It seems we are staring down the barrel of server transfers in New World and I have to admit I have a lot of concerns surrounding them. For those who have not been keeping up with this topic you can check out the Q&A thread that Amazon posted on the forums or the 1.0.3 Patch notes from the patch that was seemingly applied last night at 10 pm PDT. Essentially when the system opens up it will be limited to servers that are not currently flagged as “Full” and when it goes live you will be limited to only servers in your region. The first part isn’t really a big deal because at the time of writing this not a single New World server is currently showing as “Full”. The second part is a little more frustrating because we have a small contingency of players that rolled on a US West server when the rest of us are US East, and there is no real ETA on when we can join up together.
As it stands Minda the server that we are on has not been “Full” for quite some time and seems to run around 1400-1600 players during peak hours. So it seems to me that there is still plenty of room to soak transfers without returning us to a land of queues. However I have to admit that the worst part about the New World player experience for me personally has been the community. The problem that I have is that I have zero faith that the grass will be any greener on the other side of a transfer. This is a game that has attracted all of the hyper competitive super abrasive PVP players and brought them to the forefront of the game since so much of the systems revolve around winnings wars and taking territory. While there are plenty of great folks playing on Minda, Global chat is full of human trash-fires.
The problem is I have no real faith that any other server environment is going to be better, so I am not sure if trying to transplant everyone to more favorable shores is reasonable. Ultimately you are going to need an active server to survive in the endgame, and thus far we seem to have a fairly thriving ecosystem of territories that are active. However that said we are already experiencing issues with the less traveled territories are falling into disrepair. So many of the territories on the outskirts of the central core no longer have town board projects active, and the company that holds the territory is no longer trying to upgrade anything which means they are either stagnating or worse actively downgrading through failed invasions or missed upkeep payments. I knew holding a territory cost a lot of money, but it wasn’t until the YouTuber Demone Kim went over the costs that I fully began to understand it.
This morning I could not find the specific video, but Demone spent some time going over just how much it costs for his guild Trinity to hold a territory. We all know that the initial territory buy in is around 200,000 gold which is pretty wild for a company of 100 players to rapidly come up with. However even if you got your territory through combat you start needing to pay an upkeep cost every seven days that is based on the quality of the upgrades to your territory. These include any defensive upgrades that you have made to your fort and any crafting machine upgrades. He stated that the higher end town board projects cost the company holding the territory around 15,000 gold to start not counting any contribution from players completing the quests. He showed his companies upkeep screen and for a town that had mostly Tier 4 crafting machines it was around 45,000 gold every seven days.
The harsh reality is that any town that is not Everfall or Windsward is not viably self sustaining without having outrageous taxes. If you crank up those taxes however you drive players out of the town entirely and cause them to find someplace cheaper to live or do business. Each time an invasion rolls through a territory since they are currently bugged it downgrades four items in that territory spread between crafting machines and defensive upgrades. So if they are 15k gold each, that means a single failed invasion can cost upwards of 60k in gold to get the town back to the state it was before that invasion. Failing to meet that upkeep payment which for his guild was 45k gold, means that it has a similar impact of downgrading facilities and making the territory less attractive to players. This gold burden is being then spread out among only 100 players mind you… and a total maximum server population of around 3000 active players maybe?
Ultimately all of this means that most servers are not going to be viable once you level up your crafting past a certain point. So much of what I am seeing from folks arriving at the end game is going to revolve heavily around tier 5 crafting to gather up resources and craft your own legendary items. Most of the towns I am frequenting right now on our server that is pretty bustling… can’t support Tier 5 crafting. Even Everfall and Windsward struggle to keep a full compliment of Tier 4 crafting machines. Those towns are being supported by the most active PVP guilds on the server so the hard truth is that we need those sorts of folks to make sure that territory is held and kept updated. While the PVE players make the backbone of the commerce… someone has to foot the bill to keep everything maintained for us.
So while it might be extremely appealing to think about traveling to some backwater server that is quiet and friendly… I am already at a point where that just isn’t viable. I am now mining Orichalcum and I am not even sure what town I am going to need to travel to just to be able to refine it. I know without a doubt that Windsward the town I spend most of my time in, does not have the facilities to do this. I know Everfall is in a similar situation… and that is from a server with active towns. I’ve heard stories from friends who rolled on lower pop servers that maybe only have one or two territories held at all. Basically I don’t love Minda and its community, but I am deeply concerned about leaving and trying some other server where we might be stranded without the resources needed to progress.
As of last night I am 57 and am likely to hit 58 today, which means I am starting to enter that final crawl to proper endgame levels. In my 40s however I started encountering issues of not being able to find the right kind of crafting machines in order to craft the items I needed to craft. One of the core problems with New World is the fact that you only have two character slots period, which makes it extremely hard to shop around for a potential better server to land on. For the foreseeable future we are going to be getting a single server transfer token, which makes that a fairly scarce commodity and as such a pretty serious choice. We’ve already had a few people bail out of the company in preparation for server transfers, but I am deeply hesitant to act immediately. For the time being I still feel like the best call is to stay where we are and see what the transfer climate looks like.
