New World

The Unfixable Problem with New World

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If you followed me at all last week, you would know that I have been back in New World poking my head through the changes that have been made since I last played. I even wrote about a number of extremely positive changes that have taken place, and how weird it is that the New World team is not making a bigger deal about it. It is around this point that I feel like I need to come clean. I fell in love with New World back during the late alphas after they had already shifted the game to be significantly more PVE-focused. When the game was released it broke my heart, because for the first few weeks what had evolved in the game was everything that I said I had wanted and reminded me so much of those early days of Everquest with the player-created “camps”. Then Patch 1.1 came along and destroyed that community and with it much of the underpinnings of what I loved about the game.

This shifted me from being passionate about the game and hoping for its success, to ultimately wanting to watch it burn down around me. I pretty regularly kept track of the downfall as charted by the steam concurrency numbers. Yesterday the above video was released and I SHOULD feel righteous about the send-up about this game, but I don’t. It is a well-crafted video and pretty much every point that is made in it is true. However, after poking my head back into the game there is a huge part of me that has hope that maybe just maybe this game can be saved. There is a game here that is good and enjoyable and a world that is extremely fun just to roam around in. So many people have lampooned the looting of boxes and the zergs, but I found all of that extremely fun. I still find it enjoyable to roam around and clean out a town while working on my weapon skills.

Please note this is not me being unrealistic about this game’s fate. The numbers are going in the wrong direction and eventually Amazon Corporate will decide that it is no longer worth the expense of keeping a game studio active and cut its losses. As the above video outlines… they did everything they could possibly do wrong… and weirdly still made an enjoyable game as a result. There are folks who are actively playing that are completely riding the waves of “copium” as evidenced by a conversation that I experienced last night. Folks were in global chat trying to tell people that 20,000 concurrent players were actually “good numbers” for an MMORPG. The thing is I am not even sure what could be done to turn this game around at this point short of a global relaunch as a different business model like free to play.

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Yesterday I was lamenting this on Twitter, and my friend Jae suggested that they get streamers engaged again. The truth is… I am not sure if this would work a second time. Amazon went into this game in a big way when it came to promoting it with the most popular streamers on its platform. Similarly, they did the same thing with Lost Ark and in both cases… players, in general, felt burned by the gameplay experiences. I am not sure there is enough goodwill left in the Twitch community for another round of 10+ hour stream drop chases, and even if people watch it… it does not mean necessarily that they are going to stick around. I farmed most of those drops on my second monitor with twitch running in the background and muted, and I figure the majority of players did the same thing. I think in order to come back from this, there needs to be a more grassroots approach in getting some exceptionally passionate folks to be promoting the game organically.

Coming back to New World I have noticed that almost all of the video creators that I followed at the launch of the game have moved on to other things. They often times follow the same trail of the “next new hot thing” because once a creator starts turning a profit… they can’t really afford to be devoting time towards a stale game. This creates an interesting opportunity for the next new creator to step in and really take control of this community in a big way. The only folks who appear to be really active in content creation are the “Economy” videos, and I think there is room for someone to step up and make a name for themselves. However, Amazon is going to need to foster this community rather than chasing the big-name Twitch stars who have already moved on from this game. Paying them to come back is going to feel exceptionally shallow considering many of them have already created their own version of “What’s Wrong with New World” videos to get those hate clicks.

I think the core flaw with New World that cannot be changed easily, is it was not designed to be an MMORPG. The largest servers in the game have a maximum active population of 2250 players, which is what lead to the massive queue times at launch and overwhelming fragmentation of the player base. Players want to play with their friends, not create new friends when they land in a game, and as a result, any amount of word-of-mouth pull is going to lead back to overpopulation. Any “community” that was built up along the way is long dead given that my server Valhalla, has been merged twice from the Minda I started out on to the Frislandia that consumed it. It is now just a game with a bunch of random strangers playing it mostly, and the folks who largely stuck around are the hunter killer type that chased the PVP highs. Even on Valhalla which used to be one of the highest pop servers in the game… Outpost Rush takes forever to fill the queue in part because the game is not rewarding enough to have non-pvp types queue for it.

