New World is getting ready for another round of server merges next week. Amazon Games announced that merges will happen across most regions on January 10th.
As with prior server merge announcements, New World got some downtime to add announcements into the system in preparation for the merges. Most regions will have some merges, with Central EU, US-East, Australia, and South America each getting new merges.
Central EU will merge 12 servers into seven. US-East will merge 10 servers into five. South America will merge seven servers into three, and Australia will merge four servers into two. One of the merges that will happen, Australian server Eridu into Delos, was previously called off after community feedback from the last announcement, but it seems that another look has failed to meet the standard for activity and healthy populations.
In making this latest announcement, Amazon reminded the community of some of their criteria for judging whether a server would be a candidate for a merge:
“As a reminder, we look into a combination of average concurrency, active characters, faction population, and more to determine which worlds should be merged”.
When the Australian server merge was initially called off back just over a month ago, this came after community feedback offered additional context to the team, asking them to not just look at population numbers but also to check out interactions and other circumstances that you couldn't tell just by looking at raw numbers. It seems that in the next review, these servers didn't meet those standards, in spite of additional context.
Server merges will begin on January 10th at 12 p.m. Eastern/ 9 a.m. Pacific time. Amazon has been proactive over the past couple of months in working to accommodate population shifts and keeping an eye on things to pull back and merge as needed to avoid stagnant servers.
Read the full list of affected servers and details on what to expect, over at New World.