Over two months after the large-scale release of New World, although many players bought New World Gold in advance, the number of players still decreased. Amazon Game Studios merged servers as the number of players dropped. The game’s first server merger, the central European Union server Mardi, will be merged into the European Union server Brittia. This was scheduled to happen on December 8 originally, but on December 9 after the widespread outage of Amazon Web services affecting New World. The other two mergers, this time for all servers that make up the Terra World Set in Wanaheim in central Europe and the Nibirum World Set in the United States, were held on December 10.

These mergers may be just the beginning. Soon after New World went live, over 900,000 players were online, resulting in long login queues. In response, Amazon quickly created a new server for players to create characters on it, and promised to provide free server transfers later. The net result of server transfers and reduced active player bases is that many game servers now have only a few hundred active players. Although the game is still very popular and players will buy New World Gold for it, there are more servers than players.

Amazon recently released a FAQ explaining how and why to merge one server into another, and pointed out that if the studio’s data shows that the world’s experience becomes “suboptimal”, it will start looking for something to merge into the server. In order to determine whether the server may be “unhealthy,” Amazon said it will look at the population size, overall player engagement, and so on.

Once it is determined that the server needs to be merged, Amazon will start looking for a host server to merge other servers into it. The survey included comparing faction balance, language, and game style among different servers before deciding. When a server is merged into another server, progress will not be lost, Amazon New World Coins, items, companies, households, etc. will be transferred. The only thing that is not transferred is the owned territories, which are controlled by the people playing on the hosting server, who will accept new players from the merger. This creates trouble for the game’s PvP-focused faction wars, where the goal is to have as much territory as possible, but is better than the alternative of playing on almost empty servers with little competition.

Amazon recently withdrew a controversial change it proposed for the New World endgame. If players cannot participate in certain endgame events, the modification will reduce the efficiency of equipment got from production or missions. Other endgame changes and new seasonal content are currently being tested in the game’s public test realm. Interested players can prepare Amazon New World Coins in advance.