The New World team has disabled character creation on all regions. They have not provided any information on why this is happening, but promised that they will have more when they can share it. The fact that it is across all regions globally does point to something more significant.
The community has been speculating as to why this is happening with some considering it might be a step taken in order to combat exploiting, especially when it comes to botting, which is not a bad guess. The New World team has already shifted the reward system for new accounts, making the rewards equivalent but awarding greater gold and items later in the main questline. They then disabled server transfers for new characters, discontinuing the free transfer tokens they had been giving out to help the initially affected by both server demand strain and later deep server imbalances. They also limited the number of characters one account could create per day.
Many players do have concerns about the number of bots they are seeing in the game and reporting, and it's been this way for some time. While the team has worked to fix various bugs and close holes that were exploitable resulting in gold dupe exploits affecting other aspects of the game, the butt problem and RMT spam still remain to some degree.
Recently, the team disabled server transfers temporarily without providing the reason why in the initial announcement. They were enabled again days later. Then they disabled player-to-player trading for a potential gold dupe bug that actually turned out to be a different issue altogether.
As there is no word on what caused the team to make the decision to disable character creation, or any indication of how long it will last, all anyone can do is speculate and wait for an official announcement by the New World team.
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