Amazon will be merging some New World servers when data shows "the world experience has become sub-adoptable."
Two months after the massive launch of New World, Amazon Game Studios has begun merging servers amid a drop in player numbers.
The game's first server merge, the central EU server Mardi, will merge into the EU server Britia. It was supposed to take place on December 8th, but after widespread Amazon Web Services impacting the New World, it would be December 9th instead. Two more mergers, this time for all the servers that make up the Central EU Oneheim Terra World set and the South American Nibiru Mu World set, will take place on 10 December.
Those mergers are likely to be just the beginning. New World saw over 900,000 concurrent players shortly after launch, leading to long login queue times. In response, Amazon increasingly built new servers for players to create characters for, later promising free server transfers. Fast forward to now, and the end result of server transfers and a dwindling active player base is that many of the game's servers built to reduce login problems are now ghost towns with only a few hundred active players. While the game is still popular, at the time of writing it is the fourth most played game on Steam, with a peak concurrent player count of over 114,000, with simply more servers than players to fill them.
Amazon recently released an FAQ detailing how and why one server might be merged into another, stating that the experience turned out to be "sub-optimal" on the world if the studio's data showed that it will start looking for servers into which it can be merged. To determine if a server might be "unhealthy," Amazon says it looks at population size, overall player engagement, and more.
Once it is determined that a server merge is needed, Amazon begins looking for a host server to merge the other servers with. That investigation involves comparing things like faction balance, language, and game play style between different servers before making a decision.
Progress is not lost when one server merges with another with the transfer of gold, commodities, companies, houses, and so on. The only thing that doesn't transfer are the ownership areas, which are left in the control of the players on the host server who will accept new players from the merge. This throws a wrinkle in the game's PvP-focused faction warfare, which aims to own as many territories as possible, but beats the option of playing on almost empty servers with little or no competition.
Amazon recently rolled back a controversial change it proposed for New World's endgame, one that would have made gear derived from crafting less effective if players failed to participate in certain endgame activities. . That will no longer be the case, although some elements of the upcoming system, called specialisations, are still expected to arrive in future patches. New seasonal content, as well as other endgame changes, are currently being tested in the game's public test area.
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