I don’t know of a better server currently. Everyone that I have talked with says many of the same things about their server as I do about ours. I’ve spent plenty of time reporting bad actors and at least one of them has spontaneously disappeared from the server. I can only hope that maybe just maybe the reports actually worked. I am concerned that anything smaller than the server we are playing on currently won’t be able to support players when they get into their 50s and hit 60. I am already running into some minor issues in that department and I can only imagine that a smaller and lesser progressed server is going to have more of those issues. Say what you will about Minda, it has a fairly thriving community when it comes to defending territories. So far we have at least two companies on the Green faction and two on the Purple faction that have been pretty great Stewards of the territories that they hold.
Essentially I have reached a place where I am willing to swallow down the absolute awful names and quietly report the flagrant abuse… because I sincerely doubt that this game is going to attract the sort of players I am used to playing with in enough concentration to have a phenomenal server like Cactuar somewhere out there. If you find a magical greener pasture out there let me know. If there is a fabled land where all the crafting machines are Tier 5 and every single territory is held by Purple… that would probably trigger me to transfer. For the moment however I am not sure it is worth gambling to try and find a better server. That said I am absolutely open to suggestions, but for the very moment staying where we are seems the most stable.
I turned global chat off on day one (very unusual for me) and never turned it back on, so I have no idea if it’s still as bad. Actually, the main reason I turned it off wasn’t quality, which seemed no worse than most mmos realy, certainly no worse than Black Desert and somewhat better than retail WoW. It was the sheer quantity. It scrolled endlessly and i found it too distracting to have in my peripheral vision.
I imagine that was just launch week hysteria and it’s calmed down a bit by now but I don’t see any reason to switch it on because I have Faction chat to read instead. I’m in Maruaders, the smallest faction on Zuvendis, and I play five hours ahead of US East coast time, so it’s nicely quiet although far from dead. Conversation in that channel is very pleasant almost all the time. Polite, good spelling and grammar, mostly practical about the game. Better than most mmos, I’d say.
As far as offensive names go, I can categorically say I’ve seen nothing vile and very little that made me raise an eyebrow. I’ve definitely seen much worse in other games. I don’t really see that many names, though, with global off and overhead names set to minimum. Maybe there are bad ones I’m not seeing.
Population-wise, I would have guessed Zuvendis was a lower pop server but maybe it’s not. All of our territories have been owned from close to the start of the game and there are wars every night. It’s very competitive. Everfall is insanely busy but most of the other cities are pretty busy. I haven’t been checking the level of the crafting stations but I have seen a lot of 4s and one or two 5s.
I wouldn’t even think of worrying about any of this at this stage, though. This is the third week after launch. You can pretty much guarantee that in six to twelve months almost none of the systems will work like they do now. Also, there will be a quarter of the number of servers, if that. All the impatient, angry people will be long gone to some other game, too. If New World is a success, which it looks as though it wil be, the game will start to settle down and bed in for the longer term and in a few years we’ll either have forgotten all of this stuff or we’ll talk about it like war stories from the deep past.
I do think that, given the numbers you quoted, the whole territorial PvP set-up is unsustainable. On Zuvendis last night one of the factions had to effectively cede a territory to another because they simply couldn’t maintain a war footing in all the places they held, and that’s the Faction. If individual guilds are having to foot the bills for the Towns I can’t see anyone doing it for long. I’d guess that’ll be one of the first systems to be revamped.
You can do 2 characters per data center, so in the US you can feasibly do 4 — 2 on East, 2 on West. I’m actually in the West region, but I haven’t had any trouble playing on Minda in the East region, despite the ping times for the datacenter showing as generally being 2-3x higher than if I were on West (my “main” character that I created 1st and that sits at level 30 is on a server in West, actually. I don’t recall its name… something like Rivaneydra, I think. Maybe.). When I made my throwaway alts to test weapon combos to see what “spoke to me” I had a 2nd character on West and 2 in East also, then I deleted them all and made my character on Minda so as to join Greysky.
FWIW, in my random server selections, most seemed pretty low pop with nothing much on the TP even in Everfall or Windsward. The server that holds my 1st character I started in First Light, which is already considered to be the red-headed stepchild of the 4 starting zones. I moved to Monarch’s Bluff when I got into my teens, but even that server seems to have EF and WW as the 2 hub cities so if (and that’s a big if, since I like being in Greysky with y’all) I ever go back to that server I’ll likely move to WW or EF.
Global chat on those servers seemed to be somewhat toxic, but on my 1st server it seems all right. Minda seems pretty decent overall to me as well, relatively speaking.
I have been on a few servers. Minda is quite pleasant compared to some I have been on. The only “nice” server I’ve visited had just the issue you mention: There were regions still owned by no one and few facilities were upgraded. So I think it was only ‘nice’ because it was mostly empty.