How to fix unable to view party members problem in Lost Ark

Imagine this: two Lost Ark players share characters on the same server and want to play together. They meet at the Chaos Dungeon bulletin board in Castle Luterra, but are surprised to find that no one can see each other despite being in the same location on the same server.

Since they have never experienced this phenomenon before, they probably think it’s some kind of bug and restart the game to fix it, which is probably unsuccessful. Little do they know that the sprawling and popular MMO servers intentionally provide in-game population countermeasures aimed at reducing the server load and system wear and tear that can simultaneously cause a large player base.

Channels: Subservers between servers

What these players experienced was channel splitting. Within each individual Lost Ark server are five channels, further dividing each server’s players into smaller, more manageable populations.

When a player joins a server, they are placed into one of the five channels based on the collective load of each channel, with the player automatically joining the clearest channel available. Once logged in, that player can switch channels by selecting a new channel from the drop-down menu at the top right of the UI above the mini-map.

Related: How to fix server authentication error 10010 problem in Lost Ark

The channel switching process takes about five seconds to reload the server, followed by an additional ten second delay to prevent rapid server hopping. With this in mind, if a group of players wants to play together, they must first coordinate both the server and the channel on which they want to meet.