Games

So… this post is a lot and I apologize for that ahead of time. I started writing this yesterday and the end result is roughly four or five times the length of one of my normal posts. However I am rolling with it because come Friday I want to get this game out of my system so I can move forward with enjoying Endwalker completely. If you make it through this post… you have my admiration because it is an awful lot. This topic was originally going to be called “Unfucking New World” which on better judgement I walked back.

This morning I thought I would tackle something that has been kicking around my mind for a while.  As we stand on the cusp of Endwalker, I still feel like I want to talk some more about the game I will be walking away from…  New World.  Ultimately there is something there that is compelling and no one spends over five hundred hours playing a game unless there is some gameplay there that is meaningful.  However I also think that the game itself is in a really bad state.  Over three hundred thousand players have quit the game or at least stopped playing it temporarily since the release of Patch 1.1 back on November 18th.  At its peak New World had almost one million concurrent players, and now they are doing well if they can muster one hundred fifty thousand.

I think the challenge with New World is that ultimately it is a game that does not know what it is.  It is a game that probably works well under specific spreadsheet conditions, but does not take into account the psychology of how players actually consume and enjoy content.  It is a game designed for players to be participating in all aspects of the game…  but the truth is folks are not going to be interested in everything.  Not everyone wants to be a crafter or wage wars or even farm for gear.  For example I personally have a great distaste for PVP and PVP mindset players and would love to be able to completely avoid them on a PVE ruleset server.

The problem however is within the first thirty levels of gameplay, you can pretty much choose your own path and level through doing anything.  That first month of gameplay was amazing, because crafters who only wanted to craft could level themselves through just gathering or the use of the very prolific town board quests.  If you wanted to PVP there were a lot of very open early Wars taking place as well as a fair number of open world battles.  If you were into exploration and PVE questing, that existed as well and while it was repetitive it felt rewarding.  However you begin being funneled down a path where it is very clear that Amazon Game Studios expected every player to be that rare unicorn that enjoys all aspects of the game.

The game honestly still feels pretty reasonable until you get all of your tradeskills past level 100 and have pushed your level up to around 50…  and even then the drag doesn’t really kick in until you have dinged 60.  The “endgame” really is where the problems start to set in along with the constant grind of unwinnable invasions and constant drumbeat of wars taking place and ruining otherwise great crafting hubs.  You are put into situations like for example, right now no one on my server can craft Ironwood, because not a single town currently has a Tier 5 Lumber Mill because bad luck struck and all of the towns that had one got that specific piece of machinery downgraded in the last week.

The thing is…  there is a core in this game that I think is enjoyable and with some specific changes I think it could STILL be enjoyable at the end game.  Patch 1.1 was a step in the wrong direction.  It was a knee jerk reaction by a freaked out developer that panicked and tried to do everything in their power to slow the players down.  In doing so they created a scenario where there really isn’t anything enjoyable left to do, and those of us still kicking around are drifting on the fumes of copium because we remember slightly better times.  Most folks are waiting on server merges and farming resources for that magical day when it finally occurs, but I don’t think any of that fixes the core problems.  So here I am going to play armchair developer and present some solutions to problems.

Late Game Crafting is Awful

Crafting in the game up to level 100 is pretty enjoyable overall.  You gather some resources in what seems like a reasonable quantity and then you craft them into usable items.  However your player level will rapidly outstrip your crafting level unless you have done NOTHING but craft in the game.  Once you move into Tier IV and Tier V of crafting, everything falls off the rails because the sheer volume of resources needed to make progress becomes exponentially larger.  Ironically it is not the Tier V or even Tier IV resources that are the problem… it is the fact that every Tier V item requires Tier IV, Tier III, Tier II, and Tier I items to craft.  Let me put this into easier to follow logic by starting with the recipe for an Orichalcum Ingot, the base item for Tier V Smithing and Engineering:

• Orichalcum Ingot
  • 8 – Orichalcum Ore
  • 2 – Starmetal Ingots
  • 2 – Charcoal
  • 1 – Flux

So initially that seems pretty reasonable, until you get to the Starmetal Ingot and realize that every Starmetal Ingot requires 2 Steel Ingots, and every Steel Ingot requires 3 Iron Ingots, and every Iron Ingot requires 4 pieces of Iron Ore.  So the actual cost of a single Orichalcum Ingot looks a little something like this:

• Orichalcum Ingot
  • 8 – Orichalcum Ore
  • 12 Starmetal Ore
  • 48 Iron Ore
  • 10 Charcoal
    • Which is actually 20 Green Wood
  • 9 Flux

In order for me to go from level 180 to 181 in Engineering for example I would need to craft 13 Mining Pickaxes which would require me to gather up 195 Orichalcum Ingots along with 39 Timber and 26 Coarse Leather if I am crafting them as cheaply as I can possibly make them.  So that same checklist now looks a little something like this.

