So who had “New World merges” on your Christmas list? Because that is what you’re getting. Last night, today we’ll see selected servers in Central Europe, US East, US West, and Australia pulled offline, all in the service of “[preparing] to support” merges. Expect the initial downtime starting at 4 p.m., a slight delay from the originally announced noon plan.
Overnight, Amazon posted a more detailed list of servers getting the squish, and it’s a lot of them, in some cases as many as six servers all being smooshed into a new server group. Just for reference here, both of the servers I played on are included, and both seemed to have decent pops to me, so that suggests Amazon is attempting to get out in front of future population shifts, not just shoring up the most dire situations.
This isn’t the first merge for the game, as several servers were merged last week.
Per the world merge server FAQ, Amazon says it will notify players in-game to expect the merge the following week, which ought to give you an idea when the actual merge is happening this time. The studio has previously said it decides which servers to merge based on their health when it comes to population size and “overall engagement.”
