Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I spent quite a bit of time running around Edengrove yesterday and it is freaking gorgeous. So much of the island feels corrupted and sinister, and this is a whole other kind of dangerous. Think about the various Green Magic the Gathering cards about rampant growth and nature taking over in dangerous ways… and you have Edengrove. It is the bastion of the Angry Earth faction and there are so many different varieties of plants in this area. At first I got excited because I thought all of these were Ironwood trees… but alas they are just zone specific versions of Young and Mature trees.

I know I already talked about this before, but weapon experience is greatly increased after level 60. Proof of this is the in leveling to 60 I managed to finish off a single weapon and that was Sword. In the time since leveling to sixty last week I have finished off Great Axe, War Hammer, and as of last night Hatchet. I have switched over and am now working on Spear which is pretty enjoyable. I am not certain if or when I will ever level some of the ranged or magic weapons. Probably at some point I will start working on Life Staff since I had already gotten it to level 7 previously. Right now I have been able to just level weapons while doing content that is relevant to me, but for things like ranged I would probably need to drop down a bit until I picked up some abilities.

Earlier this week I talked a bit about the trading post and how everything was cheap… that may not be the case anymore and more the case of things just not being available for awhile. Yesterday with Patch 1.0.4 a really awful bug went into the game. Basically if you are offline, you will not get gold from anything that sold. There are some complete horror stories of folks posting high end chests, selling them, and then being short like 24k in gold. Right now this means I am dragging around with me anything that might be something I want to sell on the market. So my bags keep getting more full and I am hoping that they apply an emergency patch soon. This also means that folks are selling way more stuff in open chat than previously, which makes me realize that this game really needs a /Trade channel.

Last night I did my first zone invasion and it was super fun. It was more than a little hopeless especially given that we did not have a full group of 50 players available. People had been waiting all day long for Outpost Rush to open back up, and it did so roughly an hour before the zone invasion it opened up. That meant there were not a ton of folks available and I think we ran the invasion with 48 instead of 50. I am super interested in doing some more of this. I more or less blended into the crowd and given that I was placed in an area with a very clear objective I think I did okay. I was sword and hammer and spent most of my time as hammer for the stun and if things went really south I would swap to sword and taunt things. I probably need to get a carnelian in my hammer so I can properly tank with it.

For those curious, this is what a rewards box looks like from an invasion. We absolutely lost and died somewhere during the sixth wave. On wave five the doors were broken down and in wave six we had to mostly deal with everything on the inside. For about thirty minutes total it was well worth doing because there are few other things that reward 630 gold coins. The box of loot was blue quality and seemed to be capable of rolling higher based on snapshot. I ended up with I think some 505 boots that were not that useful to me, but it did bump my snapshot up a bit. The other rewards are pretty great as well with 350 Azoth mostly going wasted on me because I was already close to capped. At the end of the match it ranked players and I was 24th out of 48 which is firmly middle of the pack. Not bad enough to get kicked but also not good enough to really get noticed by anyone. I feel like that was reasonable performance for my first invasion.

I closed out my evening running faction missions in Reekwater because we were extremely close to flipping that zone. I am guessing with everyone doing Outpost Rush, no one was really paying much attention to the zones either. There was a swarm of purple players all running back and forth between the territory and objectives. I only really had time for five rounds of quests but I at least contributed a little bit to the total. Running faction quests doesn’t really FEEL like PVP since most of the time you don’t actually encounter much opposition. This feels more like clerical busywork associated with filing a declaration of war and I figure it is something that I can do to help out the faction as a whole if I am not doing anything terribly pressing. If they push to flip Everfall when I happen to be available, I am going to participate. The interesting thing about Everfall turning, is that it has introduced me more to Brightwood and I think in all honesty I would rather buy my third house there given that I am spending so much more time in the unheld territories of the North.