• Level 180 to 181 Engineering via Orichalcum Mining Pickaxe
  • 1560 – Orichalcum Ore
  • 2340 – Starmetal Ore
  • 9360 – Iron Ore
  • 4056 – Green Wood
  • 1755 – Flux
  • 78 – Rawhide

So the concept of it taking 13 Pickaxes per level itself is a little bit madness.  Generally speaking I would expect at worst it to take 10 crafts per level pending you are actually crafting level relevant items.  However even if we drop those numbers down to only what represents 10 crafts instead of 13…  it is still madness.  I think the core problem with the design of New World crafting is the fact that a maximum tier item…  requires you to craft everything from skill level zero items up through skill level 150 items in order to create a single material.  This also causes the problem that Iron Ore is among the most expensive materials on the trading post, and Orichalcum among the cheapest.

A first step that I would like to see is for them to radically change the formula for an ingot, and I am using ingot as the representative for ALL high tier crafted items because the same is true for ironwood planks as it is for wire fiber cloth as it also is for infused leather.  Were I tweaking this system I would change the Orichalcum Ingot to look a little bit like this:

• Orichalcum Ingot
  • 8 – Orichalcum Ore
  • 4 – Starmetal Ore
  • 2 – Charcoal
  • 1 – Flux

It does not make sense to require a refined ingot if you are going to try and make an alloy as a result.  If you want to dip down into lower tiers then fine…  just dip down into the raw resources and not the finished materials.  This one tweak alone changes the above recipe list for 13 Orichchalcum Mining Pickaxes to look something like this.

• Level 180 to 181 Engineering via Orichalcum Mining Pickaxe
  • 1560 – Orichalcum Ore
  • 780 – Starmetal Ore
  • 936 – Green Wood
  • 195 – Flux
  • 78 – Rawhide

If you take this same change and apply it to all of the materials that require exponentially more materials as you go up in tier, then I think this would go a long way to making the entire crafting system feel less punitive to the players.

Dungeon Keys are an Awful Idea

Dungeons in the New World require a specific key to grant access to them.  While only one player consumes a key to start a dungeon, you have to craft one for every dungeon that you want to run past the few keys that you might get given to you as part of a quest chain.  The concept of requiring a key to unlock a dungeon itself is not that horrible of an idea, but what is madness is the cost of crafting one.  Lets take for reference the very first dungeon Amrine Expedition and break down the cost of crafting one of the keys.

• Amrine Tuning Orb
  • 10 – Corrupted Slivers
  • 1 – Iron Chisel
    • 500 Faction Tokens
    • 50 Gold
  • 50 – Stone Blocks
    • 200 Stone
  • 1 – Eternal Heart
    • 50 – Death Motes
    • 50 – Life Motes
    • 50 – Soul Motes

The item that is created is a bind on pickup key, which means that you can’t acquire one unless you have the requisite level of stonecutting.  There are a few sticking points to this item, namely the 10 Corrupted Slivers which require the player to farm corrupted portals, or more specifically the greater variants as they are the only ones that drop slivers.  At any given moment there are only usually one or two greater portals up in a given zone, and each of these only drops one or two silvers at a time.  The other big task is 50 of three different kinds of motes, which requires a questionable amount of farming to get.  Amrine however is a cakewalk as compared to the later game keys.

