New World has been having a week thanks to the launch of its first paid expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth. However, as rising player counts have caused queues to return, Amazon has needed to spin up even more servers to combat the issue.
While the player counts have not reached the same heights New World saw after the Brimstone Sands update last year (though it should be noted, that was a free update; Rise of the Angry Earth is $30), player counts have remained on the rise since Tuesday according to SteamDB. As a result, the team at Amazon Games have had to spin up even more servers, mostly in Europe, to combat the issue.
Much like when New World launched in 2021, the servers that feature many of the prominent streamers and content creators are seeing the largest queues due to their community trying to play with them. However, queues have hit nearly every server at one point or another, with character creation even disabled on the more popular servers to force new players to join one of the new ones.
Player counts have been healthy since Rise of the Angry Earth, eclipsing 57K concurrently playing this week - again, well short of last year's peak of over 140K after Brimstone Sands. However, for a paid expansion, more than doubling the player count has got to feel good for Amazon.
Meanwhile, like every update, things haven't been incredibly smooth, as Amazon works through a list of bugs and issues found since Rise of the Angry Earth hit New World. Servers have been seeing emergency restarted to try to fix issues, while Amazon detailed a list of the biggest items it's working on, including progression issues with the main story quest, especially for those who may not have finished the initial story back when New World released.
No timetable has been given for the fixes, with New World's Game Status Twitter stating that they are expecting "1-2 hotfixes this week alone."
