Amazon now working on New World region transfer after player backlash
"... we felt we owed it to the community to find a solution."
Amazon is now working on enabling New World region transfers after a vociferous player backlash.
Earlier this month, Amazon U-turned on letting New World players transfer their characters to a server in a different region.
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.
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?
But on 8th October, Amazon confirmed that when the server transfer feature launches (it's rolling out now), players would be restricted to transferring their character to a world within their 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 said they felt stuck - and complained about wasted time. Affected players faced a tough decision: stick with the character they'd levelled up but couldn't use to play with their friends, or start all over again with a character on the server their friends were on - assuming it wasn't full.
Now, with the launch of New World's 1.0.3 update, the server transfer feature is slowly rolling out. And in a new post on the New World forum, community manager TrevzorFTW indicated Amazon is working on letting players transfer their characters to a server in a different region at some point in the future - although there's no ETA on when this will happen.
"Is there a potential for regional transfers to come in the future?" Amazon asked itself in the forum post.
"There is potential, yes, and we are working on it now. Cannot provide an ETA because it is a very different process, but when we realised we had created confusion on this, we felt we owed it to the community to find a solution."
That's good news for players, but Amazon ruled out giving those affected some sort of XP boost or other compensation.
"We heard the feedback from those affected by this issue and started work on cross-region transfers based on it," Amazon said.
"Unfortunately this will not be in the first release of transfers, but it is coming as soon as we can get it completed."