• Genesis Tuning Orb
  • 2 Corrupted Lodestone
  • 1 – Asmodeum Chisel
    • 7000 Faction Tokens
    • 500 Gold
  • 5 – Runestone
    • Requires the gathering of all tiers of stone to craft similar to the ingot problem
  • 1 – Genesis Core
    • 3 – Elemental Heart
      • 150 – Water Motes
      • 150 – Earth Motes
      • 150 – Fire Motes
      • 150 – Air Motes
    • 3 – Eternal Heart
      • 150 – Death Motes
      • 150 – Life Motes
      • 150 – Soul Motes
    • 3 – Corrupted Rune
      • Daily limit of 2 per day from elite chests in Mangled Heights
    • 3 – Molten Rune
      • Daily limit of 2 per day from elite chests in Upper and Lower Svikin

Garden of Genesis is one of two end game dungeons that currently exist in the game that are capable of dropping gear that scales up with your watermark.  So lets break down the problem with this key.  Firstly we go back to the Corrupted Lodestone which is a legendary quality version of the Slivers from above.  These still only drop from Greater Corrupted Portals and while I have farmed hundreds ot level 65 portals…  I have yet to see a single legendary quality shard.  Instead most of the time I get either green quality or white quality, with blue and purple on super rare occasions.  You can however combine shards up and if we take a worst case scenario, crafting the 2 needed Corrupted Lodestones would require 240 white quality Corrupted Slivers.  That is legitimately hours of endless portal farming for a single key.

Next let’s move to the five Runestones.  These have the same problem as Ingots which means you are required to essentially make every kind of stone item available to ultimately roll up into a single Runestone.  I am not going to do the math this time but it is a lot of materials and sandpaper which is the resource consumed by stone cutting.  Then we roll into the Genesis Core which is made up of 3 Elemental Hearts, 3 Eternal Hearts, 3 Corrupted Runes, and 3 Molten Runes.  The hearts would require you to gather up 1050 assorted motes, but the more painful part is the Corrupted Runes and Molten Runes.

These are only obtained by farming chests in elite areas in Great Cleave and Shattered Mountain and have a daily limit of only being able to find two of these per day.  So this means even under the best possible circumstances it will take you two days to gather the materials for a single key, and realistically if you are wanting to farm the dungeon regularly…  you are going to want to be looting the elite chests in this area daily to make sure you have a backlog of materials.The worst part about all of this…  these are the “lowered” requirements down from what it used to be until 1.1.

Why this matters so much currently, is that Patch 1.1 also screwed up most of the outdoor boss farms to where they are either no longer doable with a single group of five players, or they are no longer dropping upgrades.  This means players are being pushed into running dungeons as their primary source of watermark upgrades.  This also means due to the difficulty of crafting one of these stupid keys…  that players are now charging upwards of 1000 gold per player for the privilege of using their key.  This has led to a pretty degenerate climate around running these dungeons, especially if for some reason a player cannot complete one.  Once consumed the key is gone regardless if you manage to make it through the dungeon or not.

One of two things needs to happen, either lower the price further to make these extremely easy to craft…  which I do not think is in the cards.  The other option would be to give every player the ability to start a dungeon every X number of hours.  I would lean towards every 48 to 72 hours, but even if you did it weekly that is at least better than the current state of affairs.  Then I would change the way keys work as a method of getting additional attempts at a dungeon.  They become a method of entering dungeons while your timer is on cooldown.  I think the entire concept of a dungeon key is a horrible idea, but this would at least take this already bad situation and make it better.

The High Watermark System is Awful

In Destiny there is this weird system where you need to grind drops in order to get slightly higher items… which then skew your blended average item level and ultimately make it so the base drops you are getting are higher. There are specific encounters that guarantee a higher item level than what you currently have and some of these have a minimum item level gain that is predictable. Each rarity of item has a soft cap that you hit so that blues for example can only take you to a certain point, purples to another level, and then after that you have to do what are considered “pinnacle” activities to get further item level gain. This system is frustrating as hell, but it is at least predictable and something you can manage… but the pinnacle activities ultimately slow down how much progress you can make in a given week.

New World took the general smell of this system… but without any understanding of how finely tuned it was to both feel like you are progressing but also limit your total progress in a given week. To be truthful there are a lot of things in New World that seem like they once heard about a system in another game and tried to create their own version of it without actually understanding how any of it worked. If you want the “from the horses mouth” version of this system, it was confusing that they had to release a multi-part Developer Blog post about it. Essentially each time you kill anything over level 60, you have the chance of getting an item that increases your “Watermark”.

