Lost Ark One Week Later

It’s been a week since the doors opened to Lost Ark, thanks to a founders pack allowing access three days early; it’s time to check in to see how things have gone so far. Right now, all I can say is thank Christ one of our national sports – being British — is the fine art of queueing, as this is all I’ve pissing done for the past week!

There’s no doubt that Queue Simulator Lost Ark has exploded in popularity as the game surpassed 1.3 million concurrent viewers on Twitch as a category, surpassing even the likes of ear-licking tiddy streamers in their hot tubs within the Just Chatting category. Not only that, but it is also one of the very few games on Steam to break into the Millionaires club, by reaching 1.3 million concurrent players. This is indeed fantastic news as it cements Lost Ark as a much wanted game in the west.

However, with great popularity comes great responsibility. So many thirsty gamers are wanting to get inside Arkesia, has unfortunately led to overpopulation across the board. All the servers had massive queues, some exceeding six hours of wait time before one was able to fondle the controls of created characters again. Just with a quick spy on the Lost Ark forums, there’s thread after thread of maintenance news, downtime, and disgruntled players. Certainly not the kind of read you’d want to see first thing in the morning when wanting to play your new game is it!

Despite the doom and gloom of downtime, the developers are super quick to react and have already promised to alleviate the queue times, with some groundwork already in place to improve capacity for servers across the board. They’ve also set out plans for Founder Members with granting further rewards due to the server issues that have been faced.

So as you’d expect, I’ve been fighting these queues myself and gameplay time has been well and truly limited since early access opened up. I’ve not been able to progress as much as I would like but with the game time I have been lucky enough to get in, I’ve been blown away at how busy the game world is. Chat channels bustling with activity, dungeon matchmaking is pretty much instantaneous, and everyone is exchanging help, especially when world bosses are active and need taking down.

Thankfully, Amazon and Smilegate are taking action, with the announcement of a whole new server region for EU players, due to the overwhelming numbers waiting to get in. Due to the way servers operate in Lost Ark, it has required a completely brand new set to be created and launched in order for this to happen, which also means it’s a completely new region, separate to the current “Central Europe” one. As such, no region-wide goodies or play will be available, however it’s still good news for the player base.

While server queues are no stranger to me — looking at you World of Warcraft — they are bloody annoying! It is beyond any doubt that it has been the biggest negative impact on my experience for the first week, but I know that over time the situation will get better. If anyone new is looking at dipping into Lost Ark, in all honesty, wait a little bit longer for the Queue Simulator mini-game to die down before you dive in.