Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I cannot fully explain to you how freaking good it is to see Everfall in purple once more. Huge props to the folks who fought in the Everfall War and the defense of Restless Shores yesterday. Thanks to streamer Vellum670 I was able to get a front row seat for the battle, and also thanks to them I was able to see just how bad the hatchet exploits were. For those who don’t know there are a few glitches going on right now with the Hatchet, first off if you use Berserk it never actually falls off and just stays active permanently even if you swap weapons. The second problem is with the against all odds perk which increases your damage by 10% for every mob in range of you. This is a great perk, but the problem is that the stacks are never falling off and essentially over time of using the hatchet you are going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300% damage. You can check out this video to see the exploit in action, but right now… knowing it is a thing it seemed like most of the enemy team in both Everfall and Restless shores were using Hatchets for this reason.

You can also just watch the Twitch VOD of the War and you will see at many points the player taking single hits for each damage to kill them in one shot. At one point both Eliyon and I saw him take a single hit for around 22,000 damage and there is nothing that could withstand that. What is even more impressive however is that they managed to push back against this behavior and still win. For those who are not familiar with a War, you have 3 points that you need to capture outside of the fort which will give you access to the fort itself. After that you need to break down the doors and get a team inside that can stand on a point in the center of the fort and capture it. They managed all of this with about a minute left on the timer. On the flip side the same streamer participated in the defense of Restless Shores and through the hatchet exploit they burned through the teams on the three defensive points and Syndicate spent fifteen minutes standing on the point and defending it inside of the fort. There were several times I thought the battle was lost but they managed to push through.

It is odd how streamers have become almost the battle correspondents of this game, embedded with the troops and reporting back on the nonsense that they are seeing. I would love to see a VOD from the Marauder perspective on these wars and see specifically what that team was talking about. In truth I think it is a handful of bad actors, that often times are the folks most vehemently claiming there was no cheating taking place in public chat. It is my hope that this will eventually evolve into an honor system for battle on our server, with all three sides accepting proof of exploiting that will exclude these bad actors from future wars. However there is a serious lack of trust between the sides because everyone assumes everyone else is going to drop the nuke… so they bring their own nukes to the battlefield. I am pretty proud however what I have seen from the Syndicate side because it does not appear that our folks are blatantly using the same tactics.

My other big takeaway of the weekend is that apparently I actually do enjoy PVP in this game, or at least in the form of Outpost Rush. For those not familiar with the game mode, Outpost Rush is a weird love child of something like Alterac Valley in World of Warcraft and Summoners Rift in League of Legends. The end result is this sort of mixed PVE and PVP experience where you can fortify your base and summon monsters to fight on your side, but also can just rush the enemy and capture the points as fast as humanly possible then spawn camp the graveyard. The mechanic that seems to matter the most however is a spawn that shows up roughly ten minutes in to the match called Baroness Hain, which is a clear reference to the Baron from League. She grants the team a health regeneration and defensive buff and also freezes the enemy score for three minutes.

This freeze allows a team time to catch up, or to really snowball the score while the enemy team cannot effectively make progress. However what actually makes the mode great is that win or lose you get a stack of coins and a loot box with three items that are capable of bumping up your gear score snapshot. There are a bunch of weapons that are unique to Outpost Rush, and you can see me getting one of these a spear that I am currently using called Weedkiller. Generally speaking you get around 300 coins for playing the game mode with slightly more if you win, but not a large gap. The hardest part is usually getting the match started because it is currently limited to only players from our own server, but I can see at some point in the future them opening this queue up to be all of the players. The battles seem rather incestuous at the moment with the same forty players swapping back and forth between different combinations of teams.

The other big news for the weekend is that thanks to the buffer of coins that I was getting from Outpost rush, I became comfortable enough to actually buy a Tier 4 house. Given that I mostly withdrew my business from Everfall while it was Green, it got me spending a significant amount more time crafting up in Brightwood. I have to admit I have slowly fallen in love with the town and its easy access to the Northern unclaimed territories. My abode is rather humble at the moment, but I did the important things last night which was craft a set of four storage boxes and equip it with five trophies. I figure I will spend some time crafting items and placing them in my home so it can look a little less spartan. However now that I have done this… there is a big war taking place in a few days that might decide the fate of that territory. The Blades of DaTang seem to be more than capable of defending it however, and given what was experienced over the weekend I feel like they are going to come prepared for some shifty behavior.

