Im in one of the lower populated US East servers and we have had dozens of people returning to the game after an extended 1-4 month absence. However, they are coming back to a virtually dead server in terms of population. They want to run dungeons, OPR, interact with other people and do group content. Most of us try to help, but most of the newly rejoined players are ending up disappointed. Obviously I am trying to steer them to use transfer tokens as available to move to a busier server, but I fear that the first impression of a dead game is what they are left with.
So while this update has brought people back to the game, these dead servers are big contributing factor to not retaining them.
It seems to have stopped the bleeding “for now” since the patch is new. Give it a week or 10 days at most and the “new content hype” will be over.
It certainly did not bring people back. Steam charts numbers are there for everyone to see. The fact that you can see some people coming back to the game after a few months doesn’t mean jack if the game still loses players even after a content patch and the general trend is “losing players”.
I’m not gonna delve into the logic behind increased frequency of seeing more people coming back after a long timeout. I just wanted to share the numbers above to prevent any misunderstanding of “where we are going” or “what is happening” at New World.
That being said, I agree with you on the part that dead servers are not fun and certainly making more people leave the game. They utilized the World and World Set system exceptionally poorly. People should have been able to move inside a World Set freely so that AGS could have more time to react to player numbers and focus on merging World Sets instead of Worlds and those “rare” transfer tokens could have been utilized to make it possible to move between World Sets just like now.
If they keep merging servers frequently and a surge of returning players happens… Imagine the outcry. Either way, really bad execution. And I do believe focusing on the current players is more important.
I dunno. There’s a dude that joined our guild the other day that had left for a few months. He is absolutely giddy over all the changes. It’s quite fun playing with him because all his excitement rubs off on us and just makes for good fun in game while chatting on Discord.
