As expected (given the strong head start peak), Lost Ark breached the million concurrent player mark early mid-morning, Pacific time.
This easily surpasses the rather modest expectations set forth by Lost Ark’s game director, Keum Kang Sun.
Yes, there have been a variety of launch day issues (including a long delay after the original hot fix maintenance), the need to lock servers, and the inevitable queues. The majority of the postings in this blog are highly critical of many game publishers (and the games they service in general which includes AGS’ self developed game, New World, which I skewered). So I’m not the most easiest to please when posting about these problems.
But most folks (including myself) who understand the backend tech, knows that every other publisher would have faced similar issues (the original head start unpacking issue with the game files, wouldn’t have been a problem had Smilegate themselves published since that was all on Steam given the way DLC’s are handled; that was how the Founder’s packs were delivered for pre-downloading, but not pre-installed). Similarly, we would have had a (single) character pre-creation/naming had this been launched outside of Steam (since Smilegate RPG had this for the KR OBT).
Overall, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve been impressed with the overall service quality (despite these launch issues) given the sheer numbers (ironically, the last time I felt this way was the open beta soft launch of Lost Ark KR which ended up being slammed by a lot of foreigners trying to also play).
UPDATE: After a hot fix maintenance for the US West servers (shortly after the above milestone was reached), re-login’s pushed the peak to nearly 1.2 million. Unfortunately for Europe, they are experience high server queues across all 19 servers (yes, they’ll need to add a few more servers to get through this weekend). This was very much expected for the official free to play launch.
UPDATE 2: The game seems to have peaked at 1,325,305 on Saturday. The EU region continues seeing hours long queues (which was reminiscent of the original KR soft launch). AGS announced they are creating a completely new EU region (the maintenance they did Saturday for EU was to prepare for this change) with a whole bunch of caveats involved (mainly involved with Founders and Starter Packs).
I need to thus qualify my earlier statement regarding being impressed with the overall service quality; that is in relation to my personal experience over on US West (which has far fewer servers compared to East and the other two regions). The highest queues I saw was on Saturday evening (nearly 5k which took around 30 minutes to get into the server). The feeling would be much different if it were like EU with 5-digit queues.
The fact that adding more servers to the existing EU region isn’t an option, points to a technical limitation in a bunch of systems (likely cross server matchmaking). It’s clear that AGS severely underestimated the amount of free to play players in the EU region (let alone complications from different languages where some servers became the unofficial servers for specific languages sort of like how US West Valtan was selected by OCE region players).
There wasn’t an immediate goto contingency plan for example (where they are now working with Smilegate RPG to create a new region). It’s messy because players who have already settled on the existing servers (including redeeming their packs), aren’t likely to move. And there is no server transfer system (it doesn’t really exist in KR either except for short term events) that would provide a mechanism for dealing with both progression as well as already redeemed packs.
In hindsight, the US region split (which was primarily due to latency), turned out to be a good thing since it would’ve faced the same issues. Yes, this traffic will die down after the first month (and servers will eventually be consolidated after several months), but this is no consolation to players who have yet to be able to even enter the game this weekend in he EU region due to the sheer traffic.