I think the only way this game survives is to completely gut the way that the server infrastructure works and effectively start from scratch in designing it. If I were going to take a do-over here I would move to something more akin to the model that Guild Wars 2 uses with many instances of the same map active at any given time, and then have a large battlegroup of a sort where different factions vie for territory with other factions. When I walk into Brightwood, I would see who holds the phase of that territory for my battlegroup and the state of machines for my “server” but when I walk out of the town I would be in an instance that may or may not be blending me with players from other servers. I get that this is extremely complicated to pull off, but it is the only way I can see having the “game-changing” impact of the war system while still letting players play freely together regardless of where they landed.

We know the name has some rudimentary phasing technology already because it is displayed around the housing system. This house with the weirdly stacked furniture in the yard? That is being shown to me because it is the homeowner on my server with the highest accumulation of points. If I owned a house in this location, it would instead show me my home. My hope would be that they could expand upon this system to knit together a world made up of “virtual” instanced server communities that are built and disassembled on the fly. I get that this is a massive ground-up redesign of the way that the game works, but it is also the one thing that might just save the game. At its core, the game has a scaling problem because it was not designed to be an MMORPG, but instead was designed to be something more akin to a Rust or Ark with a fixed player base.

The reason why this problem is so key to the failure of the game is it is the thing that keeps players from recruiting their friends in a massive way. We went through this at launch with no one actually being able to land on the same server… and be able to play the game without massive queue times. The design of the infrastructure goes completely against everything that we know about how MMORPG populations are formed. I guess the alternate path that they could take is spinning up custom servers through something akin to the Fallout First program. There is absolutely a part of me that I would pay for a private server where I could hang out and play with my friends. The problem is… doing so would effectively destroy many of the aspects of this game that make it interesting. I think the Achilles heel of New World is likely an unfixable problem… unless Amazon is willing to pour a truly ridiculous amount of money into changing the way the server infrastructure works from the ground up.

With the core problem surrounding player counts and congestion in place… I think any amount of improvement and progress will be fleeting. I really do love this game and I am happy to play it, but also know that at some point it is going to be shuttered. I am not sure Amazon has the fortitude to stick this one out, because so far… their track record as a game studio and publisher is not phenomenal.

New World Has Improved Significantly

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I ticked something off my New World bucket list, and bankrupted myself in the process… but that is beside the point. I finished leveling Armoring to 200 and with it utilized the resources I had been gathering to craft a full set of item level 600 Voidbent armor. This is by no means the best and most optimal gear available in the game, but it is also the only gear that can be crafted at 600 by default without requiring you to have a full set of armoring gear and three armoring trophies to get that item level up there. It serves as a great option for tanking and also has a ton of luck on it, and I am already noticing a difference in the items I get as a result. While it cost me roughly 45,000 gold to finish leveling armoring and craft this, I consider it well worth it since on the open market each of the individual pieces goes for around 20,000 gold. Now that I have gone through this process I can now also craft it for anyone that provides me with the materials which is a side bonus.

I’ve been an extremely harsh critic of New World because quite honestly the game broke my heart. I was an alpha and later beta tester of the game, and I saw how much potential it had. Then I watched as it was mismanaged at every step throughout the launch with some exceptionally short-sighted decisions made along the way. I’ve written my concerns out many times through that process and have effectively been gone from the game for five months. We are now in a state where essentially the vast majority of PVE players have left, and the only folks remaining are the PVP diehards. However, after a few days back, I have to give credit where credit is due and tell you all that the game has made some pretty significant improvements.

