The game was able to Lost Ark Gold have an explosive launch weekend that saw it become the second most-played game of every time played on Steam as measured by high number of concurrent players. At 1.33 million players, it narrowly beats the peak number of Steam stalwarts Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, but fell quite a bit short of the record of 3.3 million registered from PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds in the early part of 2018.

The question is: How many of those millions of players actually were playing the game? Although Lost Ark seems to have experienced a smooth launch in America, Americas, European servers have been plagued by very long login queues. At any point over the weekend hundreds of thousands of European players were waiting to get access to the game.

(I am able to confirm this from personal experience: Trying to log into the game in London in the afternoon of a Saturday, I discovered that most servers had queues of between 8,000-13,000 players, and it took me nearly an hour to sign in. I was fortunate to have my Triangle Strategy demo to hand.)

Developer Smilegate together with Amazon, which publishes Lost Ark in the West (it is accessible to players in South Korea since late 2019), have revealed plans to establish the first European server region in order to ease the overcrowding. But this plan is not without controversy for players who are frustrated by the game's European players.

"Please note that this will be a new region (separated from Central Europe) without cross-region game play," noted the developers. "This is also a sign regional-specific features, like such as Royal Crystal and Silver balances from Central Europe will not be available within the newly created European region. The new region will be ideal for players who have not yet created their character or haven't made a commitment to Buy Lost Ark Gold remain on their existing server."