Lost Ark – Our lowest “Community First” ranked game team

As a final follow up to my post on “Community First” game companies we analyze why Lost Ark was our lowest ranked game team in 2023 and how Amazon might be able to turn things around. Check the comments for the link to the original article and yesterday’s write up on GTA and the analysis of WoW.

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS

Lost Ark unfortunately was given the lowest rating out of all the games we reviewed. The Lost Ark social media presence was our worst performer on two metrics: 1. Total Brand posts and 2. Sentiment. Lost Ark was the only title that had a overall six month negative social media sentiment score of the 10 title swe analyzed. Major brand collaborations such as the Witcher drove up engagement and impressions which ultimately pushes up their total social volume.

OPPORTUNITY

With such a large active player-base Lost Ark may have the biggest up-side of any of the games we profiled if the publisher engages and puts “Community First”

COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

Due to the hands-off nature of Amazon Games, the largest Discord server (second largest we profiled) for Lost Ark is fan operated. There is an Amazon Games Discord that has little activity from the Community or Community managers.

Amazon Games prefers communicating on their owned forums and website which is much less visited than their biggest Discord channel, which we profiled here.  Also, there is a disconnect with fans. Fans want to hear from the developer (Smilegate) directly not Amazon. There is a negative vibe and a feeling of “second rate citizens” that fans in the west have since the developer does not directly engage and players in Korea get all firsthand information.

OPPORTUNITY

Instead of creating a brand-new Lost Ark Discord, Amazon should aim to tap into the 210,000+ and growing community Discord and host community activities, AMAs and use it as a gateway to effectively communicate with the community and gather feedback from the already large servers. In addition, there is an opportunity for Smilegate to have a presence more directly with the fans.

ENGAGEMENT ANALYSIS

Although ranking fourth in our engagement percentage, Lost Ark fumbled their response to major events that impacted the player base greatly.

In early Jan, Lost Ark issued a notice to players about having banned bot accounts. Inadvertently, due to backend issues, real and active player accounts had also been banned leaving those players frustrated and unable to access their accounts. Additionally, their Steam player score was affected as well. The fact that the accounts were banned created an uproar. However, what fueled player disappointment even more was the lack of communication, transparency, and details about future actions from the community team. This left many players irritated and frustrated.

To appease player complaints, a False Ban Wave Compensation Package was also created. The information surrounding this compensation package however was not publicly communicated on major platforms such as Twitter. Players became aware of the compensation through Discord and community forums and discussions, word of mouth, and news from the game’s website. No official announcement regarding the comp package was ever made leaving a lot of players out of the loop in a time when open dialogue was key.