One downside of MMO games is that they require frequent maintenance that renders them briefly unplayable, and New World is no exception. However, several European New World players have noticed an unfortunate pattern concerning the timing of planned maintenance--namely, that it keeps happening in the middle of the day instead of late at night, when it's unlikely to impact players.
Redditor Physics_Total raised the issue by pointing out that Amazon seems to have repeatedly scheduled planned maintenance for 1:00 PM on Wednesday in the EU servers, despite the same maintenance being applied to North American servers at 3:00 AM. Apparently, something similar happened during the beta, and although Amazon promised the issue would be fixed after launch, the company doesn't seem to have followed through. This isn't the first time Amazon has broken a promise to New World players, but it may have a significant impact on the European player base.
In the original post, Physics_Total questioned why Amazon Game Studios – which is based out of North America – would apparently decide to work on the EU servers' planned maintenance in the middle of the night. The time zones involved would suggest that Amazon is not following the guidance of most other big MMOs, which tend to schedule planned maintenance either at the end of the workday or at different times in each region. The New World launch wasn't global, so Physics_Total expressed confusion about why planned maintenance was.
This isn't the first time an MMO game has been noticeably biased toward North American servers. For years, the controversial Riot Games was accused of favoring the North American League of Legends servers over the rest. While New World doesn't appear to have gone quite as far with its favoritism as Riot Games did in the past, Australian players noted under the post that they were also having trouble with planned maintenance. According to several users, the Australian servers keep getting hit by maintenance at times ranging from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM, all of which may make for very inconvenient timing.
As of writing, it appears that many other fans of New World are frustrated with the perceived favoritism and how it affects planned maintenance. One user posted nostalgically about the way that Guild Wars 2 avoided intentional server downtime, while another complained that New World's planned maintenance could take the game down for over seven hours at a time. A third user noted that the EU servers seem to have the least priority and are often the last region to come back online after planned maintenance.
New World is available now on PC.