After they complete this mornings (in Korea) maintenance, there will be a new server added. While not mentioned in the article, there is also a possibility they will send out further re-verifications for activity that they have been monitoring over the past few days.
http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=210448&site=lostark
Unfortunately, this (and their plan to add another in a couple of days) will not solve the issue with the 12,000+ login queue as well as each server hitting their defined capacity limits (which Smilegate periodically opens slots for). The core problem is what will be a continued influx of players from China (this probably represents the bulk of the connections going into the game, one that can easily top a million players).
External LOST ARK Queue Monitor: http://loaq.kr/
Smilegate netted just under 6K in the first wave (and have been getting maybe a couple hundred in the days after for accounts they detect the patterns they are looking for). That’s only a minor dent in what has to be six-figure amounts hammering their infrastructure from outside Korea.
I spent a small amount of time reading through some of the recent posts on their Inven site and many Korean players are not happy with how Smilegate has been handling the hours long login issues. Furthermore, there is a growing problem of players not actually connecting to the game server once their place in the queue has hit 0 (requiring reconnecting and landing back in a 12K+ queue again).
Some players are outright angry about “foreign” streamers playing while they sit in a queue so they’ve begun reporting them to Smilegate. There are of course some non-Korean’s living in Korea who are streaming it but those are the minority. Smilegate’s only response to this so far “is that they are working on it”.
Sending out re-verifications isn’t stopping the onslaught though because there are quite a bit of Korean players willingly creating accounts on their numbers and trying to sell them (it’s like easy side money) and then helping with verification again. Likewise, the sites which sell accounts in much larger quantities, are now mostly shifting towards monthly subscription re-verifiable ones (much more expensive) which is of course, a logistical nightmare (of actively maintaining those numbers) for those businesses.
Not all of these sites do the legwork themselves though; as I noted, there are Chinese resellers creating their own cottage industry for creating these re-verifiable accounts (side effect is increasing the demand for misappropriated KSSN’s/personal information on a completely different scale compared to before when it was just a virtual i-Pin). They then turnaround and resell these to account selling sites (accounts on SeaGM go through this route due to the demand). Those sites in turn have to then work with those resellers to perform re-verifications (if you are talking thousands, its a massive logistical problem). It’s why I am done with utilizing those services from this point on (way too much stolen personal information is now being involved).
The irony is this is money that should really be flowing into Smilegate’s coffers if the game was actively in service in other regions. But I digress…
What Smilegate may have to do is temporarily institute 2-Factor authentication in the launcher as one step (players need to confirm at login since it will be impossible for the bulk of the accounts that are being sold, to perform this in real-time). And until they get this under control, they cannot even begin to think about transitioning to their official launch (which also further delays what their official plans will be for NA/EU).
