Lost Ark

I'm not a big MMO player. I've put about 500 or so hours into ESO mostly because, well, it's Elder Scrolls and I love anything to do with that. I tried FF14 and Guild Wars 2 last year but was bored with both. So far I'm just about 6 hours into Lost Ark and I'm really enjoying it. Movement and combat are excellent, the classes feel appropriately powerful without as strict a reliance on the role trinity as most others. It looks lovely, with good technical visuals being amplified by great design. Audio is very good with excellent spatial design, the soundtrack is ok - fine but nothing so far stands out as a memorable theme. I'm running a Gunlancer (Tank'ish) with my wife as a more Short-range DPS focused Gunslinger and liked it so much so far that when she went to bed I started a solo Sharpshooter (ranged DPS) and am enjoying it just as much running through recent content. There seems to be quite a bit of depth we haven't touched yet such as engravings and cards etc. let alone not being remotely near end-game content but it seems to be moving at a good pace to ease us into those things without being boring.

My only real concern so far is it's too easy. Granted we've only faced one field (world) boss and a few normal dungeons but I think so far I've died once.

Yeah the Q issue is astoundingly bad. Especially in light of the US getting 19 servers and the EU getting 22, just going by basic population the EU should have been closer to 30 on the same model - my mates in the US have had 0 issues. The way I see it the model that gave them a succesful capacity of 19 for the US was not applied to the EU, either because 22 is a current hard limit on their regional director or they simply didn't want to invest in it properly. There is no way the model that gave them one capacity number gave them the other as a reasonable option.

We put up with 30 min or so Q times yesterday but today couldn't even get to the login screen as it kept booting us out with either a clear message they were overloaded or just an app error. So even their regional director buckled and you couldn't get far enough to jump to another. We ended up modifying the config to use East America and then chose a new server+characters there ( (Steam folder)\steamapps\common\Lost Ark\EFGame\Config\UserOption.xml , modify the region ID at the bottom (CE for europe, EA for East America etc.). That meant a whole new roster let alone new character but it was worth it to bypass the current EU server mess. And latency wasn't remotely an issue, worked absolutely fine.

With the new region solution then we can pretty safely assume the 22 limit was their regional director. I'd say they're going to give out some powerpasses to mitigate potentially splitting groups again. It's a solvable problem with their ingame merch so it really depends on how much they are willing to give. I normally hate repetition in games for any reason so the idea of starting new characters on a new region was daunting but the strength of this game is not it's story or even map layout, it's the gameplay loop and that was still a lot of fun even runnnig over the same content initially. So far I've run through about 6 hours each as a Gunlancer, Sharpshooter, Paladin and had a surprisingly great time with each.

Hello, I've been enjoying Lost Ark a lot and even managed to find, rather randomly, a Wexford guild on my previous server on Central EU.

I moved to West EU after hearing the servers are based in Dublin but have yet to encounter any locals. Does anyone know any Irish guilds based on a West EU server?

Ah yeah I was aware of that, I just thought for players joining after the creation of West EU servers it would be the natural place to be. I fancied creating a new character and liked the idea of a lower ping seeing as my connection isn't amazing.

I noticed my new server seems to have a lot of French players so I was wondering if there was any server with a high population of Irish but I guess not.

What? Its an isometric hack and slash mmorpg very similar to diablo. MMO means Massivley Multiplayer Online and has nothing to do with gameplay or UI style. You are really cutting off your nose to spite your face if you dont think anything without those very specific options is a good MMO. The obvious example that comes to mind is EVE online as its an mmo with no WASD.