Lost Ark News

Heroes of Arkesia,

The Ebony Cube arrives in two weeks, on May 10. Clear waves of enemies in a new activity that consolidates Boss Rush and Cube. With all the original rewards of both activities rolled into one, completing should feel more impactful while also cutting down on the grind. Ebony Cube will arrive with three levels:

• 1st Forbiddance - Item Level 1302+
  
• 2nd Forbiddance - Item Level 1490+
  
• 3rd Forbiddance - Item Level 1540+

As Ebony Cube will replace the existing Cube & Boss Rush activities, we wanted to provide two weeks’ notice so you can figure out the best plan for your tickets. Ebony Cube entrance ticket drop rates will be the same as the old Boss Rush entrance tickets. Titles earned from old Cube & Boss Rush activities will remain obtainable from Ebony Cube. Existing tickets in your inventory will be unusable when the update drops, so you can choose to use them ahead of time or convert them into Silver or Entrance Ticket Trade Vouchers (a new item that lets you select the level of Ebony Cube best suited to your Item Level), after the update drops. Here’s how the conversions will work:
[h3]Cube:[/h3]

• Cube - 30,000 silver
  
• Elite Cube - 40,000 silver
  
• Dimensional Cube Normal - Entrance Ticket Trade Voucher x15
  
• Dimensional Cube Hard - Entrance Ticket Trade Voucher x20

[h3]Boss Rush:[/h3]

• Hall of Silence - 50,000 silver
  
• Hall of the Sun Normal - Entrance Ticket Trade Voucher x45
  
• Hall of the Sun Hard - Entrance Ticket Trade Voucher x60
  
• Hall of the Sun Inferno - Entrance Ticket Trade Voucher x75

And here’s how many vouchers you’ll need for each Ebony Cube Ticket:

• 1st Forbiddance (Item Level 1302+) - 75 Vouchers
  
• 2nd Forbiddance (Item Level 1490+) - 100 Vouchers
  
• 3rd Forbiddance (Item Level 1540+) - 125 Vouchers

While a balanced approach to exchanging or using tickets might be the right play, we wish all the best to those looking for maximum value and knocking out all their tickets. Let us know your final count on our social channels! In the meantime, we’ll probably see you in a Cube or Boss Rush run.

Heroes of Arkesia,

We recently released a letter from Amazon Games & Smilegate RPG discussing state of the game and some directional changes we’re excited to make to better support new players and listen to our existing player feedback. While that letter covers the broader initiatives, the 2023 Roadmap will dive into the biggest pieces of content arriving over the next four months.

Before we explore the content, we know there are a few shocked faces out there seeing that the Slayer will arrive before the Aeromancer. Don’t worry, both will arrive with progression events to help players gear up quickly! We saw the high levels of anticipation and positive feedback surrounding the Slayer in the West when it was released in Korea in January, and coupled with many requests to try the class from our players— we decided to bring this class to you sooner rather than releasing the classes in order. New continents and Legion Raids have to be updated in order, while classes don’t have the same restrictions.

The content found below are some of the highlights we know players are eagerly awaiting, but the roadmap is not a comprehensive list of every change arriving in Arkesia over the next few months and could change. The descriptions provided are meant to be summaries of the content, and not provide any potential lore spoilers. As we approach each month, more details will be shared. There will be plenty of other quality of life (QoL) updates, balance tuning, adjustments to support new and returning players, and unique events. Stay tuned to our website and social channels for future release notes including the full list of new content, cosmetics, balance changes, events, bug-fixes, and more included in our major monthly updates. With that, let’s dive in.



[h3]Slayer Advanced Class[/h3]
The Slayer is the fifth Warrior Advanced Class— a female remix of the Berserker class. A melee warrior who stirs up the battlefield with her greatsword and Burst Mode, this powerful class has the potential to overwhelm anything in her path. Successful attacks with the Slayer fills the Fury Specialty Meter, which, when full, can trigger Burst Mode. During Burst Mode, the Slayer's damage and movement speed greatly increase, and a Specialty skill called Bloodlust (unique to the Slayer) can be used to unleash powerful slashes and stabs.

