New World’s plans to merge a round of legacy servers will begin later tonight. Amazon has changed plans in response to community feedback, deciding to not merge Australian server Eridu into Delos.
The downtime for the moves will start at 11PM PST tonight / 2 AM EST, and there’s an expected downtime period of about 2.5 hours for the server that is being merged into another one. The team had a previous short downtime a few days ago in order to add messaging warning players of the upcoming merge has as well as to shut down events like Wars and Invasions. These will be re-enabled on Eridu now that the merge has been called off there.
With the two Australian servers, The community gave feedback and context to the team asking them to look at not just raw player population numbers on a server, but to check out other circumstances that isn't necessarily apparent with plain data. If the merge had happened as a regional we planned, the Asia-Pacific region would be down to just one legacy server.
As noted in a post by developer Delakron, “and therefore in doing so [leaving A/P with one server] could cause the swing of the pendulum back in the other direction for War and other systems. Not to mention the diminished efforts of having built a unique and positive in-world culture. So given this unique situation, and the fact that Eridu currently does maintain a fair distribution of territories (I checked!), I have decided to call off this scheduled merge”.
When Amazon decides to merge servers, their goal is to make sure that players have an active community and to compensate for population shifts overtime for whatever reason. This time some of the shift happened with the Fresh Start servers, but they're also concerned not to keep too many lower population servers, regardless of whether they have tight-knit communities, because if someone rolls on an empty server it can look bad and dissuade participation.
For more on the server merge plans that will start tonight, see the update at New World.
