When launching Lost Ark to start a play session, players have become accustomed to experiencing noticeably long load times, ranging anywhere from five to 10 minutes between pressing the play button and reaching the game’s splash screen. The cause for this delay, as the first thing displayed by the MMO’s boot sequence, is quite obvious — the cumbersome, yet noticeably effective Easy Anti-Cheat.
Easy Anti-Cheat is activated before Lost Ark can launch, which first scans the game’s file folder for malicious or competitively dishonest software. Having fully scanned this folder and detected no threats, it then proceeds to scan the rest of the drive on which the game’s files are contained.
Under circumstances in which Lost Ark shares a drive with operating system files or folders full of other games, this approach to competitive integrity can produce overwhelming and undue work for Easy Anti-Cheat to process. As a result, it will take longer for Easy to finish scanning the player’s system and eventually allow Lost Ark to launch.
Speeding up launch times: Giving easy the boot
If the problem that seems to be delaying Lost Ark’s launch is Easy Anti-Cheat’s overstepping of Lost Ark’s virtual bounds, then the simple solution would be to limit what Easy can scan, right? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Smilegate relies heavily on Easy to combat in-game currency farmers operating bot farms within their lucrative MMO.
Lest they watch the market value of silver and gold craters, the developers are taking every precaution necessary to combat cheating in their game, even if it means policing external programs as a precaution.
In the meantime, however, players can benefit from giving Easy Anti-Cheat the easiest boot cycle possible. If they can afford the hardware, it is recommended to move Lost Ark away from system files and onto a solid-state drive, preferably one that is shared with as few other files or games as possible, if any at all. Isolating Lost Ark to its own drive can carve down its launch time to around a minute on moderately-powerful and up-to-date systems.
Related: Can you bypass the Lost Ark VPN ban? Answered
Published: May 12, 2022 02:55 am