New World Concerns

Good Morning Friends. I had quite a bit of fun over the weekend playing an excessive amount of New World. I am greatly enjoying the rhythm of the end game and most specifically the weird camaraderie we have with the folks who regularly show up at the 6:30 pm server time zerg crowd. This is raising the hackles of some of the guilds because they view it as a massive distraction for their members against whatever their chosen activities are. However for me it is this weird blend of players from all of the factions on the server and allows us to just have some fun running amok together. It is absolutely not for everyone, and it is absolutely not a good way to get drops from Elite Bosses. However it is a fun way of spending a few hours it what amounts to be a giant “Waaagh!”.

That said there are some things about the game that give me pause and serious concerns. This morning I thought I would spend some time talking about a few of these. Namely the game has some serious design problems that I hope they can address in coming patches.

2000 Player Limit / Fixed Servers

One of the truths of an MMORPG is that they have a fall off over time, especially in a game that does as bad of a job of new player on-boarding as New World. So many of the systems seem to have been designed on spreadsheets to support a maximum player count of 2000 players, but at the same time… it also seems like some of the systems are designed for a minimum player count… of 2000 players. The challenge there however is that it is going to be very hard to keep attracting new blood into a server, where there is such a fixed limit in the total number of players it can support before developing multi-hour long queues. In the very short time since launch we have gone from Six Hour long queues, to 1500 player peaks, to 1000 player peaks… to now doing good if we have 500 players during prime time.

Bad Support Structure for New Players

Which leads into the problem of not really having a good support network for new players to the game that are starting when the lions share of the population are already at the level cap. The game has a core main scenario which is gated in progress by three dungeons: Amrine Expedition, The Depths, and Dynasty Shipyard. Because of the way that gear is structured in the game, there is no benefit to a player running these dungeons once they are out of the level band for them, other than to help friends through them. I’ve run a number of these multiple times because there is a social pressure to do so in order to support the players that I have a personal connection to. However this leaves a larger problem of just not being able to find groups easily for these locations.

Last night there was a conflagration in Faction chat from a player who was fed up with the game because he had been trying to get a Depths run going for an entire week and never really managed to get anything started. Granted he was a DPS player which means it was an uphill battle, but still it highlights the problem that right now… there are just not enough players in the mid levels to support running dungeons. I could have volunteered to run the dungeon with this player, but I had other things that I wanted to do and there was no social contract between me and this stranger tugging on my emotions to make me want to help them. Final Fantasy XIV steps in with this scenario and bribes the shit out of players for running things they don’t technically need, and I have a feeling that Amazon is going to need to step in with some sort of system to reward upper level players for helping lower level ones.

High End Materials are Worthless

There is a massive problem with the way that gathered materials work in this game. As it stands Iron, Hemp, Rawhide, and Green Wood are the most valuable resources you will ever get your hands on… and they can all be gathered with flint tools the moment you land on the shores of Aeternum. Essentially high end resources exist in the game in an overabundance… which I will get into shortly. To craft a single Orichalcum Bar, you need:

• 8 Orichalcum Ore
• 10 Starmetal Ore
• 48 Iron Ore
• 5 Flux of some sort

So the most liquid materials are always going to end up being the Iron Ore and the Flux, because Starmetal and Orichalcum are in an overabundance as folks mine them constantly for rare drops.

Unobtainium Problem

Each refining profession can make some sort of materials that has a daily cooldown allowing you to craft ten of that item per day. Leatherworking has Runic Leather, Smelting has Asmodeum Ingots, Woodworking has Glittering Ebony, and Weaving has Phoenix Weave. Each of these require you to gather two extremely rare legendary items per single piece of the high end crafting material, and these items are an exceptionally rare drop chance on the harvesting loot table. This means that players are consuming as much of the high end resources as they can possibly get their hands on… all in the hopes of getting the super rare drop which leaves this glut of resources that no one can actually use. This problem is essentially the Salt Candy Factory from Willy Wonka, of people unwrapping candy bars around the clock just in the hopes of maybe getting that golden ticket.

This becomes even worse of a problem for Orichalcum, because it has an even less obtainable unobtainium called Void Ore. I had a friend relay a story to me of spending the entire day farming Orichalcum at several locations right on the 30 minute respawn and getting 27,000 Orichalcum ore, 35 Cinnabar, 20 Tolvium, and a single solitary Void Ore. Voidbent Ingots are currently used in the game to craft the best gear that you can theoretically get… level 600 Voidbent Armor. I’ve been considerably luckier in my travels and have picked up 2 Ore so far and have managed to craft a single Ingot, but I will need 5 in total to craft a set of Voidbent armor. As you might realize this means that every player that has managed to get mining up to 175 is harvesting as much Orichalcum as they possibly can because getting one of these Void Ores to drop for you is a massive payday. All of this harvesting creates a massive downward pressure on the price of Orichalcum and an upwards pressure on the price of Iron Ore given that if you remember from above… you need 48 in order to craft a single Orichalcum Ingot.

