Lost Ark has officially turned one day old and has already broken into the top five of Steam's all-time peak concurrent players list, according to SteamDB. While the game launched in North America, Oceania, and Europe yesterday, it has been immensely popular in Korea since 2019. It evolved into something very different from its launch version, and MMO fans have been waiting for the global launch for a while. Perhaps that explains the meteoric rise in the player base.
Lost Ark is nestled between two rather controversial games. Cyberpunk 2077 sits at fourth spot, which went from being one of the most anticipated games to one of the biggest let-downs. And at sixth spot is New World, which seems to be plagued with back to back issues since the day it launched. The vacuum created by players giving up on Amazon's MMO could also have added to Lost Ark's player numbers.
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It's not as if Lost Ark hasn't had its share of launch woes. The game had to be delayed due to deployment issues only hours before it was supposed to launch. It seemingly wasn't a major issue as it was resolved in a matter of hours. However, a common issue new MMOs face is server congestion, resulting in players having to wait in queue for hours. While it hasn't been as bad as it was with New World, Smilegate seems to have some plans to deal with it.
Players who pre-ordered the Founder's Pack edition got their hands on the game a few days earlier than everyone else. In order to deal with overcrowded servers, the devs offered an extra set of Founder's Pack items if they moved to a less populated server. While they would lose the progress they made in those four days, they'd still have access to the items they
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