Lost Ark Jump Start Servers Are Not Enough

Small update for info: Shortly after making this video Amazon announced they are targeting a 3 month window for the jump start server merge. As for the video itself, this does largely not effect my overall opinions and concerns, but 3 months is better than 6.

Well, it is true that it doesnt feel good to move to a new server where your account progress is inexistent if you are a returning player. But on the other hand the mokoko express and being able to get 1415 with progress nerfs and a lot of free honing materials makes possibly to progress through all raids without countless days of grinding. My friends and I made a 8-man roster and we all went into a jump start server with mokoko express just to experiment the raids, and they are quite fun. It is obvius that we are all going to uninstall the game at some point between 1490 - 1540 becase from that point up the grind starts again and goes harder and harder. In general I think its a good idea but would be much better if we could do it in our main servers where we had some account progress already.

gatekeeping arc kek.

first. amazon is probably the worst company with the least clue about mmorpgs, and they show each new game the release again and again.

when i stopped playing cuz the game sucked there were the same issues as now:
-ppl dont give a fuk in raids and join without knowing anything, meaning u cant clear raids cuz ppl are idiots who dont wanna prepare even a bit
-> this leads to the meta which forces ppl to only take overgeared characters for raids, cuz if u have the dmg u can ignore mechanics.
also some things are just plain and simple dead... guardian raids ... noone does em anymore ever.

bots i dont know, there was a huuuuge prob, but now i cant tell since i havent leveled a new char atm and most bots were in starter zone.

- upgrading gear was trash and is trash, takes THE WHOLE fun out of the game having to up ur gear 1 lvl each for a new raid.
this mechanic is awful, bad implemented and only there to grab as much cash from people as they can.
predatory shit.

- time... other trash games measure success by time ingame spent... aka known as diablo 4. this game does this prob aswell, there is a fukton of gatekeeping by time, and you will have to invest even more time to gear. raids itself dont take long (garbage story lines do, or searching 1 000 mokoko seeds...fuck that)....

so if u play anytime when theres NO event, u will hate the game cuz the core is trash.
during events on the other hand u get gear for one char mostly super fast with zero effort, there is no balance in between.

raids itself are cool, look good, have nice mechanics and okayish rewards.
story hoewever is just plain and simple dogshit and whoever wrote the story and calculated how much time u have to spend to finish it should be fired instantly.

so... u play lost ark to raid and kill bosses, its simple. without the trash up system and no story it could be a decent game, not a great one but a decent.

I just wish i could move my whole roster, characters etc to another server. When i started playing at launch (actually 3 days before cuz i purchased founder pack) i picked random server on EU central called Wei. After some time it turned out that this server is mainly spanish oriented for some reason. So playing on this server is pain cuz the most populated guilds are spanish. Another pain in the butt is that when i try to find guild and i get into one turns out that members of that guild are just leader's alts lol so for example "members" are 40/100 and 15 of that is just alts, 10 other players and rest was active like month or more ago.... i just feel that this server is dead idk correct me if i'm wrong but that's how i feel on that server.

I'm a returnee player should i start with the jump start server? i have 2, lvl 50 char in my original server with a ilvl gear 1250 + 1 vern pass?

pretty reasonable, but gatekeeping is not the problem per se, if you dont gatekeep as veteran u will literally waste your time. there are alot of player organised learning groups on several discord servers with vets teaching new players for no benefits except friendships. this is an mmo so players shouldnt wait for the silvertablet invitation to solve their problems but take initative and look for guilds, friends, discords, where they can form groups to learn the different encounters.

the MAIN issue with js server atm, is that it is not connected to main servers AH, which makes it basicly impossible to raise alts to progress, on top of that, current engraving support ends, before any news about a potential merge
Cant find ANY info about them saying merge will happen after 3 months, rather, that they will announce when it happens, in 3 months

Set gold on All legion raids the same, and do smthing about alts... nobody wants to play 100 alts to be relevant

I returned after quitting in February, the game has still the same issues. It’s just a little better but not enough in the slightest

As is tradition with AGS, this whole thing isnt realy thought through.
They either have to go full in on seasons, like Black Desert, so people stay on the season servers instead of going to to their old oens after a week.
Or they make them exlusively for new players and let them merge whenever they want into the old servers. Purely as a jump start.

