The fact that Lost Ark is about to get some major server merges is no great revelation – and that’s because Amazon and Smilegate have been talking about it since almost the top of the year, not just because the game’s peak concurrent numbers have hovered under 100K for most of the last year, which sounds like a lot until you realize the last few months the population peaks have been about 5% of their launch numbers. But if you’ve been out of the loop, you need to know that one of the merges is happening tomorrowday, with the other to follow next week.
“We have two waves of server merges planned over the next two weeks to enhance the group gameplay experience in the open world of Arkesia. The first round will take place during downtime on March 6, and the second round will take place during downtime on March 13,” Amazon says. “Server merges will be straightforward for players who have a roster of characters on one of the servers (they’ll just need to log-in to the new server), but players who have a roster on both servers will have their rosters combined.”
“Our teams at Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games are working to optimize the merge process and shorten the amount of downtime, but the process is complex and will take additional time. We are currently expecting that each weekly downtime with server merges will take up to 16 hours. To account for this, downtime will start 3hrs earlier than normal.”
The server list is huge; wave one involves 18 servers in Central Europe and 28 in the Americas, while wave two is slightly smaller and more complicated as it merges more servers into some of the other servers and renames them. We count 57 unique servers total affected. Obviously, if you’re on any of the servers on the list, you should prep now and read through the granular details.
