In just 24 hours of its February 11th release, the free-to-play MMO Lost Ark became the second most concurrent users in Steam history. The game’s popularity has resulted in lengthy wait times for European players, although the game’s publisher and developer, Smilegate, are striving to alleviate the situation.
There were long lines on the Europe Central server right away.
so engineers promised a second server in the Europe West region to alleviate the problem. “The Europe Central region is at capacity and regrettably there is no way to raise the number of players per planet in Europe Central,” the devs wrote in a post on the Lost Ark forums. “Additional servers cannot be added because of the intricacy of all the systems that must work together.”
Players in the western hemisphere are unable to switch to another server, which is a shame.
As a result, those who have spent a large amount of time in Europe Central are unable to transfer their advancement to Europe West. There is now a server transfer feature in Korea, where the game was first released in 2019, but it “recently rolled out” in the area and “does not offer cross-region functioning,” which means that it’s “not a feasible option at this point for the Western version.” Despite its flaws, Lost Ark is still a popular series. According to Valve’s Steam analytics website, it had more than 1 million concurrent users as of Monday afternoon. Final Fantasy XIV, which had to stop offering its free trial after the December release of the Endwalker expansion due to server capacity concerns, will resume offering it on February 22nd.