When New World’s Rise of the Angry Earth launched earlier this month, I was kind of baffled to realize that many returning players (including me, apparently!) had been unceremoniously booted off their home servers in accordance with Amazon’s inactive character policy.
“Characters who haven’t logged into their game world for over 180 days will become unbound from their chosen world. This system aims to reduce queue congestion during high-peak times, prioritizing active players. Unbound characters won’t lose any progress or data. However, social connections exclusive to their previous world, such as company membership, friends list, ignore list, and buy/sell orders, will be removed. For characters who become unbound from their home world, the option to select a new home world will appear on the character select screen.”
That new server choice has to be in the same region, can’t be a fresh start world if the old one wasn’t, and can’t be at capacity – which, of course, a lot of existing servers are around expansion time.
I can understand Amazon’s motivations here. It wants to make sure server resources are going to active players. And it wants to make sure returning players can be fluid in finding homes in case their old one is gone or overflowing.
But I also think the policy ignores the reality of how groups move between MMOs long-term. If my guild all returned to the game after leaving last year, we’d have been booted from our home. Anybody who’d logged in intermittently would now be stuck on the old server (unless willing to pay to leave or able to make use of the temporary free transfers Amazon announced on Friday) while the rest of us – with our guild name, character names, and friends lists scrambled – had to start over somewhere else. The aggravation of dealing with all of that seems like a major barrier to re-entry, with the sole silver lining that at least you are getting the equivalent of a free transfer for your trouble.
So I’m torn. Where do you stand on New World’s unbound’ character issue? What’s the solution here?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