Mostly i agree however was game where was no gate keeping due to sick requirements or stupid mechanics and team wipes ,
was called VINDCTUS .unfortunately they did not had pity system for enhancing (honning) and that make this game go to drain, plus nexon who is bad game publisher.

I think you hit the nail on the head pretty much, except for one thing which concerns the "rewards for teachers" segment.
There has to be some kind of proof or measurement in place to qualify as a "teacher". Just clearing a raid say x10 doesnt qualify anyone since no one knows how they cleared it. They could have been lying dead on the floor through each of 'em. My point being is, lots of people that have less than sufficient knowledge about the raid would queue in hope of getting the rewards whilst once again jailing each other. There has to be some proper measurement, Im not sure how it could be done.

The problem with Lost Ark was never the start, it was always what came after. As these really don't do anything to deal with the "after" part, I just don't see these as having a lasting benefit.

Then they're not going to address the issues in the "after" part so long as enough people are still willing to spend money. Also given how long it has been going on, even if everyone mass quits in ever region, SmileGate likely will just shrug their shoulders, announce its shut down, then move on to their next project.

One thing Amazon forgot is to compile all the quest rewards sadly.

I play on the main servers since release and after checking out the jump start, I was shocked to see how bad it is. 3 months to merge is still too long. They need to boost those mokokos a lot more and merge them after 2 months. They need to quit adding rng to stuff for mokokos. All the new cards packs feel so pointless if they are all trash rng to get a legendary card. Whats the point of that? Mokokos bust their little butts to get 50 packs so 99% of it is purple packs. Nonsense.

Adding more to do is not something I want and now the only things I “have” to do each week is 4 Akkan runs and I treat everything else as extra or gold earning activities and only do them if I want to. I am holding out hope that 2024 in KR sees a full reset not set on raids to reset the player base (except maybe cards).

I thought I could create a new caracter in the jump start server and transfer it eventually to my main rooster server, but I think it does not work this way lol.

I used the jump start to do one thing only: I made an artist to see if I would like it. I did. Then never logged in to the server again. Like you said, my response to come back and do horizontal content was "Fuck right off".
Lost Ark has and will ALWAYS have a huge player retention issue because it tries to force you to play all day. That means burn out. The way I think I'll be playing the game is every time there's an express pass, I'll hop in, use it on my one character then gtfo once i've burned it out.
Fun game that's gated by the game, the community, and my time.

Coming back to this to say that the economy/market is in fact pretty much in shambles on JS now. I'm not sure why having the market connected is a thing they decided would be a good idea.

Jumpstart server were made in mind of returning and new players, but this "returning" doesnt wrap all players probably just for whose that quit before Argos, if you were pretty active before and also you did a lot of horizontal or vertical, probably starting over (unless you want to) isn't a good way to come back to the game. These servers are for either returning or new players to start in the same boat to experience the game where the fun stuff begin which is great overall.

I'm a veteran that have been playing the game since release (almost 5.5k hrs into), I invited some friends to play on the fresh start (most of them are returning) we are having a blast doing the content, learning and teaching the raid is quite fun. I also know how time taxing can this game be, so I tell them to take it easy, play what you want while doing progress (important horizontal stuff such as skill points, giant heats, omnium stars, tower and runes). Sadly this isn't the usual case for new or returning players, most of them play solo even tho this is an MMO where having/finding a guild, communicate and make friends are a vital part in these kind of games, also you could take this as an area that Lost Ark can implement solo content or horizontal content that has an impact on the vertical content.

Regarding about "fixing" the current problem of gatekeeping that you mention, Lost Ark itself doesn't have any way or rewards to play with new players besides people willing to teach these new mokokos how to play or teach the raid. Amazon tried to incentive the community to gather on the official discord to do "mentoring" but its something that problaby the casual new audience won't bother to investigate or search, most of them will just play, this kind of system has to be in the game BUT it has to be something about "mentoring" than extra rewards by just playing with new people and that's because Bussing/RMT in Lost Ark, you have a lot of people who haven't tried bussing or don't like bussing (I'm here in this topic), where playing with new people or rather in this case new accounts can be a huge advantage for whose keep bussing like madlads on 6 or more characters, also you have people that sells their gold for personal purposes where Bussing have huge impact for those who keep doing this kind of stuff. This 'issue' haven't been touched by SG since they said Bussing is driven by players, but this can be so restrictive that you can't add these systems or any extra rewards for helpers, probably that's why SG haven't introduce it yet, but huge shout out to Amazon that tried to do it outside of the game systems, I've a strong belief that bussing will end up killing this game, rather than these kind of problems.

