Earlier this week, the Lost Ark Twitter account announced that servers would be offline on Wednesday, October 12, as they scheduled weekly maintenance and the Season 2 Ark Pass. Today, that pass is live, featuring three tiers for players to participate in. There is one free tier, and two paid tiers. The Premium tier costs 1500 crystals, and the Super Premium tier costs 3000 crystals. Who knows if one day we will see an Ultra Super Premium tier in this game, but for now it’s just the three.
Like Fortnite‘s Battle Pass, it is possible to gain rewards from the free pass. The Ark Pass will have 30 levels to grind through. This has been a busy month for Lost Ark. In September, the MMOARPG launched “Rage with the Machinist,” which featured a new character, obviously called the Machinist, as “the Fifth Gunner Advanced Class.” There was also the addition of the Kakul-Saydon Legion Raid and a roadmap that details goals for the rest of the year, including new raids, two Advanced Classes, and a new difficulty setting for the Vykas Legion Raid.
In the Tweet below, notes about the Season 2 Ark Pass update are included with some fixes mentioned in the details.
That last bit seems a little passive-aggressive, but their point is made. The Season 2 Ark Pass aims to bring plenty of rewards to players, but the comments section is less supportive. Players in the free tier are voicing their frustration at how difficult it is to gain gold without paying. One player demands that they “stop putting 3-day holds on gold bought in-game.” The player believes this is why buying gold from places like G2G is so prominent. Other comments bring up that gold laundering in the markets is a real problem, and will lead to the loss of free players. Bots are a huge problem for the game. Despite the fact that one of the updates allows “withheld gold used in crafting through Strongholds” to be refunded “in what seems to be an attempt to close a gold farming loophole,” many players don’t feel that the problem has been solved.
Lost Ark has been gaining the reputation of being a pay-to-win game. With two different paid tiers and such a difficult time getting meaningful benefits from the free tier, there’s no point in playing if you’re not going to pay real money out of your own pocket. At least with Fortnite‘s paid Battle Pass, the rewards are just gaining cosmetics faster than you would with the free pass, but you aren’t going to be able to pay for any real advantages in the game. That makes it fun for everyone, not just bots and scammers.
The Season 2 Ark Pass is live today if you’re still holding on to hope for a better free-to-play Lost Ark.
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