Lost Ark won't increase Europe Central server capacity
UPDATE: Amazon Games responds.
UPDATE 22/02/22: Amazon Games has responded to player disappointment in Lost Ark server capacity.
In a statement sent to Eurogamer, it confirmed that the Europe Central server won't see increased capacity, but the newly created Europe West server is easing congestion. Below, the statement in full:
"Lost Ark has become more popular than we ever could have anticipated, scaling to 800k concurrent players in 17 minutes and 1.3m 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 the 'Europe Central' data centre is not an option. Instead, Smilegate and Amazon Games partnered to deploy a new data centre for European players in just five 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 centres, and do not refer to the geographical region of Central Europe.
"Since opening four days ago, the new 'Europe West Region' data centre now houses just under 20 percent of our Europeans 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 centre has already reduced peak queues by 48 percent. We're monitoring this number closely while continuously working to further improve queue times."
ORIGINAL STORY 21/02/22: Lost Ark won't be increasing its Europe Central server capacity any further.
European players of the new MMO ARPG have been experiencing long queue times since launch.
In a new blog post, the game's development team acknowledged issues but confirmed there's nothing they can do.
"We know that players are still experiencing long queues in Europe," the blog post explained. "The Europe Central region is at capacity and unfortunately there is no way to increase the number of players per world in Europe Central. Adding more servers is not possible based on the complexity of all the systems that need to work together."
The Europe West server has been created to account for the game's popularity. However, there is currently no server transfer functionality meaning this new server is only an option for new players or those willing to lose their progress.
"We definitely hear the request for server transfer functionality and have thoroughly investigated our options," reads the blog post. "This instant functionality does not currently exist in Lost Ark. This service just rolled out in Korea and is a weekly batch process that requires maintenance to run. It also does not support cross region functionality. Therefore, unfortunately, it is not a viable option at this point for the western version - but we will not rest until we've exhausted all options."
Further improvements are also in the works.
Maintenance was performed on the Europe Central servers at the weekend to improve matchmaking, a critical feature that many have had issues with.
Gold sellers spamming chat will be banned as the team work on improving in-game moderation tools. Changes are also in place to prevent fraudulent purchases, including a system to track the legitimacy of a player account and a limitation on daily purchases per account.
Lastly, ongoing fixes for matchmaking errors and store stability issues are top priority.
"We appreciate your patience while we work through these launch window issues. Your feedback and issue reports are extremely helpful and appreciated, as we continue working together to make Lost Ark the best it can be."
Lost Ark, Smilegate's free-to-play MMO that's been brought to the West by Amazon Games, has proven incredibly popular in its opening weeks with the second-highest peak on Steam ever.