every third upgrade in lvl, the chance to fail will increase. Luckily, when you fail the upgrade, the item won't be destroyed or anything. Also, every time you fail, the chance of upgrading the same item again will increase by a little bit. Each upgrade will cost gold and silver. Gold is the currency you can trade between players or buy with real money, while silver is a currency that is bound to your character and cannot be traded, but you can buy silver with gold through a vendor, it is very costly, at about 1000 gold per 10000 silver(I never did it so I don't remember if this is accurate, I just remember other people saying it's a rip off.)

So, bottom line. To reach ilvl 1200-1300 in the first week of that raid's release. You will need to spend $10,000-20,000, and this was in Russia and South Korea, where their cost of living and gdp are lower than USA and Western Europe.

In season 2, upon the release of the new raid, they improved the chances for you to upgrade your gear, so you will be able to reach 1500+ ilvl in the first week by spending about $5,000.

I don't know how long it takes to reach 1500 while being f2p, but some people who farm on 10 accounts have reached 1400 in 6 months.

Now I will make a list(As comprehensive as my memory can make it) of the expenses in game.

Rerolling skill enhancing effects on items
Rerolling stats on items
Consumables
Tickets to enter a raid/dungeon/boss
Bidding on gear(In most cases, in order to get a peace of gear in a raid or a tome for engravings, you need to bid against others like an auction, whoever has the highest bid wins. Then that gold is distributed among all participants.)
Character slots: You need to buy character tickets to open slots to make more characters.
Ship and Ship upgrade materials .
Cards

PVE:

It is action combat. There's no dedicated tank or healer. Bards have shields, buffs, and a heal. They can typically heal you for 50% of your health every few minutes. There's also a shield wielding class that can taunt the boss for several seconds every 30 seconds or so. Otherwise the boss will target people randomly and reset aggro every several seconds.

There's no DPS meter or logs, so you will never know whether you are doing good enough or not, also you will never know who in the group is slacking or taking too much damage. Who is and isn't using the right potions/bombs/skills.

The bosses basic attacks can take between 10-90% of your health depending on what boss/attack/your damage reduction. Boss abilities will typically hit harder. Almost all attacks will CC you either by staggering/freeze/stun/knock up/knock down/etc.

Instanced Bosses: Rewards gear or items needed to craft gear or upgrade gear. There are several tiers of bosses, each tier is harder than the last. You can get rewards from 3 bosses from each tier every day. There are also weekly bosses, those require tickets and you can only get rewards from them once a week.

Instanced bosses are expensive and some of them have soft enrage timers while all of them a hard enrage timer. When you reach the hard enrage timer everybody will die.

You will need consumables.
1, you cannot see a boss on the minimap without using something called a flare. In a random team, it is assumed each person will use 1 flare in the order of their group number. This actually gets very expensive because many bosses will fly away or burrow under ground and move to a different location of the map during the encounter, multiple times. It takes 1 person 5 minutes to cover the entire map. So if you want to try without flares, well, it's going to be very inconvenient since there's a hard enrage timer of 20 minutes and many encounters have 3 bosses you have to kill to get the rewards. You won't get rewards for killing just 1/3 or 2/3.

2: Health potions. There are two types of health potions, normal and % health. You cannot use normal pots in these encounters. The worst % health potion only heal you for 15% of your max health. You can use 3 max of them during the whole 20 minutes. Then, there's the 30/45/60% max health potions. You can use 5 of them in the whole encounter at max. Of course, they are increasingly more expensive.

3: Bombs. In order to break or stagger a boss, you will need different kinds of bombs or skills. Not all classes have all the right skills to break a certain boss. That's why sometimes bombs are necessities.

4: Scarecrows. Scareccrows will taunt the boss for 5-10 seconds, if you out gear the boss it is probably not required but if you are all at the minimum level requirement these are essential for some bosses as they allow your entire team to stand still and dps for 10 seconds.

Note, you do not get your consumables back if you fail the encounter, it just means all the consumables/or ticket(for weekly boss) are wasted.

Raids: Rewards gear, costs tickets, but you can get rewards from them as many times as you want to do them. They are also not too difficult as you can use normal potions. So the main cost in these are the tickets.

Dungeons: Rewards gear or tickets, generally pretty easy.
World Bosses: Generally pretty easy but has a reset timer, also scales with the amount of people attacking it.

