New World is jamming a bunch of legacy servers together after players flock to 'fresh start' options
Amazon's New World MMO celebrated its reworked beginning by opening a bunch of "fresh start" servers earlier this month, and it's caused a bit of a population crisis. The game's legacy servers aren't quite as bustling as they used to be now that so many people have departed for the green and fertile lands of the new ones. So Amazon's gonna mash a bunch of them together.
The server merge will take place on Friday, December 2 at 7 am GMT / 2 am EST (which means December 1 at 11 pm for people on PST), and will see 13 servers merged into 6 over the course of a 2.5 hour downtime period. The list of servers being merged is as follows:
- Tupia will be merging into Asgard.
- Fae will be merging into Niflheim.
- Eden will be merging into Olympus.
- Themiscyra and Frislandia are merging into Heliopolis.
- Aukumea will be merging into El Dorado.
- Eridu will be merging into Delos.
Those servers were picked based on a "combination of average concurrency, active characters, faction population, and more," so if your server didn't get picked, it's probably because it's too dang popular. Or it's based on whatever mysterious category falls under "and more". Tarot readings, probably.
Player response to the merge's announcement has mostly been positive, although a few are remarking that it isn't expansive enough, and should include fresh start servers, too. Others are just remembering past merges, like that time a predominantly French-speaking server merged with a predominantly-English one, resulting in something like a prolonged, frustrating Monty Python skit before things calmed down.
We weren't too keen on New World when it released back in 2021, giving it 60% and criticising it for feeling "scattershot and underbaked". Despite an incredible launch, it struggled to hang on to its initially large player base, making merges like this one necessary. I suppose it'd be foolish to write this one off, though, it's not as if Amazon is strapped for the cash it needs to keep the game going.