Lost Ark developers race to relieve pressure on servers in wake of huge launch

polygon.com:

Lost Ark, the massively multiplayer game taking Steam by storm, will receive a new server region in an attempt to alleviate long login queues for European players.

The game has had an explosive launch weekend that saw it become the second most-played game of all time on Steam, going by peak concurrent players. At 1.33 million players, it narrowly beat the peak numbers of Steam stalwarts Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, but fell some way short of the record 3.3 million players recorded by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in early 2018.

But the question is: How many of those million-plus players were actually playing the game? Although Lost Ark seems to have had a smooth launch in the Americas, European servers have been beset with very, very long login queues. At any one time over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of European players were waiting to be able to play the game.

(I can attest to this from personal experience: Trying to log into the game in London on Saturday afternoon, I found most servers had queues between 8,000 and 13,000 players, and it took me over an hour to log on. Fortunately, I had the Triangle Strategy demo to hand.)

Developer Smilegate and Amazon, which publishes Lost Ark in the West (it has been available in South Korea since late 2019), have announced a plan to create a new European server region to alleviate the overcrowding. But this plan is not without controversy for the game’s frustrated European audience.

“Please note that this will be a distinct new region (separated from Central Europe) without cross-region play availability,” noted the developers. “This also means that region-wide features, such as your Royal Crystal and Silver balances from Central Europe will not be