Following a period of free server transfers, Amazon Game Studios says server merges will be coming to New World in the future.
The news comes via a reply from Amazon Games developer Kay in response to a topic on the game's official forums on the subject of low population servers and the need for server merges. As the user who started the topic points out, much of New World's endgame content relies on other players, whether it's for the faction vs. faction Wars, the Outpost Rush battleground, or elite farming runs. That makes it extremely challenging for players on very low population servers to actually, well, play the game.
"Hey there, world merges are on the horizon, but require additional scale testing before we are confident enough to use the tech on the live worlds," Kay writes on the game's forums. "As you can imagine given the first few rocky weeks, we are using an over abundance of caution here. Keep an eye out in the official news area for an update from our Community Managers on this in the near future."
The need for server merges is an issue of Amazon's own making. To combat long login queues during launch week, Amazon created numerous new servers and encouraged players to create characters on them to avoid queues. Amazon later offered free server transfers, so that players who may have created a character on a different server than they originally intended could find a permanent home once the game's population stabilized.
A side effect is that many low population servers have seen their populations decrease even more as a result of the free transfers, resulting in numerous "dead" servers where other players are scarce and much of the game's content is near impossible to find groups for. The sooner server merges happen, the sooner the game will be in a healthier state for all players.
Server population woes are just the latest issue for New World. A recent gold duplication bug saw Amazon shut down the game's player-run economy for an entire day, and an invincibility bug threatened to destroy the integrity of the game's PvP-focused content. Both of the above issues were quickly fixed, and despite the bugs, New World remains as one of the top-played games on Steam more than a month after launch.