One of the core problems remaining however is that the game has done a pretty awful job of actually telling players about them. Prior to sitting down to write this post I crawled through the patch notes and found no mention of the features I am going to talk about today. One would think that it would deeply benefit this team and the game that they represent if there were a running log of improvements since launch, or at least having them featured at all in the patch notes. The notes seem entirely focused on bug fixes and are hopelessly vague, completely missing any of the huge quality of life changes. So in this morning’s post, I am going to do my best to talk about some of the things I have personally experienced in the last few days.

Significant Fast Travel Improvements

Since the launch of the game traveling around the map quickly has required an expenditure of Azoth, a currency accrued and used in several different ways. The cost of azoth required for the teleport had multiple different calculations that scaled its costs including the distance of the teleport and the weight of your current character. The end result was that if you were at all heavily loaded down you could burn through literally ALL of your azoth in a single teleport. This also meant that you spent most of your time running around the map instead of actually doing the things that you wanted to. Folks used to use azoth vials like a fiend in order to fund their adventuring… which drove the price of those up to around 200-300 gold each.

Unfortunately, the azoth vial market has crashed, due to the fact that teleports are ridiculously cheap now. All teleport as far as I can tell regardless of distance or your carry weight is a flat fee of 20 azoth. You can get back twenty azoth trivially by killing a few mobs, harvesting a few nodes, etc. This means you are likely going to be near permanently capped at 1000 azoth, which leaves the only quality of life that I would love to see as a way to disable the “near cap” warning. I cannot fully explain how much this one change has improved the game for me because I no longer feel quite as chained to a specific location as I was previously. Additionally, house placement no longer needs to be near as strategic as it once was.

No Cost to Access Remote Storage

The Storage Shed was an interesting method of physically located storage, but it caused a lot of problems. Originally the design was to incentivize conquering adjacent territory but allowing players to transfer items between storage chests for territories that their faction held. In practice for any player that was not directly involved in the PVP nonsense, this felt awful, and as a result, was yet one more thing completely out of their control. Even if you happened to hold adjacent territories, the cost of gold required to transfer a stack of items became exceptionally cost prohibitive. The end result is that every player tried to build out as much storage in a single location, and the limited most of their activity to that one hub, causing Windsward, Everfall, and to a lesser extent Brightwood to be the ONLY viable crafting hubs… making all other territories feel empty.

This next change is massive, but you can store items in any storage chest and withdraw or despot freely from any other storage chest. If you are in Ebonscale Reach and need to pull a potion from your storage in First Light, you can do so easily and without cost. This means that every single player in the game now has increased their total storage footprint by massive amounts, making everything in the game feel so much less stressful. That is not even a complaint that I really dove into, but I felt like I was constantly having to micromanage my storage which made any sort of large crafting project feel cumbersome bordering on impossible. Now I am utilizing currently empty banks for bulk storage of resources so that I can batch craft my way to push up some of my other trade skills leisurely.

The other side effect of this change is that it more or less means that every single territory is now viable. Folks can spread out a bit and craft wherever they happen to be rather than relying entirely on one of three towns. This makes the world as a whole feel way more alive because between this and the fast travel changes, folks can move around more freely without feeling like they are giving up something significant. This also means that for purely PVE players… the whole territory conquest game has little to no impact on them anymore. You are no longer greatly limited by the faction you belong to.

Out of Combat Regeneration

This one is another massive quality of life improvement, but previously in the game, I used to constantly consume food in order to lower my downtime. It was the only really reliable means of healing back quickly after combat in order to prepare for the next encounter. Now when you are out of combat ability is triggered called “peaceful regeneration” which quickly heals back all of the damage that you have been dealt. Additionally, I noticed that my survival as a whole when it comes to higher-level encounters seems to be better. I am uncertain what other changes might be factoring into this, but I can happily clear camps in higher-level non-elite areas and farm resource chests again to try and get materials needed for crafting.

