Amazon's MMO New World continues to be significantly popular, frequently topping 130,000 concurrent players on Steam. Despite that, New World has gone through some growing pains to reach this point. A massive wave of players at launch dispersing over time, combined with free server transfers shifting players away from low-pop servers, has led to the need for early server mergers. Over the past month, Amazon has promised just that. Now, New World's developer is poised to begin those server mergers.

In an announcement made on Friday, Amazon confirmed that the very first server merger for New World would occur on December 8. Two servers within New World's EU Central server cluster, Mardi and Brittia, will be merged on that date. For the time being, Amazon has locked both servers in preparation for the merger so that no player data is lost in the transition. Players themselves will not be impacted by the merger, though Mardi's territory ownership and contracts will be left behind in favor of Brittia's current status quo.

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Funnily enough, neither Mardi nor Brittia are among EU Central's lowest-population New World servers, as they're actually both among the healthiest servers in EU Central. Merging the two together is likely to result in one of the top 10-20 healthiest servers in EU Central. There are around 200 servers within EU Central, as it's easily the largest region for New World and has suffered the most from players leaving or transferring. As such, Mardi and Brittia seem like prime candidates for Amazon's first live merger.

new world mardi brittia server merge announcement

Depending on how Mardi and Brittia's merger goes, Amazon will be able to draw many different conclusions. For one, whether or not server mergers work as planned for decently-sized server populations. Further, Amazon will see whether the server thrives following the merger. If it's successful, it can speed up server mergers going forward.

As noted, Mardi and Brittia are nowhere near EU Central's lowest-population servers. There are legitimately hundreds of servers needing to be merged across all of New World's regions. And then once that's done, many merged New World servers will need to be merged yet again. This is going to be a long process, and Amazon has its work cut out for itself.

For now though, New World players can keep a watchful eye on the merger of Mardi into Brittia to see whether Amazon's process meets all expectations. It'll go through on December 8 at 7:00 AM PT/10:00 AM ET. It's always possible the merge won't proceed as expected, but it's absolutely a necessary first step for the future health of New World.

New World is available now on PC.

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