Heroes of Arkesia,
As we head toward the North American Region Merge and the climactic battle against Kazeros arriving in November, we had a few quick topics we wanted to discuss. We’re going to dive right into a team update, and will also be following up with some more thorough updates and policies in the coming weeks.
Region Merge
NA West will be merged into NA East on October 22. The full policy will be released on October 15, but will be straightforward as no servers (and therefore rosters) are being merged. Because of the region merge, the October content update will be at the end of the month, arriving on October 29. We also wanted to give an early warning that after the October update, the time between the October and November updates will be shorter to adjust the update timing for November and December to the middle of the month.
As previously shared, we’ve worked to create fairer naming policies for characters and guilds, and have been working to reduce the downtime by deleting permanently banned accounts to optimize our systems and improve the overall experience for legitimate players. While the downtime will still be extensive for NA West and NA East, we are working to ensure it is as short as possible.
We are planning to release additional names from inactive accounts later this year or early next year, after the merge. We are conducting this after the merge to prevent players from potentially making multiple name changes only to lose their desired name alongside their original.
Roadmap
Lucky Box
We have seen speculation in the community surrounding the Lucky Box event, as different versions of this event have been released in different regions of Lost Ark around the globe. We wanted to clarify that the version releasing will closely resemble the version originally released in Korea, without the gacha-style systems present in other regions.
For players not aware of what the system entails, you can complete daily and special missions to earn Lucky Boxes, which contain various honing materials, trade items, cards and potentially a Surprise Box. The Surprise Box has a chance to drop special items, like a Relic Engraving Selection Chest, Chaos Stones with a 100% success rate, Legendary Card Selection Pack, along with honing materials.
Thaemine Extreme
Additionally, we saw some questions asking if Thaemine Extreme would still be launching in the West. With the Assault Raid running until the first ever double raid release with Act 4 and Kazeros in November, the timing didn’t feel quite right. Along with the Ark Grid System we didn’t want to overwhelm players with too many raids and systems to learn, so we’re waiting to release it until the timing makes sense given other events and content releases. We’ll share more updates in the future, likely in a future roadmap.
Kazeros The First
Our team has been reviewing lots of feedback around the Kazeros The First clear race, raid release plans, and are doing our best to factor this into our plans and policies as we head toward the climactic battle in November. While these plans are still being developed, we wanted to share an early look at a few policies/plans.
A player that has been penalized for RMT or other forms of cheating in Lost Ark will be ineligible to compete in the first clear race, no matter when they received it (from launch until the race). We will also be conducting extensive account reviews (similar to the Thaemine The First Race) to ensure there is no disqualifying behavior hidden in the past.
While speed-hacking has not been a widespread issue in Lost Ark (in terms of volume), we understand the negative impact and we want to ensure that it won’t be present in the competition. While we generally don't post our ban or cheat detection numbers, we have been continuing to develop new detections methods for speed-hacks. Just in the past few weeks, we've caught and banned over 100 accounts using speed-hacks. This work will continue, and ramp up, as we head toward the race.
We are continuing to investigate other plans for the release of Kazeros to ensure that it best fits our community, and will share any updates we have as soon as we’re able. We know that players who intend to race are curious about the date, and we’ll share that once the plan has been fully locked in.
We appreciate the passion from the community along with the ongoing feedback and questions, and will be working to provide updates throughout the merge process and as we head toward the battle against Kazeros in November. In the meantime, we’ll see you in Arkesia.