Players are mad at New World right now for “hiding” player counts – and that’s utter nonsense

New World released the new patch 1.3 on January 25th. He mainly took care of the endgame, but also brought some bugs and discussions with him. One of these discussions revolves around Amazon’s “hiding player counts”. But this problem is artificially exaggerated, according to MeinMMO editor Alexander Leitsch.

With the new patch 1.3, New World has made some changes. One of them probably concerns the reading of the player numbers. Because while previously external websites like NWDB Apparently, the exact number of players per server could be read out, this is no longer possible since the update. The website now only gives estimates for regions, but no longer gives exact figures.

There is no reason for this or an official statement from Amazon.

• For some players – and probably ex-players too – this was seen as a sign that New World was absolutely at the end, even close to maintenance mode. After all, Amazon now has to hide the number of players.
• The topic is boiling up, especially in the MMORPG reddit, where a thread about it is currently in 1st place and has received over 100 comments (via reddit). The main reason many are stuck is that a thread on this subject has been deleted from the official New World forums.
• But there is also a thread with over 300 comments in the New World subreddit (via reddit).

I find this discussion nonsense and see it primarily as a form of disaster tourism, which is felt to be getting bigger and bigger in video games and especially MMOs. Because New World does have a lot of issues to debate, but this change isn’t one of them.

Still, many people jump at the news as if Amazon had announced the closure of New World. And that’s nonsense.

Who is speaking here? Alexander Leitsch is the MMORPG expert on MeinMMO and plays pretty much every new game in the genre. He has found his current home in New World, where he has already spent over 500 hours. Otherwise he mainly plays Guild Wars 2 (over 8,000 hours of play), ESO (over 1,000 hours) and Black Desert.

Player numbers still visible on Steam, disadvantages only for server transfers

The alleged game of hide-and-seek of the numbers is not tenable at all.

On the one hand, the number of players can still be read out easily via Steam, since New World can only be played via this platform. In the last 24 hours, 78,279 simultaneous players were online and on average it was 69,755 in the last 30 days (via Steamcharts).

On the other hand, the exact numbers per server were never made public. Websites like NWDB got the numbers themselves. However, it is unclear how this was even possible, because there is no official interface or API.

So Amazon just closed a kind of data leak that was never meant to be public.

What bothers me the most is the accusation of censorship in the direction of Amazon. Because in the official forum a thread was deleted in which the subject of player numbers was hotly debated. In the meantime, unfortunately, we only know the title of the thread, but from that alone you can probably tell which key prevailed there:

“Dead Game removed ability to see how dead it is”

If someone wrote such a comment with us, it would also be deleted. It’s not constructive, it doesn’t encourage discussion, but I see it straight away: people are just banging on this and the thread will escalate. Then he probably is too.

The change with the number of players actually has a disadvantage that I don’t want to ignore. If you want to switch servers, you can no longer see how populated the other servers are.

But those who deal intensively with the game know the full servers. In addition, most players will probably switch to servers where they already know people than just go by the numbers.

Criticism of New World is justified, but not for this accusation

After the article, some will definitely call me a fanboy who wants to defend the game at all costs. But that is by no means my intention, because there are enough things to discuss:

But getting stuck on the subject of player numbers and wishing for the death of a game so often is, for me, more of a sign that some players are no longer interested in games being able to develop further.

They’d rather see the world burn. And that has become a big bad habit in recent years, especially among MMORPG fans.

Incidentally, the number of players at New World is not nearly as bad as many think. Because they often depend on the average number of players or the peak numbers. But these are always just snapshots.

If 78,279 players are online at the same time, there are several hundred thousand throughout the day. New World never falls below the mark of at least 40,000 concurrent players every single second over the weekend.

For comparison:

• Everquest 2 has 29,000 players, Lord of the Rings Online 108,000 and Dungeons and Dragons 46,000 players. However, players who log in once a month.
• RuneScape oscillates between two versions (old school and RuneScape 3), both of which also have a mobile version, roughly between 75,000 and 120,000 concurrent players (via misplaced items).

These games have lasted for years, sometimes decades, and are constantly being further developed. New World is roughly on that level. Incidentally, I mentioned these examples because they’re pretty much the only ones where I can access fixed numbers from the developers. The other developers do without it, probably for good reason, as the current discussions show.

How do you see the situation at New World? Have you already tried the new patch? And how do you see the number of players? Feel free to write something about it in the comments.

If you are interested in the upcoming updates of New World, you have already got an interesting preview here:

New World: Developers reveal new details about upcoming updates – Announce important PvP feature