Smilegate and Amazon Games are launching the popular South Korean MMO Lost Ark in the west, and as a result, the team behind the game is trying to keep up with demand. According to the team behind Lost Ark, it already needs to limit new characters on some servers as a result of the game's big launch.
Lost Ark was released in Head Start access that began on February 8 at 9 A.M. PST, allowing fans in North America and Europe to create characters on the game's 25 initial servers. Smilegate has confirmed that the servers being impacted by the character limitations are Asta, Avesta, Azena, Kadan, Mari, Regulus, Trixion, Thirain, Una, Valtan, and Zinnervale. The large majority of the limited servers are located in Europe Central, while North America West sees the fewest affected servers and the team has confirmed that more servers are on the way.
Although some Lost Ark players have been enjoying the new MMO for two days now, many more will come to the game with its real Western release tomorrow. Popular Twitch streamers like Asmongold, Sodapoppin, and Summit1G have been part of the Head Start access to Lost Ark and a portion of the Twitch audience may be interested in trying the game for themselves soon. Asmongold is notably not on one of the higher population servers as he's chosen to keep to a more stable server called Galatur that may still spike in players upon the official launch.
Limiting new characters on Lost Ark servers isn't the only most Smilegate is making to accommodate the large Western fanbase that the free-to-play game has reached, as two regions will receive one new server each. EU Central will be getting the new server called Beatrice and NA East will be receiving one called Elzowin. High population servers are often the target of some MMO players who wish to ensure that they can easily find groups for dungeons, raids, and other content, but overwhelmed servers are typically subject to log-in queues.
At peak hours, Lost Ark has already been able to achieve 500,000 concurrent players on Steam which illustrates one of the primary reasons Smilegate has had to limit new characters on the high population servers. Lost Ark is far from the first MMORPG to have to implement these kinds of restrictions in order to curb server instability as New World and Final Fantasy 14 have had to do the same in recent months. New World has begun the process of merging servers that are less popular as the developer tries to achieve ideal server capacity.
Lost Ark releases for PC on February 11, 2022.
Source: Lost Ark