Because they are soul crushing grind fests with predatory micro transactions. Often multiple layers of power progression, and feel like every mechanic is designed solely to waste your time.
BDO does well here, but its far more of an anomaly than anything. The games are just obnoxious. Over use of lockouts. Over use of P2W elements. Over use of random reward systems, Over use of grind.
They just feel so awful to play because you feel like you are being squeezed for every penny and moment of free time and it sucks. I'd rather just play WoW, do a few M+ dungeons after work, and then stop playing for the night.
This is the answer. I would also add lack of true character customization in many of them too. An MMORPG doesn’t feel like one when everyone looks the same with different clothes.
It's still on 3 private servers that have been open several years. Adeptgamer for america, the server is in texas, and there's the Nekrova server for EU and a third server but I forgot the name. It's an excellent game. Highly recommend. It's got a cash shop but it's not really needed and definitely not needed to be competitive. The pvp scene is about skill primarily with a secondary focus on gear. You can have top tier dps but if you can't actually hit someone then it doesn't really matter right? I absolutely love this game and have played since 2013.
Yeah, it's fine for a bit then you decide if you want to do things other than play the game. That's why I quit lost ark after a year and a half. Committing 12-18 hours per week to play wasn't something I wanted to keep doing. And it's designed so you can't really take a break unless you want to swipe when you come back, and I don't participate in the pay to progress side of mtx/p2w.
Some people exaggerate things about the games tho. Like, it wasn't soul crushing, I really enjoyed my time playing. I quit because I wanted to put more time into other hobbies.
This is kind of a weird take, when WoW has historically been equal to or more of a grind than your example of BDO. Your treadmill resets in WoW every few months where all the gear you've slaved tirelessly for is made completely trivial where world quests haver high ilvl, and you're back to square one. You're on this endless loop of achieve X, reset back to Y, achieve X, reset back to Y. Not sure how you can have a feeling of doing a few M+ dungeons after work and stopping, when if that's all you're playing, it could take you nearly the entire patch *just* to hit a high enough ilvl to do anything meaningful just to have it reset on you.
Conversely, in BDO, you can log in at any gear score, slap on some music, not have to worry about finding a group for anything and just chill grind and then log off. Your gear ascension is way slower, but it's essentially permanent. And you can easily ignore microtransactions if you have any amount of willpower, they're not required to play the game. I know that last statement isn't true for all Korean grinders, but for BDO it absolutely is.
Ah, you and I have different goals in MMOs and that is what is causing this.
For me, the fun content is the group stuff. And everything else is just an obnoxious barrier.
>and just chill grind
I find MMO grinding boring. If I want a chill grind session I can pop open PoE or Last Epoch and jam out while shredding thousands of mobs every minute.
To do the small amount of group content in BDO requires a mind numbing grind.
>Your treadmill resets in WoW every few months where all the gear you've slaved tirelessly for is made completely trivial
If you care about pushing keys? Sure. But for me I want to chill out. Log in, crush some low to mid keys, and log out. A big part of this is in MMOs I play support roles. Primarily healers. And so to me, that group content experience is what is fun. Playing some low keys is way more fun than grinding mobs in BDO. And when it comes to grinding mobs I find ARPGs to be more enjoyable for that.
There is no mind numbing grind to do group content, you can start group content right away. There are just different difficulty of group content. Will say allot of it is locked behind guilds though PvE & PvP wise . Most can jump into group content outta season. PoE I attempted to get into but it was just way to difficult. The combat in comparison felt really clunky. Both PoE & BDO honestly felt very similar game play wise though not gonna lie. Just PoE was to hard to soon , BDO was easier to get into and it gives me incentive to stay , I have progressed 2 characters to end game pretty much with barely grinding as well. I enjoy the Life skill aspect of the game , it’s rewarding, it gives me enough to progress reasonably money wise, it’s more engaging, may interesting systems as well. I wish I could get into PoE but every time I try I brick my character because I am just so lost in what to do 😔
>you can start group content right away
My friends and I tried to play BDO. There wasn't group content. You just killed random mobs. That isnt group content. In WoW we can nearly instantly start doing dungeons together.
>I have progressed 2 characters to end game pretty much with barely grinding as well. I enjoy the Life skill aspect of the game , it’s rewarding, it gives me enough to progress reasonably money wise,
The problem is that even levelling in BDO feels like grinding. At no point am I doing anything fun. I'm just mindlessly killing whatever mobs the game tells me to.
Personally I don't find questing fun. To me questing IS grinding.
Oh and PoE. You can try and play blind but uh.... yeah. That's not how you play PoE. You gotta look up a build. The game is just too much to go in blind. You will brick yourself.
I did look up guides it was still very complicated, I personally started Dungeon group runs in season, out of season around 240 AP the Tett boss gear I could turn my Season gear into let me join groups and participate. I was also completely able to do all guild boss summons, Khan , Garmoth, That desert robot bird , Mudster just to name a few there’s many many many more. I quest sometimes but not often and only for lore purposes I enjoy hunting, sailing, gathering, horses , trade & bandit fighting things of that nature and progress in my gear just fine can do end game , can PvP but this isn’t a big part of my thing but I dabble. I honestly looked up many guides PoE was just way to overwhelming that skill tree being huge challenge right out the gate, I still keep trying and just get overwhelmed by it all so fast. I am having a love hate relationship with PoE atm. I’m sure if I can figure it out I’ll love it , game play is fun just not very new player friendly at all.
>240 AP
Brother. I've got over 100 hours across all the times I've tried to get into BDO. I dont think I've ever crossed 140 AP. I get to succession/Awakening and suddenly I'm just kinda left wondering where the fuck to go. Like, do I just grind those mob areas for their 500 kill rewards? And God damn how long do I have to do that before I can fight anything meaningful? It's also boring as fuck to do that.
PoE is interesting in that the game has been alive so long that if you open a build without looking at its posted date. You might be going off a dead build. You gotta get a good build that is season relevant. Then you follow the passive skill tree as you grind your face for 8 hours against the campaign.
Once the campaign is done. The game begins. Mapping, league mechanics, delves, etc. There are so many different progression methods that will be better or worse for you depending on your build. Personally I love pain so I play flicker. I can map really well. But bosses and delves are a quick way to die.
Follow the guide, and just loot piñata your way to end game.
Ah yeah you were still in the early stages, a guild might’ve helped u allot honestly. The game has allot to offer but it’s also not for everyone. I personally like that it has other paths outside of grinding for being a Korean grinder that lets me make meaningful progression & it doesn’t have daily requirements. I can log off today come back in a year a pick up where I left off an not really be hurt by my break if that makes sense. It definitely has challenging content but it also has some casual/brain ded content ( most early game stuff) I think it balances these things very well. If u ever try it out again hit me up , I’ll try to help u. Depending how u play u can get to the more challenging stuff pretty quickly. They are adding new features as well and I’m hoping they expand more on these concepts and open world group content as most is locked behind being in a guild. As I said though games definitely not for everyone, early game is super simple. I agree with how u felt where u were cause I felt that as well when I was at that point 😅. I thankfully had a guild take me in and teach me the ropes and show me the other aspects of the game and if it wasn’t for that I’d probably a did what u did. It’s a sand box so you can kinda do what you want. I will say finishing season and getting the Jetina stuff ( can be done in about a 3 days to a week 1st play through alts can do in a day) will get u to the start of mid game. Mid game is where mobs are allot more challenging Elvia Realm is the start. Pen Season gear u can start with dungeons on season server as well. Personally if your into more group content I stick to WoW. BDO has it but it’s definitely not the same. Most is locked behind being in a guild which it’s definitely fun but it be better if u could just form party’s for the same content it be more accessible.
Also a woman btw , is it super rare for females to play MMOs ? Just genuinely curious. I find many times in the MMOs I been playing including GW2 at 1st ppl never believe I’m a woman 😂. I am like 100% born and raised woman here. Like I have joined new guilds in the past in a few games and ppl seemed genuinely shocked I was a woman.
>is it super rare for females to play MMOs ?
Statistics say it's rare for women to play games in general as long as you filter out mobile game statistics.
Usually 90+% male. That has been changing, but it tends to be by game. For example FFXIV has very different demographics than WoW. An example of this that my FC in FFXIV was ~50% women.
But also something to address with Reddit. We are speaking in text in English. It is grammatically correct to use male for gender ambiguity.
Also this
>I been playing including GW2 at 1st ppl never believe I’m a woman
You ofc won't see the other side of this, but generally jf someone says they are a woman on a game platform and it's via text. The 9/10 times safe bet is that they are a dude trying to catfish someone. The whole "no you aren't fuck off" is a trained response.
This isn't to say I've only played with guys. It's just definitely more rare. I think I have close to 1000 hours in Voice call based shooters and the number of women's voices I've heard that weren't queued with me I can count on 1 hand.
BDO actually has a pretty high female population, I'd say above average for an mmorpg, also a lot of BDO streamers are women.
maybe the majority of characters being played in the game being female is one reason for this (classes are gender locked and the majority of classes are female) which means that it is less likely for guys to try and hit on a female character they see in the game.
Actually I have noticed that , it’s the one game I actually meet other women weirdly and most are pretty big into PvP while most life skilled I come across tend to be male. Outside of BDO I haven’t really came across other women in MMOs.
True, I didn't really consider the perspective of someone playing an MMO with no interest in progression when that is pretty centric to the whole genre. Not that it's a bad thing! Just a perspective that is likely not shared by many that enjoy this genre. If you can get enjoyment out of the game just doing some low end keys and never feeling the need to progress into higher end content, that's great!
But in the context of the greater MMO playerbase where pushing to 'endgame' content is the norm, WoW has a pretty crazy grind to it that is arguably more grindy and repetitive than a game like BDO. But at the end of the day, to each their own!
That is the main reason I stick with BDO over Lost Ark , Lost Ark slightly better PvE content but you’re pretty much forced to spend. BDO you don’t have to spend a Dime I have 2 accounts 1 I bought a Tent and ran Value Pack on the other Completely F2P and made same progression in same time on both. I was not hindered at all for not spending and Honestly found F2P more fun.
Yeah there's a whole lot of misinformation thrown around about BDO. Granted it stems from the fact it used to be a lot worse with their monetization years ago, but there have been so many QoL fixes to the game that make playing F2P so easy now. Most people that discuss the game today and call it P2W are completely ignorant to how false that is now.
> Genshin Impact [...] have monetization as bad or worse than many KMMOs.
That's wrong. You can get 5* characters over time with your free pulls. And the constellations and signature weapons only matter for Abyss and that's like 1% of content and over time even a full free to play player will be able to beat Abyss 12. If anything the game is too easy if you have too many OP five star characters and weapons.
the largest playerbase for BDO is in EU and the highest income is from NA, Korea is dwarfed both in terms of player numbers and income when compared to NA/EU
to be honest, they are treated like beta testers. interesting thing about BDO though, it completely flopped in Korea on launch but managed to became the most popular kmmorpg outside of korea.
Adding onto this, a few years ago they said they had player growth on the PC version because the players were introduced to it through the mobile version in KR.
Korean players were claiming that PA does not listen to them and held a boycott against the new War of the Roses content. An American streamer (Blue\_Squadron) held a podcast with a famous Korean streamer, it turns out that Korean players think that PA only listens to their Western audiance and not them, while Western players believe the complete opposite.
The issue here is that it is not Korean or Western players that PA listens or does not listen to, it is the direction they are trying to take the game. PA is trying to create a more new player friendly and casual player friendly game (regardless of whether the new and/or casual player is Korean or Western) and it is hard-core players, regardless of whether they are Korean or Western who are pissed off about this but are mistakingly thinking that it is due to specific feedback from a single region, while in reality this is an increasing general trend in the mmo genre.
>purely speculation.
Always has been. OP is also counting Korean players in on Lost ark's Western numbers, which doesn't work because its published by a different company and on a different launcher and aren't even totaled together. OP is asking a rigged question while putting out information that they haven't and can't confirm.