One Shot Group Quests

Taking a break from crafting woes… let’s go back to New World being unfriendly to new players. During the main scenario quest there are a few exceptionally difficult story quests that in theory require players to group up. Namely “Hero’s Duty” and “Selfless Nature”, both of which require you enter into an area blocked by a wall. The only players that can pass through this barrier are folks who are actively on the quest, which means you have a single chance to help other players with these scenarios. The first one of these is solo-able if you over-level it. The second one however is only really solo-able if you glitch out the boss and are a Fire Staff or Ice Gauntlet user or are carrying a truly ridiculous number of arrows and bullets. I am currently stalled on getting this quest completed because I know that I have a single shot at tanking this and I want to get the maximum number of my guild members through out while I can.

Every day there is one or two players desperately looking for these quests and t hen coming up empty. Again the fixed server size and the spread out nature of the population means that there is not really a massive influx of new players leveling up through the ranks in order to fill these groups. At a bare minimum there needs to be the ability to players who have already completed the quest to go in and help other players get through them. There also needs to be some reward for doing so in order to entice those high end players to give up mining for unobtainium long enough to run these quests.

Item Watermarking

I have ranted before about the “High Watermark” system before, but it really does feel worse than you can even imagine. My armor has leveled up pretty reasonably because Armor as a whole shares a single watermark. This means that I am pretty reliably getting drops above 575 at this point, which means I am only a few days worth of grinding away from being able to see 580s… and knocking on the door of item level 600 drops. My weapons are all over the place however because they each have a unique water mark level… so I am seeing a lot of Life and Fire Staves that I could give zero fucks about at 560 and then the weapons I do care about like Hatchet and Sword are languishing down in the 530s all because of bad luck when it came to RNGing my way into the drops that I need. Jewelry is by far the worst option because it is already super rare on the loot table, which means those are dropping back down at 505 when I see them.

The biggest problem I see for the long term health of the game however is that one of the major ways that Amazon plans on expanding the game is through the addition of new weapons. It has already been verified that the Void Gauntlet is coming very soon, probably in a patch next week. So for all of those players who have ground their water mark up towards 600… are going to start back at square one when this new weapon enters the ecosystem. You are going to be seeing a lot of players either relying on crafted weapons or running around with a 600 item level main hand and a 505 Void Gauntlet in their offhand. As much as I hate to admit it… Amazon needs to switch to a blended average system like Destiny has for determining item level of drops.

Crafters Don’t Have Influence

Right now much of the game is focused on putting territories into conflict and then declaring war in order to make a bid at taking that territory over. The bulk of this influence is gained through running PVP quests in a given zone, but there is a way to do PVE quests to contribute as well. However one of the cool things about New World is that it legitimately supports being a pure crafter if you choose to do so. In theory you can level all of the way from one to sixty without doing a single quest and doing nothing but gathering resources out in the world and crafting items. There however is no way for crafters to directly influence the bid for territory without either choosing to PVP or going out and running PVE content. Anyone who has been a student of history even in the smallest bit, will know that often times trade cartels end up controlling the most influence in a feudal system.

What I personally would like to see is something similar to the Ahnqiraj War Effort quests from Vanilla World of Warcraft. In those quests you were helping to fund the war effort for trying to open up this new territory. Essentially you could get a repeatable quest that would remove an amount of crafting resources from the game in exchange for faction and gold. Imagine if you had a quest that required you to turn in 1000 Orichalcum Ore and rewarded some zone influence, faction tokens, and a little bit of coin in the process. This does a few things… firstly it removes the glut of high end resources from the game entirely effectively deleting them from the economy. Second it sets a floor for the value of materials because no one would sell items below the amount of gold you would get from completing a turn in. Lastly it limits the influence of a roaming pack of PVPers to swing a zone, when crafters can quietly be drawing upon their resources to buffer this. Crafters are ultimately the ones who are the most damaged by zone shifts, so it feels like they should have come control mechanism to stabilize the system.

Wrapping Up

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just some of the things that have been bothering me most recently. New World is a game that is “burdened with glorious purpose”, and quite honestly there are so many aspects of the game that are extremely enjoyable. It obviously is good enough to keep me playing it right now… at least until Endwalker launches. As a result I want it to be better, and turn into something that I can reasonably come back to once the rush of leveling in the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion is over. I would love this to be my new Destiny, the game I play on the side several times a week between activities in my main game. I don’t want this instead to be the new Anthem… a game with so much potential that ultimately failed to execute on it. I complain because I care.