LOST ARK - Usual Launch Day Issues

Unsurprisingly, there are the usual launch day issues for those who purchased Founders Packs for the 3-day headstart.  For one, all packs are issued as DLC which has normally caused problems.  While the game was able to be pre-downloaded (regardless of whether or not you have a Founders Pack or not), they remained compressed until the actual launch time (players normally expect the game to also be preinstalled and ready to launch).  Thus players were initially receiving a download/connection timeout error (likely for the decryption key to begin the unpacking process).  That issue was fixed around 30 minutes after launch.

For myself, I installed the pre-download on my hard drive rather than my SSD since I also thought the game would be preinstalled and be ready to go at 9AM PST.  Instead, it (as of this posting) is a little over 55% unpacked after 1.5 hours.  Decided it wasn't worth trying to move it over to the SSD since that might've probably caused other issues with Steam (and didn't want to be caught trying to re-download since that is also being slammed).  Given there are now also server queues (on some NA servers) to get into the actual game, today will probably be a wash.  And character names will be an issue given the naming restrictions (names are also region wide and not server specific which makes sense for eventual server mergers).

All of this will also affect the actual launch day CCU peak (Twitch viewer wise, the game has over 1 million viewers which is fairly impressive all things considered).  And yes, forums, Discord, social media has the usual hostile reactions with these foul ups.   Myself, just going to take care of other business and hope I can at least get to the character creation today.

AGS also posted a list of known launch issues with the game itself.

UPDATE: took over 4 hours for the download to unpack (moved my install over to the SSD once I created my characters on both US East and West; playing primarily on West-Mari though since the East servers I wanted to roll on were all full, and I prefer playing on the lower latency region since that is what I am closest to).  Character name Murasama and Muramasa also taken as expected on both regions (but I usually never main a character on those names anyway).