European players of the hit massively multiplayer game Lost Ark have faced long login queues since the game’s launch — and now developer Smilegate RPG and Western publisher Amazon Games have admitted that there isn’t much they can do to improve the situation, due to the inflexibility of the game’s architecture. In a blog post, Smilegate and Amazon said that they cannot expand capacity for the Europe Central region further.
As promised last week, a new Europe West server region has been added. But with no character transfers possible and no cross-region play, this does little to help players who have invested time on the Europe Central servers.
“We know that players are still experiencing long queues in Europe,” the development team said in the post. “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 team noted that the Europe West region “is an appealing option for new players or for players who have not significantly progressed on Europe Central.” Players who purchased Founders Packs for the free-to-play game have been awarded a second variation of the packs, to make it possible to switch servers without leaving the goodies they had already claimed behind.
The post noted that server transfer functionality has, in fact, just been rolled out in Korea, where Lost Ark has been available since 2019. But it is a manual, weekly batch process and does not support cross-region transfers, so it would not help Europe Central players in their current plight.
“We will not rest until we’ve exhausted all options,” the developers said.
The Lost Ark team said they were actively working on a number of other fixes, notably to improve matchmaking, reduce gold-seller spam, and improve the stability of Crystalline Aura, an in-game subscription system that provides various benefits to your character on a rolling basis.
Source: Polygon
