Lost Ark's Overwhelmingly Positive Steam review rating drops to Mixed because of long server queues
Lost Ark players are generally very happy with the game, except when they can't actually play it.
It's a story as old as time itself: a popular game starts out with great user reviews on Steam, before things turn sour as players voice their dissatisfaction with one problem or another. Lost Ark is the latest example; showing an almost real-time reflection of Steam users' feelings on the MMO RPG.
Lost Ark's early access launch last week, its massive debut on Friday and the subsequent weekend introduced millions of players to the game. Many of them were very satisfied with the wealth of content available, varied class selection, strong action gameplay, and multitude of activities beyond simple mob combat. This helped Lost Ark earn the coveted Overwhelmingly Positive review rating on Steam.
Unfortunately, as the weekend went on and server queues became longer and longer - particularly in Europe - sentiment turned, and more negative reviews started appearing. Most players referenced the unnaturally long queue times, while others voiced their displeasure with the fact premium items included in the game's starter packs are not account-wide, and instead get locked to the character where they got activated.
This all contributed to Lost Ark's current Steam user review, which stands at Mixed at the time of this writing. This is based on 45,692 reviews, 68% of which are positive. As more negative reviews get posted - which isn't out of the question given that it's a free-to-play game - the balance could be further tipped towards the negative side, potentially turning the overall rating to Negative.
Amazon Games, Lost Ark's publisher in the West, is aware of players' sentiment about how difficult it currently is to simply get into the game. The company is working on a whole region of servers in Europe to stand alongside the existing Central Europe cluster. More servers have been added between the early access and public launches, but it's unclear when this process will become smooth.
Catch up on our ever-growing collection of Lost Ark guides, covering everything from the best classes for PvE and PvP, to how to quickly level up your character and how to play the game with controllers.