‘WELP’: New World Leaderboard Test Event ends with a belly flop thanks to War Mercenary mechanics

Testing should break things and not go according to plan, but the developers New world had a pretty big stumbling block when the game continued testing its ranking system with a war event yesterday, and it’s all thanks to the way the game arranges teams with mercenary players.

In a normal war situation, the team composition is 50v50 with some restrictions on the number of team members via a mercenary system. Defenders must bring 40 company players and can bring 10 mercenaries, while attackers have 25 company members and 25 mercenaries. However, the population of the PTR and these mercenary restrictions meant that the Test War ended with a 25v10 team composition. And one of the developer’s responses to the error was literally “WELP”. The developers then aborted the test, claiming backend issues and the automatic end of the war as excuses.

The reaction to the whole affair has been generally unkind from the player base. One streamer of the war went absolutely apoplectic, while reactions on Reddit otherwise talked about the bug, referencing a previous developer post urging players to “trust the process” or suggesting WELP should be the free title, promised to the participants.

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