Game is fine...I'm a f2p player and it's fine, all you new age gamers just want the game to give you everything, no effort just reward.

In my humble opinion the biggest problem in gatekeeping is that one player can wipe the entire raid in one single mechanic when done wrong. There is nothing more frustrating when 7 players are dying and cant clear the content because one player is failing. My suggestion is to get rid of raid wipe mechanics and simply if mechanic is done wrong just kill the player who failed which leads to carry potencional, so veteran players can "carry new players"... Veteran players gets ego boost and new players clears the content and the more times they do it the better they get ... then theres no need to gatekeep anymore - win for both sides. And the difficulty can be raised in clever ways like Valtan where you can fall and die instantly. Which lead to more engaging content rather then having a homework of all raid mechanics.

I think one of the things that the game need is a practice mode for legion raids. Not knowing the fight is one of the biggest problem of the new and the returning players. I left out when vykas come out and is hard to learn the new raids like the clown or brelzhasa. Maybe a solo practice mode will be nice for the community

I used to play on the South America servers and I quit the game because finding groups was a nightmare due to the declining server population. I can't imagine how it would be on the jump start servers with even less people.

My take is that yeah; jump start isn't going to fix anything. Just a nice little publicity stunt. Nothing wrong with trying, but I think even they know it won't solve anything. It might just be a stopgap to at least get some people to try the game and interested in it, so when newer solutions start to flow in, they might be like "hey that game was fun despite it's issues, let's see if it's better feeling." Note: I said "some" people.

I don't have any end-all-be-all solutions to throw out there, but I think cutting legion raids down to 4 players instead of 8 players would combat gatekeeping while still keeping the game multiplayer. I say combat because it won't ever disappear, but you want to lessen it. With fewer people, it'll take less time to make a party, less people to teach, less people needing to learn, less people worry about disappointing, and one less support to wait for. Might even make finding a static that much easier too. And for those who love 8 man party raids, they can still exist in hell/nightmare.

Solo raids was an interesting idea, but I feel like it would make the game too single player driven. I almost feel like the game is a single player game, with how players act unless someone messes up doing their chores. So, I'm trying to spread the idea of 4-player parties to see if others like the idea too.

The best solution would be let players merge the jump start account with their existing one and combine all the horizontal content.
This could be "abused" by veteran players being able to have a free character but... who cares? This is all about making new players keep playing

The only real solution is to have several ways/modes to get stuff like for final fantasy 14 for example. Let me explain for FF there are daily roulettes to get tokens, raids at 24, normal and external raids at 8, crafting, relics, etc... For Lost Ark, there is no than raids. Why not develop other ways to get stuff. I'm sure there would be a lot more players who would come and play the game.

Amazon already announced that jumpstart will merge with their regions in less than 2 months

Until they address the core reasons why 900k players left. Jump start servers will be an epic fail and lost ark will continue bleed players overtime. Mokoko's btw is misleading being it's ends at 1540 gear score.

You are correct, a year ago i said we need to implement the same solutions you gave in the forums and was pretty much called a clown, i would also like to add that the amount of homework needs to be reduced drastically and this would alleviate the gatekeeping considerably, if people is done with their homework faster that means they dont need to be as efficient and can afford to waste a bit more time helping less experienced or weaker players.

