New World Spins Up New Servers, Will Offer Free Transfers At A Later Time

New World is still struggling under the weight of the over half a million people who want to get into Aeturnum, with #QueueWorld emerging as a frequently used hashtag (not to be confused with Cube World, for those who remember that).

To try and alleviate some of that stress, Amazon Games opened up a slew of new servers, while also "performing tests to increase the capacity for all worlds," which is currently set at 2,000 each.

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!

— New World (@playnewworld) September 29, 2021

But what if all your friends are on one, overloaded, server and you want to play with them without enduring an hours-long queue? In the short term, there's nothing that can be done about that.

In the long-term, however, Amazon will be offering free server changes at some point in the next two weeks to enable you to join your friends -- or better, to have them join you -- on whatever server you all happen to wind up on.

That's a good move on their part, but it does bring up one pet peeve I have with server/world-based games -- namely that there usually is a cost for changing them. That's typically in the $20 to $30 range, and I find it hard to believe it actually costs an MMO company that much to transfer a character from one server to another. I can see limiting this kind of request, perhaps to something like once a month, so players don't just hop around all willy-nilly, but letting players play with their friends should be a top priority for any MMO, and putting a price on that, especially on top of a box price, just feels like extortion.