Well, if you were wondering whether fresh start would boost New World even more than Brimstone Sands, wonder no more: It definitely did.
Yesterday afternoon’s staggered release of the fresh start worlds overcame its rash of delays and rolled out with the expected return of overcrowding, queues, and in some cases locked servers that are splitting player groups. We count 14 full/locked servers as of this morning, including many of the fresh start servers, and many of them were locked last night too. That led Amazon to add seven new servers even before wave 3 had rolled out, with several more after that, meaning the original 13 fresh start servers burgeoned to 33, bringing the current total of all servers to 77. Basically, it’s like the original launch all over again, on a smaller scale.
On the other hand, it’s a scale Amazon has to be excited about. Readers will recall that the game’s original launch peak of over 900K players had fallen to 22K in June but has been climbing back up this fall. Brimstone got it to 69K. Last night, the game saw 119K concurrent at one point – on a Wednesday in the middle of WoW season. Not too shabby.