Your next question should be of course “What the hell is a Watermark?”, and ultimately this is a number that is kept for every item slot that remembers what the highest drop you have seen for that given slot. Imagine there is a number line that goes from 500 to 600 and a floating scale above it that I have labelled with “drop range”. For example if you get an item to drop that is 510 item level, this sets a new watermark for item slot and the drop range in theory moves up as well centering over that new watermark, granting you access to anything +/- a number of levels above or below your current watermark. The first problem is we don’t exactly know how big this floating scale is but based on my personal experience it seems to be about +/- 5 levels.

This however can backfire like everything in New World does and drop you items all the way back down at Item Level 500 again. This is because each level of encounter over 60, has its own built in maximum level range that it is capable of dropping. Once again this is not documented anywhere so in the absence of knowledge… people make shit up. Far as we can generally tell the caps seem to align to something like this, but I am uncertain how hard the boundaries actually are because not all mobs are created equal.

• Level 60 – up to 515 Items
• Level 61 – up to 530 Items
• Level 62 – up to 560 Items
• Level 63 – up to 590 Items
• Level 64+ – up to 600 Items

Again I think it is possible for higher level items to drop off lower level encounters, but the likelihood of this occurring seems exceptionally rare. Recently I have been farming a pair of silver elites that are level 60, and I have seen an item that dropped at 518 but the vast majority of items align cleanly to the 500-515 level range. Up to this point all of this probably sounds pretty sane, but remember the part where I said this watermark was tracked based on individual item slot. Another important concept that you need to know is that the only things that increase watermark are items dropped from encounters. So this excludes every single piece of crafted gear and every single piece of gear that comes from a quest reward like the 580 weapon quests in Shattered Mountain or the 520 faction armor sets. Additionally any item that is named and drops at a specific item level… does not count either so the 600 sword or 590 great axe that can drop in Ebonscale, do not count for bumping up your watermark quickly.

The other thing that is really worth discussing is how many slots there are with their own individual watermarks. There are 21 total “slots” that need to be “leveled up” here is the full listing.

• Helmet
• Chest
• Gloves
• Pants
• Boots
• Shield
• Ring
• Earring
• Necklace
• Great Axe
• Rapier
• Bow
• Sword
• Hammer
• Spear
• Ice Gauntlet
• Fire Staff
• Hatchet
• Musket
• Life Staff
• Void Gauntlet

Notice that every single weapon is listed as its own slot… and that you don’t just have a single weapon slot that you are leveling up. Also think back to loot drops in video games… and how often you actually saw a specific slot or specific weapon type drop. You could in theory go days without seeing a Fire Staff drop for example, because every time an item drops it rolls against a large loot table for all of the possible drops. Encounters have specific items that can drop… but remember that named items for the most part don’t count towards leveling up your watermark. So the end result is the need to blindly grind for countless hours in a vague attempt to push your watermark higher… so that you can get into the dungeons and get the best possible drops… at levels that are actually worth holding onto.

Players will always find the most efficient route to do things, even if the things they are confronted with are awful in the first place. As a result the players went out into the world and carved the open world elite areas into “camps” and then farmed them 24/7 for drops. I wrote about one of these, the “Priests” camp in Myrkgard, and spent a fair amount of time hanging out with various members of the community slowly pushing that watermark level up. Unfortunately Amazon Game Studios saw this, and saw players grinding their way to item level 600… and decided to put a stop to this. In a move of sheer desperation they released patch 1.1 that effectively nerfed into the ground every single major open world camp, trying to push players into the dungeon system. Remember how awful creating keys for dungeons is?

I think this is in part why over 300,000 players have left the game after the release of Patch 1.1. Before this the server was thriving and had constant calls out to recruitment and faction chat with folks looking for elite farm groups. Now it is nothing but the occasional trying to sell access to a Garden of Genesis or Lazarus Instrumentality key with the average price of admission being 1000 gold or your own reciprocal key. Taking away the method that folks were fighting back against this horrible system design, effectively drove the final nail in the coffin for this game for many players. I know I personally uninstalled the game and took a little over a week off before ultimately popping back in to check out the results of another patch.

What makes this all even more damning… is the Watermark is a number that exists only in the ether. There is no way for us to determine what our actual watermark is. On the character screen you can see a “Gear Score” and this number is a dirty lie. I mean technically it is a blended average of the item levels of whatever you currently have equipped, and unlike other games bears no real resemblance to the actual “progression” of your character. So the absolute first step that I would make… is tell the player what the current watermark is for every item. Let us know when the watermark goes up, and what the current drop range is at any given moment. Destiny had clear systems in place and you had a way to see what your base item level was at any given moment, so you knew what to expect drop wise.