The Slayer will release in May with a powerpass and progression events. Stay tuned to our website and social channels for event details leading up to the May update.

[h3]Ebony Cube, Progression Improvements, & QoL Updates[/h3]
Clear waves of enemies in a new activity that consolidates Boss Rush and Cube and replaces them. Later this week, we’ll post a notice with information on what will happen to any remaining tickets for the existing Boss Rush and Cube activities.

Progression improvements also arrive. Knowledge Transfer has been improved to ease alternate character progression by alleviating prerequisite conditions and the duration. Another change will be added to help with new player progression. In some entry level Guardian Raids, players will receive free battle items relevant to the guardian, automatically applied as a preset, with in-game guide messages on when to use within the raid. When the player leaves the raid, the battle items will be removed. This helps ensure that newer players won’t have difficulty attaining critical battle items while progressing, and better prepares them for later raids.

Ebony Cube and new player experience improvements aren’t the only QoL updates arriving in May. With reworks to end-game raiding entry limits & rewards, attention granted to Gunslinger/Deadeye stances & weapon glows, and more, there’s plenty to improve every adventurer’s experience in Arkesia.

[h3]Proving Grounds Season 3[/h3]
Season 3 of Competitive Proving Grounds PvP arrives. Prove you’re one of the best warriors in Arkesia to earn season ranks, rewards, and prestige. The end date for Season 3 has not yet been determined, but will continue for the foreseeable future. Good luck on the battlefield!



[h3]Elgacia Continent[/h3]
The Demon invasion beginning in South Vern and the Legion Commanders' powers are growing with the Chaos Gates all over the world. With Kazeros' resurrection nigh due to the Dimensional Rift, it's time for gates of Elgacia to open. Kadan and Nineveh will lead you to Elgacia, the land of Lazeniths. What will happen in the final paradise built by Regulus? Explore Ereonnor, the city of light built in reverence to the Gods, the blessed Hestera Garden, and the sacred Mount Phylantos in the continent of Elgacia as you uncover the secrets of the Lazeniths. Venturing to Elgacia will require Item Level 1460.

[h3]Kayangel Abyssal Dungeon[/h3]
A 4-player Abyssal Dungeon will release that can be accessed after completing the Elgacia story. With several difficulties, a variety of players can participate— but the harder the difficulty, the more impressive the rewards will be, one of which enables the ability to upgrade Ancient Legion Raid gear set bonuses to level 3.

[h3]Fortunespire Floors 26 - 50[/h3]
The next 25 floors of the Tier 3 Tower will release, providing new battles and challenges to vanquish, and in return, earn valuable rewards.



[h3]Kakul-Saydon Legion Raid Inferno Mode[/h3]
The most difficult version of Legion Raids, the Inferno difficulty is all about proving you’re among the best of the best in Arkesia, and earning the accompanying prestige. Rather than chasing the normal rewards of gear, materials, and everything else you’d receive in a Legion Raid, Inferno rewards instead showcase your victory with titles, achievements, Stronghold structures, and more! The Inferno difficulty of Kakul-Saydon will require Item Level 1475, and a full build set-up in the Book of Coordination.

[h3]Elgacia Epilogue[/h3]
Epilogue quests to the continent of Elgacia will release a month later. Visit familiar faces and key characters around the world of Arkesia after the events of Elgacia.

[h3]Music Box of Memories & QoL Updates[/h3]
The Music Box of Memories is the vestige of ancient civilization long gone, manifesting as a gadget that can be played with 'Memory Orbs', a new collectible. Experience new stories of the inhabitants of Arkesia who have not received the spotlight with the Music Box of Memories. Gain hints from various continents and progress quests to collect Memory Orbs and earn rewards. Along with the Music Box of Memories, more QoL updates and will release in July.



[h3]Akkan Legion Raid[/h3]
After the battle with Plague Legion Commander Akkan in South Vern, Queen Ealyn kept some of Akkan's flesh to research the Legion Commander. However, some of the pieces have disappeared, and have begun to gather in Arthetine. Could it be that Akkan, the bringer of death, has concocted a terrible scheme to bring back his terrifying power?