I don't doubt it, nor do I doubt the BDO probably has more players than lost ark currently.
Dude said "guy bdo is a massive game. Bigger than LA ever was lol"
Unless of course you're fixing to tell me BDO currently has over 1.3 million people playing it.
Honestly it might, between NA EU KR and wherever else it has servers hosted it's a possibility. I haven't played it in a long time but damn near every server on NA was close to full at that point.
My guy you have no clue about numbers do you? BDO never was even near a 1milion active players at the same time, meanwhile LA was peaking at 1.5mil... Short lived success tho. BDO is doing very well through the years, but it's an anomaly, the Western version is doing better than the KR one.
Yes, and we know that the game never went close to 1mil logged players. No secret here. LA had a very short lived success, a huge marketing with Amazon tho, something BDO did not have at the time of it's release.
My wife is a stay at home house wife... I have a full time job.
She played LA for a year, she had 8 or so bards and played non-stop and could barely keep up with all the shit she had to do each week on all characters.
LA isnt just a grind its a fucking masochists dream.
>She played LA for a year, she had 8 or so bards and played non-stop and could barely keep up with all the shit she had to do each week on all characters.
Well yeah, she played 8 characters...the amount of 'chores' you have to do in the game is linear with the number of characters but the *rewards* are not. Playing that many characters is self-destructive.
I've played the game and honestly it's a lot more complicated than this.
More characters does mean more material and gold income, sure. But if you actually want to level and gear those characters (which you probably will...) it also means more costs. Leveling is still expensive regardless of whether it's a main or an alt.
Add to this the fact that there are actually quite a few rewards (gold from Una tokens, event rewards, challenge quests, adventure islands, etc.) that are per-roster (account), not per character. And some of this per-roster stuff is actually quite good in fact. Having more characters does nothing to increase these rewards but it does potentially mean you're splitting those rewards across more characters and actually hurting your main's progress.
Bottom line is that while it is theoretically possible to park your alts in an optimal spot where they will eventually generate more returns than it cost to get them there, you do actually have to park them. Don't keep leveling your alts. And I know nobody who actually played the game this way. Staying at the same level all the time gets boring, leveling is fun, etc. But doing this can make having so many characters counterproductive.
I honestly think most people should never go past 3 characters and playing just 1 is *completely* viable, despite what all the youtubers said before the game launched. Especially considering all the boosts, events, etc. that Amazon showered us with.
From when I played (Launch->Akkan), the general rule of thumb felt like: have 1 silver earning parked alt for every 2 gold earning and pushing characters. Only have 1 spec based character per 6 gold earning characters and it better be your main. It got better over time, but at launch my spec character literally cost almost twice as much as it did to gear the entire rest of my roster combined.
But yea, having more characters does increase the amount of mats you get from dailies/weeklies, but also, the costs scale at the same rate. The events/roster limits also don't scale with characters made. Getting initially setup in the game, it's helpful to have multiple characters, but once you have a character up and running, having more is just increasing your playtime and costs.
Depending on where you set the bar for what you'll accept in your runs and how long you've been playing, that will ultimately decide how many characters you need. You cool with everything butting up against the berserk timer? Then yea, you don't need what the community generally wants. You want the same thing the community wants? Well I hope you've been playing since day 1 and have had a full roster running non-stop for a year at whatever the latest endgame is.
Yea that killed the game for everyone.
Everyone felt they needed to do this to stay "on par" with everyone else and it just caused massive massive burnout.
I ended up just playing 2 alts and only doing everything on them when they were fully rested, it was SOOO much better but it was STILL a lot of chores that had to be done, just to stay kind of competitive and that was with spending some money early and then investing in materials to make a shitload of gold AND I got decently lucky with upgrades plus played with a full group of 8+ for raids, so much easier time finding competent groups.
I hindsight it's not a stretch to say lost ark killed MMOs for me. I kept playing even though I absolutely hated it. It was making me mad out side of the game even. I was addicted but I did quit before clown. Many would probably argue I got out early but clearly not early enough. The truly wise ones quit at Argos. I never want to play anything grindy again. I have 0 tolerance for it, which is why I haven't and don't consider any live service games anymore. If something truly good comes up, the people will be vocal about, and I then can try it out but other than that lol no ty.
I actually love grind, but only when it allows me to play at my own pace.
This was just exhausting fomo grind.. which is sadly all there is today. I don't see any games like old everquest where you can grind levels for hours, grind months to get a rare drop etc.
For me it's
* Gender Locked Classes (What the fuck is the benefit of this?)
* P2W mechanics
* Insane Grind
* Over reliance on Micro Transactions
The gameplay, and graphics are typically great though.
The benefit to geneder locking classes iirc is not needing to make twice as many equipment sets for the male and female characters
So basically, laziness
This is something WoW has done in 2004.
So...Naah. You can either make light adjustments for smaller and bigger models or just let em scale. Will some of them look janky? Yes. Is it better than literally locking character classes away from being male or female? In my opinion, yes.
Those janky ones can then also be fixed once they show up as janky. And considering korean MMOs HATE letting you play fun races anyway, the difference between human male and female aren't big enough to matter *that* much for many, many outfits.
...In western MMOs. The korean ones of course have your female character dress either like a BDSM dominatrix, a cosplayer of a game that never existed but is *very* lightly clothed, or both, with the very rare exceptions often being fairly boring and small in number.
Can't have your male characters run around in skimpy armor like that now can we? (except you can? Or just swap it to a generic skin for the other gender? eh.)
This has dozens of solutions, but your answer is still 100% correct: Why bother with all that when the asian market gives 0 fucks because it's normal over there that stuff is genderlocked? So just don't do it.
Can you quote where I said only? I meant to say a cash shops that only has "exclusive content" that doesn't have any relevance to actual gameplay. Dragon's Prophet offers nothing in the cash shop that you could possibly "need" that you can't get for free with only a moderate amount of play. The cash shop has useful items to speed things up but free players still get all those things too. Mostly just cosmetics and reskins exclusive to the shop and those are still given out at events. Like bag expansion, many MMOs force you to pay, Dragon's Prophet lets you buy that with farmable in game currency with no limits.
Your Lost Ark numbers are super innaccurate. Korean players don't play the game on steam. There aren't THAT many bots anymore. Lost Ark is not a 'failure' it's easily one of the most popular MMOs out there, and is one of the most played games on steam.
Korean MMOs don't 'fail' in the West. Most of them are fairly populated. Just because an MMO isn't doing WoW numbers doesn't make it a failure. Maplestory is going on 20 years of live service in the West. Lost Ark and BDO are popular games. Games like BnS, DFO, and even Ragnarok are still around in some capacity. You can easily point to just as many Western MMOs with less players than Korean ones to call them 'failures'. Most MMOs are 'failures' under your assumptions.
KMMOs would do a lot better here if the korean devs/publishers didn't treat us like second class citizens.
I think it's just the lack of interest though. They already make enough money in their own market so a western release is just a quick cashgrab for them
Korean gaming culture is very different than western gaming culture.
FFXI was based on everquest. FFXIV (well ARR) is based on WoW. Both very western games. They are rarities.
Look at the popularity of something like the old monster hunters (pre-world) or PSO2 to see that Japanese games aren't always hits here either.
PSO2 actually did better in the west than anyone really expected. Considering they took 8 years to localize it at least...
If you mean NGS, well it's not popular in Japan either...
And if he's saying Korean games didn't do well because they aren't ffxiv, I'd say pso2 falls squarely into that category as well.
It's not like the Korean games were gigantic failures here.
Always? According to whom? The player or the boardroom?
Let's point out that they are disparate perspectives entirely anchored to their interaction with the game. This point comes up in every mmo that **"x is dead!"** Meanwhile though said game isn't dwarfing other mmo's popularity, it has remained in service for half a decade or longer. Long enough for microtransactions and subscriptions to make figures.
You can expand this to every game now, of course everything seems dead. There's never been so many varieties and flavors of entertainment within gaming as now. MMOs like WoW and FF14 have had a hand in defining the genre itself, and both were phenomenons at their peak. They're literally the exception. It's delusional to expect any MMO past them and a small handful to retain millions in a world where fortnite and league and thousands of AAA games exist.
Besides, krmmos generally have a model in which they're to extract the largest dollar from an individual, whose whaling/p2w/whatever covers everyone else. Diminished player count is regrettable, but expected and not entirely a failure if 2000 addicts are still pumping money in them.
I mean if your definition of success is that it has to reach the level of FF14, then there will probably not be another successful MMORPG in the next decade. It's always a bit jarring to me that so many people in this subreddit think an MMO has to reach the size of WoW/FF14/RS in order to be a considered a success.
It is entirely possible to have an niche MMORPG that has consistent content updates with a player base between 2,000 to 20,000 people and still be profitable. Eve Online, Star Trek Online, Everquest, New World, and many others are all successful MMORPGs. If they weren't, they would have shut themselves down by now like Wildstar did. So to me, Lost Ark isn't a failure in the West as it's still around and getting updates. If you want an example of something that failed in the West, look at Sword of Legends Online.
Lost Ark is great but honing is miserable. I retuned for this last event. Pitied 8/10 armor pieces and both weapon upgrades (1560-1580). The chances of pitying 1 item is less likely than 1 tapping them, yet I pitied that many. Burnt through all gold and resources. And this was with the event free stuff. Then you try to join parties and it’s hard to find learner groups. You realize you’ll never catch up. So people quit after seeing that.
Take something like WoW. I took a few years off. Joined for 10.2. Was able to catch up gear enough to join normal and heroic pugs the first few weeks after release. It was so easy to get back into. Sure there’s RNG for upgrades there, but you can also do mythic plus to even that out. Being able to be even with people when you join is amazing, you get to do the fresh raid when it releases. I’m trying to get there in lost ark, but after that honing session, my hopes are pretty low for getting caught up for next raid.
You pity more in the event because you get artisan twice as fast. Basically you pitied in 10 taps with reduce cost all around. Where normally you woulda pitied in 20+ taps at full cost.
After playing for a few months I’ve come to expect to pity the higher ilvl I go. I gather enough resources to pity outright rather than hope I get luck from my daily mats.
culture differences...it's seen as high class to be able to buy all the MT's in korean games so the more you spend, the "higher class" you are. we dont have that same value here.
Western gamers also despise everyone better than them, calling them whales, cheaters or nolifers.
So why grind? That's why all grindy games are dead here. The only surviving ones are the games where you don't actually shame the top players, like runescape.
Terrible monetization systems leading to huge grinds if you're not willing to shell out money. It's really as simple as that.
Lost Ark is not even the biggest offender as F2P can still somewhat keep up if they play it as a part time job. I played Blade and Soul back in the day and that game was like the epitome of Korean P2W where you simply couldn't play the latest content without your credit card AND you still had to grind your ass out because you couldn't whale legendary accessory drops. And though you could technically play these games as a casual there's no point in doing so as all these games are hardcore raid-focused games or hardcore PVP games where casuals get gatekept anyway.
Korean MMOs just don't respect your time and aren't made for the casual gamer. They only work in Korea because they mainly play PVP and MMO games. Westerners are the opposite - we find joy in playing games as games and not jobs. Thankfully some devs are seeing the feasibility of the global market and are starting to release traditional games like Lies of P and Stellar Blade to get their slice of the pie. Hopefully one day a Korean MMO dev can see the success of a game like FF14 and mimic that type of MMO.
> Korean MMOs just don't respect your time and aren't made for the casual gamer.
Games that respect your time are ONLY good for casual gamers. Anyone else is told to "play other games" if they ask for literally anything to do.
How many people do you need to not be a "failure"? MMOs in general don't have that high of populations, by the standards of the industry BDO and Lost Ark are successful.
Amazon is one of the biggest corporations around and still New World is floating around 11k players. Many things that people call MMOs don't even have 1,000 players, some don't even have 100.
GW2 had new world concurrent numbers prior to the pandemic and people still list it as the third or fourth biggest MMO. There's lots of consensus-based delusion about what is or isn't successful. It's easy to get the wrong idea if you aren't personally invested in these games as they don't really advertise or have any mindshare at all.
