New World Player Count Jumps With Rise Of The Angry Earth Expansion While Queues, Issues Persist

mmorpg.com:

New World launched its first paid expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, yesterday, and the excitement new content — especially mounts — has brought to Amazon's MMO has seen a return in queues and a rise in player count.

While the MMO made waves with its enormous player count when it first launched two years ago, eclipsing 900K concurrent players within the first month, the player counts have been more down to earth in New World since. However, with the release of Rise of the Angry Earth, those concurrent counts have doubled from September's peak player count, hitting 54,498 concurrently as of this writing, according to SteamDB. While it isn't nearly as much as October or November 2022's peaks which coincided with the free Brimstone Sands update, it's still impressive since the expansion costs $30.

To combat the higher player count, Amazon has had to spin up new servers across regions, especially the EU region, where queues were high all day yesterday. While the EU region saw a few servers spun up, the US and South American regions also got new servers to combat queues (my own server of El Dorado in US West didn't seem too bad either time I logged in yesterday, but I may have just been lucky).

Funnily enough, as one Reddit user pointed out, the queue has become recursive, with players queueing to join the server and queueing to complete objectives once in the server proper.

And it wouldn't be an expansion launchwithout some issues. New World has had to pull its servers at least once to fix an intermittent connection issue, and as of this morning, the team at Amazon has disabled Premium Season Pass purchases due to an issue. The official New World Discord has a bevy of user-reported issues as well, from main quest progress being