The Doors Have Closed

Yesterday was the launch of the New World Brimstone Sands expansion content and with it the potential rebirth of the game. On the 8th of October, we had set plans in place to roll on Themiscyra which at the time was the lowest population of the US East servers with an average population of around 300-500 players. It was in the same server group as three other servers, which would in theory allow it to merge down later and still be a reasonable place to play. My hope was that this would allow us to weather whatever burst in activity came with the launch and still have a viable population after mergers.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the New World team directly conspired against these plans as on the 10th they released this population heatmap post. While I realize that the team has no clue who the hell we are or the plans that we were making, this was compounded by the fact that yesterday according to folks in chat Themiscyra was the server that was being suggested to brand-new players. The end result is that over the course of several hours, we went from being one of the lowest pop servers to one of the highest population servers. This also means that by around 6 pm CDT last night, if you did not already have a character on the server you were effectively locked out from creating one or transferring. So once again I know of at least a handful of people who did not manage to get onto the server before the window closed. I am sure over time it will open up and apparently anyone who has not logged in since February got an additional server transfer token, so maybe over time, everything will sort itself out.

I guess the positive is that the door slammed shut at pretty much the optimal time for playability. I disconnected in the middle of the night when the game crashed on me, and it took me maybe 15 minutes to get back in through the login queue. So while Themiscyra is locked off from anyone who did not pre-stage a character on the server like a number of us did, it does appear that those who managed to get into it can play freely without much concern. Valhalla the server my original main is on had an estimated 16-hour queue last night, so I really do think that the re-roll was a great idea. Unfortunately, it appears that you have to log into your character before you can transfer off to another server, so that means anyone on these higher-pop servers is largely stuck.

It is impossible to ignore the impact that the last few months have had on the game, and the onslaught of players is palpable. On Steam last night the game had the 9th highest active population behind a number of the usual suspects and beating out Wallpaper Engine… which is a thing that is just always running in the background so it rarely drops in concurrency. It isn’t just returning players however because at one point yesterday New World was the third highest-selling game of the day behind Destiny 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, so some heavy hitters. This is a pretty significant feat and if they can hold this out, the game might make a legitimate comeback. Unfortunately, we are already straining under the poor system design.

I have talked about this so many times before and I will mention it again. The core remaining problem with New World is its server infrastructure which greatly impedes maintaining a reasonable population, while also allowing you to play freely with your friends. It is that last part that is extremely important to most MMORPG gamers, and we are less than 24 hours from the release of this patch and already the doors have slammed shut for anyone who might have wanted to play on the same server we targeted. Thankfully Ace, Kodra, Tam, and I pre-staged characters on Themiscyra but creating the character and then logging out in the starter experience allowed us to pick up from there when we logged in yesterday. Anyone who did not have the foresight to do that however is out of luck.

I spent most of yesterday working on trade skills and I am deeply thankful for my memorization of harvest routes. Over the course of alpha and beta I did spend quite a bit of time in the Monarch’s Bluff area, and while I do not know it nearly as well as say Windsward, Everfall, or Brightwood… I do at least know several good spots for much-needed low-level resources. Funny enough is that I have not been spending almost any amount of time questing, and instead through almost harvesting alone I am already sitting at level 19. My key focus has been getting all of my harvests up to 50 so that I could easily gather random rare resources as I stumbled across them in the world. From there I am working on leveling Armorsmithing first to 50, and then will pick up and focus on Weaponsmithing to 50. Then raise those both to 100, and so on until I eventually get both to 200. After that, I will probably work on leveling Engineering and Furnishing since they will both be extremely useful late game.

You can see my progress for the first day, as I have all harvests but skinning up to at least 50 as well as all of my refinings except leatherworking. Unfortunately, Monarch’s Bluff lacks a really great resource like the near-instant respawning boar valley near Everfall. Across the board, I would say that Prydwen is one of the rougher starting areas for raw resource gathering. I do wonder if that was intentional, in order to get folks to spread out a bit more across the map. First Light has phenomenal Iron Ore and Windsward amazing Flax with then Everfall being a bounty for lumber and leather. While there are pretty much all relevant resources near Prydwen in Monarch’s Bluff it is not exactly plentiful, which probably does a good job of dispersing the player population and keeping them from “turtling” around their first hub city.

As it stands I am running up Greatsword and Sword/Shield first and favoring the first former leveling and DPS and the latter to eventually tank. There are a ton of weapons that I greatly enjoy but most of them are strength-based so at some point, I will work those up, probably the first alternate duo being Warhammer and Blunderbuss. I am deeply excited to have a real focus in New World other than just running Orichalcum and Iron Wood routes on my main. It legitimately feels like a fresh start. It is however tarnished by the fact that I know any friends who contemplated joining in but were slow in getting started are now locked out. I will be monitoring the situation and if our server unlocks I will be talking about it over on Twitter.