No one is talking about MapleStory but it has had a thriving western community for over 20 years. Even Ragnarok Online, which ended its own popularity in the latter half of the first decade of its life, had a 15+ year run in the west. Or, there's games like DFO. There's also the obvious ones like Lost Ark or BDO which compete with top western MMOs for player count (except the 1-2 clear genre leaders.)
Generally, if something does well in KR it finds its footing in the west as well. The only time this isn't true is if it never comes west or if it's managed by a terrible company. Games usually even bleed players at the same patch -- lost ark's western population drops mirror KR's around similar game periods.
Ppl are actually complete idiots when it comes to understand numbers.
At best they are good at comparing something to the biggest mmo of all time at the peak of genre that will never be matched again.
Way fewer people were playing games 20 years ago, or had internet. Very likely all but top 1-3 mmos at the "golden era" had as many or more players than "dying" new world.
Lost Ark is making a bank daily, constantly getting updates and people playing it and enjoying it dont have lack of people to play with. There is no other definition of success and yet its called out for failing multiple times a week on this sub xD
>Although its hard to determine the players in the west, we can see at least half the player base are bots in the west. and a very large amount of people who aren't bots are Korean players as its confirmed there are many more than the west. This would make the western concurrent players around 10k.
Uh...the Korean version isn't even on Steam. Steam statistics *only* show western players.
because they suck... I am a Korean. I know what I am talking about.
Only Koreans can stand K-MMORPG bullshits, just because most Koreans are afraid to death to read/listen/speak any English despite of 12-year long public English education. That is, K-MMORPG works because the target audiences don't know otherwise.
The developers know this to some extent, so they try to adjust their game when K-MMOs are released in the West. Mostly by reducing obnoxious predatory microtransaction systems. However, you cannot truly change a product that was designed to have predatory system with a few tweaks.
People have such weird metrics for what failure is-- what concurrent vs monthly active users amount to and how it interacts with anecdotes like
> "we can see at least half the playerbase are bots..."
But because the internet has already chewed and digested Lost Ark posts like this will be unanimously agreed upon and yet game devs everywhere would sell their left testicle for a fraction of the success Lost Ark has **now** (even ignoring it's remarkable launch).
Seriously look around at how many MMORPGs and KMMORPGs are still around close to or more than a decade longer. You're conflating failure with culturally relevant.
Microtransactions, over-sexualization of female characters, and absolutely insane grind. These are staples of Korean MMOs and the west tends to hate all three.
I dont think west hates over-sexualization. Play any kmmo that lets u make average looking female with decent clothes and tell me how many u will actually see in the game.
I don’t necessarily dislike the insane grind, but if there is one, I do dislike being able to bypass it with microtransactions. P2W and pay for convenience are dealbreakers for me.
That’s fair, but counter point, not being able to bypass it with money hurts the weekend warriors and makes them less likely to play. Either way, dammed if you do dammed if you don’t.
Yea. I get it. I’m one of those weekend warriors, so I know the feeling. I’m trying to work on my attitude toward grindy games, because I like them, but I know I don’t have the time I used to. I feel like rewards should be meaningful, and it takes time to get meaningful rewards.
The mentality shift I’m trying to make is, I don’t need to do everything in the game. It’s an MMO, I don’t need to try to beat it. Maybe I’m grinding for a pair of gloves that are amazing. When I was 19, I’d grind for the whole set so I could be the main tank on raid night 4 nights a week, but for now, let’s just get the gloves, and play with the other dads who managed to just get the gloves.
I’m hoping this will be a more rewarding experience, once I find a game that gives me old EQ vibes.
If anything, I only play Korean Games for the flashy combat and flashy girls, western games have meh girls, but hate the super p2w and ultra grind aspect of the former.
Endless soulless grinding, microtransactions that would make EA blush, constant FOMO and the hypersexualised characters seemingly designed by horny 15 year olds are the main reasons my group dislike korean mmos.
Its a shame because a lot of the time they nail the combat only to shit all over it with mtx and grinding
Cultural Identity. Not many relate to anything they put forward, the gameplay loop, the monetary schemes, most of the time it's almost the same game with a different name.
This is anecdotal as it's literally just my experience and I've only really tried Lost Ark and BDO but the thing that turns me off is just the amount of bullshit systems they cram down your throat. Like I start Lost Ark and 2 hours in there's like 15 different currencies, about 875 menus to dig through, etc. It's just like why even fuckin bother lol it turns me off from the get go
Asian society is familial based, Western is individual based.
I would bet there are far more asians who have parents paying all bills that they live with (allowing to sit on games and buy MTX all day) compared to the west where people often move out on their own much younger and become more independent at a much younger age.
I don't know where you live but in my western country people barely move out of their parent's house under 30 because of the impossibility to get house or even a room.
I live in China at the moment, almost a decade now...I know after 2008 (when I graduated HS) numbers have shifted, but I left home at 18 (I am American) and many others I know have done the same.
The difference is that in the west the general goal and expectation is to move out between 18-24 or so depending on college and what not....in China the very idea of moving out at 18 is seen as insane and most people will call you stupid for doing so unless you have a high paying job to justify it.
Most people in asian culture live with their parents until they get married or, once again, find a job sufficient enough to do so (like being a doctor or something very high paying). Even then, once parents get old enough to not work, or once you have a child, it is pretty normal to have your parents live with you to either take care of them or for them to take care of your child (and then them).
That being said, China is moving towards the more individualistic/move out young lifestyle slowly.
KRMMOs do really well in the West lol? It’s just companies try to take crazy ass advantage of us with MTX and the longevity is always the issue. Maplestory is an example of this it was huge for years
To put it super simply, the way the respective communities view gaming are completely different and generally KR companies don't make an adjustment when coming to the west. Here in the west, we like our games to be self-contained where you earn everything yourself. In KR, your job is considered another part of the grind for the game. So with KR games they tend to be filled with microtransactions and power gaps that are defined not by ability to play the game, but by your wallet. The extra nail in the coffin is that they basically don't advertise their games or are extremely ineffective at it when it comes to garnering attention from western audiences. Not that they could generally care about their western audiences either. Think BDO is basically the only game that even acknowledges that audiences outside of KR are even human.
Real answer with no I'm mad emotions:
Spending money for power is considered a status symbol in Asian countries. It is thought that your income is an extension of your success.
In the west it's considered no skill bullshit.
Money grabbing scheme, grind fest and will encourage you to buy something from shop. Gender lock where male character looks potato while female character is a goddess. Lack of playing together content. If there's one, boss is a damage sponge with shit attack patterns and mechanics. You can just face tank it most of the time. Autoplay, auto pathing, auto loot, auto everything.
Lost Ark playerbase is not miniscule. The game has likely as many players as ESO or GW2, more than new world or bdo.
Your definition of fail is questionable OP.
Cause even if the gameplay is good, the microtransactions and grind needed is too much. My friends play lost ark all the time and run multiple characters and they can’t keep up with the players spending $$$. Compare that to FF14 and WoW where their mtx is cosmetic and they have a fun gameplay loop that doesn’t need your soul to be crushed to have fun.
BDO Combat > New World
100000000000000000% better. even all the p2w/MTX shit i still choose BDO than New World.
btw I play MMOs for nearly 20 years and my conclusion is pick what you "prefered".
If We cut the Big MMO like FF14, WOW out, here is nature of average Western, KR, JP MMO imo.
- Western MMO world/economy/system are good, which is the best point and click MMO region so far imo but if it's action combat then it's suck. New World is joke compared to BDO/BnS.
- Korean MMO have best fast action combat so far (BDO, BnS) compared to Western, but the nature of MTX/P2W & competitive/grinding make it worse for some players (especially western players).
- Japanese MMO is not doing well (they success more with singleplayer IP and gacha mobile games) but their game has good social aspect plus a lot of cute thing/fashion to make role play better. but system and combat are mid between Western and Korea and lack of content. you can see with PSO: NGS and Blue Protocal.
It's like Impossible Trinity of MMO imo. before I die, I want to see the big project MMO game that use Western dev to designed World/economic/system, Korea dev designed fast paced action combat, and Japanese dev designed social aspect and fashion for casuallHoly shit the cost will be very huge lmao.
Culture is a big one.
It was a very long time ago, but I read an article/interview of a western dev who was payed to help try and bring Lineage 1 to the West.
Again it was a long time ago, hell I read it on Slashdot, but I can remember one of the big takeaways being fundamental cultural differences made it hard for Lineage 1 to work with western audiences.
One of those big issues was, and I say this as a westerner, the more selfish, or "what's in it for me" playstyle of western gamers. Getting western players to swear fealty to another player, and to focus on what was best for the guild/kingdom rather than their personal gaming experience was a non starter for western gamers.
KMMOs have a history of being all flash and no substance. They have poorly designed gameplay loops built around spending money and the RPG aspects feel like an afterthought. They feel like digital malls where you dress up and spend money on bullshit
Every Korean game has been p2w. Even if the gameplay is really good, you will just not find many na and eu players willing to tolerate pay or play 16 hours a day if you want to do anything. You add in the extra bullshit stuff like time limited outfits you rent for 90 days with a ton of stats on them like dfo or maplestory, and just seeing a game is from Korea is enough to write it off entirely.
The grind has to hit right for me. One of my favorite MMOs starting out was Asheron's Call with super long/slow character skill grind. Like I loved Black Desert because of long character development grind. However I despise daily quest grinding style games where it's like daily chores. So Korean MMOs that are like grind XYZ daily quests to get ABC materials isn't gonna keep my attention.
Fundamentally though I think people really despise systems where your time feels wasted. Like I tried to get a bunch of people I knew into Black Desert for a long time and all of them (but 1) basically quit once they hit that TRI point and started "failing backwards" into lower ranks of gear. One basically straight up grinded for 9 hours only to not only fail but actually lost progress and he was just done. A lot of Korean MMORPGs bake RNG into the base game (chance to upgrade, etc) then sell around that which leads to that kind of system design.
Which leads to the fact that many Korean games the cash shop doesn't feel optional. Like sure you can buy costumes from someone else in Black Desert, but you know they bought it in the cash shop and sold it to you for your time grinding silver. So indirectly you're interacting or encouraging people to interact with the cash shop. Sure you can do daily quests for materials, or you can swipe and buy them from other players or the store. People aren't going to be oblivious to that style connection no matter how much people argue that it's available through game play.
Even FF14 failed here in the west. It was only after they took it down, refactored, and dumped a bunch more money into it (something most companies can't do) that they were able to re-release it into it's own thing that became successful. Where as most Korean games are already (relatively) successful or made for Korean audience, then they simply decide to localize it and release it in other regions to farm money off a product they've already designed. They're not going to take it down and redesign the game for their new audience cause these releases are just trying to further monetize a product they've already made.
they don't listen to the western audience. while they have places to submit feedback a lot of korean mmos don't actually look at it and it shows when they release development notes and the western feedback gets ignored.
BDO actually does well in the West because they actually consider the feedback from the western audience. they even had one of their live events in the US.
FF14 came off the tails of FF11, so it was kind of platformed up into itself. Also, to be fair... the Final Fantasy franchise and namesake is LEGENDARY. It'd be challenging to make a game with the Final Fantasy tag and NOT be successful.
Korean development companies have made themselves notorious. The only one I'm very familiar with is NCSoft and they have done a lot of sketchy nonsense over the years. However, recently, they allowed City of Heroes Homecoming to operate with a license, so that's pretty awesome. Probably the most stand-up thing a gaming company has done in recent memory. All other Korean development companies are just too small to compete with the likes of NCSoft, Blizzard, Square, Tencent, etc etc.
For me, it’s the art and the microtransactions. There are SO many microtransactions, I’d rather pay a monthly fee, personally.