Good Morning Folks. I am sorry I didn’t end up blogging yesterday but I was feeling out of it in general. I woke up with this crazy headache and it never really went away. I sorta felt like I never fully woke up until last night and went through the day in a bit of a haze. In that mode I just could not muster the “oomph” to actually put digital pen to paper and write a post. I’ve also been feeling a bit of mixed feelings about New World right now, and I most definitely do not want to help in bringing it down. That said as much as I love the moment to moment game play I have some concerns. Essentially if I had not made the push to level 60 when I did, it would be considerably harder to achieve the same sort of leveling pace today.

This morning I ran around for a bit and collected some screenshots. Ironically Brightwood a higher tier zone is the only one actually keeping the project board full. While this only represents four of the eleven claimable territories, they are all more or less in this state or worse. Other towns like Monarch’s Bluff and Fight Light for example, generally only have the single town upkeep task running. There are a lot of things at play here, not the least of which is an impromptu and unwanted civics lesson. Governments do not make money, that is unless they are absolutely ignoring the needs of their citizens. When you claim territory, like it or not, you are taking on the responsibility of taking care of all of the citizens of your territory. That means your number one job should be keeping the town boards humming in order to keep everything upgraded so that the citizens are best taken care of. Instead we have folks in a situation where they are just not making enough money in taxes from the territory to keep things up… which again works just like rural areas in America.

The problem is right now owning a territory is a hole in the ground that you pour money into. This is compounded by a couple of things, not the least of which is the invasion mechanic which legitimately ends up penalizing you more for trying hard to beat it than just throwing and wiping with the first wave. When you lose the game chooses random upgrades that have been applied to the town and removes them, so for example you could luck out and lose only fortifications to the territory which won’t really impact your citizens. Then you have a situation like last night when the defense of Monarch’s Bluff did fairly well against the waves… and lost 4 crafting machine upgrades and 1 fortification as a result. Making it even worse… holding a territory is not really certain because there are some exploitable mechanics at works that make territories flipping fairly unpredictable. Hopefully however that last point has been addressed with some changes in last nights patch. Essentially in practice what happens is if a territory is expecting an invasion or war, then any money spent could be lost entirely so the companies that hold territories just don’t keep projects running.

At this point you are probably thinking “Gee Bel, Minda seems fucked” and on one hand you are correct, things are pretty rotten in “Denmark”. However we are also not the only server struggling right now. This is what the server population looks like for US East, divided into the three buckets that Amazon uses to classify servers. Currently there are 200 servers in the US East data center and of those 1 is classified as High Population, 9 are Medium and 190 are Low Population. By this metric, Minda is a Low Pop Server along with the other 190 servers, but in practice we are firmly in the middle of that pack based on prime time numbers. We are likely doing significantly better than some servers, and worse than a handful of servers. In fact I have been using my secondary character to create alts on other servers to test the waters just to see if things are better somewhere else. So far after a half dozen or so of these jaunts, everyone seems to be pretty much in the same shape we are.

The problem with New World is that the game feels at times that it was designed by spreadsheet and relies on systems interacting with other systems, but did not take into account how players actually play games. There was deep concern that the coin duping bugs would lead to price inflation, but all I am seeing is that most things have little to no value, yet the taxes associated with things are fixed costs not based at all around the health of the general economy. Here is an example of a legendary item and quite honestly one of the best shields in the game… going for 24 coins. I bought a version of this when I dinged 60 for 200 coins and I thought I was getting a steal. There are plenty of fixed cost gold sinks, but not near enough gold faucets so unless you are a trade cartel, pretty much every player is going to be hurting for money in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been saving for my third house because I want it to be a Tier 4, and I am not sure when I will feel comfortable enough to actually spend that initial 20,000 gold on it.

In my perfect version of New World, a single faction would control the entire map and that controlling company would be made up of representatives of the other factions. The profits from the wealthy territories could subsidize the lower profit territories and improve the state of New World equally. However as I am sure you are aware this dream state of the game does not exactly jive with a game that folks still consider to be purely PVP based. Additionally the even more astute will have realized I have more or less described a federal plan of government. The challenge that we have is that real world Governments who have had hundreds if not thousands of years of experience… can’t figure this shit out. This game chooses to place the reigns of power in the hands of a bunch of dudes with rage boners because the only viable PVP in the game really… is through waging war with other companies for control of territories.