The other big change of the weekend is that Covenant aka Yellow now has a territory. Ultimately I think this was a case of us being unprepared for what was about to unfold. Reports from those in the war indicated that the majority of the players fighting for Covenant were actually the Marauder battle hardened A Team. That means that maybe we didn’t stack the deck in quite the same way, and as a result the territory was lost. That said I am mostly okay with it. This means that Covenant now has a territory and quite honestly other than people just not liking the swamp… Weavers Fen is a pretty freaking great zone. It has among the best chest farming available in the game, and my hope is that more Covenant players will gravitate towards viewing it as their new home… which will make the fact that I have a house there useful. The Syndicate have Everfall as our capital city, The Marauders have Windsward, and I am hoping that maybe just maybe our Covenant will start to see Weavers Fen as the same making it a market hub.

Good Morning Friends! I spent quite a bit of time running around Edengrove yesterday and it is freaking gorgeous. So much of the island feels corrupted and sinister, and this is a whole other kind of dangerous. Think about the various Green Magic the Gathering cards about rampant growth and nature taking over in dangerous ways… and you have Edengrove. It is the bastion of the Angry Earth faction and there are so many different varieties of plants in this area. At first I got excited because I thought all of these were Ironwood trees… but alas they are just zone specific versions of Young and Mature trees.

I know I already talked about this before, but weapon experience is greatly increased after level 60. Proof of this is the in leveling to 60 I managed to finish off a single weapon and that was Sword. In the time since leveling to sixty last week I have finished off Great Axe, War Hammer, and as of last night Hatchet. I have switched over and am now working on Spear which is pretty enjoyable. I am not certain if or when I will ever level some of the ranged or magic weapons. Probably at some point I will start working on Life Staff since I had already gotten it to level 7 previously. Right now I have been able to just level weapons while doing content that is relevant to me, but for things like ranged I would probably need to drop down a bit until I picked up some abilities.

Earlier this week I talked a bit about the trading post and how everything was cheap… that may not be the case anymore and more the case of things just not being available for awhile. Yesterday with Patch 1.0.4 a really awful bug went into the game. Basically if you are offline, you will not get gold from anything that sold. There are some complete horror stories of folks posting high end chests, selling them, and then being short like 24k in gold. Right now this means I am dragging around with me anything that might be something I want to sell on the market. So my bags keep getting more full and I am hoping that they apply an emergency patch soon. This also means that folks are selling way more stuff in open chat than previously, which makes me realize that this game really needs a /Trade channel.

Last night I did my first zone invasion and it was super fun. It was more than a little hopeless especially given that we did not have a full group of 50 players available. People had been waiting all day long for Outpost Rush to open back up, and it did so roughly an hour before the zone invasion it opened up. That meant there were not a ton of folks available and I think we ran the invasion with 48 instead of 50. I am super interested in doing some more of this. I more or less blended into the crowd and given that I was placed in an area with a very clear objective I think I did okay. I was sword and hammer and spent most of my time as hammer for the stun and if things went really south I would swap to sword and taunt things. I probably need to get a carnelian in my hammer so I can properly tank with it.

For those curious, this is what a rewards box looks like from an invasion. We absolutely lost and died somewhere during the sixth wave. On wave five the doors were broken down and in wave six we had to mostly deal with everything on the inside. For about thirty minutes total it was well worth doing because there are few other things that reward 630 gold coins. The box of loot was blue quality and seemed to be capable of rolling higher based on snapshot. I ended up with I think some 505 boots that were not that useful to me, but it did bump my snapshot up a bit. The other rewards are pretty great as well with 350 Azoth mostly going wasted on me because I was already close to capped. At the end of the match it ranked players and I was 24th out of 48 which is firmly middle of the pack. Not bad enough to get kicked but also not good enough to really get noticed by anyone. I feel like that was reasonable performance for my first invasion.

I closed out my evening running faction missions in Reekwater because we were extremely close to flipping that zone. I am guessing with everyone doing Outpost Rush, no one was really paying much attention to the zones either. There was a swarm of purple players all running back and forth between the territory and objectives. I only really had time for five rounds of quests but I at least contributed a little bit to the total. Running faction quests doesn’t really FEEL like PVP since most of the time you don’t actually encounter much opposition. This feels more like clerical busywork associated with filing a declaration of war and I figure it is something that I can do to help out the faction as a whole if I am not doing anything terribly pressing. If they push to flip Everfall when I happen to be available, I am going to participate. The interesting thing about Everfall turning, is that it has introduced me more to Brightwood and I think in all honesty I would rather buy my third house there given that I am spending so much more time in the unheld territories of the North.

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.