Easier Access to Dungeon Keys

I still feel like the whole dungeon key concept is bad, but it feels like they are married to it. Previously it was ungodly resource heavy to craft any of the higher tier keys. This led folks to have 2000 gold or higher buy-in in order to get into a group running a dungeon. This felt awful and while I believe some of the crafting requirements for keys have lessened a bit, the bigger improvement is that you can now purchase these keys on your faction vendor. The keys are around 500 gold, which sounds like a lot… but I have also noticed that in general the amount of gold that I am making has significantly increased. Just running around and killing stuff in the world netted me almost 2000 gold last night, and I was not purposefully farming anything of significance.

I’ve also heard rumor that all of the open world camps that had been broken with patch 1.1 are now viable again, but no one seems to be running them due to the ease of access to dungeon keys. For whatever reason, the New World team really wants folks to be running dungeons and has heavily incentivized them by flooding you with loot. Given that I am playing by myself I do not have a team to actually go test this theory out about the open world camps. The community is doing what all communities do… and optimizing the highest chance of getting drops which seems to occur in dungeons. Maybe if I stick around long enough I will try to pug tank again.

Expertise System

I still think that the Expertise and Item Snapshot system is a bad design. However, with the addition of the Gypsum Orb system, it has become pretty easy to get multiple guaranteed improvements each day. You can purchase an Orb from your faction vendor for tokens, you can get 3 special loot bags a day which gives you diamond gypsum, harvesting resources gives you emerald gypsum, and if you participate in two Outpost Rush per day it is trivial to get ruby gypsum. In an hour or so of game time, you can pretty easily get four item slots daily upgrades. The items that you get are not great, which means you are still going to need to be farming up equipment in another fashion. However, getting your expertise up does manage to open up other avenues like purchasing gear on the market board.

Outpost Rush From Anywhere

Outpost Rush was an interesting game mode option, but ultimately AGS made it less than viable. The problem was that you had to queue up for the game from a town, namely your faction merchant, which lead to players just not queueing up very often. It was really hard to go do anything in the world, yet need to be back in a town to queue up again after the match finished. This has thankfully been improved and you can join a match from anywhere in the world by opening up the game menu and choosing modes. I am guessing this is also where the 2v2 and 3v3 duel modes will eventually be added as well. Win or lose you end up getting some Umbral Shards and Ruby Gypsum so this makes the process way more viable. I’ve not really talked about Umbral Shards yet but that is a currency used to upgrade gear from 590 to 625, and obtained through “endgame” activities.

[Edit] – If you get rolled hard… you can absolutely get zero rewards still. This is a massive problem and needs to be fixed. So essentially undo anything I said about being a good source of Umbral Shards or Expertise because it is unreliable. PVP has to be rewarding win or lose to pull players like me who don’t really like PVP into the equation. Basically one loss over lunch and walking away with nothing but my time wasted, means I am never going to queue for it again until there are significant changes in the rewards structure. I PVP in Guild Wars 2 because I know regardless of my success it is going to be worth my time spent.

Easier Access to Unobtainium

I specifically called out that one of the core problems with the game previously was that there were a number of chase resources that were exceptionally difficult to get. This led to overfarming of resources in the vague chance of getting the one item that was useful… and more or less throwing away the bulk of the product or flooding the market with it cheaply. I specifically compared this to the scene in Willy Wonka where Veruca Salt is surrounded by workers unwrapping chocolate bars as fast as they can looking for the golden ticket and then throwing all of that chocolate away. There was never enough of these high-end resources to make crafting with them viable.

Since I last played they put in a system called “Aptitude” which kicks in when you max out your skill to level 200. Every third of a level bar gained after that point earns you a cache of materials. The above screenshot is an example of a cache that I opened for mining, and I got both Cinnabar and Tolvium, the materials required to craft higher rarity items as well as a few other baubles that might be useful. Not pictured is the fact that I got around 200 gold for opening the cache as well, which leads to a constant flow of coins for those who are harvesting regularly. This has balanced the market for high-end materials and is in part what lead me to be able to craft my Voidbent armor set from the top of this post. The first of these caches that you earn per day rewards you with an Emerald Gypsum, which feeds in to the Gypsum Orb unlock system as well.

