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Last week New World developer Kay responded in a thread asking for server merges with a definitive “they are on the horizon”, without giving too many details on how soon players can really expect them. This week, information was provided with the first step in the path to server merges, which is to test a server merge on the Public Test Realm (PTR).
In a blog post outlining the upcoming PTR server merge, Luxendra also touched base on a couple other transfer-related topics. In the case of additional server transfers, AGS first plans to take care of “edge cases” where some players were blocked from using their transfer tokens. The team believes that, despite a few ongoing problems with the server transfers, the team was able to learn some lessons in how to handle these issues in the future.
“The first round of server transfers provided a lot of lessons for us to learn from, and we apologize that it has been at the expense of some of you joining your friends on a server of your choice. After transfers have been unblocked and our investigations into these cases are complete, we are looking to provide a second round of server transfers. Estimated timing is before the year’s end. We will keep you updated if that changes.”
-Luxendra, Community Manager, New World Official Forums
Region transfers have also been a hot topic as we recently reported on as well. Luxendra stated that they are currently gauging interest in how many players would actually want to do a region transfer between the EU Central and US East servers. Interested players can add their information to this thread on regional server transfers so that their “vote” counts.
Finally, server merges on the PTR have a tentative date, which is 11/15/2021. If the merge test goes smoothly, Amazon Game Studios will identify and schedule merges, which will require the team to look at not just the population of the server, but the overall engagement of their players. One major issue the team will try to keep in mind are faction representation:
“But there is more nuance to these merges. Once we’ve identified a world as a candidate for merge, we compare it to the existing worlds by reviewing elements like faction representation and overall population in the set to find the most optimal partner world. While we cannot guarantee exact matches, we make every attempt to choose worlds for merge that are complementary.”
-Luxendra, Community Manager, New World Official Forums
When the time comes for merges to take place, all players will be informed in advance of the plan. All gold, items, faction and company will remain the same after the transfer has completed, or at least that is the intention at this time.
The post also touches on several other aspects that aren’t quite server related, but still extremely important to New World players. AGS wants to incentivize players to join less dominant factions on some servers. Currently New World prevents players from swapping their faction to the dominant faction, and they also give underdog factions extra influence so they have a better chance at declaring war. These features may not dissuade players from joining the dominant faction initially, so the team has asked the community their opinion on what they would see as a way to bring players to the less popular faction.
For much more information on the current issues and how AGS is handling them, you can check out the original blog post for more details.