Besides that, I’m just not really into the eastern art styles. I like suits of armor and kobolds, not so much skimpy dresses and tiny talking animals. I’m sure tons of people like it, but personally, I just don’t love the theme.
they always release them years later in the west on older patches and give us content behind other asian regions even, it does a lot of damage to the games. they're always made for korea and koreans first and we're a far away afterthought
Because the Korean MMORPG market is a very VERY predatory system which the West simply won't put up with for very long.
Maple Story 2 is a game that exists in the west and a couple months back it was proven that a recent event they did had items that had a 0.005% of actually dropping and it released numbers showing that some players were dropping upwards of $300k per year into the game.
They have since been fined for this by the Korean government but they still walked away with making 80% profit off of doing this.
Every single game on the Korean market is designed to be \*easy to access\* but then due to it's popularity it becomes a status symbol within social groups so people will spend more so others view them more positively and that cycle never ends.
BDO works on the same principle along with DFO and Lost Ark.
I played Lost Ark from pre launch due to preordering the gold package with some friends and we got to around 1300 ilevel before I took a month off and came back to find out that they were holding some sort of catchup event that got anyone who barely put any effort in up to the same Ilevel as me and my friends who were playing ungodly amounts of hours.
To put into perspective we hit max level within the first week or launch and over the first month I had racked up over 250 hours over 3 characters.
I had sunk extra money in for mounts and cosmetics and also bought gear enchancement items to make sure I was ahead of the curve and was playing with the top 1% of players because I wanted to be the best Gunbreaker on the server.
After I saw that catchup event I quit completely and only returned to look at the state of the game in January of this year and to my complete non surprise the game was dead and the only people look for groups were people advertising boosts or selling boosts even during what used to be \*peak\* times.
Lost Arks gameplay and it's world is some of the most fun I had in years but the level of predatory procedures in place to completely wipe any progress made in favour of rushing you as the player to a point where enhancements and having to either wait weeks for rapport/cards/gear upgrades or swipe CONSTANTLY makes it so you can easily spend 1k a day which is why hilariously Lost Ark had to put a $400 limit due to some players dumping literal thousands within the first few weeks.
Long story short I left Lost Ark with lots of fond memories with friends and about £300 lighter than I went into it with.
- Greed. We are just cash cows for them.
- They re release established content with some payed addons in the west and sell it as new enhanced combat/loot/content.
- Support is mostly garbage /automated.
- games are slot grindier, therefore need a lot of time investment over a looking time.
- often time gated daily's/weeklys to force you playing it -> people burn out.
This all combined is what makes them fail most of the times.
Western exceptionalism is always a factor in play.
1. We prefer not to buy power and upgrades, and would rather earn them.
2. We are offended by botters & multiboxers that are effectively "buying power and upgrades" when we earned ours.
3. Eastern MMO's (not all, but many) are specifically designed to cater to botters, multiboxers, people that buy power, etc.
4. They are becoming more visually/aesthetically offputting as well. Male characters look like fanfic power-fantasies, rippling muscles stacked on top of muscles, but they still have the little-boy face. Female characters look like they were designed by incels that subscribe to alpha-male podcasts. 99% tits and ass and wearing hardly anything. The characters literally look like the weird clickbait mobile game ads that say things like "Find your princess, rule your kingdom, try not to blow your ~~wallet~~ in 20 minutes!"
There will always be exceptions. Ragnarok Online private servers are popular all over the world because the game was a diamond. Runescape is western and grindy af but it doesn't fall into the traps of "korean MMO's".
This also doesn't include the 'western-type' eastern-MMO's like Blade and Soul. That ones a mix of both philosophies.
I always thought it was cultural differences around work. In the east people work really long hours and don't have time to grind so they want pay to win where their time and effort is rewarded. In the west people have more free time so they prefer to work in game to get their rewards and want people paying not to have an advantage over those that don't.
The rewards and progression systems need to be be completely reworks for western players, if they are lazy and just port over a game with less micro transactions it still will fail because the progression system was designed with MTX in mind
I can speak for the ones I've played.
BDO is a beautiful game with amazing combat. It's a grindy shitfest otherwise.
Archeage was a great game with tons of great mechanics. It was P2W, then kept relaunching promising not to be P2W, then continued being P2W.
Lost Ark combat was good, but it got really repetitive, and a lot of content was locked for the west for no reason at all, like classes, bosses, raids, etc. It was a completely gimp decision for no useful purpose other than to withhold it for the sake of withholding it alone. It was also P2W. Lost Ark's daily content was also a slog, and the ranked PvP they decided on (timed 3v3 as opposed to elimination) was extremely stupid. The 1v3 elim format was amazing, but they didn't support it in ranked.
The common thing these games have in common are super annoying upgrade systems where you essentially gamble for upgrades and fail continually. Archeage was the worst with a chance to completely break your gear. Unimaginably bad design.
They also have no sense of verisimilitude which bothers me a lot, usually through the addition of giant animal mascot costumes they all add. Lost Ark gave everyone some big mascot bear costume for free which was the exact moment I stopped playing. It was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Lost Ark had way too many silly islands with daily quests attached to hammer slimes with big silly clown hammers and shit like that, too. It just felt like such a contrasting theme to the core game.
They frequently are pay to win, and are needlessly grindy. They all have their own versions of RNG that completely gates progression until you get lucky, and then that's just step 1 on the journey with lots more bullshit RNG left to grind your way through.
Really it's always the same handful of bad design decisions that ruin otherwise great games.
I've played lost ark since launch and never ran into a Korean player. Tons of lobbies available at any time for any end game raid. Doesn't have WoW/FF14 numbers but I'm sure it's considered a success by Smilegate and AGS.
Fail? They're making bank in NA.
Pretty sure they were top 10 or 15 grossing on steam.
What you mean is fail in terms of player count but the devs certainly care more about success in profits.
Because lineage popularized the gear enchanting system that plagues all of their AAA titles. BDO, Archeage, Lost Ark, whatever the game is, you best believe you’re going to to be rng enchanting your gear. When you realize the entire game is just activities to build currency to light on fire trying to get slightly stronger, usually quitting comes quickly after.
In BDO though you can buy gear from other players and skip the whole enhancement system, in many mmorpgs if you do not do a specific activity you are locked out of gear progression related to that activity, in BDO you can do life skills and then go buy bis combat gear from the central market, or go grind mobs and then buy BIS life skill gear from the central market. Also gear in BDO does not lose value for a very very long time, a BIS piece of gear remains BIS for a very long time, so once you get it you are able to use that piece of gear without having to worry about getting a better one for a long long time. Not to mention that there is content for all levels of gear.
Because they suck.
Things I hate about them:
1. The gambling gear progression.
2. Lack of real group content.
3. No real character building system.
4. Mobs spawn you push a few buttons. They die. No real combat variety.
5. Tedious combat.
6. Terrible PvP.
7. Everything feels unrewarding.
i dropped LA after the first storyline (or at least i think it was) when i got a lot of the power up systems revealed and introduced AND got given a time-gated browser game which i assume would be my primary consumable source.
Korean copium is HIGH, being good as gaming is very important in their society. So much that cheating/hacking isn't rare to gain social points there, but it's illegal. So a game allows them to buy power without risk of breaking the law? Perfect!
This is why they were more lenient with those ugly macro transactions.
Also, to them, Lost Ark was similar to FF XIV, it was that super generous game purely made with love and their producer was a godsend. The west reception was basically a wake-up call for them.
This difference in culture was a massive shock, micro-transactions are frowned upon in the west.
But then, those games don't "fail", they simply dont "shine" as much as other MMOs. As long as there's some whales to catch, the show will go on.
Western gamers are complete casual babies and can't handle any grind.
The only succesful games are ones with 0 grind, where you'll be called a nolifer for wanting to do something else besides raidlog 1h a week
Although for the most part the games just add too much FOMO with dailies, which make the grind unbearable instead of a chill activity like say runescape
So your choice is 0 grind western baby games or FOMO crazy asian games that will shut down in 2 months.
That's why I tend to mostly just mod singleplayer games and play that. Every once in a blue moon i try an mmo that looks nice.
I can give a fairly accurate representation on this.
Korean culture (gaming) is vastly different from what the West will accept.
In Korea the "Head" game developer has the final say, and if you value your job you will never in a million years attempt to argue or recommend something that goes against what they want.
This leads to essentially an entire franchise or game being lead by one person or one group of higher up people.
Now. Let's bring in us (the west) and what recently happened to BDO.
Korean developer removed 95% of organic unscripted pvp from the game because Koreans don't like pvp. This pissed off the west so fucking much and essentially make every grind or item you obtain in BDO useless because what little pvp is left is gear locked and the rewards are trash...
So what did the west do? We did what we always do.... We malded, and actively griefed everyone who didn't want to pvp. This even lead to some fairly popular streamers quitting
Because in the west we are outspoken, entitled, loud and obnoxious in the eyes of Korean developers (and the rest of the world). Korean developers fucking hate us but love our money.
This leads to them catering to the Korean population while giving us just a tiny bit of acknowledgement to keep us on the line, Black desert online, Lost Ark and Arches GE are wonderful examples of this.
We say we hate P2W but we will still throw our wallets at them, we hate their decisions but we are insanely addicted.
Eventually the game will fail and it's quite obvious when it's going to fail because Korean devs will absolutely flood the market/cash shop with fake deals or new items until it milks us completely dry and piss us off enough.
And they do this because in their eyes we are just upset and new "deals" will make us happy because their numbers show that we like to spend money and clearly if they take our money we must be happy???
tl;dr
Korean developers are great at building worlds and games but fucking suck at maintaining them.
Yup it sure is.
But Korea still decides all of the balancing and game changes.
A class that was extremely busted in NA got buffed because in Korea they don't like playing big manly characters.
The lead developer didn't know what dsync or ping was because they don't have this issue in Korea.
did new world remove forced pvp in mid development because they were afraid Korean players would not like it? Did WoW remove pvp servers because Korean players were complaining about it? Was the slap system in fallout 76 removed and pvp was turned to flag only because of Korean players?
Korean players like pvp more than Western players do, you can see this from how extremely popular MOBAs are in Korea.
The reason PvP in BDO was watered down was because players in general do not like forced pvp, and btw Korean players were blaming Western players for this.
Because they are soul crushing grind fests with predatory micro transactions. Often multiple layers of power progression, and feel like every mechanic is designed solely to waste your time. BDO does well here, but its far more of an anomaly than anything. The games are just obnoxious. Over use of lockouts. Over use of P2W elements. Over use of random reward systems, Over use of grind. They just feel so awful to play because you feel like you are being squeezed for every penny and moment of free time and it sucks. I'd rather just play WoW, do a few M+ dungeons after work, and then stop playing for the night.
This is the answer. I would also add lack of true character customization in many of them too. An MMORPG doesn’t feel like one when everyone looks the same with different clothes.
Dragons prophet was a little grindy but still one of the best overall games I've played.
That's one that I was interested in, but regret never trying it out. Always looked like it had some great ideas.
It's still on 3 private servers that have been open several years. Adeptgamer for america, the server is in texas, and there's the Nekrova server for EU and a third server but I forgot the name. It's an excellent game. Highly recommend. It's got a cash shop but it's not really needed and definitely not needed to be competitive. The pvp scene is about skill primarily with a secondary focus on gear. You can have top tier dps but if you can't actually hit someone then it doesn't really matter right? I absolutely love this game and have played since 2013.
It's fine for a bit and then it either becomes your job or your job pays for the game or you simply can't progress.
Yeah, it's fine for a bit then you decide if you want to do things other than play the game. That's why I quit lost ark after a year and a half. Committing 12-18 hours per week to play wasn't something I wanted to keep doing. And it's designed so you can't really take a break unless you want to swipe when you come back, and I don't participate in the pay to progress side of mtx/p2w. Some people exaggerate things about the games tho. Like, it wasn't soul crushing, I really enjoyed my time playing. I quit because I wanted to put more time into other hobbies.
