New World is making server transfers free for now because it's too damn popular
New World is very hot right now, which has the adverse effect of making it a little hard to simply log in and play.
As an MMO, New World relies on the age-old model of letting players choose a server and locking their characters to said server. This greatly helps MMO developers manage capacity, and it helps build communities when you know you'll be coming across roughly the same group of people every time.
This is all well and good, but the issue is that New World has been incredibly popular in the 24 hours since it launched. Yesterday, it peaked at over half a million concurrent players on Steam. Today, that figure has risen to over 700,000.
As you can imagine, this has made queue times exceedingly long for some. Seeing as many players want to join the same servers as their friends, this further exacerbated the problem, as some servers were inevitably more popular than others.
The New World developer addressed this overwhelming popularity in a blog post, detailing exactly how it plans to improve the situation. First, the team is currently spinning up more servers, and intends to expand the number of players per server once it ensures this won't break things.
But the most important change being made is that Amazon Game Studios is allowing players to hop between servers for free. This will only be possible for the next two weeks, meaning you'll be able to transfer your characters across servers - you just need to decide which one you and your friends are going to stick with.
We've rounded up several helpful New World guides you should definitely consult as you play. New players will get the most benefit from understanding which faction to align with, picking which weapon to start with, and planning for the best PvE and PvP builds.
Once you have the basics down, you'll find our farming guides for Saltpeter/ making gunpowder and bullets, and finding Flawed Freshwater Pearls more useful.