Aetanople is slowly being sumberged by water permeated with the power of disease, and the souls of the deceased still wander the living world, shackled by Akkan's spells. Akkan needs to be stopped before all of Arkesia succumbs to his horrid rot and decay.

Journey to Arthetine to battle the Plague Legion Commander in a new 8-player Legion Raid. The normal and hard versions of the Legion Raid will release, each with their own Item Level requirements.
Normal: All 3 gates can be entered with Item Level 1580
Hard: All 3 gates can be entered with Item Level 1600

[h3]Aeromancer Advanced Class[/h3]
The Aeromancer is the second Specialist Advanced Class. With power of mystical illusion she’s able to manipulate the weather to devastating effect on the battlefield, or fight to vanquish enemies with spectacular flourishes of her umbrella. The Aeromancer’s Identity is Sun Shower. The Sun Shower Raindrop Meter is filled as the Aeromancer successfully hits enemies with skills, and Sun Shower can be used when the meter fills all the way up— providing dual benefits of offense and defense. Upon using Sun Shower, the Aeromancer’s basic attacks and movement skill evolve while active, nearby enemies are constantly damaged, and her (and her party's) damage received from enemies is reduced.

The Aeromancer will release in August with a powerpass and progression events. Stay tuned to our website and social channels for event details leading up to the August update.

[h3]Sonavel Guardian Raid[/h3]
For a long time Levanos, the Elemental King, protected Arkesia by following light and order. He’s abandoned his mission of protecting nature, chosen chaos, and has turned in to Sonavel, obsessed with anger and chasing only darkness. Sonavel must be defeated before he destroys that which he once protected! Players can challenge Sonavel in a new Guardian, which requires Item Level 1580 to participate.


We’re excited to witness players experience the unique events, explore new parts of Arkesia, battle in new PvP battles, and prepare for the challenging experiences awaiting in the new dungeons and raids over the coming months. In the meantime, stay tuned to our website, social channels, and the release notes for the full list of new content, store updates, events, bug-fixes, and more over the coming months. We’ll see you in Arkesia!

Heroes of Arkesia,

Our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG met recently to discuss player feedback, share insights, and talk about the next steps for Lost Ark in the West. The dust hasn’t settled yet and our teams have a lot of work on the horizon to materialize these conversations, but we wanted to share our thoughts and plans with you.

We’d like to start off with a huge ‘thank you’ from both of our teams before we dive in. The love and dedication shown by so many while playing Lost Ark has been inspirational. While we’re extraordinarily grateful to see the excitement around the recent updates, we understand that you are still experiencing inconveniences and pain-points.

Last year, our top priorities were introducing content into the Western shores of Arkesia at an appropriate cadence to avoid burnout, working to pull forward quality of life (QoL) changes, and waging the war on bots. Now, our goal is to continually improve the Lost Ark experience, while layering in the exciting content that has yet to arrive. Many updates and changes are required to achieve this goal, and that’s only half of it— to constantly work on creating a better game, we need to listen to our player base and ensure that you feel heard so we can build a better game together. We recognize that we’ve fallen short of accomplishing our desired relationship. Like the game itself, our current goal is to continue to grow, improve, and foster a better connection.

As we work to set the best course for the rest of 2023 and beyond, you’ll find some of our thoughts and plans below. These are focused on areas of player feedback and directional goals, not content coming to Arkesia over the coming months. While you might still find one or two spoilers, we’ll be following up with the 2023 Roadmap - Part 2 next week to share those plans.




One of our top priorities over the last year was taking care of the bot problem. Enormous effort was made on both Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games’ part, and together we’ve implemented a variety of changes to restrict bots from exploiting the system to gain economic benefits. During this process, we realized new players may be hindered from progressing, like not getting enough gold for honing. We’ll keep an eye on these unwanted side-effects, and actively work to resolve them.

