I just lost the ark

HGR quit Lost Ark last night. I really didn’t expect him to be the first to drop it (though, to be fair, he’s clocked 300+ hours which is assuredly longer than I’ll wind up playing).

There were a couple reasons. First, he was bummed there were not enough people to do high-level world content with him. When Lost Ark first released, most serious players purchased the Founders Pack, which gave them a week of early access. Then the servers filled up. So our server is a runoff server for non-founders. That means it’s full of casuals (like me) who are nowhere near HGR’s level. He reached tier 3 a couple days ago, went to do the tier 3 Chaos Gate (a daily nexus-like event), and discovered there was no one else with him. Nobody on our server does tier 3 Chaos Gates because the playerbase is just not there. And since he spent his daily Chaos Gate entry on that, he couldn’t even farm currency at a lower-level gate.

More importantly, his main impetus for playing the game was doing high-level raid content with friends. Hardcore bosses are his jam. But it doesn’t look like he’ll have friends to play with. Frey and numbers quit the game, I’m a turtle, etc. He could pug the raids, but would that really be fun? Not so much. And without doing the high-level raid content, it’s just a game of numbers going up, and he resolved last year that life was too short to spend on NGU.

So he quit. He doesn’t do anything by halves. Last night, he logged out for the last time, and he’ll never log in again. Going instantly from 17+ hours a day to 0.

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update: He’s now streaming DT4.

“There’s no such thing as free damage, newbie. If there were, someone would already have taken it. […] The efficient damage hypothesis says if this were easy damage, I would already be doing it.”

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update (3/7): Come to think of it, I haven’t been on Lost Ark since HGR quit.

“Did you quit because of me?” he said. I don’t think so? I’ve just been doing other stuff, such as reading Moon Witch, Spider King. I want to at least resolve the current arc (you drink little blob juice and go to littleblobville, it’s very cute).