Amazon now blocks New World players from creating new characters on full servers

Amazon is blocking New World players from creating new characters on full servers as it continues to struggle with the MMO’s explosive popularity. Now, when a server is full it will be greyed out, with a note to say character creation is not possible.

Of course, if you’ve already created a character on a full server, you can log in (or, queue to log in, anyway) and play with them as normal.

Amazon signalled the new system last night as it launched a server status page on its website. At the time of this article’s publication, many of the servers are marked as full.

— New World (@playnewworld) October 2, 2021

The new feature comes as New World continues to grow in popularity following its massive launch this week.

New World currently has over 800,000 concurrent players on Steam, making it the second-most popular game in Valve’s platform. It’s not far off top spot, currently held by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Yesterday, Amazon asked new New World players to join servers with low wait times as it worked to increase the population caps of existing servers.

Amazon said over a million players entered New World on launch day – and that number has increased each day since. It said that while it expected a big launch, it was “frankly surprised” by the huge influx of players, which led to extremely long queue times.

Amazon said it’s increasing the number of servers available and increasing the capacity of existing servers to support a higher population cap. It promised to continue adding servers “until we stabilise wait times”.

Until then, Amazon encouraged new New World players to go on servers with low wait times. It said 40 percent of the game’s servers have low or no wait times – but that was as of yesterday.

Of course, people want to play with their friends (New World is an MMO, after all). Amazon said it’s working on a feature that will let you transfer your character to a new server for free. The hope is this will be released next week.

“So if you choose one now just to get up and playing, you can make a different choice later to play on a server with your friends,” Amazon said.

“We know how important it is to be able to play with friends, so we’re putting this feature at the top of our priority list.”

New World is Amazon’s first video game hit after a string of high-profile failures. Its success sparked a tweet from Amazon boss Jeff Bezos in praise of the development team:

“After many failures and setbacks in gaming we have a success,” he said. “So proud of the team for the persistence. View setbacks as helpful obstacles that drive learning. Whatever your goals are, don’t give up no matter how hard it gets.”

(2/2) The two articles are only 8 months apart. https://t.co/EbTVhnrJpA

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) October 1, 2021

New World’s launch has also come with fresh reports from players that New World is still bricking expensive graphics cards, after it was found to be doing so in the game’s beta. In July, in response to concern from players, Amazon released a patch to cap the framerate on the MMO’s menu screen.