So my only real concern for the game is server support at launch and insane ques for the FTP MMO with a history of being good. Why does the subscription option not list login priority as a feature? Makes it way more desirable than it is now and seems like a logical reward for people who support the free game financially.
That is a really bad idea. You should never feel forced to buy anything.
It is better to keep people as equal as possible. Imagine reading: AGS sells priority login features instead of increasing server capacity. Doesn’t sound good, does it?
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This game don’t need login priority. It has instanced servers. So it will not have any queue differently from other games like New World that has static servers.
Instanced Servers = For each server there are multiple physical servers. Each server has a soft and hard cap. Soft cap usually is at 25% of the estimated max performance while hard cap is at 50%. But each instanced server can have multiple physical servers. Usually each location has at least 1 physical server. If the physical server reach the soft cap it creates a duplicate of the same location an load new player that enter inside this location in the new physical server “called instance or channel”. This means that not all players will be loaded in the server. In fact, you often when you try to find your in game friend and you both go in the same location. There is a chance that you won’t see him at all. This because he is in another physical server. In game you can manually change the channel you are in using the specific menu in the top right corner of the minimap. This means that when you login you won’t login in the main server but you will login in an instance dedicated to a specific location. Each time you use a triport “fast travel” each time you leave the map the managment server assign you to the less populated channel. All of this is the most efficient way to handle a server for an mmo.
Static Server = Everyone is logged in the same physical server. Each physical server can handle a limited amount of people. The problem with queues appear when the company decide to save some money on the static servers. They just allow more people to create accounts that actual concurrent players to reach the hard cap. This creates the famous queues that no one likes.
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Yeah I know it uses that server style but I could have sworn there is still a max concurrent available across it all. I could be wrong. Definitely not a tech expert in this area.
They are not mutually exclusive. You can work toward more server capacity and still give paying customers priority if there is a que.
Well if you have this type of structure is easier to manadge the servers in order to avoid the overload situations. At 99.99% is quite impossible to generate an overload. The reason is simple. Each location has 1 dedicated server. Plus the other servers are based on the player base “created accounts”. The other server are allocated to the locations that needs them because there is a bigger concentration of people in the town for example.
Considering that this structure usually is set at 50% of max capacity. In order to create any problems to the server stability the amount of created account must double in less that a few hours and at the same time all the already registered players will login as well. Is quite impossible.
In case there are new players once the server capacity is over 50% they need to set up another phisical server before it will be too late “too late means that the player base doubles”.
There is another factor to react in time in case of this overload of new created accounts. In case the server aren’t physically set up by the developers but rented from a hosting company, they always has the hardward ready to set up new servers in a few hours, compared to a server manadged privatly by the company that needs in case of overload to buy the hardward and wait a few days if not weeks to it to get to them.
But in case of instanced servers hosted privately you still can rent from dedicated servers providers emergency servers and link to the main system, until their own will be ready.
So if well managed instanced servers are impossible to overload, unless a hacker group will do a ddos attack that will create millions of new accounts and log in them all at the same time.
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Thanks for taking the time to explain all that. 
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Happy to help 
That Is a complex explaination… make sense though… good information
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Well first off, it creates a bit of mandatory purchase item to be treated as first class citizen, which will fuel the anti P2W crowd, and give off further negative impression of the game to those who are sensitive to monetization. Frankly, I don’t think the game needs any further bad press for “localization” decisions.
Secondly, why should people who spend $15 bucks on the aura be treated better than those who spend the same amount on other items in the game or perhaps even more money on other items, just because they don’t think the aura provides value they care about? It creates a bit of a paradox that not all money spent will be treated equally.
That’s just my personal 2 cents.
Also I’m not sure what htfgamesstudio said is necessarily accurate considering there’s no information shared on how the login server structures will be set up while we know for certain that other regions that serviced Lost Ark definitely had server queues as well as character cap limitation.
What he’s describing appears to be more relevant to how ingame map instances automatically populate additional “servers”(channels) once certain soft cap is met, not how actual server login is handled.
Matter of fact, if the login servers were “Instanced” which I honestly haven’t seen any games that has such login server, there would be no need for regions to have more than 1 server outside of arbitrary reasons.
