The New World team has been merging servers over the past week. While the process has gone pretty well in general, there have been some issues and community concerns over the results. Some of the choices of which servers to merge into other servers brought up questions and now the team is looking to address those and offer some help.
Over the weekend, developer Kay published an explanation of how their merge planning goes, as well as what some of the criteria are in determining which to merge and which to merge those into. The explanation also pointed to a few remaining issues that are preventing some servers from merging just yet. Along with some bugs that they are being careful with.
Some of the criteria for server merges includes looking for “close to equal faction representation and a peak population of 1000”, with the notion that this should indicate a likelihood for a healthy server population afterward that will make the change worth it. This is where things started with the recent server merges.
However, there are certain servers that cannot be merged yet due to an ongoing persistence bug. They offer this is an explanation as to why some of the server merges announced and performed may not have made as much sense and may not have resulted in a balanced enough outcome.
This persistence bug has to do with housing, and the effect of server merges and character transfers. On the data side, server merges and character transfers make housing plots stack their data, which can cause overload and instability. If it does reach that point, they've determined that houses may just disappear. They are proceeding carefully, which is in line with recently acknowledging the problems with updates and bugs so far. In order to help, they are planning a one-time reset of the faction change cooldown.
For the full details, see this update over at New World.
