I can attest to this personally when I tried to Lost Ark Gold login to games in London on a Saturday afternoon, I discovered that most servers had queues between 8,000 and 13,000 players, and it took me more than an hour to get online. Fortunately, I had my Triangle Strategy demo to hand.
Developer Smilegate in conjunction with Amazon, who publishes Lost Ark in the West (it has been accessible in South Korea since late 2019) they have made an announcement about the creation of a brand new European server region in order to ease the overcrowding. But the move isn't unpopular with the game's frustrated European player base.
"Please be aware that this will be a distinct area (separated from Central Europe) without cross-region game play," noted the developers. "This means regional-specific features, such as your Royal Crystal and Silver balances from Central Europe will not be accessible within the newly created European region. The new European region is perfect for players who haven't yet created a character, or haven't otherwise committed to stay on their existing server."
This means that users who've invested serious time, unlocked rewards or have established communities in the game will see no advantage from the new server region (beyond smaller numbers of new players trying to make accounts on servers). When playing Lost Ark, you cannot transfer characters from one server to the next, and while some resources and activities are shared between servers, nothing could be transferred between players or characters that are located in different regions.
Smilegate and Amazon have both stated that a brand new server region was the only viable solution. "Due to the structure of the game, there is only one way to Lost Ark Boosting support more players in Europe," they said in their statement.