Good Morning Folks. I am sorry I didn’t end up blogging yesterday but I was feeling out of it in general. I woke up with this crazy headache and it never really went away. I sorta felt like I never fully woke up until last night and went through the day in a bit of a haze. In that mode I just could not muster the “oomph” to actually put digital pen to paper and write a post. I’ve also been feeling a bit of mixed feelings about New World right now, and I most definitely do not want to help in bringing it down. That said as much as I love the moment to moment game play I have some concerns. Essentially if I had not made the push to level 60 when I did, it would be considerably harder to achieve the same sort of leveling pace today.
This morning I ran around for a bit and collected some screenshots. Ironically Brightwood a higher tier zone is the only one actually keeping the project board full. While this only represents four of the eleven claimable territories, they are all more or less in this state or worse. Other towns like Monarch’s Bluff and Fight Light for example, generally only have the single town upkeep task running. There are a lot of things at play here, not the least of which is an impromptu and unwanted civics lesson. Governments do not make money, that is unless they are absolutely ignoring the needs of their citizens. When you claim territory, like it or not, you are taking on the responsibility of taking care of all of the citizens of your territory. That means your number one job should be keeping the town boards humming in order to keep everything upgraded so that the citizens are best taken care of. Instead we have folks in a situation where they are just not making enough money in taxes from the territory to keep things up… which again works just like rural areas in America.
The problem is right now owning a territory is a hole in the ground that you pour money into. This is compounded by a couple of things, not the least of which is the invasion mechanic which legitimately ends up penalizing you more for trying hard to beat it than just throwing and wiping with the first wave. When you lose the game chooses random upgrades that have been applied to the town and removes them, so for example you could luck out and lose only fortifications to the territory which won’t really impact your citizens. Then you have a situation like last night when the defense of Monarch’s Bluff did fairly well against the waves… and lost 4 crafting machine upgrades and 1 fortification as a result. Making it even worse… holding a territory is not really certain because there are some exploitable mechanics at works that make territories flipping fairly unpredictable. Hopefully however that last point has been addressed with some changes in last nights patch. Essentially in practice what happens is if a territory is expecting an invasion or war, then any money spent could be lost entirely so the companies that hold territories just don’t keep projects running.
At this point you are probably thinking “Gee Bel, Minda seems fucked” and on one hand you are correct, things are pretty rotten in “Denmark”. However we are also not the only server struggling right now. This is what the server population looks like for US East, divided into the three buckets that Amazon uses to classify servers. Currently there are 200 servers in the US East data center and of those 1 is classified as High Population, 9 are Medium and 190 are Low Population. By this metric, Minda is a Low Pop Server along with the other 190 servers, but in practice we are firmly in the middle of that pack based on prime time numbers. We are likely doing significantly better than some servers, and worse than a handful of servers. In fact I have been using my secondary character to create alts on other servers to test the waters just to see if things are better somewhere else. So far after a half dozen or so of these jaunts, everyone seems to be pretty much in the same shape we are.
The problem with New World is that the game feels at times that it was designed by spreadsheet and relies on systems interacting with other systems, but did not take into account how players actually play games. There was deep concern that the coin duping bugs would lead to price inflation, but all I am seeing is that most things have little to no value, yet the taxes associated with things are fixed costs not based at all around the health of the general economy. Here is an example of a legendary item and quite honestly one of the best shields in the game… going for 24 coins. I bought a version of this when I dinged 60 for 200 coins and I thought I was getting a steal. There are plenty of fixed cost gold sinks, but not near enough gold faucets so unless you are a trade cartel, pretty much every player is going to be hurting for money in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been saving for my third house because I want it to be a Tier 4, and I am not sure when I will feel comfortable enough to actually spend that initial 20,000 gold on it.
In my perfect version of New World, a single faction would control the entire map and that controlling company would be made up of representatives of the other factions. The profits from the wealthy territories could subsidize the lower profit territories and improve the state of New World equally. However as I am sure you are aware this dream state of the game does not exactly jive with a game that folks still consider to be purely PVP based. Additionally the even more astute will have realized I have more or less described a federal plan of government. The challenge that we have is that real world Governments who have had hundreds if not thousands of years of experience… can’t figure this shit out. This game chooses to place the reigns of power in the hands of a bunch of dudes with rage boners because the only viable PVP in the game really… is through waging war with other companies for control of territories.
Shocking to no one… the whole incentives for flagging up and participating in World PVP are not nearly attractive enough to actually get players to do it. The only time folks flag up is when they are actively trying to flip a zone as a coordinated effort, which again is generally a small group of players that are associated with the larger war effort. The rest of the players state “white named” and are only really impacted by wars by who controls the territory, whether or not there is a teleport bonus, and who is controlling the tax rates. New World needs significant rework to make the systems actually interact in a way that makes sense for the pattern of play. However for all if this post I am still greatly enjoying myself and for all the gnashing of teeth about the server… I have come to love it.
Minda reminds me so much of Argent Dawn in that there is a cast of characters that make up who is actively talking in Global chat, and then an army of folks who never speak up in public. In fact when the server transfers open up again I will be trying to actively get folks to transfer onto the server. I don’t think it is beyond saving and my hope is if we increase the population, some of the other taxation issues with start the sort themselves out. My only real concern is knowing that Endwalker is on the horizon and it will vastly cut into my play time in New World. I don’t want to completely abandon things here, but I know I will be focused on getting to 90 and gearing up to be able to raid there.
They openly designed the game with the intent of merging servers so I’m sure we’ll see that happening soon enough. They only opened the extra ones to meet the extremely heavy early demand so I would guess we’d drop to about a quarter of the servers we have now. I think it’s far too soon to worry about what server we’ll end up on – chances are whatever we pick now won’t exist by next year.
The PvP set-up is interesting. It’s very lively on my server with lots of action and constant changes in territory ownership. It’s getting more competetititve rather than less, too. As for the economy, I need to tak eanother look because last time I was shopping for armor on the TP the problem was things were too expensive, not too cheap. If there are real bargains to be had, I’d say grab them now and stash them. It won’t last. Someone’s going to make a lot of money.
I imagine that once they start combining servers, they’ll get down to the “right” number of people on each server and things will get busy again and reach a steady state, probably with one faction being predominant on a server. If Amazon keeps supporting the MMO, I think it will land in a good spot.