Lost Ark won't increase EU Central server capacity further, despite player saturation and long queues

Lost Ark players on the European Central server were in for some rough news a couple of hours ago. Smilegate announced that they would no longer expand their servers in the region anymore.

Since its release in the West, MMORPG has been plagued with some of the worst queue times. The game is incredibly popular, and players often wait behind thousands to get in. At times, many had to wait for over an hour until they were allowed entry.

European servers, especially EU Central, are the most populated, with the biggest queue time. The developers have announced that they will not be expanding the servers in the region.

It is pretty frustrating for players who will have to go through an immeasurably long wait time or shift to a completely different server. Thus, leaving behind their already levelled-up characters.

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Lost Ark EU Central players are not happy

In a blog post regarding the decision, Smilegate stated,

"We know that players are still experiencing long queues in Europe. The Europe Central region is at capacity and unfortunately, there is no way to increase the number of players per world in Europe Central. Adding more servers is not possible based on the complexity of all the systems that need to work together."

They added,

"We definitely hear the request for server transfer functionality and have thoroughly investigated our options. This instant functionality does not currently exist in Lost Ark. This service just rolled out in Korea and is a weekly batch process that requires maintenance to run. It also does not support cross-region functionality. Therefore, unfortunately, it is not a viable option at this point for the western version - but we will not rest until we've exhausted all options."

While Smilegate is reasonably justified as to why they will not look to expand on the EU Central server, the players who boot up the game in that region aren’t too happy about it.

While the developers are looking to fix the server queue issue as much as possible, the community feels that their current efforts aren’t exactly bearing much fruit. Moving on to a less populated server is not the solution.