The free-to-play MMO Lost Ark debuted in the West, becoming the Lost Ark Gold second-most concurrent game in Steam history just 24 hours after its release on February 11. Unfortunately, this popularity means players in Europe have had to wait in long lines to play, although developer Smilegate and the game's Western publisher Amazon Games are working hard to try and fix the problem.
Long queues became an issue shortly after the launch of the European Central server, and the developers were quick to commit to implementing a new European West server to give players another place to play. While that Western Europe server is now active, "Central Europe is at full capacity and unfortunately cannot increase the number of players in each world in Central Europe," according to a post by the developer on the Lost Ark forum. "Adding more servers is impossible given the complexity of all the systems that need to work together."
However, players in the west cannot transfer to another server, so those who have invested a lot of time in central Europe cannot bring their progress to western Europe. The game first launched server transfers in South Korea in 2019, but it's "just launched" in the region and "does not support cross-region functionality," meaning it's "not currently a viable option for a Western version."
Despite these problems, The Lost Ark remains popular. As of Monday afternoon, it had more than 1 million concurrent players, according to Valve's Steam stats page. This is just the latest MMO that Lost Ark Power leveling has recently experienced server capacity issues - Final Fantasy XIV had to stop offering free trials after the Endwalker expansion in December, although the free trial will be available again on February 22nd.