Oh, um. It wasn't my number 1 vote, but if we're going by hours played then I suppose it was my most played game of 2022. I don't think I saw it on the list but I wasn't looking.
There is a lot to like about Lost Ark but it eventually started feeling like logging in to do daily/weekly chores to get upgrade materials and gold then see them all vanish on failing 1% chance to upgrade.
New raid would come out and it was clearly going to be a couple more months of grinding daily chores to get in at minimum gearscore but then there's new items to start the process again.
The raids are really hard too, which I'm fine with, but people started to get really elitist and would quit the raid if it didn't look like we'd win it easily. They want overgeared whales who pay to buy and upgrade everything and that's not an option for me. Top Korean players have spent $700,000 USD on upgrades and auction house. Good groups would be selling raid "Bus" where you'd have to pay thousands of gold to get a spot in the raid.
So here's the catch that no one really mentioned in the loads of fan hype videos I was watching to try and work out how P2W it really was...
1. You can't give gear to your alts! Can only sell it in the Auction House.
2. The "pheon" currency that you use to buy things on the auction house is probably the most p2w thing. You get like 10 per month in the daily login rewards and in tier1 the price was like 1 coin per item, but at high level it keeps going up to like 15 coins and beyond.
Last time I logged in was August.
edit:
Couple more things worth mentioning, especially for anyone reading who was thinking about trying it out,
The leveling dungeons are great but everyone will be soloing them. At launch there were groups but don't waste your time in a queue for leveling dungeons, anymore.
The bots! I'm not up to date on the bots but I would say even though Steam says theres 300k players at least half of those could be bots. I've never seen a game with more bots running around.