The day after launch, New World server queues continue to hit the thousands, with some players waiting hours to play Amazon's new MMO. Others, however, are jumping into servers immediately after creating their characters. It's a slightly odd situation: There are lots of New World servers with no queues—Amazon has added a bunch since launch—but many players still have to line up to join the servers where they started, or where their guildmates or friends are.
Certain servers are ultra-popular because streamers and YouTubers have said they're playing in them. Shroud has chosen US West server Celadon, for instance, and 823 people were in the Celadon queue at midday local time despite plenty of queueless options for new characters. Other servers have been claimed by big MMO guilds and Discord communities, whose ranks and fans are pushing the worlds well past their 2,000-player population caps.
Frustrating New World players further are errors that apparently drop them out of the queue, potentially after hours of waiting. In one Reddit thread, players discuss strategies for dealing with the "TooManyRequestsException" error without losing their spot in line.
Amazon says that, along with adding new servers, it will increase the 2,000-player server cap following testing. It hasn't said what the new cap will be, but noted today that testing is in progress.
As an update, we are continuing to work on the long queues. We're adding new worlds and are performing tests to increase the capacity for all worlds.More details on character transfers are coming soon. Our main priority is resolving long queues.Thanks for your patience!September 29, 2021
To help with long queues, Amazon also announced yesterday that it will offer everyone a way to transfer their characters to different servers sometime in the next two weeks. That way, you can get started on a quiet server and then move to a more popular one (or where your friends are) once the launch rush settles down. Details on transfers are "coming soon," Amazon said today.
The transfer promise may have helped, because we're not seeing any of the ridiculous 20,000-player queues we saw a few times yesterday, but the issue is far from solved.
In a Reddit thread posted earlier today, Central EU players complained that there weren't any low-queue servers to play on, even if they did give in and make a new character.
"I have yet to play the game," said user Frenk. "I work in the EU 9-5. I gave up yesterday after being stuck for 4 hrs and right now I am 1000th in queue. I don’t see myself playing today either."
Newworldstatus.com, a "quickly thrown together noncommercial lunch hour project" that monitors New World's server populations, showed over 400,000 players queued for Central EU servers at one point on launch day, and the peak didn't dip much today, hitting 340,000 players queued in the region. The data isn't perfect—the site isn't partnered with Amazon and gathers information with its own methods—but it appears to capture the overall situation well. Looking at the New World server browser myself, I counted 92 Central EU servers each with 2,000 to 4,800 people in their queues near today's peak. That lines up.
Amazon added even more servers today, though: There are 150 Central EU servers now, and it can no longer be said that no low-queue servers exist. Even at today's peak, dozens of Central EU servers had no queues, or very small ones. The situation is similar in other regions. At the time of writing, there are 2,000-player lines for popular US East servers despite there being plenty of US East servers with no queues. The US West El Dorado server, which was chosen by a few YouTubers and streamers, had 1,400 players in its queue earlier today, whereas the server some of us at PC Gamer chose had only one person in its queue.
But none of us are safe from queues: Our chosen US West server now has a 90-player queue, which will presumably only increase as we approach peak after-dinner gaming hours.
Some of us got stuck waiting last night, too, and as streamers and communities move around, it's anyone's guess which servers will become hotspots. Hypothetically, someone could've picked a random server on launch day, played all night, and then found themselves unable to get back in because a 3,000-member Discord RP community claimed it for improv purposes.
The promise of a future character transfer is nice, but starting over right now on a server without friends or guildmates isn't a very attractive prospect. Who wants to spend launch week, which will probably be the most concentrated week of play, not playing with friends? No one, and if the alternative is sitting in a queue, it seems a lot of people will make that choice.
If you and the people you want to play with are starting New World fresh today, though, you currently have lots of queueless server options. Maybe pick an unpopular server with a hard-to-spell name, such as Mimisbrunnr or Glubbdubdrib? Just cross your fingers that Glubbdubdrib doesn't become the favored server of the Roblox subreddit or a gang of grandmas or something.
We'll check back in on the New World server situation throughout the week, and we'll let you know as soon as Amazon says anything new about those character transfers or the server capacity increase.
