Friends… I am standing in a Marauder occupied Everfall and I have some feelings about that. Making it worse it was claimed by “Run It” which were effectively the slumlords that already held Monarch’s Bluffs and were not keeping that terribly well maintained. The positive is that so far they have left the tax rates completely untouched, which is good because Everfall was extremely profitable with some of the lower taxes in the game. What I did not expect however is how much not seeing the purple banners of Apex Fishing flying over the town would impact me. I’m among the most PVE of Carebears but over time I had begun to gravitate more and more towards Everfall with it sorta being the unofficial capital of the purple empire. In fact I was planning on buying my third home there and going all in on a Tier 4 house at some point. The irony is that the entire time I have played on Minda, Windsward has been held by the Marauders and I have still continued to more or less have that as my primary base of operations.
What a difference a few days makes in the fate of the server. On the 21s server transfers were open and I was making a stump speech to have people migrate to the server and join me. At that point Syndicate held seven territories including the deeply unprofitable and disconnected First Light. Over the course of the weekend First Light was more or less allowed to fall because it was a losing proposition. Everfall was defended successfully, put into conflict again, and finally lost last night. Now there are upcoming wars for Mourningdale and Restless Shores by Covenant forces and an attempt by Syndicate to flip Reekwater to purple once more. So one of the things you have to understand is that I have never really felt faction pride before and could not have cared less about the whole Alliance versus Horde debate. I’ve also never felt anything about a sports team and I thought maybe just maybe I did not have whatever it was in me to care about being a spectator. However with this whole Everfall thing… I think maybe I finally understand how a sports fan feels on the day after their team lost.
One of the defenders that goes by Soju streamed the War and I can finally see what people have been talking about regarding lag and warfare. I assumed that it was just the normal sort of “too many things happening and the game feels like molasses” style lagging, but this is more insidious. It appears that the green side utilized a tactic known as “Lag Capping” or “Freeze Capping”. Essentially the idea is to go to a point and get it moving in your direction and then start bombarding that one location with as many ice attacks as possible. If you watch the VOD, you can see that the end result is that it locks up the game for players causing their actions to not really have much impact, but at the same time the capture continues ticking down as though things were normal. This would have been a close match regardless because the sides were stacked with best players Purple and Green had to offer. However this tactic I think made the difference and caused the zone to flip against our favor.
I am certain that we will flip the zone back because a fire has been lit under purple to reclaim their capital city. I will say that in the meantime… it is going to feel a little bit less like home when I am doing the over-encumbered walk of shame back to it. I also have a sudden desire to spend a bit more time in Brightwood which I think now becomes our capital city for the time being. If it were not so late already I probably would have joined in the effort to flip back Everfall into conflict so we could declare war. If there is a directed effort happening tonight then I will probably flag up and join in the questing. That is a new experience for me because this weekend was the first time I had ever been purposefully flagged at all in New World.
I spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday running PVP faction quests in Reekwater. This is one of the easier places to go in order to have low effort faction currency because until recently… no one gives a shit about Reekwater. Friday night as multiple wars were waging, I was slowly flipping the zone a little purple with my activity which I believe accounted for around 5% in total. Over the two days I farmed up the 100,000 tokens needed to buy the full set of heavy armor and I have to say… now that I own it… I am a little unimpressed. Stat wise it is completely great but having gone through this I would never suggest someone do it because not only did it take the 100k tokens but it also cost 3000 gold. Eliyon spent about 1000 gold after dinging 60 and is already way more kitted out than I am. Additionally I have to say the armor looks kinda dumb for something that is supposed to represent “Heavy” armor. The set on the right is the low level faction armor and I loved it. Now instead I am just going to rock the Halloween skeletal armor until I get something more appropriate.
Lastly I did manage to get my shit together and actually log in for a maps night in Final Fantasy XIV. There was much cognitive dissonance as I got readjusted to the controls of FFXIV but it was nonetheless enjoyable. All in all it was pretty successful with I think only three of the maps being duds and not spawning a portal. There is talk about farming up level 70 maps and trying our hand at those since they have completely different drops. I guess I need to pop in every day this week and farm up a 70 map then so I can be stocked for shenanigans. We have just over three weeks until the head start for Endwalker and I am very much ready to get back in the swing of things properly. In the meantime however I am loving New World and want to get into a much better position gear wise before I ultimately put it on the back burner.
FYI, that faction set is currently considered “BIS” for pvp — the “resilient” perk on it is bugged and provides damage reduction vs ALL damage, not just crit, so wearing that set gives you higher than 80% mitigation….. And you can just use a skin on it. You’ve got the new Robin Hood one now, right? Heck, even that pirate/swashbuckler one isn’t bad….
This post gives me Ultima Online flashbacks. I remember there was a technique in that game where a clan would use lag as a weapon against their enemies, tho for the life of me I can’t remember the details at this point.
The only real negative about playing on a US server from the UK is that I’ll probably never get to participate in a War in New World. They all start at 10pm EST which is 3am my time. It’s a shame because I do like territorial PvP. I’ve never had much interest in fighting other players for the sake of it – I absolutely loathe and despise duelling and always have. But fighting over territory is much more involving and absorbing.
That said, I picked my NW faction almost at random and ended up in the smallest of the three on my server by far so the opportunities have been prety thin anyway. With the only territory we held for weeks being Reekwater, now followed by Restless Shores) I might as well have been factionless for all practical purposes. I also so far haven’t paid any attention to taxes because I’ve been working on raising Standing in various towns and it makes no difference who owns them or what the taxes are for that.
What I would say, and did say in my post about housing, is that if you take anything but the shortest-term view, there’s no reason to pick any town over any other for any reason other than that you would like to live there. Taxes and faction could (and will) change countless times during any player’s time in the game so basing a choice on any of that stuff is pointless. It might be that even if certain servers eventualy settle down to a predictable and stable pattern of ownership, the devs will deliberately change things to shake that up. The whole PvP element of the game relies on territory constantly changing hands. If that stops happening New World becomes a PvE game, although, I suspect that is what will eventually happen anyway, especially when they get their battleground PvP working properly, at which point the devs will most likely accept the status quo and not try to push players back into a conflict they will have effectively opted out of.