New World, Day 4: New servers, long queues, transfers next week, and Jeff Bezos weighs in

We’re guessing the engineers at Amazon Games aren’t getting much sleep right about now. Since the launch of New World on Tuesday, the servers have been slammed with the typical big MMO launch problem: not enough room for the huge numbers of people trying to play. And they are indeed huge numbers; the latest record was set yesterday at 758K concurrent, though again that’s folks in-game and waiting in-queue to get into the game. As I type this Friday morning, more than half a million people are in there now, and Steam reviews have recovered from the obvious review-bomb that went on earlier this week.

So where does New World stand right now? Well, over the course of yesterday and last night, Amazon continued releasing new servers in just about every region, in addition to rolling out a client-side patch to make the queue itself more stable. (There was nothing quite as enraging as waiting for hours in a queue only to be booted out of the game right as you were finally logging in. A bit like waiting half a day to ride a new roller coaster, only to have it break while you’re literally at the front of the line. I speak from experience!)

Last last night (EDT), the team admitted that it had actually been “surprised” by the huge influx of players for the game – over a million people total on launch day and growing every day since – which presumably is why a studio whose parent company literally runs AWS was a bit unprepared. The studio now says it has “more than doubled” its server count and is still “working to increase the capacity of all available servers to support a higher population cap.”

Once again, the studio notes that there are many servers in every region – 40% – that have low queues or no queues at all, while those from day one are pretty much universally bogged down in multi-hour waits. Amazon is encouraging players to start up on those servers instead and promising transfers next week.

“We are also working hard on a feature that will allow you to transfer your characters to a different server, so if you choose one now just to get up and playing, you can make a different choice later to play on a server with your friends. Our goal is to release this feature next week, once we’ve thoroughly tested and are sure it’s ready.”

The problem, of course, is that day-one players are now entrenched on the original queue-logged servers, with characters and communities they don’t want to leave. And until Amazon actually does release that transfer tool, many of them will continue to choose to wait it out.

I personally gave up on my original server last night and rerolled on a server with an even dumber name – but no queue – so we’ll see whether the weekend causes more folks to break.