Good evening fellow corn farmers and MMO nostalgics. Lost Ark seems entertaining to me as a crossover between Diablo and Guild Wars with a hint of WoW. Is it worth playing for lowly peons who spend 12 hours a day working/traveling or is there no point? Also how predatory is it regarding payment to progress?
Is it possible to both progress and enjoy oneself by using money to make up for lack of time and is it the cost worthwhile?
I think Lost Ark's general casual stuff is a satisfying enough romp that you can almost completely ignore the whole raiding progression stuff and get a fine time for a free game if you like this style of game (Diablo esque). Just mash skip the story and you'll be good. I think their are ways to boost to level 50 for a reasonable price which might be what you're looking for. Once you get one character at 50 and through some point in the main scenario, you get what's called a "powerpass" twice, which is another level 50 boost for other alts. It is very easy to get alts endgame ready once you get to endgame one time, which means you get to play many classes and the classes are generally fun.
If you want to get into the whole raiding progression stuff and get sweaty, I don't think its worth it for you as it has a good chunk of daily/weekly grinds that you're encouraged to do across your main and alt characters (which take a solid amount of time per, but their are some rollover systems so you don't have to do them literally every day). Their is a pay to skip element for progression, but it isn't very direct or cheap at all to see notable power boosts, as unlike in KR/RU you can't directly buy the items you need to progress your gear (the primary gate) and instead you roundabout buy weekly currency to get items which is more expensive to the point of almost uselessness then in KR/RU that a lot of people are citing it as a total p2w shitshow.
So unless you want to give Amazon mucho buckos, I'd find contentment in just casually doing your dailies and progress at whatever pace you can enjoy yourself in and you'll probably have fun.
As far as how predatory it is by itself, unless you really give a shit about doing the big sweaty raids, it doesn't matter and you need real legit skill to beat them anyway so you can't just credit card swipe to win for very long from what I've asked. For a KR MMO? I've seen much much worse tbh which is the only reason I'm trying it as I usually avoid KR MMOs on sight. I've also been told that the gear enhancement cap is +20 in this version instead of +25, which notably lowers the p2w ceiling compared to KR/RU versions.
I also find the game to be kind of resource heavy, especially on RAM for some reason where the title screen uses about 30-40% of my 16 gb of ram, so if you don't have a good laptop (I assume what you'll use to play if you're that busy) you might struggle to enjoy the game as well.
tl;dr:
I'd enjoy it casually and just take in whatever content you can timely afford, you get at least 3 mostly max level characters for the price of doing it once for free which is a decent price tag for a f2p game and their are level 50 boosts too but I don't know how they work, so you can get a solid piece of action across 3 different classes pretty quickly. Game is fun if you like Diablo-esque combat and is at minimum a fun romp where you just blow up enemies with your big sword, your giant fireballs, or with the mighty backhand. As far as p2w stuff, it is tolerable for KR MMO standards which are usually rock fucking bottom as using your alts to grind is a very useful way to speed up progress that anyone can do.
