Lost Ark has been struggling with technical problems for weeks. Since the last update, however, a new one has caused a lot of frustration among users and high processor temperatures. Easy Anti-Cheat could be to blame for this. We at MeinMMO summarize.
What problems does Lost Ark have? Lost Ark fans have been complaining about problems with the MMORPG for a few weeks now. Currently, the game tends to frequently lose connection to the server or simply close.
Frequent patches from the developers aim to counteract the problem, but a recent patch caused even greater resentment. Because suddenly some players notice that their processor is getting much too warm in Lost Ark and for no apparent reason.
How is the error expressed? An inexperienced user will probably only recognize the problem because his PC has been a little louder than usual lately or because Lost Ark occasionally hangs briefly. But if you look at the numbers, you will discover a curious problem.
After 10-30 minutes of gameplay, Lost Ark suddenly starts to load one of the processor cores to 100%. This also leads to an increase in processor temperature, which means that the fan has to work quite a bit to compensate.
The utilization of this core then remains at 100% until the game is closed and sometimes even afterwards. Some users report even having to restart their PC to get the processor load under control again.
Hopefully the devs can get this fixed by the time Geralt comes to Arkesia:
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This is how you can find out if you are affected
How often does the error occur? That’s difficult to estimate. There are several threads on the Lost Ark reddit with over 300 upvotes addressing the issue. One of you currently has 140 comments, many of which are from users having the same problems.
We at MeinMMO tested it ourselves and were able to reproduce the error on 2 of 4 test systems. It also didn’t matter what brand the processor came from. In our test we had a system with a Ryzen 9 5900X and a slightly slower i7 4790. Both showed the same anomalies.
How do you find out if you are affected? First of all, you can keep an eye on the temperature of your processor. Some manufacturers can already do this with built-in tools, but if you are quite haphazard, you can use external programs such as CoreTemp.
Pay particular attention to irregularities. Our test system with the Ryzen 9 5900X normally runs between 60 and 70 degrees in Lost Ark, but also likes to jump briefly to 80 to 83 degrees in loading screens.
However, once the error occurred, the system stayed at 85 degrees consistently, regardless of what we were doing in-game. This is a first indicator that something is wrong.
If you have the suspicion, you can confirm this via the task manager. To do this, open it, select the “Performance” tab and then right-click in the graph under “CPU”. There you then select “Change graph to” and set it to “logical processors”. Now you can see the load of your individual cores.
If one of them is consistently at 100%, you too have the error and should keep an eye on temperatures and FPS.
Not dangerous, just annoying
What can overheating cause? However, in the context in which the problem currently occurs, it is not dangerous. You don’t have to worry about your hardware as long as it stays within an acceptable temperature range. Smaller spikes are considered by the manufacturers and only overheating over a longer period of time would damage your hardware.
The problem is annoying nonetheless. Because, among other things, the PCs could become very loud. Due to the additional heat, both test systems operated the cooling at 100%, although this would not be necessary in normal gaming operation and without the error.
Some users also report experiencing lower frames per second and other performance issues. This is because some processors lower their performance to avoid overheating. This is where the error can be particularly annoying.
Furthermore, fans describe that lostark.exe continues to run even after the game is closed and keeps the processor at 100%, so it also interferes with other applications. However, this error only occurred in one of our 4 test systems. The only thing that helped here was a complete system restart, since lostark.exe could not be closed manually either.
Is there anything you can do about it? Currently not. So far there doesn’t seem to be a fix for the problem that the community has found. A fix by the developers is not yet planned. In general, Amazon or Smilegate have not yet commented on the problems.
We’ve reached out to Amazon for a statement and will update this article as soon as we receive a response.
Lost Ark is already challenging even without bugs because it just looks good:
5 MMORPGs with the most beautiful graphics
Easy Anti-Cheat is said to be to blame – problem in other games too
What’s the problem? That has not yet been finally clarified. However, most fans assume that the problem is a bug on the part of Easy Anti-Cheat. There are some indications that this is the case.
The problems have only occurred since the last EAC update, we can also confirm this on a test system, but unfortunately we don’t have any before values for comparison on the other. However, many fans agree that the last update is to blame for the problems.
Furthermore, for some people, not only does lostark.exe remain open after closing, but Easy Anti-Cheat also keeps sucking processor power. Last but not least, not only fans of Lost Ark report this problem.
Exactly the same error should also occur in other games that rely on the same version of EAC. There are currently reports about the problem in The Division 2 (via reddit). Battlefield 2042 should also be affected, as MeinMMO author Dariusz Müller reports.
What are the fans saying? They’re mostly angry. Especially in Lost Ark, many are already annoyed by Easy Anticheat, since the tool is also to blame for the disconnections that have been plaguing the MMORPG for weeks. The EAC Offline error message is likely to cause high blood pressure for some.
Therefore, with the new bug, sentiment has dropped again. At this point we would like to let some fans from the most prominent post on the subject have their say (via reddit):
Are you affected by the issue? Have you encountered it in another game or are you annoyed by it in Lost Ark? Write it to us in the comments here on MeinMMO.
Lost Ark takes the servers offline for hours to take away items that were given to the players