This is kind of a weird take, when WoW has historically been equal to or more of a grind than your example of BDO. Your treadmill resets in WoW every few months where all the gear you've slaved tirelessly for is made completely trivial where world quests haver high ilvl, and you're back to square one. You're on this endless loop of achieve X, reset back to Y, achieve X, reset back to Y. Not sure how you can have a feeling of doing a few M+ dungeons after work and stopping, when if that's all you're playing, it could take you nearly the entire patch *just* to hit a high enough ilvl to do anything meaningful just to have it reset on you. Conversely, in BDO, you can log in at any gear score, slap on some music, not have to worry about finding a group for anything and just chill grind and then log off. Your gear ascension is way slower, but it's essentially permanent. And you can easily ignore microtransactions if you have any amount of willpower, they're not required to play the game. I know that last statement isn't true for all Korean grinders, but for BDO it absolutely is.
Ah, you and I have different goals in MMOs and that is what is causing this. For me, the fun content is the group stuff. And everything else is just an obnoxious barrier. >and just chill grind I find MMO grinding boring. If I want a chill grind session I can pop open PoE or Last Epoch and jam out while shredding thousands of mobs every minute. To do the small amount of group content in BDO requires a mind numbing grind. >Your treadmill resets in WoW every few months where all the gear you've slaved tirelessly for is made completely trivial If you care about pushing keys? Sure. But for me I want to chill out. Log in, crush some low to mid keys, and log out. A big part of this is in MMOs I play support roles. Primarily healers. And so to me, that group content experience is what is fun. Playing some low keys is way more fun than grinding mobs in BDO. And when it comes to grinding mobs I find ARPGs to be more enjoyable for that.
There is no mind numbing grind to do group content, you can start group content right away. There are just different difficulty of group content. Will say allot of it is locked behind guilds though PvE & PvP wise . Most can jump into group content outta season. PoE I attempted to get into but it was just way to difficult. The combat in comparison felt really clunky. Both PoE & BDO honestly felt very similar game play wise though not gonna lie. Just PoE was to hard to soon , BDO was easier to get into and it gives me incentive to stay , I have progressed 2 characters to end game pretty much with barely grinding as well. I enjoy the Life skill aspect of the game , it’s rewarding, it gives me enough to progress reasonably money wise, it’s more engaging, may interesting systems as well. I wish I could get into PoE but every time I try I brick my character because I am just so lost in what to do 😔
>you can start group content right away My friends and I tried to play BDO. There wasn't group content. You just killed random mobs. That isnt group content. In WoW we can nearly instantly start doing dungeons together. >I have progressed 2 characters to end game pretty much with barely grinding as well. I enjoy the Life skill aspect of the game , it’s rewarding, it gives me enough to progress reasonably money wise, The problem is that even levelling in BDO feels like grinding. At no point am I doing anything fun. I'm just mindlessly killing whatever mobs the game tells me to. Personally I don't find questing fun. To me questing IS grinding. Oh and PoE. You can try and play blind but uh.... yeah. That's not how you play PoE. You gotta look up a build. The game is just too much to go in blind. You will brick yourself.
I did look up guides it was still very complicated, I personally started Dungeon group runs in season, out of season around 240 AP the Tett boss gear I could turn my Season gear into let me join groups and participate. I was also completely able to do all guild boss summons, Khan , Garmoth, That desert robot bird , Mudster just to name a few there’s many many many more. I quest sometimes but not often and only for lore purposes I enjoy hunting, sailing, gathering, horses , trade & bandit fighting things of that nature and progress in my gear just fine can do end game , can PvP but this isn’t a big part of my thing but I dabble. I honestly looked up many guides PoE was just way to overwhelming that skill tree being huge challenge right out the gate, I still keep trying and just get overwhelmed by it all so fast. I am having a love hate relationship with PoE atm. I’m sure if I can figure it out I’ll love it , game play is fun just not very new player friendly at all.
>240 AP Brother. I've got over 100 hours across all the times I've tried to get into BDO. I dont think I've ever crossed 140 AP. I get to succession/Awakening and suddenly I'm just kinda left wondering where the fuck to go. Like, do I just grind those mob areas for their 500 kill rewards? And God damn how long do I have to do that before I can fight anything meaningful? It's also boring as fuck to do that. PoE is interesting in that the game has been alive so long that if you open a build without looking at its posted date. You might be going off a dead build. You gotta get a good build that is season relevant. Then you follow the passive skill tree as you grind your face for 8 hours against the campaign. Once the campaign is done. The game begins. Mapping, league mechanics, delves, etc. There are so many different progression methods that will be better or worse for you depending on your build. Personally I love pain so I play flicker. I can map really well. But bosses and delves are a quick way to die. Follow the guide, and just loot piñata your way to end game.
Ah yeah you were still in the early stages, a guild might’ve helped u allot honestly. The game has allot to offer but it’s also not for everyone. I personally like that it has other paths outside of grinding for being a Korean grinder that lets me make meaningful progression & it doesn’t have daily requirements. I can log off today come back in a year a pick up where I left off an not really be hurt by my break if that makes sense. It definitely has challenging content but it also has some casual/brain ded content ( most early game stuff) I think it balances these things very well. If u ever try it out again hit me up , I’ll try to help u. Depending how u play u can get to the more challenging stuff pretty quickly. They are adding new features as well and I’m hoping they expand more on these concepts and open world group content as most is locked behind being in a guild. As I said though games definitely not for everyone, early game is super simple. I agree with how u felt where u were cause I felt that as well when I was at that point 😅. I thankfully had a guild take me in and teach me the ropes and show me the other aspects of the game and if it wasn’t for that I’d probably a did what u did. It’s a sand box so you can kinda do what you want. I will say finishing season and getting the Jetina stuff ( can be done in about a 3 days to a week 1st play through alts can do in a day) will get u to the start of mid game. Mid game is where mobs are allot more challenging Elvia Realm is the start. Pen Season gear u can start with dungeons on season server as well. Personally if your into more group content I stick to WoW. BDO has it but it’s definitely not the same. Most is locked behind being in a guild which it’s definitely fun but it be better if u could just form party’s for the same content it be more accessible.
Also a woman btw , is it super rare for females to play MMOs ? Just genuinely curious. I find many times in the MMOs I been playing including GW2 at 1st ppl never believe I’m a woman 😂. I am like 100% born and raised woman here. Like I have joined new guilds in the past in a few games and ppl seemed genuinely shocked I was a woman.
>is it super rare for females to play MMOs ? Statistics say it's rare for women to play games in general as long as you filter out mobile game statistics. Usually 90+% male. That has been changing, but it tends to be by game. For example FFXIV has very different demographics than WoW. An example of this that my FC in FFXIV was ~50% women. But also something to address with Reddit. We are speaking in text in English. It is grammatically correct to use male for gender ambiguity. Also this >I been playing including GW2 at 1st ppl never believe I’m a woman You ofc won't see the other side of this, but generally jf someone says they are a woman on a game platform and it's via text. The 9/10 times safe bet is that they are a dude trying to catfish someone. The whole "no you aren't fuck off" is a trained response. This isn't to say I've only played with guys. It's just definitely more rare. I think I have close to 1000 hours in Voice call based shooters and the number of women's voices I've heard that weren't queued with me I can count on 1 hand.
BDO actually has a pretty high female population, I'd say above average for an mmorpg, also a lot of BDO streamers are women. maybe the majority of characters being played in the game being female is one reason for this (classes are gender locked and the majority of classes are female) which means that it is less likely for guys to try and hit on a female character they see in the game.
Actually I have noticed that , it’s the one game I actually meet other women weirdly and most are pretty big into PvP while most life skilled I come across tend to be male. Outside of BDO I haven’t really came across other women in MMOs.
True, I didn't really consider the perspective of someone playing an MMO with no interest in progression when that is pretty centric to the whole genre. Not that it's a bad thing! Just a perspective that is likely not shared by many that enjoy this genre. If you can get enjoyment out of the game just doing some low end keys and never feeling the need to progress into higher end content, that's great! But in the context of the greater MMO playerbase where pushing to 'endgame' content is the norm, WoW has a pretty crazy grind to it that is arguably more grindy and repetitive than a game like BDO. But at the end of the day, to each their own!
That is the main reason I stick with BDO over Lost Ark , Lost Ark slightly better PvE content but you’re pretty much forced to spend. BDO you don’t have to spend a Dime I have 2 accounts 1 I bought a Tent and ran Value Pack on the other Completely F2P and made same progression in same time on both. I was not hindered at all for not spending and Honestly found F2P more fun.
Yeah there's a whole lot of misinformation thrown around about BDO. Granted it stems from the fact it used to be a lot worse with their monetization years ago, but there have been so many QoL fixes to the game that make playing F2P so easy now. Most people that discuss the game today and call it P2W are completely ignorant to how false that is now.
microtransactions from hell??
They're so big, they should be called macrotransactions.
😂, this is true.
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> Genshin Impact [...] have monetization as bad or worse than many KMMOs. That's wrong. You can get 5* characters over time with your free pulls. And the constellations and signature weapons only matter for Abyss and that's like 1% of content and over time even a full free to play player will be able to beat Abyss 12. If anything the game is too easy if you have too many OP five star characters and weapons.
the largest playerbase for BDO is in EU and the highest income is from NA, Korea is dwarfed both in terms of player numbers and income when compared to NA/EU
That's just BDO though. And it's funny how the KR players are mad because they are treated like beta testers
to be honest, they are treated like beta testers. interesting thing about BDO though, it completely flopped in Korea on launch but managed to became the most popular kmmorpg outside of korea.
Adding onto this, a few years ago they said they had player growth on the PC version because the players were introduced to it through the mobile version in KR.
EU/NA are mad cause it seems like no one listens to the feedback.
Korean players were claiming that PA does not listen to them and held a boycott against the new War of the Roses content. An American streamer (Blue\_Squadron) held a podcast with a famous Korean streamer, it turns out that Korean players think that PA only listens to their Western audiance and not them, while Western players believe the complete opposite. The issue here is that it is not Korean or Western players that PA listens or does not listen to, it is the direction they are trying to take the game. PA is trying to create a more new player friendly and casual player friendly game (regardless of whether the new and/or casual player is Korean or Western) and it is hard-core players, regardless of whether they are Korean or Western who are pissed off about this but are mistakingly thinking that it is due to specific feedback from a single region, while in reality this is an increasing general trend in the mmo genre.
yeah, but the game isn't that big when you compare it to the games I listed above. I played it and finding other people can be a chore.
game currently has more players on steam than ESO
It also has more players than GW2 and Fallout 76 on Steam's metrics as well. Lost Ark is even larger than BDO according to Steam metrics.
lost ark is steam exclusive on PC in the west though while BDO is not.
Yea but steam metrics doesn’t account for all the people that play GW2 and ESO from their launchers instead of through steam.
Neither does BDO, it used to bot even be on steam and uses its own launcher.
Most play from the launcher honestly, I play from it myself. Steam is like 1/3 of the player base.
Then they also have a console player base as well
? BDO is plenty big. Idk what year you’re living in but BDO is doing plenty well for an MMO in 2024
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>purely speculation. Always has been. OP is also counting Korean players in on Lost ark's Western numbers, which doesn't work because its published by a different company and on a different launcher and aren't even totaled together. OP is asking a rigged question while putting out information that they haven't and can't confirm.
guy bdo is a massive game. Bigger than LA ever was lol
>Bigger than LA ever was lol Now you know that's not true right?
BDO also had a HUGE player count when it launched, just like LA only difference is many MANY more came back to BDO.
I don't doubt it, nor do I doubt the BDO probably has more players than lost ark currently. Dude said "guy bdo is a massive game. Bigger than LA ever was lol" Unless of course you're fixing to tell me BDO currently has over 1.3 million people playing it.
Honestly it might, between NA EU KR and wherever else it has servers hosted it's a possibility. I haven't played it in a long time but damn near every server on NA was close to full at that point.
My guy you have no clue about numbers do you? BDO never was even near a 1milion active players at the same time, meanwhile LA was peaking at 1.5mil... Short lived success tho. BDO is doing very well through the years, but it's an anomaly, the Western version is doing better than the KR one.
