Almost three months after its official deployment in Europe and America, Lost Ark is experiencing a new massive influx of players, creating aberrant queues on some servers. Unfortunately, these seem very different from those observable when the game was launched: although so important, they seem to have no end and even take place at absolutely insane times. The cause ? A new upsurge of bots, so "false players"...
Second wind for Lost Ark?
While it was estimated without taking too many risks that Lost Ark seemed to have found some semblance of stability a few weeks ago already, the data of the last few days seems to contradict this trend. After reaching the threshold of approximately 426,000 players connected simultaneously ( according to SteamDB ) on March 31, 2022, the curve quickly started to rise again... And not just a little. Precisely one month after this lowest ever Lost Ark threshold, Smilegate RPG's MMORPG is showing another increase in player numbers with more than 586,000 concurrent players as of April 28. Excellent news ! Yes and no actually.
Although this new influx is probably partly explained by the arrival of the April update and the Spearhead in particular, in recent days players have been complaining about the return of a threat that has, it seems, he never really disappeared: the bots. Since the last update, the Archesians report experiencing bewildering queues at times that should alert many, including Amazon Games.
An abnormal crowd
In recent days, players have indicated on the forums that queues exceeding 10,000 players have been observed on certain servers, particularly in Central Europe and North America. Although viewed favorably at first glance, they are in fact much more problematic than originally imagined. The champions of Archesia actually indicate that these are present every day for a large part of the day, but also... at night!
Worse still, they don't seem to unclog. Aphrodite , on the forums, estimates that if you find yourself in one of these queues hoping to play, then you will experience a wait approximately three times longer than the similar ones that were seen when the game was released in the West. Concretely, for a queue of 10,000 players you would wait between 9 and 10 hours before being able to connect since the basic principle of a bot is that it does not disconnect to go to work or sleep. An unbearable situation for players when they thought they were pretty much out of the woods with these stories of queues and fake players.
One of the crucial things about queues in any game is that they never really last all day. Thus, we know more or less the peak hours of the players (before leaving for work at 7:00 a.m., when leaving work at 5:00 p.m., on weekends, etc.) and we can adapt our connection times to these. here in order to suffer as little as possible from these interminable waits. Only with this new wave, it is not: the lines appear at abnormal times (around 01:00) and last a huge part of the day. It is therefore impossible to anticipate.
The most affected servers seem to be those with the most basic populations, namely:
- Asta (Central Europe)
- Wei (Central Europe)
- Kadan (Central Europe)
- Thirain (Central Europe)
- Azena (North America East)
- Regulus (North America East)
- Avesta (North America East)
- Karta (North America East)
- Una (North America East)
- Valtan (West North America)
- Rohendel (West North America)
- Mari (North America West)
- Enviska (West North America)
- Akkan (West North America)
- Bergstrom (North America West)
- Shandi (North America West)
Result ? Not only are players no longer able to play, but they don't even want to connect in reality anymore, and we understand that: sometimes waiting several hours before being able to play is nothing fun, especially when you hope to pass a little pleasant moment on the way home from work or lessons. No one seems to be able to escape it this time, and the discontent continues to grow.
Amazon Games Stance
Although the culprits of these endless queues have not been officially named, players are already pointing the finger at bots as the main culprits. Such an influx of players in the middle of the night makes little sense, even on a Sunday, and it is easy to imagine that those responsible for this mayhem are not very human. Although the Lancer will undoubtedly have rekindled the love of the game for some players, it seems very unlikely that such queues are the consequence of this new class.
For its part, Amazon Games did not communicate on this subject. Shadow_Fox and Maselbart, two Amazon Games Community Managers, regularly respond when this subject is raised on the forums in order to delay the time that the publisher finds a solution with Smilegate RPG, but nothing official seems to have come from their side for the moment.
A semblance of better should therefore be seen with the next weekly maintenance, scheduled for Thursday, May 5, 2022. In the meantime, you will have to be patient if the server on which your characters are located suffers from such queues...
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