New World dev team "resolves to be more transparent and communicate more frequently"

New World
(Image credit: Amazon Game Studios)

The development team behind Amazon's MMO New World has pledged to be "more transparent and communicate more frequently".

In a lengthy blog posted to the game's official forums, the team addressed dozens of issues, big and small, including character transfers, server status, patch schedules and downtime, economy – deflation, exploits, and coin farming – lag, bugs, and even in-game moderation.

"Since launch, the team has been working hard to gather, investigate, and address issues surfaced by our players," explained community manager Luxendra. "We know how much our players care, and we resolve to be more transparent and communicate more frequently about how we’re addressing issues.

"We have been listening to your feedback on ways we can improve our communication with you. This post [...] is an expression of our desire to do a better job of communicating about the issues and feedback we receive from our passionate community. We are making several improvements."

Perhaps most crucially for players, New World players should now see that character transfers have been re-enabled and" most players should be able to move their characters". 

"We are committed to making sure our community is satisfied with where they are playing long term. We will continue to monitor your feedback after this wave of Character Transfers is complete and offer additional Transfers if needed. We are also working on region-to-region Character Transfers, but it is difficult to solve and will take time," Luxendra added.

They also addressed server woes, too.

"In an effort to ensure that folks actively playing characters on a server are not competing in queue with new players, we have implemented a Full Server Status to prevent new characters from being created," the blog post says. 

"We understand this may mean that new players are not able to play with their established friends and that some worlds are not receiving the volume of new players that others servers may, and this can have a variety of impacts. We continue to monitor this situation and will make real-time adjustments accordingly, as well as provide a 24 hour notice before a server is marked as full."

Before thanking players for their "patience, support, and understanding", the team promised it will post "a notice every Tuesday on the status of our weekly patches, to let you know how it is looking and when it might ship", and "continue provide Megathreads for feedback and bug reporting". 

"We are also working very hard to be more actively communicative and present here in the forums on a daily basis," they pledged (thanks, TheGamer). 

To read the full report – and trust me, it's a big 'un – head on over to the official New World forums.

The update and promises come after a litany of issues for New World players, including an exploit that was crashing games every time someone sent images – or worse – via its global chat client, resulting in "unsavory behavior". Amazon was also recently forced to increase server capacity for every world in a bid to reduce New World queue times, and as recently as just a few weeks back, players were once again reporting that playing New World was bricking GPUs, although Amazon has firmly refuted the claims.

ICYMI, Amazon Games' New World has seemingly dropped around half of its one million playerbase since it launched a month ago. An analysis of the data freely available on SteamCharts suggests the MMO has been losing around 135,000 players a week since it launched at the end of September, at which time it hit an impressive concurrent player peak of 913,027 players on October 3. 

By monitoring player numbers at the same time on every Sunday since New World launched, the number of players simultaneously online has fallen week on week from 913K players to 726K, 608K, and – on October 23 – 508K, which is a little less than half of the player numbers the game saw at the start of the month. 

If you're just getting started with Amazon's new game, head over to our New World Factions guide for a complete rundown of all the groups you can join.

Vikki Blake
Weekend Reporter, GamesRadar+

Vikki Blake is GamesRadar+'s Weekend Reporter. Vikki works tirelessly to ensure that you have something to read on the days of the week beginning with 'S', and can also be found contributing to outlets including the BBC, Eurogamer, and GameIndustry.biz. Vikki also runs a weekly games column at NME, and can be frequently found talking about Destiny 2 and Silent Hill on Twitter.