Today is the full free to play launch of Lost Ark and Amazon is making a few moves that should hopefully make things smoother as well as address the challenges of server queues and demand.
Yesterday, during the head start, Amazon already turned off character creation on servers that had high queue times and says this limit will be in place for the foreseeable future. Anyone who already made a character on those more crowded servers can still make additional ones, but new players won’t be able to create there at all.
Since the final launch is today, they will be adding additional servers in anticipation of the demand. Across all regions there are a total of 15 planned new servers and they will continue to monitor demand and work to add more capacity. This is a measured approach, different from the one for New World, which is gearing up for more server merges. To help some players move over to lower population servers, Amazon is also addressing concerns over Founder’s Packs.
In asking some players to consider moving to lower population (or even the new) servers, some had already redeemed their Founder’s Packs and this was one reason that they couldn’t move. Amazon announced that they will grant every Founder’s Packs purchaser who redeems their pack by February 14th at 12 PM PST/9:00 AM EST an extra set of the Founder’s Pack exclusive items at the level they redeemed. This means that all of the bonuses like titles, pets, and more will be available as a one time grant on any server you move to. This is intended to help people find a new server that they can call home especially in light of character creation switched off for new accounts and some needing a new server to be able to play with friends who are coming in with F2P.
For more, see the details over at Lost Ark.
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