World Events: There are events all over the world on islands or big continents, they will show up on the your in game schedule, most of them are easy. There are good rewards for doing them. Usually they have a limit on how many you can do a day or a week.

To elaborate about command tickets, the ones you get 3 of everyday for free, most events in the command center cost command tickets. It used to cost 1 per event when the game came out but now cost several but the rewards also boosted by several times. It used to be character-based, meaning each character get 3 a day, but now it is account based, so your entire account get 3 per day.

Cube(cost command tickets) : Similar to instanced bosses, you can only use expensive consumables. The way to go through cubes is to clear waves of monsters. There's a timer for each wave and you get rewards depending on how many waves you clear. Usually the waves get harder as you progress, but each wave can either give you a buff or debuff. Sometimes you get really bad debuffs like 30% movement speed slow and total darkness(which means you get like a 90% vision reduction), and get a bomb wave(basically suicide bombers that run toward you and explode.) Some bomb explosions will cover half the room, so you won't even see the suicide bomber. Only 1 person need to be alive to clear the wave, so the other 3 people will be revived after the wave clears, but they only get 10-20% of their health back when they revive.


Farming(cost command tickets): there are two locations, each supporting 3 different professions. You need specific skill levels to farm the highest lvl objects. To do this you need tools, the best tools will increase your skill level by a few, allowing to harvest the highest lvl objects. You can't harvest the highest level objects without tools. Tools cost silver and gold to make or buy. There's a timer so you need to have a farming gearset to maximize your profit in the farmlands.

Tower: tower is a solo event where you climb through floors, you can only use expensive consumables. Your health resets every for each floor. Some lvls require very specific items. For example, there's a floor where you fight a boss with a silence debuff. When silenced, you cannot use abilities or even use basic attack, you can only consumables.

PVP:

There are several different types of arenas. The ranked arena is 3v3, where you have 2 teammates gathered via LFG, completely random. You cannot form groups to join. It is timed, so the team with the highest kill count wins the match mostly.

Then there's normal arena. 1v1, 3v3, and FFA. In normal arena, you can enter with friends for the first two modes. 1v1 is not a solo event, it is called last man standing, you join with 2 others on your team. However, it is in the form of a 1v1. If you win the first round, you will fight the 2nd person on the enemy team with whatever health you have left, your cooldowns do not reset either. If you win again you fight the last person. Whichever team
has the last man standing wins. Each round also has a timer, whoever has the highest health wins if the timer comes up.

In all the arenas, your ilvl will be equalized for the most part, but the stats on your gear still matter in the sense of distribution. PVP typically has different desired stats than PVE.

Island PVP happens on the some of the hundreds of islands around the world. There is no gear equalizer so whoever is whaling wins. They can also use bombs and kill 5-10 people with each bomb. There's an Island heart(Collector item that gives you very useful rewards if you get them.) where you are locked onto an island that's only big enough to fit 10 players side by side. Idk if there's a limit to how many people can actually enter the island at once. You fight free for all in order to open boxes to have a 1% chance of obtaining the island heart. There's 3 boxes on the island that each respawn every few minutes or so. Every time you are hit by an attack, it cancels your opening of the chest. Good luck getting that Island Heart, honestly.

Guild VS GUILD. It's like a 10v10 battleground of capture the flag or defend the node. Gear is also not equalized here so it's just for the whales.

CC in pvp: every attack staggers you. There's several different types of cc, stagger/knock/hard cc. There are many skills or abilities that make you immune to stagger. There are some that make you immune to physical CC which means the knocking. There are no skills that make you immune to hard cc. You can however be immune to all cc in 2 instances. One, you are using your spacebar evasion. The animation lasts between 0.1-.5 seconds depending on your class. This has a 5-10s cooldown. During the animation, you are immune to all cc. Two, you got knocked down and is in the process of getting up. Three, you used space bar while knocked down, you will jump back up, this has a very long cooldown.

In general, if you get chain cc'd you are probably dead. Getting chain cc'd from 100-0 isn't that uncommon.

Island Exploration: Exploration is a big part of the game. You need a number of Island Hearts to advance to the next continents. You will obviously have a ship for traveling between islands. There's many ships, each have different requirement for getting it, some are easy and some are extremely hard. For example, to get the fastest ship, if you are trying to progress your gear at the same time, and is a f2p that's not farming on 10 different accounts, you are probably never going to get it. Even if you did, you still have to upgrade it to max level, which is probably never going to happen since it's expensive as hell to even upgrade a cheaper ship to max.