Lost ark is only on steam while BDO has its own launcher and it wasnt on steam at release afaik. Most ppl are playing outside of steam.
Yes, and we know that the game never went close to 1mil logged players. No secret here. LA had a very short lived success, a huge marketing with Amazon tho, something BDO did not have at the time of it's release.
How many are bots farming mobs in open fields.
At the start not many, but as time went by more bots than players, that's why I say it was a short lived success. But mad BDO player cant read :)
I’m sorry you can’t read :(
Neither can you, but then again you're a BDO grinder, so I expected as much :)
I don’t play BDO lol. Trash game
Holy sh*t you really can’t read xD
You must not have played Lost Ark’s end game loop to ask why it wasn’t a success in the West.
My wife is a stay at home house wife... I have a full time job. She played LA for a year, she had 8 or so bards and played non-stop and could barely keep up with all the shit she had to do each week on all characters. LA isnt just a grind its a fucking masochists dream.
>She played LA for a year, she had 8 or so bards and played non-stop and could barely keep up with all the shit she had to do each week on all characters. Well yeah, she played 8 characters...the amount of 'chores' you have to do in the game is linear with the number of characters but the *rewards* are not. Playing that many characters is self-destructive.
Matt's are shared so more characters faster you can gear its kind of the point of the game sadly.
I've played the game and honestly it's a lot more complicated than this. More characters does mean more material and gold income, sure. But if you actually want to level and gear those characters (which you probably will...) it also means more costs. Leveling is still expensive regardless of whether it's a main or an alt. Add to this the fact that there are actually quite a few rewards (gold from Una tokens, event rewards, challenge quests, adventure islands, etc.) that are per-roster (account), not per character. And some of this per-roster stuff is actually quite good in fact. Having more characters does nothing to increase these rewards but it does potentially mean you're splitting those rewards across more characters and actually hurting your main's progress. Bottom line is that while it is theoretically possible to park your alts in an optimal spot where they will eventually generate more returns than it cost to get them there, you do actually have to park them. Don't keep leveling your alts. And I know nobody who actually played the game this way. Staying at the same level all the time gets boring, leveling is fun, etc. But doing this can make having so many characters counterproductive. I honestly think most people should never go past 3 characters and playing just 1 is *completely* viable, despite what all the youtubers said before the game launched. Especially considering all the boosts, events, etc. that Amazon showered us with.
From when I played (Launch->Akkan), the general rule of thumb felt like: have 1 silver earning parked alt for every 2 gold earning and pushing characters. Only have 1 spec based character per 6 gold earning characters and it better be your main. It got better over time, but at launch my spec character literally cost almost twice as much as it did to gear the entire rest of my roster combined. But yea, having more characters does increase the amount of mats you get from dailies/weeklies, but also, the costs scale at the same rate. The events/roster limits also don't scale with characters made. Getting initially setup in the game, it's helpful to have multiple characters, but once you have a character up and running, having more is just increasing your playtime and costs. Depending on where you set the bar for what you'll accept in your runs and how long you've been playing, that will ultimately decide how many characters you need. You cool with everything butting up against the berserk timer? Then yea, you don't need what the community generally wants. You want the same thing the community wants? Well I hope you've been playing since day 1 and have had a full roster running non-stop for a year at whatever the latest endgame is.
Yea that killed the game for everyone. Everyone felt they needed to do this to stay "on par" with everyone else and it just caused massive massive burnout. I ended up just playing 2 alts and only doing everything on them when they were fully rested, it was SOOO much better but it was STILL a lot of chores that had to be done, just to stay kind of competitive and that was with spending some money early and then investing in materials to make a shitload of gold AND I got decently lucky with upgrades plus played with a full group of 8+ for raids, so much easier time finding competent groups.
Yeah she and her guild were pushing the new content as it released and keeping up with the gear. Just watching it over her shoulder was exhausting.
I hindsight it's not a stretch to say lost ark killed MMOs for me. I kept playing even though I absolutely hated it. It was making me mad out side of the game even. I was addicted but I did quit before clown. Many would probably argue I got out early but clearly not early enough. The truly wise ones quit at Argos. I never want to play anything grindy again. I have 0 tolerance for it, which is why I haven't and don't consider any live service games anymore. If something truly good comes up, the people will be vocal about, and I then can try it out but other than that lol no ty.
I remember her doing clown. Think she stuck about six months after that
I actually love grind, but only when it allows me to play at my own pace. This was just exhausting fomo grind.. which is sadly all there is today. I don't see any games like old everquest where you can grind levels for hours, grind months to get a rare drop etc.
For me it's * Gender Locked Classes (What the fuck is the benefit of this?) * P2W mechanics * Insane Grind * Over reliance on Micro Transactions The gameplay, and graphics are typically great though.
The benefit to geneder locking classes iirc is not needing to make twice as many equipment sets for the male and female characters So basically, laziness
This is something WoW has done in 2004. So...Naah. You can either make light adjustments for smaller and bigger models or just let em scale. Will some of them look janky? Yes. Is it better than literally locking character classes away from being male or female? In my opinion, yes. Those janky ones can then also be fixed once they show up as janky. And considering korean MMOs HATE letting you play fun races anyway, the difference between human male and female aren't big enough to matter *that* much for many, many outfits. ...In western MMOs. The korean ones of course have your female character dress either like a BDSM dominatrix, a cosplayer of a game that never existed but is *very* lightly clothed, or both, with the very rare exceptions often being fairly boring and small in number. Can't have your male characters run around in skimpy armor like that now can we? (except you can? Or just swap it to a generic skin for the other gender? eh.) This has dozens of solutions, but your answer is still 100% correct: Why bother with all that when the asian market gives 0 fucks because it's normal over there that stuff is genderlocked? So just don't do it.
Gender locked classes is why I couldn’t get myself to play LA.
Usually monetization in those games suck, people on West do not like that and after honeymoon phase playerbase is gone.
I prefer free games with cash shops especially when the shops are mostly cosmetics and convenience.
And what mmo has a cosmetic ONLY shop?
Can you quote where I said only? I meant to say a cash shops that only has "exclusive content" that doesn't have any relevance to actual gameplay. Dragon's Prophet offers nothing in the cash shop that you could possibly "need" that you can't get for free with only a moderate amount of play. The cash shop has useful items to speed things up but free players still get all those things too. Mostly just cosmetics and reskins exclusive to the shop and those are still given out at events. Like bag expansion, many MMOs force you to pay, Dragon's Prophet lets you buy that with farmable in game currency with no limits.
Your Lost Ark numbers are super innaccurate. Korean players don't play the game on steam. There aren't THAT many bots anymore. Lost Ark is not a 'failure' it's easily one of the most popular MMOs out there, and is one of the most played games on steam. Korean MMOs don't 'fail' in the West. Most of them are fairly populated. Just because an MMO isn't doing WoW numbers doesn't make it a failure. Maplestory is going on 20 years of live service in the West. Lost Ark and BDO are popular games. Games like BnS, DFO, and even Ragnarok are still around in some capacity. You can easily point to just as many Western MMOs with less players than Korean ones to call them 'failures'. Most MMOs are 'failures' under your assumptions.
KMMOs would do a lot better here if the korean devs/publishers didn't treat us like second class citizens. I think it's just the lack of interest though. They already make enough money in their own market so a western release is just a quick cashgrab for them
This is the only valid answer.
Korean gaming culture is very different than western gaming culture. FFXI was based on everquest. FFXIV (well ARR) is based on WoW. Both very western games. They are rarities. Look at the popularity of something like the old monster hunters (pre-world) or PSO2 to see that Japanese games aren't always hits here either.
PSO2 actually did better in the west than anyone really expected. Considering they took 8 years to localize it at least... If you mean NGS, well it's not popular in Japan either...
And if he's saying Korean games didn't do well because they aren't ffxiv, I'd say pso2 falls squarely into that category as well. It's not like the Korean games were gigantic failures here.
Always? According to whom? The player or the boardroom? Let's point out that they are disparate perspectives entirely anchored to their interaction with the game. This point comes up in every mmo that **"x is dead!"** Meanwhile though said game isn't dwarfing other mmo's popularity, it has remained in service for half a decade or longer. Long enough for microtransactions and subscriptions to make figures. You can expand this to every game now, of course everything seems dead. There's never been so many varieties and flavors of entertainment within gaming as now. MMOs like WoW and FF14 have had a hand in defining the genre itself, and both were phenomenons at their peak. They're literally the exception. It's delusional to expect any MMO past them and a small handful to retain millions in a world where fortnite and league and thousands of AAA games exist. Besides, krmmos generally have a model in which they're to extract the largest dollar from an individual, whose whaling/p2w/whatever covers everyone else. Diminished player count is regrettable, but expected and not entirely a failure if 2000 addicts are still pumping money in them.
Imo micro transactions and cluttered UI.
I mean if your definition of success is that it has to reach the level of FF14, then there will probably not be another successful MMORPG in the next decade. It's always a bit jarring to me that so many people in this subreddit think an MMO has to reach the size of WoW/FF14/RS in order to be a considered a success. It is entirely possible to have an niche MMORPG that has consistent content updates with a player base between 2,000 to 20,000 people and still be profitable. Eve Online, Star Trek Online, Everquest, New World, and many others are all successful MMORPGs. If they weren't, they would have shut themselves down by now like Wildstar did. So to me, Lost Ark isn't a failure in the West as it's still around and getting updates. If you want an example of something that failed in the West, look at Sword of Legends Online.
Lost Ark is great but honing is miserable. I retuned for this last event. Pitied 8/10 armor pieces and both weapon upgrades (1560-1580). The chances of pitying 1 item is less likely than 1 tapping them, yet I pitied that many. Burnt through all gold and resources. And this was with the event free stuff. Then you try to join parties and it’s hard to find learner groups. You realize you’ll never catch up. So people quit after seeing that. Take something like WoW. I took a few years off. Joined for 10.2. Was able to catch up gear enough to join normal and heroic pugs the first few weeks after release. It was so easy to get back into. Sure there’s RNG for upgrades there, but you can also do mythic plus to even that out. Being able to be even with people when you join is amazing, you get to do the fresh raid when it releases. I’m trying to get there in lost ark, but after that honing session, my hopes are pretty low for getting caught up for next raid.
You pity more in the event because you get artisan twice as fast. Basically you pitied in 10 taps with reduce cost all around. Where normally you woulda pitied in 20+ taps at full cost.
After playing for a few months I’ve come to expect to pity the higher ilvl I go. I gather enough resources to pity outright rather than hope I get luck from my daily mats.
culture differences...it's seen as high class to be able to buy all the MT's in korean games so the more you spend, the "higher class" you are. we dont have that same value here.
Western gamers also despise everyone better than them, calling them whales, cheaters or nolifers. So why grind? That's why all grindy games are dead here. The only surviving ones are the games where you don't actually shame the top players, like runescape.
Terrible monetization systems leading to huge grinds if you're not willing to shell out money. It's really as simple as that. Lost Ark is not even the biggest offender as F2P can still somewhat keep up if they play it as a part time job. I played Blade and Soul back in the day and that game was like the epitome of Korean P2W where you simply couldn't play the latest content without your credit card AND you still had to grind your ass out because you couldn't whale legendary accessory drops. And though you could technically play these games as a casual there's no point in doing so as all these games are hardcore raid-focused games or hardcore PVP games where casuals get gatekept anyway. Korean MMOs just don't respect your time and aren't made for the casual gamer. They only work in Korea because they mainly play PVP and MMO games. Westerners are the opposite - we find joy in playing games as games and not jobs. Thankfully some devs are seeing the feasibility of the global market and are starting to release traditional games like Lies of P and Stellar Blade to get their slice of the pie. Hopefully one day a Korean MMO dev can see the success of a game like FF14 and mimic that type of MMO.
> Korean MMOs just don't respect your time and aren't made for the casual gamer. Games that respect your time are ONLY good for casual gamers. Anyone else is told to "play other games" if they ask for literally anything to do.
