Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we return to some discussion about New World and how the promised server moves don’t seem like they are going to work out as we thought. The end result is the server queues are gone from Minda but we have a handful of people isolated on servers in a different region. We talk about some of Kodra’s woes in attempting to run PVP Faction missions solo. From there we talk a bit about Tabletop Simulator and some of the interesting ways it allows you to play board games virtually during the pandemic. We talk a bit about Tales of Arise and some of the issues it has with not really explaining clearly where a player should go next. We wrap things up with some discussion of Kodra finally beating Celeste and moving on to the modded version of the game including Glyph.
I don’t want to jinx things but the queues appear to just be… gone. I spent some time popping around various zones and I did not encounter a single “wall runner”. For those who might not have been following along this saga, the term wall runner is used colloquially in New World to refer to someone who is exhibiting a behavior designed to evade the AFK Timeout functionality. There were various schools of thought here, but the most basic seemed to be toggling the run hotkey on and then pushing up against some obstacle that would keep you running into a corner. Moving around the zones you would find people in random corners of the world furiously racing against some rock, or gate… all in an attempt to make the game think they were actively playing.
Yesterday Amazon patched in some updated tech designed to detect these folks and punt them from the game. Then magically it was like we had enough breathing room to simply not have to worry about login queues at all. I popped in yesterday morning to take a few screenshots and unsurprisingly there was no queue. Then I logged in after work… and still no queue. Throughout the course of the night, I logged in and out a few different times, with one of them being around 8 pm and still no queue at all. In fact, it showed that our server population was only sitting at around 1700 players. So I guess the question is, was all of the activity by folks afking to reserve their place in line?
I think you have a few things at work. Firstly like every game, the newness has worn down a bit and those folks who took off days from work to play 24/7 have run out of vacation time. Secondly, there is the challenge that it was impossible to play on the busy servers reliably, so if our little group is any evidence… many folks voluntarily rerolled elsewhere and started from scratch because they had not made enough progress to make that painful yet. Thirdly, of course, there is always a significant drop-off in a new game after a week or so, and we are seeing that play out here. For all of those folks who crushed the server on the opening days, there are going to be a chunk that for one reason or another didn’t really find what they were looking for. New World is not going to be the ideal game experience for everyone, and as a result, you are going to have a significant chunk of players that just completely bounce off the title no matter how good it might be.
All of that said… I really do think the improved detection made a significant difference and the early signs that maybe just maybe folks were going to get banned for the behavior. What we are left with is a situation where those original few servers now don’t have queues but are still in a locked-down state to prevent new players from rolling on them. Similarly, we have a fragmented community of folks waiting on the server transfers to allow everyone to once again play together. That said I find myself questioning what the next best steps are going forward. I am left with the majority of a community on one server that has no queues, and an isolated but growing number of people taking up residence on other servers. Is it the best choice to try and get everyone on Minda, or is it to abandon ship and latch onto a completely new server?
If we united the community, we have maybe in the realm of fifty players. Coordinating that many people landing at the same destination is going to be a bit of a challenge. At least with the loss of the queues, it takes away some of the immediacies of needing to do this. My hope is we can take a bit of a wait and see as the server transfers open up. I still think that the server status website is our best bet in gauging active populations, but I do wish it had a 48-hour peak number or something to that effect so that you can see what the potential for a server load looks like, not just what the active one is. In the meantime, I am nearing level 40, and probably need to stop what I am doing for a bit and focus on some faction currency given that I would love to buy the level 40 set of faction gear.
I do feel a little bit bad though in that the worst seems to be over… and now a handful of folks have scattered to the wind. I hope we can reunite the community and get everyone back together on either Minda or some new destination. I will of course keep folks updated as to where we decide to land. For the short term however I want to see how folks shift before choosing a destination to leap to.
Morning friends! It has been a few days since I talked about my core mission over in Final Fantasy XIV. This would probably lead someone to believe that I had given up on my goal of leveling all of the things to 80. However, what it really means is that I am mostly just doing the easiest and most beneficial leveling opportunities each day rather than grinding every possible drop of experience. Essentially I am logging in every day and at a minimum doing the daily roulettes for Main Story Quest, Alliance Raid, and Frontlines. Generally speaking, I also do the Faerie quests in Il Mheg while waiting in one of the above queues. Combined they represent more than a level’s worth of experience and through that, I managed to level to 80 on my Astrologian yesterday.
New World has absolutely slowed down my progress, but it did not halt it completely. You can notice that curve flattening out a bit but that probably looks worse than it is because I also got out of the habit of recording data points. Essentially there are now two classes left before I get my Amaro mount, and I have purposefully left two classes I enjoy quite a bit. I am now focusing on finishing off Dragoon which I got to 77 yesterday as well. That will leave me with a tank to level as my very last class, and given that it is my favorite style of gameplay it should be extremely easy for me to grind that out in dungeons if need be with near-instant queues. The ultimate irony… is me, who almost exclusively plays tanks and melee… maxed out all of my healers and magic DPS first.
On to New World… the queues seem to be dying away. Last night I spent most of the evening playing Final Fantasy XIV and the around 8:30/9ish last night I popped into the game and only had a 26 player queue which breezed by in a few minutes. I am not sure if this is due to the fact that the new smell is wearing off or the 24/7 tryhards are finally getting some sleep. There is also the possibility that a sizable amount of players manually rerolled on a lower population server. Whatever the case I am super happy to see Minda be something that you can realistically log into in the evenings without much gnashing of teeth.