Next if you are going to copy Destiny’s homework, at least do a competent job of it. Destiny’s system works the way it does because there are a lot of other systems backing it up. Firstly there is the entire concept of infusion, where you can use an item of a specific slot that you don’t care about as fodder to increase the item level of an item that you DO care about. Throw away the single slot watermark madness and replace it with a blended average based system. If you don’t want crafted items to count, then fine be assholes… but give the players a single number to increase instead of twenty one of them. It felt really freaking bad when the Void Gauntlet went in with 1.1 and everyone who had been farming up their weapon watermarks now had one item that started back at 500.

Destiny gives you clear indications of when an activity can increase your item level, so it it would be really freaking nice if there was an icon or something out beside the name of mobs that are capable of increasing your actual watermark. Maybe differentiate between the activities that guarantee an increase in your item level, and ones that have a chance of increasing it. Remember in the absence of knowledge people will just make shit up, and the number of conspiracy theories that are circulating about the watermark are extreme. For example there are folks completely convinced that you can only get one watermark raise per slot per day, but I have seen evidence to the contrary. My own personal conspiracy is that any time you are rewarded chests, the item level does not increase correctly if you open them back to back, so I exit out of the UI between every single Corrupted Portal Chest as part of my own little tinfoil hat ritual.

Lastly restore the damned elite camps, because the way loot works in your game means that players are going to spend countless hours farming even AFTER they have hit the maximum item level. The above image is one I have posted before and it is a sequence of five legendary drops that are item level 600… that are all complete hot garbage. The items that your game generates mean that most everything that you loot is going to be useless and not even worth selling. So maybe fix your item generation system so that the perks that roll on an item actually make sense for the attributes the item increases. A Strength item should not have perks for Bow users, because Bows do not scale on Strength.

Another lesson that you need to learn from Destiny is that in order for players to play your game it needs to feel rewarding and enjoyable, and under the right conditions they will grind their faces off seeking out that one perfectly rolled item. In New World Legendary items have 3 perks and a gem slot… and I am not going to do the math here but it is exceptionally hard to get an item with exactly the perk combinations that you are wanting. Hell it is nigh impossible to actually craft one, and you can influence the item level and set one single perk through the crafting process making it so only two slots are randomized. Getting that perfect drop in the world is a rare Unicorn and it is the sort of thing that builds stories around your game. The chase for perfect loot is way more engaging than closing the pool because the fun police freaked out that someone was swimming in it too much.

So my advisement is to open that pool up again. Let players grind their faces off because it was fun and engaging and built a sense of community. Normalize the watermark into a single score and make it easy to track so we as players know where we stand in the grind. Finally fix the damned drops so that weapon perks cannot drop with useless stat combinations that make no sense and ultimately invalidate the weapon. Clearly indicate which activities can give you watermark increases and then set back and let players play your damned game. Have you so little faith that what you built was enjoyable that you are scared to death that we are actually going to play it?

Final Thoughts

I know this post is way the hell too long, but the thing is… I care about New World. There is some spark in this game that is clearly evident by pretty much every player that spends any length of time with it. Amazon Game Studios however needs to get the fuck out of the way and let people play the game in the manner that they enjoy. Firstly they come across as a studio who has spent zero time actually playing their game. They also come across as a studio that has no idea how players actually interact with large persistent worlds, more specifically the way players interact with MMORPGs. You may not have intended to build one, but that is what you have and as a result you need to figure out how we WANT to play your game rather than trying this hamfisted routine of trying to FORCE people into playing it the way your spreadsheets intended.

If anyone from Amazon actually reads this… and I sincerely doubt they will. You are killing your own game. This is a game that almost broke one million active players at launch and last night we had less than one hundred thousand players. Your stewardship of this title has been negligent at best, and purposefully adversarial at worst. The first step to getting things back on track is to stop breaking things that are working and actually enjoyable by the player base. Next you really need to take a step back and analyze the things that players actually want to do in your game, and embrace those… or at least stop trying to make them actively worse. There is still an enjoyable core there, but you are slowly removing all of the reasons for actually logging in. Also remember… that you don’t sit down and write a post this long if you don’t also have a lot of love for the game.