With all the issues regarding the the servers over the last week and talking with friends about it, I became interested in knowing how the server/load balancing works for Lost Ark. Our group of friends all have a IT background and subjectively speaking we do not understand why AGS does not get the servers to work as simplified it would just be increasing the capacity of servers.
On a more rational level what AGS can actually do now is hugely limited by Lost Ark itself and how it was programmed to function. Like what can the load balancer handle, how many channels is Lost Ark able to create in a region and so on.
Of course the easiest fix would have been to provide much more servers at the start, but they sadly did not expect such a huge run on Lost Ark and empty Servers are expensive to maintain. So there might have been a cost factor in the initial decision to only go with a handful of server on launch.
Therefore I would have a few questions that I would hope could be answered on a somewhat technical level from a Developer. This could also improve the understanding of the player base what kind of challenges you guys face at the moment.
- What hinders you to simply increase the server capacity to a level where queues would hugely minimize?
- As mentioned in other posts, is it possible to clone a server and let players decide on which server to play in the future? For example just delete the character the was not the last to be played before a certain date.
- Would it be possible to create a server cluster in the backend to cater to one “front-end” Server? For instance Asta for the players is only one Server, but in the background the load is divided on 4 servers and people could switch between backend servers like with the channels to do guild content etc. On login a user would be on one of the servers with little players thus having no queue times and if wanting to do group content players could move to one of the less active servers in the cluster.
- In general are we talking by server limitations as mentioned in forum posts about hardware limitations as in server cannot be increased anymore or software limitations as in Lost Ark is not able to handle such server sizes?
- As a server transfer seems to be not possible code wise yet, what would be the challenge to implement one now? What would a timeline for such a feature look like?
Out of my head that would be the questions I would be interested in knowing the answer of at the moment. I would appreciate for you taking the time to read the post and maybe answering some of the questions so that the playerbase and me might understand you challenges and clear some of the doubts of the playerbase.