Bigger is Better

Good morning folks! So I thought I would start this morning’s post with a little bit of a tip. In New World, there are a lot of resources nodes that come in various shapes and sizes. This is not just a cosmetic thing, the larger the node the more resources you will get from it. This means that if you ever roll up on a cluster of nodes, always focus on clearing them from largest to smallest. What is often going to happen is another player will roll up and start to harvest a node beside you, which means you are in a race to gobble up as many resources as you can as efficiently as you can. This for example is Iron and it is among the most hotly contested materials and given that your mining skill, your strength, your faction standing cards, and the quality of your tools all determine how fast you can gather as compared to other players. Always start on the big node and work your way down from there.

Yesterday I spent most of my time wandering around and mopping up lower-level quests that I probably should have already taken care of before now. Of course, while going on a walkabout… I would discover resource nodes that would distract me from my goal. This is the core gameplay loop for me and honestly what I enjoy about this game and games like Skyrim or the modern Fallout series. I set forth on an adventure with a goal in mind, but the process of traversing the distance in between provides a real meaningful journey. The truth is in these sorts of games I tend to use fast travel or mounts very sparingly because it is that cross country trek that really provides me with joy. In New World, I like that I pretty much still need resources that I can find rarely out in the fields and forests on the way to my destination, so stumbling across a stand of hemp for example means I am always going to stop and gather it before continuing onwards.

So far surprisingly I have only really encountered a single bugged area, and that is surrounding a quest where you need to kill a named mob down in a cave. The problem with this quest is that it seems like folks are camping the area constantly and the spawn time so infrequent that whenever we do get a pop… it is almost immediately killed by splash damage. I am uncertain how much interaction is needed in order to earn credit for a quest, but it seems like I am always short because I am pretty sure I am interacting and dealing damage but never actually finishing the quest. I am hoping to roll over there really quickly after publishing this post and maybe just maybe the early morning crowd has moved on past this area.

At this point, I have made it to level 23 and I am thinking about maybe taking a bit of a break from the game and returning to my leveling over in Final Fantasy XIV. The key turn-off right now is knowing that I pretty much have to idle with the game running in the background all day if I have any hope of actually getting some playtime that evening. Then what makes that worse… is knowing that it is highly unlikely that any of the people that are starting the game are going to be able to roll on our server and join us. This whole only 2000 characters per server thing is a pretty debilitating problem, and it threatens to kill the experience for a lot of players out there that will likely bounce, or spend two hours in queue and be unable to return the game. I think someday this will be a great experience, but until they sort out the technical limitations it feels like a really fun game that is only available for a limited few players who can manage to land on the servers in a reasonable manner.

As far as the server goes, the other company still holds First Light but is at risk of losing it. There is a war that has been declared because Marauders have taken the fort and make war on the territory to claim it. Based on what I just raid on Twitter it sounds like the Marauders are playing dirty as the Trading Co. has just had a number of their highest level members given temporary bans. I guess this is the problem with contested territory and games that more or less have automated enforcement systems. I have no clue which group is gunning for the territory because the fort doesn’t say which force claimed it, but I am going to guess it is the Spartan Legion that controls Windsward, and that they are going to be taking their progress in that territory and beginning to take over the map. Honestly, I would be completely fine with that group taking more territory because they seem to be charging fair tax rates. As a citizen of Aeternum and not a combatant… I have a completely different view of these territories because quite honestly all I care about is having a beneficial overlord that isn’t going to charge odious taxes.

I am greatly enjoying the game, but the fact that I cannot reliably play with friends… because my friends cannot reliably get into the game is somewhat damaging the experience. As I said earlier, I am getting tired of feeling like I need to stay connected in the background in order to save the said connection for the moments I can play the game. There is simply no viable way to make it through the queues during prime time hours and I think for the moment I might just move on to doing other things with my time and hoping that at some point the server sizing problems are fixed and we can all move forward together. As much hype is surrounding this game can easily turn bitter if these growing pains are not resolved quickly. More servers are not the answer… bigger servers that allow more people to play together are the only path forward. If Amazon cannot provide that, then this game will die on the vine. Otherwise, folks are probably just better off playing something like Valheim if they can’t actually experience this reliably with friends who didn’t take off work to log in at non-primetime hours.