The MMORPG New World opened many servers to accommodate all of its players. Now that many have quit, it’s merging some servers. Does that do anything?
The number of players was very high for the release in autumn 2021 (via SteamDB). Over the months, however, they dropped below 20,000 average players per day. That changed with the Brimestone Sands update, which went live on October 18th. The numbers jumped to 34,000 and soon after that to 67,000 when the reboot servers opened shortly after.
New World has now lost 30,000 of the players again.
Shortly after the release of the fresh start servers, some of the old servers were merged as they became quite quiet. Another merge followed on January 10, 2023.
Players on empty servers benefit the most
Each server has a capacity of 2,500 players who can be online at the same time. The rest end up in queues. But when only a tenth of that goes online, it quickly doesn’t feel like an MMORPG anymore.
If you play on a popular server that has been quite full since the beginning, you will hardly have noticed anything about the merge. This is how MeinMMO author Alexander Leitsch, who is active on Aaru, feels. As a New World expert, he makes a statement on this article:
Anyone who has previously played on quite full servers will not notice much of the server mergers. There were already a number of active players on it and these are now being supplemented by new players from an almost empty server. However, these servers suffered from the Fresh Start in late 2022 as veterans started over with their friends or just for fun on the fresh servers.
In the meantime, this has almost evened out. With us on Aaru, for example, we almost always reach 2,000 simultaneous players during prime time. If you also look at the statistics at New World DB, you can see that the small server Artemis and the Fresh Start server Kronos have recently benefited from the mergers. But the real winners are the players who were previously on an almost empty server. For them, the situation has clearly improved.
Those who were previously on almost empty servers and now find themselves on Aaru, for example, will definitely benefit from the merger. There are more teammates that are especially important when it comes to party finder. Without other players you are stuck in it forever and cannot complete certain content.
PvP is also difficult on empty servers. For fortress battles or open-world PvP, it needs fellow players to enjoy it. In New World you join one of three factions that fight each other.
You can see 5 tips for newcomers to New World in the video:
5 tips if you want to start with New World in 2022
Restart servers are also affected by the merge
From the EU servers, these were recently merged:
So this time not only the legacy servers, i.e. the old ones, are affected, but also the restart servers. With the last merge in December, only the old servers were affected.
Many were attracted to the Fresh Start, which is why it became quiet on the legacy servers at the time. But that didn’t last very long. Players returned to their previous worlds or quit New World altogether. Therefore, the restart servers are also affected by the January merge.
What are your thoughts on the server merge in New World? Is your world affected? Are you playing on the fresh start servers or the legacy servers? Did you benefit from it or didn’t you notice it at all because your server is full of players anyway? Write it to us in the comments here on MeinMMO!
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