The experience of central EU players of Lost Ark has been an absolute mess. As we’ve been reporting, massive player counts in the region have led to Amazon Games and Smilegate opening up a Europe West server cluster (with no way for established central EU players to transfer characters over) in an attempt to alleviate server-related issues.
Over the weekend, players on the game’s feedback forums continued to call attention to server queue problems, while some threads in the forums and several in the game’s subreddit point out a vast number of players are experiencing matchmaking issues. These problems have reportedly been ongoing for seven days to the point that a megathread was formed on Reddit to collect player frustration and feedback.
It does appear that Amazon is aware of the issues and as of yesterday vowed to investigate.
We are also looking into matchmaking and any other issues that occurred in the past days. You can find more "Current Top Issues" updates on the forum https://t.co/vrH7VpqHH7
— Lost Ark (@playlostark) February 20, 2022
Meanwhile, Lost Ark is touting a free launch celebration pack being issued today that features health potions, items, mounts, and instrument skins, as well as bonus founder’s pack items that can be collected by players who start on a different server (though those are apparently borked too) and goodies handed out to players on Galatur who were stuck by a bug in a story quest.
“Lost Ark has become more popular than we ever could have anticipated, scaling to 800K concurrent players in 17 minutes and 1.3MM in 24 hours. This is the balance of bringing great games to new territories – new surges in demand can also bring new, unforeseen challenges. Given the complexity of the systems that have to work together, adding more capacity in ‘Europe Central’ data center is not an option. Instead, Smilegate and Amazon Games partnered to deploy a new data center for European players in just 5 days — ‘Europe West’ — to respond to the regional demand. To further clarify, the terms ‘Europe Central Region’ and ‘Europe West Region’ are the names of specific data centers, and do not refer to the geographical region of Central Europe.
“Since opening four days ago, the new ‘Europe West Region’ data center now houses just under 20% of our European players and is growing every day. We know queue times are very frustrating for our players, and we are encouraged to see this new data center has already reduced peak queues by 48%. We’re monitoring this number closely while continuously working to further improve queue times.”
Amazon does not here explain why it deleted the tweet we quoted yesterday, but you can still view it above.
