The new MMO New World announces its plan to merge the first servers. In the initial phase, many servers were launched online, and now that the rush has settled, they plan their first server merges. However, they want to proceed cautiously.
This is the announcement from Amazon: On Saturday afternoon, November 7, 2021, there was an official announcement from New World in a thread in the official forum, promoting server mergers (via forums.newworld). An Amazon employee stated:
“Server mergers are on the horizon, but we need further scale testing before we feel confident enough to apply the technology in live worlds. As you can imagine, we are now more cautious after the initial rocky weeks”
Kay, New World Developer
They announce that players should keep an eye on what Amazon has to say about it in the “near future”. An announcement from a community manager will likely follow.
Trapped on a “dying server”
Why do people want server merges already? In the forum, a player states that his server in Europe now has a low population density and is shrinking. Some guilds are already planning a server transfer.
Some content in New World (like Outpost Rush) is designed to require a minimum number of players to operate. Players now feel “trapped on a dying server.”
Other players in the forum add: There is nothing happening on their server. No dungeons are being run anymore. There are too many servers for the people still playing New World.
This is an urgent problem: Playing New World on servers without many players is simply not fun.
Server structure of New World necessitates such measures
Here’s what’s behind it: This sounds more dramatic than it is. New World relies on a “classic server” model with many relatively small servers. This is actually unusual in 2021; most MMORPGs have flexible servers where you can switch channels (Black Desert), server clusters (WoW), or even mega-servers (The Elder Scrolls Online): With this structure, there’s no need to constantly increase or decrease the number of servers.
The advantage of small servers is that you know people there on the server. It has direct repercussions, such as when an invasion horde of players attacks.
The downside is this effect now:
- In the release phase, at maximum capacity, there are long queues, people are shouting for “more servers”, and more and more worlds are launched
- Once this initial rush is over, people complain that they are on “dead servers”, the operator has to merge servers, and the feeling emerges that “the game is dying now”
This will now automatically lead to “New World is already dead” postings, but this is indeed a problem that lies in the server structure of New World.
New World has lost nearly 50% of its players – I say: “That’s totally normal”
