Lost Ark's new servers are now online

A sorceress whose pants only have one leg for some reason

(Image credit: Amazon Games)

For European players, this year's exciting new MMO experience Lost Ark has largely been an exciting new queue simulator. While Amazon Games correctly anticipated the number of players who'd be logging onto North American servers, which have been essentially queue-free since launch, the publisher does seem to have underestimated the European popularity of PC gaming in general, and games with deep mathematics and pretty ladies in particular.

Today, eight servers in a new region called Europe West went live. "We expect opening a new region to reduce, not eliminate, queue times for Europe Central", Amazon says in an announcement. "However, players choosing the new Europe West region are much less likely to experience long queues. Please note, if you move to the new region you will continue to be able to use your Royal Crystals and Crystalline Aura but no redeemed, claimed, or acquired items move with you."

Since Lost Ark doesn't allow server transfers, the temptation of moving to a new region where you'll see a reduction or absence of queue times has to compete with the loss of any progress you've made on the existing servers. Lost Ark may become increasingly full of wild nonsense and even get down to clown as it goes on, but the early game is a bit dull and fetch-questy. It's hard to imagine many players wanting to go through all of that again.

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To sweeten the deal, players who do start over on the Europe West servers will receive the last 10 days of daily login rewards as well as "special daily attendance rewards for the first 10 days of the Europe West server launch". What's more, players who bought a founder's pack and have already redeemed the exclusive items it contained will get a bonus set of those exclusives, as well as some more of Lost Ark's royal crystals currency. The latter bonus is available to everyone, not just European players, and is claimable on any server. Presumably the hope is to further encourage migration from busy servers to quieter ones. If you bought a founder's pack before February 14, you'll get the bonuses on February 19.

The eight new servers are called Rethramis, Tortoyk, Moonkeep, Stonehearth, Shadespire, Tragon, Petrania, and Punika. If they're not showing up for you, rebooting the client should fix it.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.