There’s the last official news. A post with a lot of encouraging words about adding new servers before the F2P launch at 11am. " ADDITIONAL SERVERS
Ahead of our free-to-play launch, we will also be opening up additional servers in each region to help support the influx of new players and will continue to monitor to add more capacity as needed. The following servers will open at 9 AM PT on Friday, February 11th: "
The biggest point no one is addressing, is the very bad decision to attempt this maintenance at 7am! The justifiable upset of about 400,000 people would have been avoided if the downtime started during non-peek hours say 12:00? Then only about 100,000 consumers would be justifiably upset when you take 8-10 hrs instead of the announced 4hrs. Not to mention (with any luck) you could have fixed the “Deployment” issues by primetime.
LA is a very well-designed game with much appeal. However, Bad communication and down-time management will deplete the player-base, leading to the dreaded server merging.
In my many years of customer service I have learned one very valuable lesson. It is always better to communicate a longer-than-expected delivery time of said goods. This allows the service provider to always exceed expectations!
Due to deployment issues the Lost Ark launch is unfortunately delayed. We hope to have this resolved in a matter of hours, and we appreciate your patience. We want your time in Arkesia to be a great experience and we’re working hard to get Lost Ark live as soon as possible. Stay tuned to our social media and website for updates.
If you take a look at twitter and the forums you can see the legion of enraged manlets complaining about the server maintenance and “muh EU server being discriminated against”.
I agree with your point about communication being important, but at this point, complaining is going to do nothing.