Only 15 minutes before the free-to-play Korean MMO Lost Ark was due to launch on Friday, a Tweet announced that it would be delayed. Finally playable four hours later, Amazon took the servers offline once again to fix a problem with missing characters. Over the weekend, the game was constantly taken down and put back up while the devs fixed a number of bugs and issues, all while queue times continued to stack up.
Despite this incredibly bumpy release, Lost Ark managed to break the all-time concurrent player records of two massively popular games: CS-GO and Dota 2. With this impressive achievement, it has become the second-most-played game on Steam when measured by concurrent players, beat only by PUBG. Lost Ark‘s top peak player count sits at 1,324,761, and that number was reached not even a full 24-hours after launch on February 11.
While this number is impressive no matter how you slice it, it should be noted that many of these players not have been actively playing. (Lines to get into the game are reaching New World and FFXIV-level highs, and Steam counts a person as playing as soon as they launch the game). Lost Ark players hopefully won’t have to deal with this issue too long, as Amazon is adding some additional European servers.
Those willing to move their character to a less busy server will also get some swag in the form of free Founder’s Pack items. This is only available to those who previously purchased one of these packs, and a duplicate pack will be sent to the new character.
Lost Ark was released on February 11 and is free-to-play. Those purchasing one of four founder’s packs were eligible for early access, and the game amassed over 500,000 concurrent players on Steam prior to launch day. For those just getting started, check out these keyboard shortcuts to make your adventure much more streamlined.