Material accumulation by bots also requires action. We have banned millions of bot accounts in an ongoing effort, but the materials they have produced still pose a risk of inflation. We will continue to take strong actions against RMT participants, and will take future action based on both gold and other materials' production figures.

Many technical measures have been developed and tested, and we will continue to invest in future measures. Specific tactics can't be revealed for security reasons, but we can assure you that we are keenly monitoring bot activity patterns and are ready to respond to their modified activity. While it will be difficult to ever completely remove bots from Lost Ark, we've made significant progress in limiting the impact they have on gameplay and the economy. With new measures and constant ban waves, our changes have led to 55 billion bot gold removed from the game, and a 99% decrease in bots interacting with the economy.

After we implement additional changes next month, we’re planning to share an article with more updates on our progress and approach.




Thankfully, we still have new players embarking on their first adventure in Arkesia every day. However, our version's vertical content update cadence is significantly faster than the original version in Korea, and we've noticed that new players find it hard to catch up to the content level. One year after launch, new/returning players are having difficulty adjusting to reaching combat level 50, learning Legion Raid patterns, setting up for raid requirements. To address, we will cut down on 'unnecessary' content exhausting new and returning players, starting with:

1) Low-Tier Improvements
In order to enjoy Legion Raids, 4 gear progression steps are currently required (Tier 1 301, T2 802, T3-1 1302, T3-2 1340). Too many honing steps are overwhelming new and casual players alike. Having repetitive gear progression seems unnecessary, so we plan to integrate them into 2 tiers.
Guardian first-time clear and Tower rewards will be enhanced to be on par with the integration, so players will not have to play each tier's content multiple times.

2) Horizontal Content Improvements
So far, we have been focusing mainly on improving and alleviating honing difficulties. However, new players are also suffering from collecting horizontal content materials. To improve their experience, we plan to make collecting Runes/Tripods/Cards/Gems easier for everyone.
To reveal some of the things we have in mind, new 'Uncommon' runes will be added in the early progression period to help players acquire and use runes more easily.
The new 'Deep Dive' and 'You Have a Plan' set's collecting difficulty will be improved, and cards/card xp needed to complete the sets will be provided.
Sailing content will be changed, with improved co-op quests and enhanced rewards.

3) Alt Progression Improvements
As you probably know, we introduced the 'Silver Honing' system in the March update. We will continually expand the levels that the system covers to ensure players can easily progress on new classes and alts. The expanded Silver Honing system will come with the next class launch. We also cut down the requirements for two of most needed materials (silver and honor shards) to make gear progression easier. Looking forward, we are currently contemplating methods to improve the engraving/gem setting difficulty for alts, and will let you know (when decided) what we develop.

4) QoL Updates
We recently made Triport activation roster-bound, so once a Triport is activated every character in the roster can benefit from it. Moving forward, we will also work on reducing other unnecessary and time-consuming activities while progressing alts. For example, having to play through story quests after completing them with the main character is an issue. 'Knowledge Transfer' is in place to let players skip this inconvenience, but due to many restrictions, it's difficult for actual new players to use. To address, we are working on alleviating the restrictive conditions.

5) Improving the Battle Item Experience
While looking through the various suggestions players have given us, we noticed there were issues with acquiring/using battle items in the earlier tiers. We rated this as a critical issue, and after discussing with the developers, we plan to change the system to let players use battle items for free in early tier Guardian Raids. We are aiming to implement this change before summer comes. Along with providing battle items for free, we will add a guide to help players out with the appropriate use of battle items. Thank you for the great suggestion— we are always open to more ideas.

These will take some time to develop, but we’re hoping to prepare them by the end of summer or early fall. We will implement the improvements as soon as they are completed, and thank you for your patience in the meantime.




Along with the content mentioned above, frequent content updates are leading to enhanced exhaustion and gatekeeping, making gameplay difficult for new and returning players. With dozens of patterns to memorize, burden is put on new players attempting to learn. To address, we are preparing the following updates:

[h3]Argos Abyss Raid[/h3]

• The best way to help progression is to provide appropriate content for the players' current level of play. Through this point of view, Argos is an extremely difficult raid considering it is one of the first raids a new player encounters, without having enough time to adjust to Arkesia.
  
