Gatekeeping? You hear this term being thrown around people complain about it on Reddit. You’ll see it in a game many people that want Lost Ark to be a “dead game” always throughout this term. By the end of this article, you’re going to get a better understanding of what gatekeeping is and you’re going to roll your eyes so hard the next time someone mentions gatekeeping in 99 of situations.

First, let’s look at gatekeeping as a spectrum. So, if there’s no gatekeeping at all at the one end of the spectrum. You’re going to get people that apply to your parties with complete rainbow stats. So, the order of importance goes like these Engravings (which you can get by using Lost Ark Gold) and stats.

Engravings and stats is the bare minimum and it just shows if the person can do a simple Google search. You’re trying to find life in that barren wasteland of a brain and then gems and quality shows how much they care about the character really relative to their economy. And finally, if you’re really sweaty, you can invite them to your party and ask them where their bed faces in their bedroom to determine their Feng Shui to guarantee you’re clearly there’s always content where gatekeeping doesn’t matter at all.

Let’s say I take my 1500 character into Argos and I blast it with another 1500 eye level friend and bada-bing bada-boom would take any of the Coco’s.

However, we’re going to take Rainbow Lucky Charms, but in content where people have to kind of carry their weight. You will not take the next precise dagger one. That’s just not how it works. It’s because we are all playing a MMORPG and you expect a certain level of effort from every player in your raider.

If one person slacks, someone else in the raid has to pick up that slack. No one is saying you can’t do the raid or you don’t know the raid. People just expect to do it at a certain speed and they want to clear it as quickly as possible. So, as the content gets harder, the requirement and gatekeeping also goes up as a funny little exercise.

Let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. The other extreme end of gatekeeping is someone who is only looking for max eye level people 5x3 plus one led to Salvation 30. I wouldn’t get into these groups because I’m not 1580. I parked most of my characters around the 1540 sweet spot for ancient bracelets, so ultimately, gatekeeping is a slider where the center of the slider is.

What you need for the end game contents and the easier the content is, the more the slider can move towards the side of Nokia keeping at all. So, I would consider this the horizontal spectrum of gatekeeping. One thing is a lot of scenarios where people get the knife from the party is. This is because of anything on the spectrum at all. It’s the way party finder works in Los Ark because many people don’t want to make their parties.

So, if you make a party, your applicant pool is going to fill up quickly, especially if you have support friends. A raid only has eight slots. So, whoever makes the party takes up one of them. There’s only seven slots to go and there’s way over seven people applying, especially if it’s looking for DPS. So, the average Joe applies, but then better Joe applies.

They’re probably gonna just take the better Joe in 99 of cases. I mean, at that point, were you really a gatekeeping? No, it’s just someone’s better.

That’s when you just work on yourself because the way things work, Lost Ark is actually a PVP game disguised as a PVE game. You’re always against the competition, which is why they don’t make support like they don’t solve the support issue because then you’re motivated to swipe to increase your character power to get into parties better, etc.

*What is a player to do in without succumbing to these predatory monetization schemes? Try joining a party early. You see, one out of eight, two out of eight and three out of eight. You have a better chance of joining those than, say, six out of eight. That’s looking for one support in the support’s friend.

*The second thing you can do is engage in one of these online communities. There are discord groups. There are also streamer groups. So, if you ever see a streamer making a party like TTV and party finder, that’s a perfect place to get started.