Also you are going to have to upgrade the ships to unlock more slots for the for the sailors. Each sailor(an npc you collect) have a different ability that will be helpful.


Alternatively, can you board an ingame ship for a chunk of silver, how much it costs depends on where you are traveling to. But this is only for continental travel, you can't go to islands or spots on the map in the sea.

Many events or islands will require you to have a specific ship upgraded to a specific level, otherwise your ship will be destroyed and you can't get on the island for the event.

There are also many events where you need a specific profession. For example to get the island heart on mushroom island you need lumbering. Where you cut lvl 4 mushrooms, without lumbering you can only cut the lvl 1 mushroom. There's about 12 nodes on the island and only 1-3 lvl 1 mushroom will be up at any given time. The lvl 1 shroom has a very low drop rate of the island heart, the lvl 4 shrooms have maybe 1-5% droprate? While the lvl 1 is 10x lower. Unfortunately, you are going to need more characters because each character can only max out 1 profession.

That's about all I can think of. Might've missed some things.

[Raga]

Nguyên văn bởi Hello:

Nguyên văn bởi Raga:

Why are you still here lol?

he's banned lol

About time..

[LuckyMu]

Him being banned should say A LOT to anyone dumb enough to believe anything he's posted

[ItMeJammy]

Just waiting for the reddit post, waaa they banned me for exposing the truth, I'm the fox mulder of lost ark, the truth is out there!!!

[LuckyMu]

Nguyên văn bởi AceRebornXIV:

Just waiting for the reddit post, waaa they banned me for exposing the truth, I'm the fox mulder of lost ark, the truth is out there!!!

LMFAO RIGHT, man really wants this game to burn and is gonna actually divulge all his energy to hating on something people enjoy to the point of spreading misinformation

[zealai]

The TC got banned... huh. Wonder why.

[Raga]

Nguyên văn bởi zealai:

The TC got banned... huh. Wonder why.

Because he is toxic and spreading false information consistently in this thread and many others.

[ラグナ [Aracune]]

Nguyên văn bởi zealai:

The TC got banned... huh. Wonder why.

I think because he told a bunch of lies. Thats the main reason. Not because he was also toxic. If that was the main reason the could have banned half of the community here.

[Nazgrel17]

Was waiting for this game, i alrdy heard that is p2w, but didnt know is it true or not, so tnx alot for ur review, i will stay away from this game.

[[AiR] CorsaiR]

He got Banned because of false informations about our version of the game. We cant see whats in shop and dont know it will be P2W. He wrote completly false infos

[Boodendorf]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HE GOT BANNED FOR SPREADING MISINFORMATIONS

edit: not posting on this thread cuz I don't wanna bump it anymore so I'll edit this post:
no OP isn't spot on, he's far from spot on.
Saintone dismantled this post.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1055790992?t=2h21m32s

[LordOfTheBread]

Nguyên văn bởi Boodendorf:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HE GOT BANNED FOR SPREADING INFORMATIONS

Fixed that for you, also played Lost Ark as I live in Asia and OP is pretty much spot on.

[belle]

Nguyên văn bởi LordOfTheDread:

Fixed that for you, also played Lost Ark as I live in Asia and OP is pretty much spot on.

I wouldn't say he was "spot on." There were some minor errors that were outdated, but he had some decent points on P2W although I have different interpretation on this matter.

[Chirichaurio]

I dont know if what he said is true...And personally i dont care much. Probably,if true,will have a negative impact on the hard pvp players. For pve players like me change nothing,just got the plat founder,and i will be happy if i can enjoy the game with friends. Hope the maps will be pvp off,i dont want to run somewhere and get killed by random players,i hate the pvp

[.Kaz']

Well deserved ban for spreading misinformation about the game, anyone who believes what he said should so some research on their own..

[ItMeJammy]

Nguyên văn bởi Shiiryu:

I dont know if what he said is true...And personally i dont care much. Probably,if true,will have a negative impact on the hard pvp players. For pve players like me change nothing,just got the plat founder,and i will be happy if i can enjoy the game with friends. Hope the maps will be pvp off,i dont want to run somewhere and get killed by random players,i hate the pvp

I think you'll be okay, Pvp only in very specific areas