Lost Ark players from Australia and New Zealand are flocking to the game's official forums to ask Amazon for region-specific servers, citing latency issues and long server queues.
Requests for an Oceania server region began back in November 2021, several months before Lost Ark's global launch. In a thread title "Please Reconsider Oceania Servers" user ooglydit wrote "While I'm very thankful for the work that AGS have put into having the region-lock removed for Australia & New Zealand, having a dedicated server for our region would go leaps and bounds toward making the game more enjoyable for us." The main reason behind the request was concerns over high ping when connecting to more distant servers. "As it stands, if our only options are NA/EU, we're looking at either -250 ping to NA or -300 ping to EU."
It appears that ooglydit's concerns were well-founded. As of writing, the request for Oceania servers is the top post on the Lost Ark forums, with over 3,000 respondents adding to the call for a region-specific server, and that number is growing.
As players feared, high ping caused by connecting to distant servers is impacting the experience. "I can tell I'm missing out on the satisfaction of my abilities: as the delay between animation and impact/result puts a dampen [sic] on the whole thing," writes user Poppleop. Meanwhile, Rigeth notes that high ping puts Oceania players at a disadvantage during PvP. "It's also more common for most Australians to sit around 203ms, so when we enter PVP and are up against someone with 18ms or even better we will usually lose 1v1", they point out.
Latency issues aren't the only reason players are calling out for Oceania servers. Without local servers, players are having to join the already lengthy queues in regions like North America and the EU. "Just got into queue at 4pm AEDT and it's 8000 long" writes user Archmage. " Lately I have been getting 8-9k queue, around 1 hour queue time every night" adds Hiroyuuki.
The Lost Ark team is aware of the feedback, and has been since before the game's launch. A community manager by the username Roxx responded to the initial requests back in November, stating that they would "take note" of the feedback and "make sure it gets shared". But it appears the players' calls are unlikely to be heeded any time soon. "There are currently no Oceania servers in the works," Roxx said in an update on January 24. "While this may be re-evaluated at some point in the future, right now there is not an update to give as there has been no significant change surrounding the topic."
No reason has been given for Amazon's decision not to add servers for the Oceania region, although it's worth noting that New World, Amazon's other big MMO, does have Oceania servers, in the form of the AP Southeast region. Whether Amazon's decision is based upon financial or infrastructural reasons, what is true is that players from Australia, New Zealand, and other countries in the region are going to stuck playing on distant servers for the foreseeable future.