New World is currently undergoing maintenance, but I did patch up my game and log in to see that we now have a code of conduct screen that players will have to agree to before entering the game. Given that a large chunk of the patch notes involved methods to detect and kick AFK players, it makes me think that we are only a few weeks away from a massive ban wave. So if you are doing anything untoward to avoid getting kicked from the game, I would highly suggest you halt that activity now. New World employs Easy Anti Cheat, which should in theory be able to detect pretty much anything that is running in the background. My hope is that they start acting upon some of the bad behavior I am seeing in chat because the community is pretty uncouth. I’ve been spoiled by Roleplaying servers for far too long, and most recently the very amazing community on Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. Having the waves of the obscene masses come crashing over me… has been a wake-up call to just how generally awful gamers can be.
Yesterday I managed to hit 37 and also wrap up one of my huge overarching missions in-game, which was to upgrade all of my tools to Starmetal. This means even if we do end up server transferring someplace else, that I should be in pretty good shape for the rest of the leveling curve. The biggest thing gained by Starmetal is that each of the tools has three perks instead of two, and they also do a much better job of chewing through things like Starmetal nodes and Wyrdwood trees. The skinning knife is so freaking quick when it comes to lower-level carcasses which admittedly is still a lot of what I skin as random cats and wolves attack me. Right now I am splitting time between Cutlass Keys, Brightwood, and Weavers Fen as I knock out some of the quests there. Still greatly enjoying myself but also very happy to begin mixing in more Final Fantasy XIV.
This weekend I was not certain how much time I would get to play, because the weekend tends to be when we do things. For the most part, I got to hang out and play New World all Saturday because it was raining buckets outside, and neither of us had the desire to leave the house. Sunday however it became rapidly clear just how untenable our current server situation is. Because of just the nature of how our Sundays go, I spent time in queues three different times for a grand total of four and a half hours spent watching this box tick down. Essentially if you cannot log in before noon, you are not going to have what I would call a reasonable experience. Thankfully my machine is capable of running multiple games at the same time so on the longest of these queues… 2.5 hours, I spent time over in Final Fantasy XIV doing roulette.
One thing that I can attest to with a fairly high degree of confidence is that the tool we have been using to estimate how long a queue is… is pretty freaking accurate. The three queues that I entered yesterday were pretty much dead on for what the queue estimates were at the time of me logging in. These are some sample queues from the site at the time of writing this, and I sorted them by the most players in a given queue. This more or less tells the tale of New World right now. Notice that a few servers have seemingly been bumped up to 2250 players as a test, but I am starting to doubt that they plan on scaling these up very much higher. In fact 2000 players seems to be an important number for the design and stability of this game. I provided some server data on Friday when I wrote about the game and since then 131 more servers have been added… only further increasing the fragmentation of the player base. The current data centers look something like this:
Frankfurt, Germany – 230 Servers
Arlington Virginia, United States – 200 Servers
Sydney, Australia – 70 Servers
Umatilla Oregon, United States – 64 Servers
Sao Paulo, Brazil – 44 Servers
Amazon has made some attempts to flag players who are trying to get around the AFK timeout and force them out of the game. Cities right now are rife with players running in place against obstacles or auto-attacking while standing still via a macro. So while I am happy to see them making strides in keeping this from happening, I also don’t think it is going to really go very far in solving the problem. The core issue is that the day one, day two, and probably even day three servers are way too populated.
Amazon has officially locked many of these overly populated servers so that new characters cannot be rolled on them. However, this action probably came a little too late for it to make a difference either. If you have a fixed server size in mind as they did… maybe stop character creation at 2.5 times that number? On opening day there were servers with queues that were upwards of four times the size of the total number of players allowed on a server. Ultimately I am just not certain that staying where we are is going to be tenable much longer. There has been a discussion that Amazon is trying to rush a solution to allow players to migrate elsewhere, and right now I am thinking that is our next best hope. Once this opens up, find a smaller server and then coordinate a move to that location so that we can recreate the company again on the other side.
There is a lot of really fun group content available in this game. I spent some time over the weekend closing “Rifts” aka corruption breaches and they were great. I also got pulled into a random group with players from various factions and did Amrine Expedition the first dungeon. All of this is pretty awesome content, but also things that would have been so much more enjoyable had I been able to do it with my friends. The core problem with the game right now is actually getting players online. It is making all of the core systems function a little worse as a result. For example, I watched a video from a YouTuber that talked about how hard it is to make the War system work right now because they just can’t reliably get players online at a fixed time in order to meet up and defend a territory.
There are times I am committed and connected to the community on a server. For example, I would refuse to ever move away from Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, because that server is just phenomenal. In New World, however… I think pretty much every server is a dumpster fire right now and Minda is not really a place I care about significantly. I am deeply connected to my character and would not want to re-roll elsewhere. I am deeply connected with the people I am playing with… whenever we can actually play together. I am not however connected to any given server, so far as I am concerned our best bet is to move. This is going to still have some pain associated with it because I am in a place where I need those tier 4 crafting machines, but I can deal with being delayed if it means we can all play the game in a reasonable manner.
I think the plan going forward is to wait for the server transfer tool to open up, and see what it does to server populations. Then find a relatively low to medium population server and transplant our little group of players. The players that rerolled on low pop servers are seeing a lot more of these sweet sweet loading screens than those who have stuck by Minda. At level 33, I am too deep to contemplate starting over, so my last hope is for a server transfer.
