I admit that despite all the hype that has been generated around Lost Ark, I have not finished feeling attracted by the proposal. Eye, it is not a criticism of the game, much less, what little I have seen has seemed very interesting, I think the approach is cool, and I have some friends who have already been one step away from staying up one night or another immersed in its history. So, if he had more free time, he might have already spent a few hours on it, perhaps not so much out of interest as out of curiosity.
Be that as it may, and largely due to the fact that, as I said, a good group of friends have completely turned their backs on Lost Ark, yesterday, Saturday, I decided to install it and give it a try. Who knows? If all of them are so hooked, maybe it’s worth spending a couple of hours or three, to see if it really is as much as it seems, for the huge number of people who are playing it (or that they are trying, at least), or if on the contrary it is just one more example of what can be achieved with good marketing (which I have a feeling that it is not, honestly).
And what is my opinion? Well honestly, I still don’t have an opinion about the game. Well, correct, I do have an opinion about the game, but it has nothing to do with its plot, its development, its gameplay, its graphics or anything like that. No, my opinion about Lost Ark has to do with the infrastructure on which it sitsand with great regret, I can’t think of in what scenario I could give it a worse grade, since the one I currently give it is terrifyingly negative.
In case you don’t know it yet, Lost Ark is an RPG free to playavailable on Steam, which sits at the crossroads between MMOs and dungeon crawlers, a cross between WoW and Diablo, if you will.. And so formulated, the proposal seems very interesting, and what people who have already played it tell me is that the combination is, in practice, as interesting as it seems in theory. Something very promising and that aims to turn it into one of those life-stealers that appear from time to time.
Like any other online game, Lost Ark relies on a server infrastructure to which all users connect to be able to play. And let’s remember that Lost Ark can only be played online, it doesn’t have a local mode, local network games or the possibility for players to deploy their own servers, as is the case with Minecraft, for example. To play Lost Ark you depend, yes or yes, on the game servers.
A few days ago early access was enabled for those users who wanted to buy a pack that, in addition to certain advantages, allowed you to enjoy the game before its global launch in mode free to play and, by the chronicles of some players, there have already been some problems with the capacity of the servers. Yes, in the early access phase, with only a small fraction of the players who were waiting for its arrival in F2P mode, Lost Ark was already beginning to have problems with its infrastructure.
Thus, as was predictable, the day of its launch was a real nonsense, and since then the situation has not improved. In these two days I have already found several Twitch channels that have had to adjust the time at which they open directly to the queue to access the game, and in some of the Discord servers where I find myself endless of comments about the eternal waits (of hours) to be able to access a server, and that is when there are no failures during the wait, or even when it is not even possible to join the queue waiting to be able to enter.
Curiosity has been stronger than me, so today I have tried again. I illustrate my attempts with these images:
During the first round of attempts, about 15 minutes, Lost Ark client was unable to connect to the server. She could only accept, close, and try again later. After an hour and a half or so, I tried again, and the only difference was that the text of the message changed. And a little over an hour and a half ago, I finally got it, I could already queue… behind 14,748 other people. Now, an hour and a half later, my number in the queue is 4,585. At least it goes “fast”, yes, with a little luck I can play a little, if I still feel like it, after two hours of waiting.
This reminded me of the times of the Among Us boom, when the servers were totally saturated, and those responsible had to make a huge effort to improve the infrastructure. And even at its worst, Among Us did not have waits as long as those of Lost Ark. With one important difference, Innersloth, creators of Among Us, are a really tiny studio, Lost Ark is an Amazon game.
Precisely from Amazon, yes. Those responsible for AWS, one of the largest cloud platforms in the world, they don’t seem to have properly provisioned resources for the Lost Ark. It is paradoxical, right? Those responsible for the game have stated that they are working hard to solve the problems and that, as soon as possible, all users can enjoy the game. However, until they do, Lost Ark will be primarily a patience simulator, and it seems that many of those interested in the game are beginning to see theirs exhausted.
In my case, I am not sure what I will do when the wait is over. And it is that all this Lost Ark has reminded me a bit of a joke they told me when I was a child:
A group of various stray cats are in their den, when one of them says, –Guys, shall we go out to flirt?-. Several cats perk up, and the smallest of the group asks, –What is flirting?-, to which one of the elders replies, –Come with us and you’ll see, you’ll like it-.
Thus, with the smallest doubt, the group of cats leaves their den and head to a nearby garden when, halfway there, they meet a huge dog that begins to run after them. Half an hour later, cats and dog are running wild around a house, when the little boy says –Well, I’ll do a couple more laps and I’ll go home, I’m tired.-.
Well, that’s it, I’ll play the queuing simulator for another half hour and I’ll go out to dinner and watch a series.
And if you are in a similar situation, remember that we have recently published a complete and varied selection of free games for PC. And without the wait for Lost Ark, it’s all advantages.