• When the progression adjustments listed above take place, players will get to enter Argos raids much earlier in the game, so alleviating the burden of the mechanics in the Argos Abyss Raid is a must.
  
• We will reduce the number of patterns in the raid to ease the learning curve, and change most of the 'wipe' mechanics to plain damage-dealing ones. This way, players can overcome mechanics and patterns by using appropriate skills/battle items/reaching relevant Item Levels, as well as getting help from other party members. We do not want players to experience too many situations where one player's mistake results in everyone's failing so early in the game.
  
• Smilegate RPG’s research and development team is also looking into applying similar changes to the earlier Legion Raids like Valtan and Vykas. Not every wipe mechanic will be adjusted, considering their designation as top-tier end-game raids. We’ll be sure to share more details on these changes when they’re available.

With these changes, we hope every player in Arkesia can experience the fun of trying out end-game raids without too much stress, while simultaneously learning about the types of patterns and mechanics they can expect to see in harder end-game content.

Similarly, we know the community conversation surrounding dailies is a hot topic these days, and we’re aware of the sense of discontent regarding Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and Una's Tasks. Currently, these daily activities are critical for obtaining the materials necessary for gear progression, and allow hardcore players to have something to earn every day— so reducing them is not a simple problem to tackle. We need more time to think about it, but we understand the repetitiveness of the content, and Smilegate RPG is undergoing internal research and development to discuss resolutions. To help cut down on the grind in the meantime, we'll introduce the Ebony Cube - a new activity that combines Boss Rush and Dimension Cube - in May.

When further plans for reducing dailies are confirmed, we’ll make sure to share in greater detail. Until then, QoL updates like Ebony Cube will be implemented as fast as possible in our version.




We know that players have expressed some questions and concerns with the current content release cadence. Catching up to the new end-game content is important to us and our players, but there are two problems with speeding up the process; localization timelines and player burnout. If content is localized too quickly, the overall quality may be compromised. Regardless of localization timelines, there’s still the problem of having to digest too much content at the same time, or constantly feel pressured to hit the next required Item Level, related to the previously mentioned exhaustion and issues with new player catch up mechanics.

Our goal is to introduce content as fast as we can without having these problems occur. However, we know this is not satisfactory for players. Therefore, we promise that new classes (at least) will be updated as soon as possible. New continents and Legion Raids have to be updated in order, while classes don’t have the same restrictions. We’re excited to share the next 4-month roadmap with you next week, and hope that you feel heard when the content plan is revealed.

Another piece of content we plan to integrate at a faster speed heading forward are in-game events. The events in our version have mostly been older events in Korea, which isn’t ideal. Heading forward, our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG plan to introduce more events applied simultaneously across the versions, including events similar to the recent April Fool's event in Korea. Of course, some of them will be Western-exclusive, and some will take place at the same time as Korea. We are open to suggestions!




We still have a long way to go, and understand that one letter isn’t a magic band-aid (or even a Splendid Elemental HP Potion), but we hope this letter becomes the first step in our road to more open communication and positive changes to the game. To thank you for your ongoing support and dedication to Lost Ark, we’ve prepared a gift for all players that will be sent out alongside this letter. As a first-time log-in reward, you’ll find the following in your Product Inventory:

• A Mokoko Skin Selection Chest
  
• A Moko Pet Selection Chest
  
• A Mokoboard Selection Chest
  
• Collective Battle Item Chest x100
  
• Silver x2,000,000
  
• Relic Rapport Selection Chest x3
  
• Pheon x50

These items can be claimed by anyone who logs into the game before May 19.

As we progress into 2023 and beyond, our very first priority is you, the players of Lost Ark. We plan to close the distance between you and our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG, by taking one step at a time to interact more with you. We’ll see you again next week with the 2023 Roadmap - Part 2, which has some exciting surprises.

Thank you for the patience and dedication you have shown past year. We will continually strive to exceed your expectations.

- Amazon Games & Smilegate RPG