Well I was sceptical in the beginning of the video, though it will be another bored beefing, but you make solid points. Compared to my progression your is still really mokoko, and now I kinda get why Jumpstart didnt really made me excited and return to my main char in just two days. As you made the little list what did not get implemented, I started to feel bad and already choking on information.
For me at least, for someone who love the game by heart since the beginning, and pumping money into it like a fourth kid, over 3K play hours. I still love the game and my favourite, but the honing system is terrible. All of my friends either stopped playing the game, because of toxic players combined with pretty hard mechanics or the honing. But meanwhile you can bridge the first issue pretty easly, especially if you have someone doing inferno raiding, didn't mind to help out my friends, making prog lobbies, accepting only mokokos, you can make a friendly enviroment easly to learn with, just dont join the fast quick fppd plc lobbies. BUT, the honing is an issue I couldn't bridge no matter. No matter how much material I sent, the straigth sheer dissapointment feeling of 10 and 5% maximal chance, seeing it fail so many time. It's just simply not fun. If there would be a way to at least top up ANYTIME to 25% it would be much better. Make it expensive as hell, but let it be 25%. I myself stopped after brel hard raiding since it's just getting annoying to me as well. I'm the person who would rather collect more mats and gamble less. Even if you buy the books and the honing support it's just 2-3%. It feels like a gold drainage, and my luck is also the worst of the worsts in games, so honed everything since argos even in my alts at min 80%. Mostly everything succeed at 84% for some reason. It's just not fun, it's just annoying. I cannot imagine myself doing Akkans, thanks not, even if I'm a support paladin main since the beginning and there is a support shortage. 1-2%.. Man, dont joke with me, prefer doing old content, helping 12 times on Argos forever than doing that sheet.

*Edit: In my opinion gate keeping is the only way to defeat it is to improve guild systems. Finding communities and guilds to play with is the key, not trying to find 7 fully random dude, who is most probably toxic to others as well. guild learning enviroment is a healthy atmosphere, they play together each week with a goal of playing together every week. Not just sitting and watch random guys improving on those mechs you already know, just to never see him again.

really good video

Lost Ark is a hard game to get into. It's complex, it's unforgiving and it takes a while for you roster to be at a level where you can fully experience the game. It's also extremely rewarding and has the most fun engaging combat in the genre. So yeah it's not for everyone to get into, but it's totally worth it imho. Whether you do it on the jump start server or not doesn't really matter imho. Important is that you have a guild or a group of friends you can play with. That fixes most of the issues. But if you want to play mostly solo and use party finder etc. you will have a harder time getting into grps.

Im always sad to gatekeep rn, but just today i had a clown run with 1 rather fresh player and i specifically named it reclear to then have the ppl throw g3 5 times and then admit its a 1st time. I gotta value my time too if there are these kind of ppl

Rn its a good point to start fresh on a decend populated alrdy merged server. Or continue. Still got the Vern PP and the Event Quest so its still ez to catch up

I played for around 1.3k hours before quitting the game, which was a few weeks just before Kakul Raid release, came back to the game, played nonstop for a week and quitted again yesterday FOR THE SAME REASON: gatekeep. I LOVE this game, got like 8 or 9 Ignea tokens, around 80% of island souls and over 1k mokoko (all of that just a bit after South Vern release). Kakul Raid is 1475 ilvl and Brel is 1490. It is IMPOSSIBLE for me to play on either content on ilvl, I've easily spent over 6 hours TRYING to do the raids. Even older one just for fun got me gatekeept, saw ppl doing Valtan and Vykas card runs, all players over +1520 and I couldn't get into the parties. Came back on this events, did honing for my alt Sorc from 1445 to 1500 and barely played stuff from my lvl. Fuck that shit, uninstalled the game yesterday for the first time since release

The fact that more MMOs just doesnt have some form of "mentoring" system in place or rewards for reclearing content that they have already cleared for that week in the form of some sort "support token" is beyond me at this point, They want retention so fucking give it to the people that wants it instead of some braindead daily activiies that no one asked for no? Just doesnt make any sense.. But its an issue of people not being able to contain their addictive desire to spend money on dumb shit in the form of these design decisions at the end of the day. This obviously is more specific to F2P games but seems to be bleeding into even sub based MMOs lately, I'd never in a milion years expect a collective boycotting of this to ever happen at this point obviously since ignorance is bliss after all but fuck me man, Feels like the term common sense should erased at this point 🙃

Most likely this comment will get buried down, but sadly those solutions you gave are just illusions we want to believe time and time again.

After spending years in the MMORPG community i can say people will find a way to abuse it, such as:
-Make a queue to help new people, get rewards from it
We read and think: Good way to bring new people
People read: So we smurf our way out, trading boosts and materials and if we don't find experience players outright quit and regroup
Recently I even found out how people trade gold from other servers into their own and are pilling up gold on the jump start so as soon as the action house is open, it will flood their server/market

The best way we can do is start making more group finders with lower expectations for new people, teach them, be patient, and if you are in a guild. always be there to help others and scold those for gatekeeping

Also if someone is messing up, tell them how to improve, guide them where they can learn and also make groups, talk to them
If we isolate and insult people they are bound to get bored of the game

Nice video recapping most points :D

As a returning player in EUC (Played until right after Clown release), Jumpstart servers have been absolutely amazing to me. I tried coming back on Elgacia release, but it was a giant challenge to get into learning parties, something that jumpstartservers automatically solved to me.

