Amazon’s new massively multiplayer online role-playing game New World opened its doors earlier today, reaching a peak of over 700,000 players. That said, not even Jeff Bezos’ piggy bank has kept the MMO’s grand debut from being plagued with the usual launch day woes, including ridiculous wait times to just play the game.
New World individual server capacity is currently capped at 2,000 players which, when multiplied by the 233 global servers, means as many as 466,000 users should be able to play Amazon’s MMO at the same time. With new-game interest pushing the user count hundreds of thousands of players above what is currently feasible, however, folks who log into the game are now running headfirst into crowds of their fellow, aspiring adventurers.
Social media, as always the village square for these types of calamities, is currently inundated with screenshots showing queues thousands, sometimes tens of thousands deep.
“I’m 16, but I will pass my queue position to my children one day so hopefully they can play on Hallheim,” joked one Reddit user, referencing a European server hit particularly hard by capacity issues.
An unofficial website tracking New World data calculates that these bottlenecks might lead to wait times of up to 212 hours on some servers — that’s over a week, by the way — if player numbers hold. And while these figures likely indicate a possible threshold rather than an unavoidable reality, it’s still surprising that online games continue to deal with these issues.
“We understand that some players are experiencing lengthy queue times and we are working hard on a few things to help address these issues,” reads a developer update on the official New World website. “We are continuing to stand up additional servers and will expand the capacity of our existing servers once we have properly tested these changes.”
Amazon also promises that players will be able to switch servers for free over the next two weeks, a service for which other online games often charge a small fee.
Servers dramatically failing to meet demand is nothing new in the world of MMOs. Earlier this year, a massive influx of players to Final Fantasy XIV prompted an apology from producer Naoki Yoshida over the amount of time users were forced to wait to play. Even so, one expects a little better from a corporation with Amazon’s expansive infrastructure and seemingly limitless resources.
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