Lost Ark has been globally available for a good while now, despite its initial release having been exclusive to South Korea. Smilegate’s MMO has since come far in the West, with hundreds of thousands of players logging in each day to the mythical Arkesia. The western version of Lost Ark is split into five regions that host servers currently, but Smilegate has plans to change that. The developers have just announced their plan to merge the European servers into one which will make just four western regions.
The merge is set to take place “later this summer” with no specified date aside from August just yet. Europe West will be folded into Europe Central, as Smilegate wrote “players have been requesting region merges, and our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG are currently building the components to make this happen.” The devs acknowledged the struggle players on servers with low populations face, writing, “After the August region merge, we will begin identifying servers in need of a merge.”
Smilegate did specify that they “don’t have any other region merges planned” just yet, though, as they have to take possible consequences into account. The devs wrote, “While we have seen feedback that some players in South America would like us to consider a merge, merging South America into North America could create a suboptimal player experience due to increased latency.”
Even though the studio has no plans to merge other servers just yet, devs stated that they “will continue to monitor and look for ways to improve the player experience.” You can read the official notice here for Smilegate’s full details on the merge, where devs also specified, “As we move toward the region merge our team is working to identify the full policy, similar to the plan we released during the last round of server merges.”
If you want to read more about the game, be sure to check out Lost Ark’s newest class or have a look at other new MMOs to play if you are a fan of the online experience it offers. You can also browse through some of our favorite PC games if you want to step outside of the MMO genre for a while.