This weekend I was not certain how much time I would get to play, because the weekend tends to be when we do things. For the most part, I got to hang out and play New World all Saturday because it was raining buckets outside, and neither of us had the desire to leave the house. Sunday however it became rapidly clear just how untenable our current server situation is. Because of just the nature of how our Sundays go, I spent time in queues three different times for a grand total of four and a half hours spent watching this box tick down. Essentially if you cannot log in before noon, you are not going to have what I would call a reasonable experience. Thankfully my machine is capable of running multiple games at the same time so on the longest of these queues… 2.5 hours, I spent time over in Final Fantasy XIV doing roulette.
One thing that I can attest to with a fairly high degree of confidence is that the tool we have been using to estimate how long a queue is… is pretty freaking accurate. The three queues that I entered yesterday were pretty much dead on for what the queue estimates were at the time of me logging in. These are some sample queues from the site at the time of writing this, and I sorted them by the most players in a given queue. This more or less tells the tale of New World right now. Notice that a few servers have seemingly been bumped up to 2250 players as a test, but I am starting to doubt that they plan on scaling these up very much higher. In fact 2000 players seems to be an important number for the design and stability of this game. I provided some server data on Friday when I wrote about the game and since then 131 more servers have been added… only further increasing the fragmentation of the player base. The current data centers look something like this:
- Frankfurt, Germany – 230 Servers
- Arlington Virginia, United States – 200 Servers
- Sydney, Australia – 70 Servers
- Umatilla Oregon, United States – 64 Servers
- Sao Paulo, Brazil – 44 Servers
Amazon has made some attempts to flag players who are trying to get around the AFK timeout and force them out of the game. Cities right now are rife with players running in place against obstacles or auto-attacking while standing still via a macro. So while I am happy to see them making strides in keeping this from happening, I also don’t think it is going to really go very far in solving the problem. The core issue is that the day one, day two, and probably even day three servers are way too populated.
Amazon has officially locked many of these overly populated servers so that new characters cannot be rolled on them. However, this action probably came a little too late for it to make a difference either. If you have a fixed server size in mind as they did… maybe stop character creation at 2.5 times that number? On opening day there were servers with queues that were upwards of four times the size of the total number of players allowed on a server. Ultimately I am just not certain that staying where we are is going to be tenable much longer. There has been a discussion that Amazon is trying to rush a solution to allow players to migrate elsewhere, and right now I am thinking that is our next best hope. Once this opens up, find a smaller server and then coordinate a move to that location so that we can recreate the company again on the other side.
There is a lot of really fun group content available in this game. I spent some time over the weekend closing “Rifts” aka corruption breaches and they were great. I also got pulled into a random group with players from various factions and did Amrine Expedition the first dungeon. All of this is pretty awesome content, but also things that would have been so much more enjoyable had I been able to do it with my friends. The core problem with the game right now is actually getting players online. It is making all of the core systems function a little worse as a result. For example, I watched a video from a YouTuber that talked about how hard it is to make the War system work right now because they just can’t reliably get players online at a fixed time in order to meet up and defend a territory.
There are times I am committed and connected to the community on a server. For example, I would refuse to ever move away from Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, because that server is just phenomenal. In New World, however… I think pretty much every server is a dumpster fire right now and Minda is not really a place I care about significantly. I am deeply connected to my character and would not want to re-roll elsewhere. I am deeply connected with the people I am playing with… whenever we can actually play together. I am not however connected to any given server, so far as I am concerned our best bet is to move. This is going to still have some pain associated with it because I am in a place where I need those tier 4 crafting machines, but I can deal with being delayed if it means we can all play the game in a reasonable manner.
I think the plan going forward is to wait for the server transfer tool to open up, and see what it does to server populations. Then find a relatively low to medium population server and transplant our little group of players. The players that rerolled on low pop servers are seeing a lot more of these sweet sweet loading screens than those who have stuck by Minda. At level 33, I am too deep to contemplate starting over, so my last hope is for a server transfer.
I feel almost guilty being able to log in and play pretty much as and when I like. And I am playing on a Day One server (Zuvendis). There’s next to no obvious afk-macro-wallrunning going on. In fact, at times it seems almost too quiet. This afternoon I spent an hour or so gathering and fishing no more than half a kilometer from my starting town of Monarchs Bluffs and i literally did not see a single other player.
Obviously that has a lot to do with playing on a US server in UK hours but I’ve been doing that for decades and weekends are still usually very busy for me. In the first few years of GW2 we used not to bother even trying to play WvW in GW2 on a Saturday or Sunday from mid-afternoon our time because it was just too crowded, for example.
On Zuvendis there’s not to much of that going on. I played a lot on Saturday and Sunday and it was pleasantly bustling but there were no queues until mid-evening, which means in the US you could get on straight away with no queues at all until late afternoon. It was pretty busy by around 9-10pm my time, which would be about 4-5 in the evening on the US East Coast but even then there was no more than 15 or 20 minutes to wait in the queue and things were very playable once I got in.
Not sure why Zuvendis is such a backwater but it’s made this whole experience very different for me from what I read elsewhere. I ought to check what the queues are like in the rest of the server cluster to see if they’re all like that.
I’m glad I moved, frankly. Of course my character was a lot lower than you are, so it took really one night to catch up to where I’d been. I haven’t seen a queue yet on my new server.
However I am playing with a bunch of really juvenile people based on the names of both players and companies I see. You always see random names that scream “This person’s brain is somehow damaged” but on my server some of the top companies have that kind of name and that is harder to avoid. (Yes, I’ve reported them.)
I’m REALLY hoping when the transfers open we can wind up back on the same server again!