I popped into discord one night to hear my friends all chatting about a dungeon, “Warcraft?” I asked assuming that is what they were doing. “Nope new game called New World, it’s a lot of fun, get it.”
As a father of three small children who works 50 hours a week my opportunities to play new games is somewhat diminished, but I figured I’d check it out, I had some at home vacation time coming up so I figured I would be able to catch up while the kids were at school.
So I started the download for the game and went to bed. The next morning I asked what server my friends were on, they told me Balnibarbi.
Alright well time to roll on Balni… Character creation disabled. Well that’s neat apparently they are saying I need to roll a character on a different server and level it until there are transfers.
So not being able to play the game with my friends, but with the hope of being able to eventually, I set about rolling on one of the new servers.
I took that at-home vacation time, cleaned the house, did some career study, and leveled the hell out of my character to catch up to the same level as my friends.
Holy crap was the game fun, even as a bow user, playing essentially single-player man I had fun, I was IMMERSED. I ended up dropping a side hobby for some more play time at night after the kids had gone to bed, I was hooked.
The server I was on was very low pop, but there were still people doing things during prime time, so I was able to grab a group here or there, make gold, craft…
I got into a few wars, those were fun.
Did a few Invasions, and thought, man those will be really fun to do with my friends, and hard… sweet.
And so the day of the transfers came, I was going to get to go to my friend’s server, or have them come to mine, we were going to discuss it together.
While all of us were logged on I watched my interim server’s global. “Bye server” over and over and over. Well… the interim server was a bust, and we figured Balnibarbi was still a Medium pop server so more people would transfer there, after all who wants to deal with a que time. Sure a few companies left, like 2… but who cared right?
Fast forward to this week.
Currently, Balnibarbi has 3 towns abandoned, taxes all set to extreme, their owners fled the server this week when they found out merges were within world set and our world set has some of the lowest pop. (I went back to check on my old server maybe they are fairing better, morbid curiosity, no one is there save like 10 people, 6 of them were spamming to sell gold. )
3/5 of the friends have dropped the game only logging in sparsely because of dupping bug and dying server. 2 of them and myself still do our best to farm, but… to what end?
Outpost rush was a 5-hour queue last night, that to my knowledge never popped. (I gave up hour 2, and went to bed, friends said they hit hour 5 and still nothing).
I figure what the heck I’ll chat with support, I don’t want to keep my friends who still play chained to this server where their housing taxes are now in “collections” because why pay 2k every 5 days for a 5k house?
I explained the issue, explained how the server is dead and asked if there was any way to get perhaps a transfer token (I figured it wouldn’t work but nothing ventured, nothing gained).
As expected it was a no. However the unexpected part, “We have no information on if there will even BE another transfer, HOPEFULLY, the merge will liven up your server, whenever that may be.”
Words like “hopefully” don’t really help motivate me to stay around and wait to see if we will ever have a server that is worth it again.
Look I understand that the devs are working hard, but there are entire servers out here “suffering” under no one to play with, players who used their tokens like I did thinking we found a good home server only to find out that every carpet bagger and their mom took all the gold and skipped town.
From not being able to initially play with friends, to now even with friends we can’t get much done and the game is literally punishing at times because some trolling pre-teen who owned a company decided it would be hilarious to transfer and leave the server in disarray… a game that I was immersed in and super excited to play has become a drudgery that I can only “hope” gets better while I go touch some grass or something.
I realize no one cares, I wasted my token blah blah blah, but CS suggested posting this to the forums in hopes the devs read it and it lights a proverbial fire under the tushes. I can’t be the only person and this can’t be the only server having this issue.