Increasing Lost Ark's EU server capacity is 'not possible,' Amazon says
Lost Ark players in Europe have been dealing with lengthy queues since the game went live in the EU and North America earlier this month. Last week Amazon Games set up a new region called Europe West to help alleviate the strain, although it warned that the Europe West servers would only "reduce, not eliminate, queue times for Europe Central."
Unfortunately, it appears that's about as good as it's going to get. In a new update, the Lost Ark team acknowledged that there's not much it can do for Europe Central itself, apparently because of the game's underlying structure.
"The Europe Central region is at capacity and unfortunately there is no way to increase the number of players per world in Europe Central," Amazon Game Studios community manager TrevzorFTW wrote. "Adding more servers is not possible based on the complexity of all the systems that need to work together."
The situation is further complicated by the fact that Lost Ark does not fully support server transfers. A server transfer option "just rolled out" in Korea, where Lost Ark has been running since 2019, but it's a manual process, run weekly, and doesn't support cross-region transfers, meaning that players can transfer to other servers within Europe Central, but not to the new servers on Europe West.
"Therefore, unfortunately, it is not a viable option at this point for the western version," TrevzorFTW wrote. "But we will not rest until we’ve exhausted all options."
The bottom line is that the Europe West region will be useful for newcomers and players who haven't progressed very far into Lost Ark on Europe Central, but less so players who are deep into it and don't want to walk away from their characters and progress. As an interim aid, Amazon is offering a second variation of Lost Ark founders packs to players who purchased them so that they can start up new characters in the new region without losing all the startup loot they paid for.
The update also touches on changes aimed at improving matchmaking, reducing gold seller spam, avoiding fraudulent purchases, and improving stability. Full details are up at playlostark.com.