I am on a server whose population has been plummeting for the last few weeks, and now it peaks at 600 on a weekend. It is not uncommon to wait for 40min to 1h+ to form a mutation group, and these are values for the favorite mutation of the week. If we are talking about the commonly avoided mutations, like Ennead this week or Tempest the week before that, then you might simply not find a group at all. The same can be said about PvP content.
I have talked to friends on the server and it is a general disatisfaction. As a consequence, people are transfering to higher population servers or straight up quitting the game. Either way, the population plummets, which causes even longer wait times and more disatisfaction about group finding. So even more people leave. It is a feedback loop to death. As it stands, New World server structure is extremelly sensitive to population shift. A few hundred players leaving a server can bring it to the death spiral just described.
I have read a lot of requests for balancing issues, fixing bugs or creating new content, but I can see no bigger problem than players being unable to play the main content of the game, or having a strong feeling of time wasted when trying to do so. It seems to me that maintaining healthy server activity should be the number one priority. Be it by merging servers earlier than usual, giving even more emphasizes to cross-server functionalities or whatever change they see fit.
Thanks for reading! I’m interested in knowing your experience and takes on the matter as well.
The game is losing players so bad because the lack of content. They should not have even released brimstone if they did not have follow up content ready. Brimstone was super good and fun for everyone but after a month or two the only thing there is to do in the whole map is a chest train. People get bored and quit. 2 Months after brimstone comes out we get a roadmap that has no content coming out for 6 months. I can completely understand why servers are already losing players at a alarming rate.
At this rate why not just make transfer token free with a 3day cooldown until cross server are ready . This could solve multiple problem…ok it created more at longterm but better that compare to just losing all your player…
The average MMO player plays around 21 hours per week. In 2 months that is around 180 hours. In between crafting, trading, mutations, OPRs and wars, the current content in New World is definitely enough to keep people exploring and growing for much longer than that.
If anything, new players are leaving for the lack of content quality, not quantity. That includes how easily they can engange with the existing content, long waiting times being a major culprit.
In fact, adding new activities to the game instead of improving the existing ones will have the undesired effect of dividing the population even thinner among them, and therefore longer waiting times.
This is completely false. Pretty much everyone I know that has quit and all the negative feedback I have seen is because of lack of content. New world end game is supposed to be pvp and we have not had a pvp update in forever and there is not one coming in the next 6 months.