In JS, getting the hang of Valtan and Vykas was easy enough that I didn't need to go through learning parties, but I absolutely needed them for Clown and Brelshaza , and soon Kyangel.

Managed to complete Brelshaza gate 4 this week on a semi-learning party, we had 3 veterans helping us with some tips and we got there in the end (shoutout to these giga chad players, btw!).

One thing you left out of the video is not everything is about horizontal content we already completed. I didn't care too much before, and still dont care much now. The most important are runes and skill potions which are not too grindy to just farm again (other than some annoying RNG bosses). Cards I was far away from LOS then, and JS give us so many leg cards that I'm probably very close to where I was before. Less daily homework and less fomo to make alts and gold quickly (since it's so common to have learning / beginners and semi-learning parties anyway, no need to hurry).

It's such a casual and forgiving environment to be in, I wish they'd do it every 6months

And about the sweaty vets making gold on this servers, shame on them, sure, but I'm mostly ignoring them anyway, just playing my own game and having fun. You know, in the end, that's what playing a game is about

I’m a returning player and didn’t want to redo horizontal so skipped over fresh start. Worse though is I convinced my friends to try lost ark for the very first time… and they wanna play with me so they skipped the fresh start too…

Play another game ez, and do content for that, and talk bad things about that game.

I think bussing should be banned for just the Jumpstart servers.

You've pointed out absolutely everything.

I had to start fresh on EUC when I learned EUW was half dead, losing 700h was already infuriating. So when I first heard "JumpStart servers", the simple idea of having to re-farm absolutely everything (Cards, StrongHold, Astray, etc, etc...) all over again was an instant "F*ck no! lol". And of course, as anticipated, those servers are already getting drained of their player base.

Regarding helping new players, you've just pointed out the obvious really. Why they still haven't figured out a way to help new players with some form of roulette like in FF14, with according rewards for vets, is a mistery to me.
I'd add one thing when it comes to gatekeeping though, to make it better it has to come from both the community and the devs. Exemple, In GW2 there are active training group communities on Discord, organizing and teaching new players interested in Raids or other multiplayer activities, I often go back to my favourite (The Crossroad Inn) when I want a refresher after a long break, it's pretty chill and very instructive.
However, the difference is that consummables are a f*cking nightmare in LostArk, and I don't see veterans willingly waste them to provide training sessions for newbies :T

Bad take. The returning player Is for The one that did not have a substantial progression in other servers and it’s worth for restarting with a boost. And that’s it, there is no more to it. Dude is just straight farming negativity algorithm

Yeah im crazy

Highly disagree with this video. Jumpstart servers have two mokoko expresses, the regular one that all servers have, and a jumpstart mokoko version. This means you can accelerate two characters to endgame, and if you haven't consumed the one-time account wide Aeromancer Powerpass, new and returning players will have two 1415 powerpasses (one in mail, and one from product inventory). The event shop wasn't mentioned in the video. Lost Ark always has an event running where materials can be claimed from running dailies. The jumpstart server has TWO event shops: the regular one, and another one in a separate tab similar to regular but with highly discounted materials. This is extremely valuable for progressing main characters and starting new characters.

Community wise, the prevalence of gatekeeping cannot be understated. From playing on the jumpstart server, I've seen greater willingness and acceptance of new players. While experienced groups do exist and are often labelled so in the title (reclear, experienced), many groups accept, encourage, and help new players. Market wise, many of the scarcer materials like Oreha Fusion Material are cheaper on the jumpstart server than the regular server. While I agree prices will have less stability in the short term, engravings and accessories aren't required for your first two characters given there are two event expresses providing engraving support. Small bonuses such as double roster exp upto 100, double character exp (excluding quests), and double stronghold progression upto 40, are helpful in getting new players started. If you've spent hundreds of hours doing horizontal progression for skillpoints and runes, perhaps the jumpstart server isn't for you. But in terms of what they provide, I would say it has been more than enough once you discover the full benefits, and far more inclusive for new players than the main servers are.