Testing is meant to break things and not go to plan, but the devs of New World had a pretty big stumble as the game continued testing its leaderboard system with a war event yesterday, and it’s all thanks to how the game arranges teams with mercenary players.
In a normal war situation, the team makeup is 50v50 with some restrictions on team member numbers via a mercenary system. Defenders have to bring 40 company players and can bring on 10 mercenary players, while attackers have 25 company members and 25 mercenaries. However, the population of the PTR and these mercenary restrictions saw the test war end up with a team makeup of 25v10. And one of the dev’s responses to the mistake was, quite literally, “WELP.” The devs then canceled the test, claiming backend issues and the war auto-finishing as excuses.
Response to the whole affair has been generally unkind from the playerbase. One streamer of the war went absolutely apoplectic, while reactions across Reddit otherwise facepalm about the mistake, reference an earlier dev post that asked players to “trust the process,” or suggest that WELP should be the free title that was promised to test attendees.
