New World’s population went up during the first month, because they added servers in Europe. Which was overcrowded because they hadn’t planned correctly for the amount of European players. Lost Ark got new servers, which solved nothing, and the population went down during the first week.
They were both horrible launches, and Amazon did both of them. So far it’s looking much worse for Lost Ark. But hopefully the fact that Amazon can’t screw up the game itself, just the servers, means it won’t die like New World.
There is a big difference between Lost Ark and New World, one has actual endgame and one hasn’t. I played the hell out of New World and quit a month after because there was simply no content and still isn’t. Most people left New World for exactly that, no content. Lost Ark has a ton of content and is successful in two other regions for years now. And we only have a tiny amount of the content the other versions have.
Lost Ark opened the first few Server again after closing them because the community pressured them to do it as they wanted to play with their friends (obviously). But the effect was that they could play together but the server structure could’nt and can’t handle so many players. So it’s not just on AGS for fucking this up. The Situation is sad but I would blame Smilegate for this.
The Director said he wanted to see 300k concurrent players and he 100% should have known this number is wrong. But even then as AGS said the server structure does not support more servers per region so even if they wanted they couldn’t add more. As solution, they needed an entirely new region but this is also not enough as people won’t switch and they don’t have the tools to just grant only this region a power pass, etc. So it’s just all Smilegate all over again, no server transfer feature, and a bad structure that doesn’t support so many players.
They have pretty much the same regions as New World did, the same proportion of NA to EU servers, and the same problem with overcrowded EU servers and no real plan for how to solve it. This could all have been solved by preparing in advance. Unless you can show me that this wasn’t Amazon’s horrible planning again, I’m going to assume it was. It looks like a very clear pattern.
thank god hoping the fix the lfg issue and also the claiming shit issue my OCD be going nuts seeing the 3 there and not being able to collect it witch is soooooo toxic
I love to see that this game is popular - really deserves that… game is gorgeous and there is so much cool things to do, BUT these bugs will drown the game very deep if there will not be a solution… this will be NW 2.0
NW failed more because the game is shit than servers…
NA dont have problem on lost ark, they enjoy the game like does japanese, russian or korean,
The problem is european, and will be forget by most (because human has short memory) when people will leave…
Lets see if GW2 xpansion will help a little tuesday…
and 9.2 wow
We understand folks are also experiencing issues with matchmaking, which is a critical feature for organized play. To improve matchmaking we will restart Europe Central servers on 2/20 at 11pm UTC (2/21 12am CET) with an expected downtime of 2 hours. This will help stabilize the feature while we work with Smilegate RPG on a more long-term fix.
i cant believe how incompetent this shit is handled once again. And the talk about insta lvl 50 boost for people who switch to EU west besides the normal powerpass… ITS NOT IN THE GAME SO WE CANT IMPLEMENT IT. Also server transfer seems to be a FUTURE TECHNIC nowadays, not like that shit exists since forever
In the end it’s still AGS, they knew the number of players to expect from founders pack orders and extrapolating based on that and still decided to go through with the launch with a small number of servers (they added some and increased the capacity of existing servers) instead of at least 2 regions right from the start. They also ignored the community warning them that they should language label the servers (as they should have learned from new world).
There where a lot of decisions that, if chosen right, could have minimized the problem of the infrastructure not being made for so many people, but AGS excells at making the wrong choice every time. Like doing server maintainence right before the big F2P launch for some non-critical bugs.
Actually this is not true. You can progress without doing any dungeon, guardian raid or abyssal dungeon since islands give you most ressources for basically everything and even welcome challenge quests are linked to it.
It´s not fun with getting locked from matchmaking content though, sure. But if you just want to progress in item level and story, so as collectibles you really don´t need any of the matchmaking contents.
Server transfer should have been a mandatory feature for going live. I can’t just understand these management decisions, it’s like nobody of them ever played a MMO or has any experience in managing one.
They’re probably only fixing the shop because it’s losing them money while it doesn’t work.
Matchmaking and queues probably won’t get better until people actually start quitting the game
HUGE queue will be a thing in the future. 
