Amazon has U-turned on letting New World players transfer their characters to a server in a different region.
Last week, following New World’s explosive launch, Amazon asked players to join servers with low wait times as it worked on increasing the population caps of existing servers.
To reassure those who wanted to play with their friends already on high population servers, Amazon said it was working on a feature that would let you transfer your character to a new server for free.
“So if you choose one [a low wait time server] now just to get up and playing, you can make a different choice later to play on a server with your friends,” Amazon said at the time.
“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.”
Then, the official New World Twitter account said players would be able to move between regions, for example switching from a US server to an EU one. This tweet is still live, at the time of this article’s publication.
Yes, you can move between regions if you want.
— New World (@playnewworld) September 28, 2021
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And so, sufficiently reassured, players went for pretty much any server they could join – even those in another region – in a bid to avoid New World’s incredibly long queue times. Why not, when they were told it would be fine to do so?
Fast forward to yesterday, 8th October, and Amazon’s confirmation that the server transfer feature was delayed to next week after an issue was discovered during testing. That’s not a big problem – better to wait for the feature to launch in a solid state than release it early and broken.
But with this delay announcement came confirmation that when the feature launches, you’ll be restricted to transfering your character to any world within your region only.
“So the ‘transfer to any server’ statement issued earlier was not true?” Amazon asked itself in a forum post FAQ.
“Unfortunately the original information provided was incorrect,” Amazon said.
Some players who picked a low popular server in a region outside that played on by their friends have now said they feel stuck – and have complained about wasting their time.
“My friend group is split across regions because they TOLD US we could transfer between worlds and the queues were ridiculous the first couple days, so we decided to meet up later,” redditor seektankkill said.
“This is frustrating, adding to a list of already frustrating things. No-one wants to remake their character, that’ll be a one-way ticket to burnout.”
“A friend of mine grinded from early 20s to over level 40 believing he would be able to transfer to the region the rest of us are in and now chances are he’s just going to quit the game,” said redditor Otterable.
“I wasted 80 hours,” redditor TheMostRev said.
We chose characters on NA servers based on this response, we need to be able to transfer back to EU, we?re only here as queues we?re ridiculous on EU and you stated we would be able to change regions, you need to fix this pic.twitter.com/ovrjAkFadd
— James Wash (@Washy_J88) October 8, 2021
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“We need region transfers,” New World forum user kel1975 said.
“A lot of EU players went to US East to even be able to get on during day one. It can’t be that we have to stay there. Regions has to be part of the transfer.”
“Yeah, the double back here is really unfortunate,” said New World forum user Dimeman.
“Spent the first week of launch playing more or less from sunrise to sunset, accrued around 100 hours. No way I’m restarting because of a misstep on their part. I liked the idea of some type of reparation in the form of double xp, but that feels more like a band-aid solution to an injury that required stitches.”
“We understand the frustration from this, unfortunately the original messaging provided was incorrect,” community manager TrevzorFTW posted.
There are other server transfer restrictions in place. You cannot move your character to a full world, and you cannot move your character to a world you have an existing character in already.
New World players who are left stuck playing in a region different to that of their friends now face a tough decision: stick with the character they’ve levelled up but can’t use to play with their friends, or start all over again with a character on the server their friends are on – assuming it’s not full.