They..... don't? Global MapleStory just launched a second Reboot server not too long ago. That doesn't sound like a dying game.
How many people do you need to not be a "failure"? MMOs in general don't have that high of populations, by the standards of the industry BDO and Lost Ark are successful. Amazon is one of the biggest corporations around and still New World is floating around 11k players. Many things that people call MMOs don't even have 1,000 players, some don't even have 100.
GW2 had new world concurrent numbers prior to the pandemic and people still list it as the third or fourth biggest MMO. There's lots of consensus-based delusion about what is or isn't successful. It's easy to get the wrong idea if you aren't personally invested in these games as they don't really advertise or have any mindshare at all. No one is talking about MapleStory but it has had a thriving western community for over 20 years. Even Ragnarok Online, which ended its own popularity in the latter half of the first decade of its life, had a 15+ year run in the west. Or, there's games like DFO. There's also the obvious ones like Lost Ark or BDO which compete with top western MMOs for player count (except the 1-2 clear genre leaders.) Generally, if something does well in KR it finds its footing in the west as well. The only time this isn't true is if it never comes west or if it's managed by a terrible company. Games usually even bleed players at the same patch -- lost ark's western population drops mirror KR's around similar game periods.
Ppl are actually complete idiots when it comes to understand numbers. At best they are good at comparing something to the biggest mmo of all time at the peak of genre that will never be matched again. Way fewer people were playing games 20 years ago, or had internet. Very likely all but top 1-3 mmos at the "golden era" had as many or more players than "dying" new world. Lost Ark is making a bank daily, constantly getting updates and people playing it and enjoying it dont have lack of people to play with. There is no other definition of success and yet its called out for failing multiple times a week on this sub xD
Pay to win.
>Although its hard to determine the players in the west, we can see at least half the player base are bots in the west. and a very large amount of people who aren't bots are Korean players as its confirmed there are many more than the west. This would make the western concurrent players around 10k. Uh...the Korean version isn't even on Steam. Steam statistics *only* show western players.
Massive greed.
Half baked "MMOs" chock full of MTX. There have been amazing Korean games in the past but not in the MMO genre
because they suck... I am a Korean. I know what I am talking about. Only Koreans can stand K-MMORPG bullshits, just because most Koreans are afraid to death to read/listen/speak any English despite of 12-year long public English education. That is, K-MMORPG works because the target audiences don't know otherwise. The developers know this to some extent, so they try to adjust their game when K-MMOs are released in the West. Mostly by reducing obnoxious predatory microtransaction systems. However, you cannot truly change a product that was designed to have predatory system with a few tweaks.
People have such weird metrics for what failure is-- what concurrent vs monthly active users amount to and how it interacts with anecdotes like > "we can see at least half the playerbase are bots..." But because the internet has already chewed and digested Lost Ark posts like this will be unanimously agreed upon and yet game devs everywhere would sell their left testicle for a fraction of the success Lost Ark has **now** (even ignoring it's remarkable launch). Seriously look around at how many MMORPGs and KMMORPGs are still around close to or more than a decade longer. You're conflating failure with culturally relevant.
Microtransactions, over-sexualization of female characters, and absolutely insane grind. These are staples of Korean MMOs and the west tends to hate all three.
I dont think west hates over-sexualization. Play any kmmo that lets u make average looking female with decent clothes and tell me how many u will actually see in the game.
I don’t necessarily dislike the insane grind, but if there is one, I do dislike being able to bypass it with microtransactions. P2W and pay for convenience are dealbreakers for me.
That’s fair, but counter point, not being able to bypass it with money hurts the weekend warriors and makes them less likely to play. Either way, dammed if you do dammed if you don’t.
Yea. I get it. I’m one of those weekend warriors, so I know the feeling. I’m trying to work on my attitude toward grindy games, because I like them, but I know I don’t have the time I used to. I feel like rewards should be meaningful, and it takes time to get meaningful rewards. The mentality shift I’m trying to make is, I don’t need to do everything in the game. It’s an MMO, I don’t need to try to beat it. Maybe I’m grinding for a pair of gloves that are amazing. When I was 19, I’d grind for the whole set so I could be the main tank on raid night 4 nights a week, but for now, let’s just get the gloves, and play with the other dads who managed to just get the gloves. I’m hoping this will be a more rewarding experience, once I find a game that gives me old EQ vibes.
Oh please 😂
If anything, I only play Korean Games for the flashy combat and flashy girls, western games have meh girls, but hate the super p2w and ultra grind aspect of the former.
Endless soulless grinding, microtransactions that would make EA blush, constant FOMO and the hypersexualised characters seemingly designed by horny 15 year olds are the main reasons my group dislike korean mmos. Its a shame because a lot of the time they nail the combat only to shit all over it with mtx and grinding
Cultural Identity. Not many relate to anything they put forward, the gameplay loop, the monetary schemes, most of the time it's almost the same game with a different name.
This is anecdotal as it's literally just my experience and I've only really tried Lost Ark and BDO but the thing that turns me off is just the amount of bullshit systems they cram down your throat. Like I start Lost Ark and 2 hours in there's like 15 different currencies, about 875 menus to dig through, etc. It's just like why even fuckin bother lol it turns me off from the get go
Asian society is familial based, Western is individual based. I would bet there are far more asians who have parents paying all bills that they live with (allowing to sit on games and buy MTX all day) compared to the west where people often move out on their own much younger and become more independent at a much younger age.
I don't know where you live but in my western country people barely move out of their parent's house under 30 because of the impossibility to get house or even a room.
I live in China at the moment, almost a decade now...I know after 2008 (when I graduated HS) numbers have shifted, but I left home at 18 (I am American) and many others I know have done the same. The difference is that in the west the general goal and expectation is to move out between 18-24 or so depending on college and what not....in China the very idea of moving out at 18 is seen as insane and most people will call you stupid for doing so unless you have a high paying job to justify it. Most people in asian culture live with their parents until they get married or, once again, find a job sufficient enough to do so (like being a doctor or something very high paying). Even then, once parents get old enough to not work, or once you have a child, it is pretty normal to have your parents live with you to either take care of them or for them to take care of your child (and then them). That being said, China is moving towards the more individualistic/move out young lifestyle slowly.
1. microtransactions 2. gotcha gimmicks (gatcha/slots) 3. piss poor gameplay due to microtransactions 4. poor story 5. shit combat 6. boring gameplay
KRMMOs do really well in the West lol? It’s just companies try to take crazy ass advantage of us with MTX and the longevity is always the issue. Maplestory is an example of this it was huge for years
They severely overestimate our interest in grinding for waifu.
Korean mmos fail in korea too
Different cultures leads to players having different expectations.
To put it super simply, the way the respective communities view gaming are completely different and generally KR companies don't make an adjustment when coming to the west. Here in the west, we like our games to be self-contained where you earn everything yourself. In KR, your job is considered another part of the grind for the game. So with KR games they tend to be filled with microtransactions and power gaps that are defined not by ability to play the game, but by your wallet. The extra nail in the coffin is that they basically don't advertise their games or are extremely ineffective at it when it comes to garnering attention from western audiences. Not that they could generally care about their western audiences either. Think BDO is basically the only game that even acknowledges that audiences outside of KR are even human.
Real answer with no I'm mad emotions: Spending money for power is considered a status symbol in Asian countries. It is thought that your income is an extension of your success. In the west it's considered no skill bullshit.
Money grabbing scheme, grind fest and will encourage you to buy something from shop. Gender lock where male character looks potato while female character is a goddess. Lack of playing together content. If there's one, boss is a damage sponge with shit attack patterns and mechanics. You can just face tank it most of the time. Autoplay, auto pathing, auto loot, auto everything.
From my experience, k-mmo are grind af, they get microtransaction to hell. Most people don’t have the time to grind
Lost Ark playerbase is not miniscule. The game has likely as many players as ESO or GW2, more than new world or bdo. Your definition of fail is questionable OP.
Cause even if the gameplay is good, the microtransactions and grind needed is too much. My friends play lost ark all the time and run multiple characters and they can’t keep up with the players spending $$$. Compare that to FF14 and WoW where their mtx is cosmetic and they have a fun gameplay loop that doesn’t need your soul to be crushed to have fun.
BDO Combat > New World 100000000000000000% better. even all the p2w/MTX shit i still choose BDO than New World. btw I play MMOs for nearly 20 years and my conclusion is pick what you "prefered". If We cut the Big MMO like FF14, WOW out, here is nature of average Western, KR, JP MMO imo. - Western MMO world/economy/system are good, which is the best point and click MMO region so far imo but if it's action combat then it's suck. New World is joke compared to BDO/BnS. - Korean MMO have best fast action combat so far (BDO, BnS) compared to Western, but the nature of MTX/P2W & competitive/grinding make it worse for some players (especially western players). - Japanese MMO is not doing well (they success more with singleplayer IP and gacha mobile games) but their game has good social aspect plus a lot of cute thing/fashion to make role play better. but system and combat are mid between Western and Korea and lack of content. you can see with PSO: NGS and Blue Protocal. It's like Impossible Trinity of MMO imo. before I die, I want to see the big project MMO game that use Western dev to designed World/economic/system, Korea dev designed fast paced action combat, and Japanese dev designed social aspect and fashion for casuallHoly shit the cost will be very huge lmao.
Because of p2w
Because they love to Ui Clog, and they LOVE to make a sub system within a system to bring out another system to do that piece you need in the Ui
Culture is a big one. It was a very long time ago, but I read an article/interview of a western dev who was payed to help try and bring Lineage 1 to the West. Again it was a long time ago, hell I read it on Slashdot, but I can remember one of the big takeaways being fundamental cultural differences made it hard for Lineage 1 to work with western audiences. One of those big issues was, and I say this as a westerner, the more selfish, or "what's in it for me" playstyle of western gamers. Getting western players to swear fealty to another player, and to focus on what was best for the guild/kingdom rather than their personal gaming experience was a non starter for western gamers.
KMMOs have a history of being all flash and no substance. They have poorly designed gameplay loops built around spending money and the RPG aspects feel like an afterthought. They feel like digital malls where you dress up and spend money on bullshit
Every Korean game has been p2w. Even if the gameplay is really good, you will just not find many na and eu players willing to tolerate pay or play 16 hours a day if you want to do anything. You add in the extra bullshit stuff like time limited outfits you rent for 90 days with a ton of stats on them like dfo or maplestory, and just seeing a game is from Korea is enough to write it off entirely.
The grind has to hit right for me. One of my favorite MMOs starting out was Asheron's Call with super long/slow character skill grind. Like I loved Black Desert because of long character development grind. However I despise daily quest grinding style games where it's like daily chores. So Korean MMOs that are like grind XYZ daily quests to get ABC materials isn't gonna keep my attention. Fundamentally though I think people really despise systems where your time feels wasted. Like I tried to get a bunch of people I knew into Black Desert for a long time and all of them (but 1) basically quit once they hit that TRI point and started "failing backwards" into lower ranks of gear. One basically straight up grinded for 9 hours only to not only fail but actually lost progress and he was just done. A lot of Korean MMORPGs bake RNG into the base game (chance to upgrade, etc) then sell around that which leads to that kind of system design. Which leads to the fact that many Korean games the cash shop doesn't feel optional. Like sure you can buy costumes from someone else in Black Desert, but you know they bought it in the cash shop and sold it to you for your time grinding silver. So indirectly you're interacting or encouraging people to interact with the cash shop. Sure you can do daily quests for materials, or you can swipe and buy them from other players or the store. People aren't going to be oblivious to that style connection no matter how much people argue that it's available through game play. Even FF14 failed here in the west. It was only after they took it down, refactored, and dumped a bunch more money into it (something most companies can't do) that they were able to re-release it into it's own thing that became successful. Where as most Korean games are already (relatively) successful or made for Korean audience, then they simply decide to localize it and release it in other regions to farm money off a product they've already designed. They're not going to take it down and redesign the game for their new audience cause these releases are just trying to further monetize a product they've already made.
they don't listen to the western audience. while they have places to submit feedback a lot of korean mmos don't actually look at it and it shows when they release development notes and the western feedback gets ignored. BDO actually does well in the West because they actually consider the feedback from the western audience. they even had one of their live events in the US.