Shocking to no one… the whole incentives for flagging up and participating in World PVP are not nearly attractive enough to actually get players to do it. The only time folks flag up is when they are actively trying to flip a zone as a coordinated effort, which again is generally a small group of players that are associated with the larger war effort. The rest of the players state “white named” and are only really impacted by wars by who controls the territory, whether or not there is a teleport bonus, and who is controlling the tax rates. New World needs significant rework to make the systems actually interact in a way that makes sense for the pattern of play. However for all if this post I am still greatly enjoying myself and for all the gnashing of teeth about the server… I have come to love it.

Minda reminds me so much of Argent Dawn in that there is a cast of characters that make up who is actively talking in Global chat, and then an army of folks who never speak up in public. In fact when the server transfers open up again I will be trying to actively get folks to transfer onto the server. I don’t think it is beyond saving and my hope is if we increase the population, some of the other taxation issues with start the sort themselves out. My only real concern is knowing that Endwalker is on the horizon and it will vastly cut into my play time in New World. I don’t want to completely abandon things here, but I know I will be focused on getting to 90 and gearing up to be able to raid there.

Good Morning Friends! You are about to embark upon a very mathy blog post. If you are as allergic to math as I happen to be, you might need to skip this one. However I have been mulling something over in my head for awhile, and this morning I finally broke down these thoughts and confirmed my theories. Essentially crafting in New World is extremely painful once you pass the level 100 line, pretty much regardless of whatever crafting profession you are doing. For me, I have chosen to focus on Engineering and Furnishing, two extremely grindy professions but ones that can make sure I am supplied in the best harvesting tools as well as the best storage options for my houses.

I have a whole slew of crafting professions and at some point I would love to level all of them. However right now I have two goals in mind. Firstly I want to be able to craft Orichalcum tools which will require 150 Engineering and I am presently sitting at 143. The other goal is to be able to craft Starmetal Storage Boxes… because at some point in my travels I picked up that crafting schematic. In order to craft these I will need to be 145 Furnishing and am currently sitting at 112. So when I started New World I brought with me a lot of assumptions about crafting that were gained through other MMORPGs. One of these assumptions is that crafting the most resource efficient higher tier item is going to be a better option than creating lower tier items. This comes from games like World of Warcraft that eventually “grey out” items so that their crafting rewards no experience. This assumption I made was completely false but we will get into that a bit later.

As a result of my assumptions however I have been crafting the items that I can in theory use currently. It seemed more efficient to craft Mining Picks as opposed to the other items that I could craft based on the experience gained per item, and as a result until recently I had been going through this entire process of running a Starmetal Route to gather a cache of Starmetal and then running a number of Iron Routes to slowly convert said Starmetal into bars.

The first thing that you need to understand is that in order to craft a Starmetal Pick you can use almost any wood and almost any leather, and if you are crafting a pick for yourself you want to use the highest quality item you can make of each of these to increase the chances of getting a high item level pick. However for grinding purposes you want to use the cheapest and most readily available materials because quality of material has zero factor on the experience gained per craft. Additionally there is a chance of getting bonus materials when you refine, but that doesn’t happen every time so we are going to assume you got zero bonus materials. So with all of that in mind if I break down a single Starmetal Mining Pick into the most simple version I can craft you get the following raw materials list:

• Starmetal Ore – 84
• Iron Ore – 336
• Green Wood – 404 (needed both for timber and charcoal)
• Sand Flux (or better) – 98
• Rawhide – 8

One of the challenges that we have with New World is that the game does not do a great job of giving us access to all of the necessarily information to make decisions. For example I can see that I have 9658 Experience left before I hit level 144, but there is no real clear indication of how much experience I have gained currently. So for the sake of estimating I view that progress bar as a little less than 1/6th of the way full which based on my fuzzy math would make me guess that there are something in the neighborhood of 12,000 experience points needed to get from level 143 to 144 in Engineering. This is the assumption we are going to go with, but admittedly this is a flawed assumption. However with that as our base… in order to get this level I would need to craft 9 Starmetal Pick Axes at 1425 Experience gained per craft. If you extrapolate that out to total pool of materials… this single level is going to cost me:

