Despite Lost Ark being on a much older version of Unreal Engine and published via Steam, Smilegate and Amazon have chosen to employ Epic Game’s EasyAntiCheat service to scan player’s computers for the presence of 3rd Party Software.
It is evident from the last 10 months, that this service does not provide the necessary game moderation tools that is promised to the end-user, instead acting as spyware for Epic Games to farm user data through partnership with Unreal Engine based developers.
Whilst also providing miniscule protection against 3rd party software, EasyAntiCheat bloats down the loading and performance usage of the American and European Union clients, with excessively delayed loading screens and anomalous hardware utilisation (EAC will often eat up the entire CPU core for no consumer-beneficial reason).
Given that Lost Ark has many systems and faculties that rely heavily on a time-based schedule with the Procyon’s Compass, Fever Events and Wandering Merchants, it becomes significantly more difficult with the introduction of EasyAntiCheat. The large and unreliable window that EAC adds to the launcher, sometimes 10-15 minutes, it is sometimes almost inevitable for players to completely miss the time windows they are expected to be able to engage with Lost Ark’s community within.
For something like the Wei card, that can mean that as a direct consequence of EAC, players are required to wait for several weeks for another opportunity to complete this time-based system. Granted this is only one specific example out of the plethora of time-based events that Lost Ark features.
As openly admitted by players amongst discord communities this is an almost direct reason for why they keep their computers running to avoid having the tackle the long splash loading times.
Which is supported by players that have close to 4000 hours in the game whilst the large amount of time spent included hours Away-from-keyboard or completing other tasks.
From the above, it is self-evident that Easy Anti Cheat is not meeting its expected needs that Epic Games alleges to the end-user and I implore AGS and Smilegate to reconsider its suitability when it comes to license renewal / updating the game moving forward.