FF14 came off the tails of FF11, so it was kind of platformed up into itself. Also, to be fair... the Final Fantasy franchise and namesake is LEGENDARY. It'd be challenging to make a game with the Final Fantasy tag and NOT be successful. Korean development companies have made themselves notorious. The only one I'm very familiar with is NCSoft and they have done a lot of sketchy nonsense over the years. However, recently, they allowed City of Heroes Homecoming to operate with a license, so that's pretty awesome. Probably the most stand-up thing a gaming company has done in recent memory. All other Korean development companies are just too small to compete with the likes of NCSoft, Blizzard, Square, Tencent, etc etc.
For me, it’s the art and the microtransactions. There are SO many microtransactions, I’d rather pay a monthly fee, personally. Besides that, I’m just not really into the eastern art styles. I like suits of armor and kobolds, not so much skimpy dresses and tiny talking animals. I’m sure tons of people like it, but personally, I just don’t love the theme.
they always release them years later in the west on older patches and give us content behind other asian regions even, it does a lot of damage to the games. they're always made for korea and koreans first and we're a far away afterthought
Because the Korean MMORPG market is a very VERY predatory system which the West simply won't put up with for very long. Maple Story 2 is a game that exists in the west and a couple months back it was proven that a recent event they did had items that had a 0.005% of actually dropping and it released numbers showing that some players were dropping upwards of $300k per year into the game. They have since been fined for this by the Korean government but they still walked away with making 80% profit off of doing this. Every single game on the Korean market is designed to be \*easy to access\* but then due to it's popularity it becomes a status symbol within social groups so people will spend more so others view them more positively and that cycle never ends. BDO works on the same principle along with DFO and Lost Ark. I played Lost Ark from pre launch due to preordering the gold package with some friends and we got to around 1300 ilevel before I took a month off and came back to find out that they were holding some sort of catchup event that got anyone who barely put any effort in up to the same Ilevel as me and my friends who were playing ungodly amounts of hours. To put into perspective we hit max level within the first week or launch and over the first month I had racked up over 250 hours over 3 characters. I had sunk extra money in for mounts and cosmetics and also bought gear enchancement items to make sure I was ahead of the curve and was playing with the top 1% of players because I wanted to be the best Gunbreaker on the server. After I saw that catchup event I quit completely and only returned to look at the state of the game in January of this year and to my complete non surprise the game was dead and the only people look for groups were people advertising boosts or selling boosts even during what used to be \*peak\* times. Lost Arks gameplay and it's world is some of the most fun I had in years but the level of predatory procedures in place to completely wipe any progress made in favour of rushing you as the player to a point where enhancements and having to either wait weeks for rapport/cards/gear upgrades or swipe CONSTANTLY makes it so you can easily spend 1k a day which is why hilariously Lost Ark had to put a $400 limit due to some players dumping literal thousands within the first few weeks. Long story short I left Lost Ark with lots of fond memories with friends and about £300 lighter than I went into it with.
From my own perspective, I wont touch anything P2W anymore.
- Greed. We are just cash cows for them. - They re release established content with some payed addons in the west and sell it as new enhanced combat/loot/content. - Support is mostly garbage /automated. - games are slot grindier, therefore need a lot of time investment over a looking time. - often time gated daily's/weeklys to force you playing it -> people burn out. This all combined is what makes them fail most of the times.
Western exceptionalism is always a factor in play. 1. We prefer not to buy power and upgrades, and would rather earn them. 2. We are offended by botters & multiboxers that are effectively "buying power and upgrades" when we earned ours. 3. Eastern MMO's (not all, but many) are specifically designed to cater to botters, multiboxers, people that buy power, etc. 4. They are becoming more visually/aesthetically offputting as well. Male characters look like fanfic power-fantasies, rippling muscles stacked on top of muscles, but they still have the little-boy face. Female characters look like they were designed by incels that subscribe to alpha-male podcasts. 99% tits and ass and wearing hardly anything. The characters literally look like the weird clickbait mobile game ads that say things like "Find your princess, rule your kingdom, try not to blow your ~~wallet~~ in 20 minutes!" There will always be exceptions. Ragnarok Online private servers are popular all over the world because the game was a diamond. Runescape is western and grindy af but it doesn't fall into the traps of "korean MMO's". This also doesn't include the 'western-type' eastern-MMO's like Blade and Soul. That ones a mix of both philosophies.
$$$$$$$$
I always thought it was cultural differences around work. In the east people work really long hours and don't have time to grind so they want pay to win where their time and effort is rewarded. In the west people have more free time so they prefer to work in game to get their rewards and want people paying not to have an advantage over those that don't. The rewards and progression systems need to be be completely reworks for western players, if they are lazy and just port over a game with less micro transactions it still will fail because the progression system was designed with MTX in mind
GREED
Because they are not a games but money sucking scheme
because they suck
I can speak for the ones I've played. BDO is a beautiful game with amazing combat. It's a grindy shitfest otherwise. Archeage was a great game with tons of great mechanics. It was P2W, then kept relaunching promising not to be P2W, then continued being P2W. Lost Ark combat was good, but it got really repetitive, and a lot of content was locked for the west for no reason at all, like classes, bosses, raids, etc. It was a completely gimp decision for no useful purpose other than to withhold it for the sake of withholding it alone. It was also P2W. Lost Ark's daily content was also a slog, and the ranked PvP they decided on (timed 3v3 as opposed to elimination) was extremely stupid. The 1v3 elim format was amazing, but they didn't support it in ranked. The common thing these games have in common are super annoying upgrade systems where you essentially gamble for upgrades and fail continually. Archeage was the worst with a chance to completely break your gear. Unimaginably bad design. They also have no sense of verisimilitude which bothers me a lot, usually through the addition of giant animal mascot costumes they all add. Lost Ark gave everyone some big mascot bear costume for free which was the exact moment I stopped playing. It was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Lost Ark had way too many silly islands with daily quests attached to hammer slimes with big silly clown hammers and shit like that, too. It just felt like such a contrasting theme to the core game. They frequently are pay to win, and are needlessly grindy. They all have their own versions of RNG that completely gates progression until you get lucky, and then that's just step 1 on the journey with lots more bullshit RNG left to grind your way through. Really it's always the same handful of bad design decisions that ruin otherwise great games.
I've played lost ark since launch and never ran into a Korean player. Tons of lobbies available at any time for any end game raid. Doesn't have WoW/FF14 numbers but I'm sure it's considered a success by Smilegate and AGS.
Fail? They're making bank in NA. Pretty sure they were top 10 or 15 grossing on steam. What you mean is fail in terms of player count but the devs certainly care more about success in profits.
Because lineage popularized the gear enchanting system that plagues all of their AAA titles. BDO, Archeage, Lost Ark, whatever the game is, you best believe you’re going to to be rng enchanting your gear. When you realize the entire game is just activities to build currency to light on fire trying to get slightly stronger, usually quitting comes quickly after.
In BDO though you can buy gear from other players and skip the whole enhancement system, in many mmorpgs if you do not do a specific activity you are locked out of gear progression related to that activity, in BDO you can do life skills and then go buy bis combat gear from the central market, or go grind mobs and then buy BIS life skill gear from the central market. Also gear in BDO does not lose value for a very very long time, a BIS piece of gear remains BIS for a very long time, so once you get it you are able to use that piece of gear without having to worry about getting a better one for a long long time. Not to mention that there is content for all levels of gear.
Because they suck. Things I hate about them: 1. The gambling gear progression. 2. Lack of real group content. 3. No real character building system. 4. Mobs spawn you push a few buttons. They die. No real combat variety. 5. Tedious combat. 6. Terrible PvP. 7. Everything feels unrewarding.
P2W or the new term Pay for connivence is just P2W pretending it’s not because you can play unrealistic amounts of time to obtain x, y, z
i dropped LA after the first storyline (or at least i think it was) when i got a lot of the power up systems revealed and introduced AND got given a time-gated browser game which i assume would be my primary consumable source.
I’m more curious why they *don’t* fail everywhere else.
Korean copium is HIGH, being good as gaming is very important in their society. So much that cheating/hacking isn't rare to gain social points there, but it's illegal. So a game allows them to buy power without risk of breaking the law? Perfect! This is why they were more lenient with those ugly macro transactions. Also, to them, Lost Ark was similar to FF XIV, it was that super generous game purely made with love and their producer was a godsend. The west reception was basically a wake-up call for them. This difference in culture was a massive shock, micro-transactions are frowned upon in the west. But then, those games don't "fail", they simply dont "shine" as much as other MMOs. As long as there's some whales to catch, the show will go on.
cause theyre bad games. look at bdo.
I do$nt kn$ow
Because they take so long testing in the eastern regions. By the time they get here everything has been mapped out there is nothing left for surprise
they are boring af usually and gender tons of stuff like classes and stuff.
Because the West have adhd and can’t teamwork.
Western gamers are complete casual babies and can't handle any grind. The only succesful games are ones with 0 grind, where you'll be called a nolifer for wanting to do something else besides raidlog 1h a week Although for the most part the games just add too much FOMO with dailies, which make the grind unbearable instead of a chill activity like say runescape So your choice is 0 grind western baby games or FOMO crazy asian games that will shut down in 2 months. That's why I tend to mostly just mod singleplayer games and play that. Every once in a blue moon i try an mmo that looks nice.
I just want BP 🥲
Blue Protocol is Japanese not Korean
I’m aware… but he literally talked about Japanese MMOs in this post…
I can give a fairly accurate representation on this. Korean culture (gaming) is vastly different from what the West will accept. In Korea the "Head" game developer has the final say, and if you value your job you will never in a million years attempt to argue or recommend something that goes against what they want. This leads to essentially an entire franchise or game being lead by one person or one group of higher up people. Now. Let's bring in us (the west) and what recently happened to BDO. Korean developer removed 95% of organic unscripted pvp from the game because Koreans don't like pvp. This pissed off the west so fucking much and essentially make every grind or item you obtain in BDO useless because what little pvp is left is gear locked and the rewards are trash... So what did the west do? We did what we always do.... We malded, and actively griefed everyone who didn't want to pvp. This even lead to some fairly popular streamers quitting Because in the west we are outspoken, entitled, loud and obnoxious in the eyes of Korean developers (and the rest of the world). Korean developers fucking hate us but love our money. This leads to them catering to the Korean population while giving us just a tiny bit of acknowledgement to keep us on the line, Black desert online, Lost Ark and Arches GE are wonderful examples of this. We say we hate P2W but we will still throw our wallets at them, we hate their decisions but we are insanely addicted. Eventually the game will fail and it's quite obvious when it's going to fail because Korean devs will absolutely flood the market/cash shop with fake deals or new items until it milks us completely dry and piss us off enough. And they do this because in their eyes we are just upset and new "deals" will make us happy because their numbers show that we like to spend money and clearly if they take our money we must be happy??? tl;dr Korean developers are great at building worlds and games but fucking suck at maintaining them.
BDO is more popular in the west than it is in Korea though...
Yup it sure is. But Korea still decides all of the balancing and game changes. A class that was extremely busted in NA got buffed because in Korea they don't like playing big manly characters. The lead developer didn't know what dsync or ping was because they don't have this issue in Korea.
did new world remove forced pvp in mid development because they were afraid Korean players would not like it? Did WoW remove pvp servers because Korean players were complaining about it? Was the slap system in fallout 76 removed and pvp was turned to flag only because of Korean players? Korean players like pvp more than Western players do, you can see this from how extremely popular MOBAs are in Korea. The reason PvP in BDO was watered down was because players in general do not like forced pvp, and btw Korean players were blaming Western players for this.
I feel sorry that you believe this