• Starmetal Ore – 756
• Iron Ore – 3024
• Green Wood – 3636
• Sand Flux – 882
• Rawhide – 72

That is a staggering amount of resources and it includes two things that are HIGHLY contested in game. Essentially Wood and Leather are enough of a renewable resource and come from enough different sources that you as the player can always reliably find an endless amount of them available to you. Metal and Cloth however are highly contested resources that only appear in specific areas of the map, and as a result players tend to run reliable routes in order to gather up enough resources to make it worth their while. Cloth is considerably easier to find than metal, and my best Iron route usually gets me about 1500 to 2000 Iron ore in 20-30 minutes of running around depending on how contested the route is at that moment.

Similarly there is the problem of what the game refers to as “resources” which are the materials needed to convert one material into another. For example if you want to make anything higher than an Iron Bar you are going to need a constant supply of Sand Flux or one of the later variants. These come exclusively from looting supply chests out in the wild. During the very brief crafting summer of love when they were dropping 20 or more at a time and the market for them crashed. However after some nerfs they are dropping more slowly which means I have run out of sand flux at numerous times along this journey.

It was this drought of resources that lead me to start exploring other alternatives, namely looking for something that does not require Iron ore. However more than that it got me to start assessing the value of each item crafted based on the experience gained from it. One of the curious things I noticed about New World is that items never really become “trival” or stop giving you experience per craft. That means over time crafting enough of a low level item will gain you the levels needed to push through to higher tiers. With that in mind I tried to identify the cheapest item that I could craft with the most sustainable materials I could find. The end result is the humble “Treated Wood Bow” which rewards 204 Engineering experience per craft. A single bow requires the following:

• Green Wood – 48
• Rawhide – 12
• Fibers – 8

All items that are relatively easy to get within a short distance of any newbie town. While that is a lot fewer resources, it is also a significant chunk less experience. So I was trying to come up with a way to determine some sort of index to value the item crafted. While this is imperfect, the best idea I coudl come up with is to simply add all of the resources needed and divide it by the experience gained per craft. So for example a single Starmetal Pick requires a total of 930 gathered resources for an experience gain of roughly 1.5 xp per item needed. This humble bow however has a total item footprint of 68 items and gives 3 xp per item required to craft it.

The core problem with bows however is the sheer number that I would need to craft in order to get a level. If we take the same 12,000 xp needed to hit 144 and divide out the experience gained per bow you end up needing to craft 59 bows per level. However for sake of comparison lets do the same thing we did earlier for Starmetal Picks and create a list of the total resources needed to gain a level crafting these bows.

• Green Wood – 2832
• Rawhide – 708
• Fibers – 472

I think ultimately where my mind is at is that in order to craft Orichalcum items, I am going to need a ton of Starmetal as well as a ton of Iron. I would rather sit on the stockpile of what I have gathered so far and gather up the significantly easier to find list of items above. In truth I can probably gather all of that multiple times over in the amount of time it it would take me to find the Flux and Metal needed to make a single levels worth of Pick Axes. In fact I have been doing this recently and have made faster progress in Engineering than I had in the previous weeks. Basically… I think in New World we need to unlearn what we have learned from other MMORPGs and approach these systems with somewhat fresh eyes. I absolutely thought wrong of how best to level crafting in this game, and I am wondering what other systems I might have failed to grasp as well. From now on when I approach new crafts, I am going to Math out my path rather than just making what “feels right” to make.

[EDIT] So apparently Thalen was trying to tell me this during the podcast on Saturday. I did not fully grok what he was saying at the time. I thought he was talking about crafting bows in general not literally the lowest bow possible. However I got there eventually so thanks to Thalen for trying to send me down this path and bad for me being too dense to understand it at the time.