New World fans, today is your day to finally jump into the hardcore seasonal server that Amazon has been teasing since even before the game’s eighth season officially rolled out in May. When Amazon says hardcore, mind you, it’s referring to the death rules, not necessarily the difficulty, as this is a semi-permadeath server. We need a better name for this template than hardcore, frankly.

“Seasonal Server 2 is our take on a hardcore experience. We’ve built this to reward you for flexing your mastery and knowledge of the game,” the studio says. “Additionally, we want to open up all the content for all our players in this time-limited experience.” That means the replacement of the main quest with an “expedited” version that’ll get you to max level in roughly six hours, along with a different reward structure that encourages players not to die – so they can port their bonuses back to the live servers.

“A new status effect will be present on your character when created on this server for tracking your Unfallen or Fallen state. This is our attempt at a different kind of hardcore experience. Characters who have not died will be considered ‘Unfallen’ and characters who have died will be considered ‘Fallen.’ Instead of a traditional hardcore model, where your character is simply deleted on death, this status effect will stack up, granting 25 bonus attributes per stack. However, some challenges can only be completed in an Unfallen state. Group up with others to tackle these objectives and remain Unfallen, but don’t be afraid to keep going if you do Fall, you’ll be getting stronger and stronger.”

The base game patch also tweaks expeditions to scale based on the number of players you bring, so PvE players back home are getting a lil something too.

Servers went down at 8 a.m. EDT this morning and should be back up at 9:30 a.m. EDT, just as this post goes live.