Amazon messed it up, there is no way anybody in their right mind can deny that. But the Ark is not completely lost yet. Unfortunately, everything Amazon is trying to fix the game, including the new European region, is doomed to fail. I do not know if it is arrogance, or sheer incompetence, but they cannot see beyond the end of their nose.
There is only one solution to this mess, and that is going the FFXIV way. We need a new launch, at least for European servers. The following are the steps they need to take:
They need to eat humble pie. The people in charge (and not some random CM), must go on camera and apologize to the community. They have to admit they messed up and show they are sorry for ignoring our feedback;
The new launch must grant all Founders everything they paid for. We need a 3 days headstart. We need all the content in the Founder’s Packs. We need a chance to reclaim our character names. Splitting Europe into 2 regions is a good idea, but it won’t work unless we all start from scratch. People are not willing, myself included, to lose their names, Twitch drops, etc.;
The 2 European regions need to be called West and East. It doesn’t matter if all the servers are in the same location. This will help to ease the language wars which are afflicting all European servers;
They need to restore all Twitch drops granted up to the new launch date;
They have to provide some compensation for the huge inconvenience they have caused. People have taken days off work, given up time with their family and friends. I believe doubling Founder Packs, as they are already doing, is pretty decent;
They must show this time they are listening to the community. They could start with lifting the restrictions on character names.
Launch must happen within a reasonable time. A couple of weeks, not longer.
FFXIV did all this and became the best MMO on the market. Lost Ark has the potential to be even better. Amazon people, do not ruin it because of pride.
Well… with how many people are unable to play in EU I would say that there is a lot of them that would go to the new region. Most of them F2P because they do not hve that much to lose.
I would not really change my region at this point unless they would just do a copy of my character to a new server. And i really do not have that big of a problem with Queues… There are ways to get to server at a time I need.
This shouldn’t and won’t happen. There have been over a million players putting in tens of hours at this point into characters. Do you really think that side of the playerbase would accept your solution? No.
Amazon are kinda in a lose/lose scenario at the moment because no matter what they do a large portion of their playerbase will be upset. Personally I do agree they should of had two EU regions since the beginning as well as Language tags for servers but at least they are doing something proactive.
I agree there is no way to please everybody. But that’s normal when you try to fix a problem.
The ideal scenario is preventing problems and in this case it would have been possible if they just listened to the feedback.
But we have to deal with reality, which is quite grim. Server transfers are not possible as they do not have the technology to implement them. Server capacity is already at its top. I read people are already experiencing lag and disconnection issues. I wouldn’t know that out of experience because I haven’t played in 3 days.
I would be happy if they magically solved this absurd situation, but I believe a new start is the only way to go.
Unless a wipe happens the new EU region is not gonna see much traction. Reboot is harsh solution, but needed one if we are to fix the queues and community issues.
except launch went great in NA and I’m guessing ok in SA, they already made bunch of money, the interest is huge even with 20k server qs soooo they don’t actually have to do nothing except open new eu regen and write “there we fixed it, its your problem now”
oh did I mention its a free game?
they don’t have to do a single thing, we do hope that they do something cause they do stand to gain more money out of working and queless EU.
I honestly think rebooting the whole game would be the best option here. Amazon messed up real bad and all the solutions that they’ve given aren’t really fair to players who bought Founders.
I don’t even mind a fresh start. It’s just like giving the game a try for a few days and reset. How hard is that???
New World might need a reboot, that game is full of flaws.
Lost Ark is not on the same boat the game is great, the problem that we are having is that the game is very popular and we don’t have enough servers for ppl to settle on.
The issue with EU in short is to many players for the amount of servers ^^
You can’t please everyone. Especially now. But you can make the game playable for everyone.
AGS have ruled out any other possible solution. Didn’t you read the new post on the last update? They are saying they are not willing to do anything except waiting for the situation to fix itself.
All the “solutions” proposed by AGS will fail because it will be AGS that implements them. AGS is an incompetent company. AGS is the problem (see New World and the launch of Lost Ark)
The first step to fixing the problem is to take back the rights that Smilegate has granted them.
Once this is done - the OP’s proposal would become possible.
If you’re too attached to your twitch drops to leave your 5+ hour queues to join the new server then that’s on you. I left Zinnervale for the new server (as a gold+plat founder) and enjoyed a queue/bug free weekend of playing.
I was about to say something similar to this myself.
The focus some people have on the Twitch drops, baffles my mind.
I gave up on 80+ hours of progress on Tharain, all the skins I bought for different characters and just took the hit. It was simply the only option for me to get to play with my friends.
Do I understand that some people dont want to do this? Absolutely, but these kinds of threads calling for a “restart” is helping no one. EU West is working fine, and everyone has the option to do something about it. Would it be preferable if they managed to fix EU Central? Absolutely, but the way things are looking right now, that seems less likely to happen by the day. Am I defending AGS/Smilegate and how this has been handled? Not at all, its been a shameful display all over. But the same threads over and over on the forums are not helping anything either.
If you want to lose everything - then you can start over in the new Region. As far as i know you get the full founders back at the new region.
Twitch Drops maybe gone, but honestly that would be the smallest problem.
To compare it with the FFXIV Relaunch is a joke too. FFXIV wasn´t relaunched because of server issues. The Game was broken and shitty. So they reworked it.
The point of wipe is that people aren’t gonna wipe themselves. It had to be done on major scale equally. But it’s too late, they should have done it before opening EU-West, now we have to swim in unstable poop and wait in line for it too because we like that more than the choice to move.
It’s Twitch drops, it’s names that are already taken because of the stupid naming policies, it’s currency you will not get back, it’s character slots already claimed, it’s progress, it’s Prime loot… It’s money and time we all have spent and we are not willing to give up because AGS messed up.
If you are fine with it, good for you. Apparently the vast majority is not, otherwise there would be no queue left on CEU.