While Smilegate RPG attempted to load balance and implement servers during the character pre-creation event, there was no real way for them to fully stress test the bottlenecks that exist before a player even hits the game servers; and that is the authentication server. That is the reason for the OBT moniker on these soft launches. VPN Korean nodes being partially swamped are also playing a factor in other cases but the primary point of failure several hours after the soft launch, is happening past their ingress point.
The end result is occasional errors with getting past the STOVE login, being able to launch the client but not seeing any server listing, hitting an actual queue into a server but not being able to get into it, general load related issues if you then manage to get into the game (where those earlier channel instances are going to be much more heavily populated compared to those who got in earlier and are in a completely different part of the game world).
I didn’t even bother trying at the beginning (even though that is usually the best time to get in before other parts of the infrastructure begins to crack and fails, and those who are stuck begin slamming those points of failures over and over as they retry connecting) because I really couldn’t start playing until maybe 12 hours later.
Those who managed to get in game and haven’t run into actual game server issues and don’t disconnect will be able to play until something hiccups or Smilegate decides to perform emergency maintenance/server restarts.
UPDATE: Issue with blank server list looks like a problem with Mudfish VPN nodes. I downloaded ExitLag (which has 3 days of VIP trial access) and after setting it up, was able to quickly get into the game and begin leveling.
