Good Morning Friends! I just realized that I talked about it on Twitter but have yet to talk about it here. The first non-Ishgard round of lottery is finished and I failed to snag the house I was interested in. I was bidder number 5 and I have no clue the total number of players that were in the running, but number 15 won. Even though it makes me sad that I lost the property, I will say it was an infinitely better experience than the previous click fest. On June 4th if my information is correct, I will be able to go house shopping again and place another bid that will be drawn on the 8th. I really think there needs to be some sort of in-game clock to let players know where we are in the housing draw period. Either that or I need to go sifting around on the interwebs and find a resource that is going to be reliable for this purpose.
I will take this opportunity to plug the Super Dungeon Friends discord again. If you are curious about the whole idea behind the SDF then you can read the original post. As far as me lately it has turned into an FFXIV housing system support group. I know a few people in the chat managed to snag a home and I was super happy for them. Since launching it has been expanded to have some channels related to other games as well including New World, Guild Wars 2, Diablo, Destiny 2, Lost Ark, and World of Warcraft. It is not exactly a high-volume server but is a fairly chill place to have a conversation.
So I know I said I was done caring about New World yesterday, but here comes some more New World talk. My main is currently situated on Valhalla and I got there because Minda my original server merged into Frislandia… and then Frislandia merged into Valhalla. The above screenshot was taken Monday night and represents something close to the active population of servers during North American primetime. So the server I play on is effectively the sixth most populous server during the times I am active. For a while now I have been hearing that Maramma is this haven for PVE players and that is really the place you want to be if you care about that side of the game. As a result, I have found myself contemplating a server move given that I have two free tokens.
| Reagent | Valhalla | Maramma |
| T5 Sandpaper | 0.83 | 0.09 |
| T5 Tannin | 0.59 | 0.15 |
| T5 Flux | 3.05 | 0.89 |
| T5 Weave | 0.63 | 0.1 |
| T5 Solvent | 0.75 | 0.19 |
On my original server Minda we had this problem where everything was either worthless or had insane value, meaning that you could not make a reasonable living selling normal materials. Based on my quick survey of the Maramma economy, it seems as though that is taking place there as well. While reagent prices are nonsense on Valhalla, I can make quite a bit of money just by providing refined resources and selling them on the open market. I think again this is entirely brought on by the fact that we seem to be a very PVP-focused community, and as a result, there are fewer PVE-centric players providing the resources to the market. It is moments like this that I really miss the Guild Wars 2 economy where prices are so stable and regulated that you could set a clock by them.
So essentially I am finding out that the grass is not in fact greener on the other side. We are going through this weird period of Valhalla where there was a mass migration of green players to team purple, and as a result, my faction controls most of the map now. I really need to get over my own social anxiety and just put myself out there and do some end-game content. I’ve made a handful of friends of the server already through random interactions, and I would love to get to the point where I had a regular group of people interested in running dungeons. I think if I could ease my way into that side of the game that it might be the enjoyment I am looking for. All of this said… I am still actively playing Guild Wars 2 every night and if I just managed to get further into some of the grinds like Skyscale I would probably forget entirely about New World.