I don’t want to jinx things but the queues appear to just be… gone. I spent some time popping around various zones and I did not encounter a single “wall runner”. For those who might not have been following along this saga, the term wall runner is used colloquially in New World to refer to someone who is exhibiting a behavior designed to evade the AFK Timeout functionality. There were various schools of thought here, but the most basic seemed to be toggling the run hotkey on and then pushing up against some obstacle that would keep you running into a corner. Moving around the zones you would find people in random corners of the world furiously racing against some rock, or gate… all in an attempt to make the game think they were actively playing.
Yesterday Amazon patched in some updated tech designed to detect these folks and punt them from the game. Then magically it was like we had enough breathing room to simply not have to worry about login queues at all. I popped in yesterday morning to take a few screenshots and unsurprisingly there was no queue. Then I logged in after work… and still no queue. Throughout the course of the night, I logged in and out a few different times, with one of them being around 8 pm and still no queue at all. In fact, it showed that our server population was only sitting at around 1700 players. So I guess the question is, was all of the activity by folks afking to reserve their place in line?
I think you have a few things at work. Firstly like every game, the newness has worn down a bit and those folks who took off days from work to play 24/7 have run out of vacation time. Secondly, there is the challenge that it was impossible to play on the busy servers reliably, so if our little group is any evidence… many folks voluntarily rerolled elsewhere and started from scratch because they had not made enough progress to make that painful yet. Thirdly, of course, there is always a significant drop-off in a new game after a week or so, and we are seeing that play out here. For all of those folks who crushed the server on the opening days, there are going to be a chunk that for one reason or another didn’t really find what they were looking for. New World is not going to be the ideal game experience for everyone, and as a result, you are going to have a significant chunk of players that just completely bounce off the title no matter how good it might be.
All of that said… I really do think the improved detection made a significant difference and the early signs that maybe just maybe folks were going to get banned for the behavior. What we are left with is a situation where those original few servers now don’t have queues but are still in a locked-down state to prevent new players from rolling on them. Similarly, we have a fragmented community of folks waiting on the server transfers to allow everyone to once again play together. That said I find myself questioning what the next best steps are going forward. I am left with the majority of a community on one server that has no queues, and an isolated but growing number of people taking up residence on other servers. Is it the best choice to try and get everyone on Minda, or is it to abandon ship and latch onto a completely new server?
If we united the community, we have maybe in the realm of fifty players. Coordinating that many people landing at the same destination is going to be a bit of a challenge. At least with the loss of the queues, it takes away some of the immediacies of needing to do this. My hope is we can take a bit of a wait and see as the server transfers open up. I still think that the server status website is our best bet in gauging active populations, but I do wish it had a 48-hour peak number or something to that effect so that you can see what the potential for a server load looks like, not just what the active one is. In the meantime, I am nearing level 40, and probably need to stop what I am doing for a bit and focus on some faction currency given that I would love to buy the level 40 set of faction gear.
I do feel a little bit bad though in that the worst seems to be over… and now a handful of folks have scattered to the wind. I hope we can reunite the community and get everyone back together on either Minda or some new destination. I will of course keep folks updated as to where we decide to land. For the short term however I want to see how folks shift before choosing a destination to leap to.
Yeah I started earlier this week and just rolled on some random server. Hopefully there will be transfers soon as Amazon has suggested. It would be nice to play with some friendly people.
I find all of the conversations around whether it’s too late to change servers and whether people have made too much progress to lose quite hard to follow. This is only the second week. If Ne World turns out to be an mmorpg that people stick with long term, they’ll be playing for years. Even mmo tourists used to last three months.
A week and a half means we’ve barely started, surely? Can any progress anyone’s made really matter at this stage? We could reroll and start over half a dozen times and still get back to the same place we are now by Christmas. Not that I’m suggesting anyone needs to do anything of the kind but those are the timescales we’re looking at here.
I agree with Nimgimli on the character limit, though. That just seems weird to me. I understand why we’re not allowed more than one character per cluster, although I think that could have been handled better by locking each account to a single faction per cluster rather than by only allowing a single character. To only allow two characters across all clusters, though,seems completely pointless. What’s that supposed to be preventing?
At first I assumed it was because extra character slots would be something we’d buy from the cash shop but so far there’s no sign of that. In GW2 I ended up buying three accounts so I could do that here, eventually, if necessary. I’d rather just make more characters on the one account I’ve got, though. Always assuming I stick around long enough for it to become an issue, that is. For now, one character is plenty.
At this point steam clocks me at having spent 115 hours over the past two weeks in game. Granted quite a bit of that was with it running windowed in the background in order to preserve a slot on the servers. So I was part of the problem. However some of the achievements tell me a tale that I have put in a lot of time and effort into the game. I have one for example that you get for harvesting 24,000 wood. At this point I am just shy of level 40, and have progressed a number of my trades to Tier 4 crafting out of I think Tier 5 is the max currently. I also have a home in one of the towns. All of that would keep me from ever wanting to reroll elsewhere. Could I start fresh somewhere else? Sure, but I would be grumpy the entire time until I reached the level of progression that I am currently at.
I was thinking that this is kind of a perfect storm for those of us who left. If there are no queues on Minda there is no reason for y’all to move. And if Minda doesn’t allow new characters then I’m sure they won’t allow transfers to Minda, either. So my guess is that those of us who ran out of patience are gone for good, but hey it was our decision.
If the community on Minda is a decent one, I’d suggest you stay there. I hate the 2 character limit because it makes it difficult to just ‘test the waters’ of a few servers before committing to one. Like ideally I’d start 4 or 5 characters on various servers and log in to sample the community of each server a few times, then decide which I wanted to live on, but that’s super cumbersome given the 2 character limit.