Matter of fact, if the login servers were “Instanced” which I honestly haven’t seen any games that has such login server, there would be no need for regions to have more than 1 server outside of arbitrary reasons.
There is always some data that is really risky to host in instanced servers and must be set on the actual main server. Like players information & what they have, the auction house data and many other features still must be all placed in the central server. So when you login still part of the data is keep updated through a main server. This is really important to avoid bugs created by latency between servers. This can create huge problems in particular for the auction house when 2 people try to buy the same item from different locations.
There is still a limit of how many people can be handled on the main server this is why there are more that one server to choose from.
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Right. OP was talking about priority access to login servers, not for ingame instances.
And to my knowledge, main servers/login servers are almost always static.
A game like lost ark that rely on all people login daily encouraging it by even gifting free shop items is made the way that the hard cap for the main server is also at least 50% of the max power. The only situation for login to be a problem is when there is not enough internet speed to load too many people logging at the same time. But considered the instanced system of the rest of the server and that they usually have insane speed like 1/2 GB per second if a queue will pop up during the login it will be for a few seconds maximum 1 minute. Building a system that will prioritize paying members to skip 1 minute of waiting is a waste of resources and this system also will need to analyze each player that try to login to find out who has the priority. Considering that we speaking about performing for loops “cycles” and take data from the server of each user to identify if they are paying or not will slow down so much the login for not paying people that they need to wait even 5 min to login only coz of extra work server side.
Priority for paying is worth set up only on static servers. On instanced it will only discourage not paying people to leave the game before they will actually consider buying something
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When the game first launched in Korea, people couldn’t login for hours for every server, and they had to quickly increase server infrastructure to support the population.
During major updates in season 2, especially those on the 1st server had queue wait time of 2-3 hours, although they made server improvements to reduce queue time. It isn’t just 1 minute or few seconds of wait time. Even outside of major updates, 1st server in KR still experience login queue on pretty regular basis.
Of course, we do not know how many concurrent players we will have or how our servers will be set up on the infrastructure wise, but what you’ve written seem very misleading is all.
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Well I shared my knowledge because I already done some work in this field. People just fear that Lost Ark launch will be similar to New World that for like 1 month was impossible to play at all without 1/2 hours in queue some even waited 12 hours in the most populated servers. People fear this can happen with lost ark because amazon is involved.
Anyway, for what you describer about the Korea launch this was the case because the game launch was here the 1st time. If the game explodes massively in popularity some times who make the servers cannot forecast how much power is needed. So you don’t know how many servers you need to buy. Servers costs a lot of money. If you buy too many is lost profit, if you don’t buy enough the queues problem is here.
But thanks to the instanced system is fast to solve. Compared to for example New World that uses Static Servers and the fix is impossible when all players want to play at the same time.
PS: Thanks to steam people can wish list the game this allow the developers to estimate how many people can be online at the same time and adjust acordenly the servers before launch
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Okay… so we should expect similar result when server is up on 8/11th February… Server queues players for 2-3 hours average based on the Korean server history?
I thought that western server will hold much larger capacity especially when the population is a lot bigger than just Korea
P.S: 2-3 hours waiting when LOST ARK release is expected… Could be worse if AGS handle it similar like how they handle NEW WORLD
When they release in Korea they didn’t know exactly how many people was interested in the game in total. But thanks to the fact that they will release on steam they have the wishlist count:
On top of that they know how many people pre-ordered the game as well.
Therefore if the actual player count on day 1 won’t be at least double this number + preorders it won’t be a problem. Because they already expect that all those people will jump on.
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Thanks for sharing your knowledge 
. Nowadays it’s very rare to encounter people that actually know what they are talking about.
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Considering the game is highly anticipated it would be surprising to see no clog on launch day. I wouldn’t worry too much about headstart though, considering they know how many people purchased founders pack and are likely set up enough servers for founders plus amount of additional players they expect to join upon launch.
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Korea alone just topped 240,000 players on 8 servers. That is a >30,000 players per server average because of how they use channels.
I for one think there will be - if any - very small issues because of how the game uses instanced servers, and they’ve already stated this is something they are looking at.