With the strength of the player numbers in New World's first couple of days, there has also been the presence of that old launch standby: lengthy queues. Well, following the launch, Amazon has been opening up new servers across regions to help with the initial capacity issues.
Starting on Tuesday, when 10 new servers were added to the EU Central region, Australia followed with eight servers. Yesterday, new servers began opening up for the US regions, split again into US-East and US-West. US-East got over 40 new servers, while US-West got eight. Would this be enough? Well, no, since the expansion of available worlds has continued.
Amazon keeps opening up dozens of new servers in various regions, all which add to the initial impressive list of what was announced for launch, but there are more places to go. Since it’s still early and Amazon has announced that free character transfers are coming soon, we should begin to see if these expanded world lists and transfers begin to alleviate the login issues. At the very least, they are proactive in addressing the issues so far. With MMORPG launches, there are already so many lessons that could have been learned from two decades of releases, server strains, queues, and demand, so at least things are moving at a pretty fast clip.
There’s a valid concern that adding too much capacity will result in what we’ve seen before in terms of population imbalances, but this isn’t uncommon. It’s never easy to get something exactly right, and the heavy demand is a good thing for a big launch like this. It remains to be seen how this will work down the line, but the priority for Amazon is getting New World up and running in a way that lets people get in, stay in, and enjoy their journey.