Ammunition No Longer Required

This is a weird one but I just found out about it last night. You are no longer required to use ammunition when using Bows, Muskets, or the newly added Blunderbuss. This was honestly one of the parts that made using these weapons awful is that it required you to constantly be either crafting more ammo or buying it at a pretty hefty loss on the market. They changed completely what ammunition does, and now it simply adds bonus damage to your weapons instead of being required to use them. This means that you can carry around a stack for specific fights, but also if you run out it isn’t the end of the world. For farming materials or questing, you can run around without ammo and be just fine. I wish I had known about this before burning through my first stack of ammunition leveling Blunderbuss.

Improvements Across the Board

The thing is not a single one of these on their own is significant to make the game feel better, but taken collectively… it feels like maybe the game has a chance. What worries me though is that MMORPG players tend to be a fickle lot, myself included. Once we get a bad taste in our mouth about a specific game, it is exceptionally hard to turn the tide and convince people to give it another shot. I still am not entirely certain what lead me to install New World and give it another chance. I am thankful that I did because the game really has improved significantly. The only thing that really needs to happen now is to have an influx of PVE players drown out the edgelord PVP community that has remained. I am not sure that is going to happen, however.

I have hope for the first time in six months about this game. I think maybe the team at Amazon Game Studios has learned some hard-fought lessons and has backed away from some legitimately bad decisions made along the way. I hope they can pull it off and I hope that players are willing to give the game a second chance. I will say that if the state in which the game is today, was the game at release… we might be having entirely different conversations about New World in general. I still think it has a lot of problems, but the game feels way less openly antagonistic towards its players. If you have the game you might give it a reinstall and check out the things that have changed. I am glad that I did.

A Brand New Jade Mech

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Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.

As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.

In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.

In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.

In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.

Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.

Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.

Revisiting New World

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Good Morning Friends. I regret to inform you that there is no Mixtape Monday this week because I have not felt like fiddling with them over the weekend. I have two that are in progress but neither of them is really ready for primetime. I am playing the “is it allergies or is it covid” game right now as I had to attend high school graduation on Friday and just based on the statistics, more than one person in that crowd was a carrier. However, at the same time, the cottonwood is in full bloom which I am deathly allergic to, so more than likely… it is just allergies given a “general awful feeling” and “lethargy” are my only real symptoms so far. Aligning to my already strange mental state, I apparently booted up New World over the weekend and spent a little bit of time roaming around it.

My Character now apparently lives on Valhalla and I am not sure how many merges have taken place between our origins on Minda and the first merge with Frislandia. Whatever the case it appears that team purple is outgunned, though last night they did manage to take Everfall. In truth, a sequence of changes has more or less made it that I no longer give a shit about the faction balance. At some point the costs of teleports were reduced significantly, and also no longer take your inventory into account so if you are so inclined you can bop around the map at will. The other significant quality of life improvement that I noticed was the fact that there is now “peaceful regeneration” which turns on quick life recovery any time you are out of combat. I would say MOST of the food that I went through was trying to regenerate my health so I could get back into the action, and now there is just a buff that does that for me.

As far as combat in general, as heavy armor, sword, and shield tank… I feel much sturdier than I was previously. I need to do some more tests here but I spent a bit of time running around in Edengrove and fared far better than previously against everything there. I was also able to easily take single pull elites in Shattered Mountain and even managed a few two pulls. Like I said I need to get out into the world and try a few of my haunts that I was clearing regularly when the hatchet bug was in place, to determine just how viable open-world farming is again. If nothing else it was fun to do a good number of the lower level towers in Edengrove for materials.

I made a quick visit to Adjorjan and he still appears to be dropping decent stuff, though I am not sure what level of watermark he is capable of dropping. I only stuck around for a single kill but I got a purple bow around 550, but also did not get a watermark upgrade from him because there is now an animation that plays when that happens. As far as watermarking there seem to be a few reasonable ways to get daily progress namely in the way of bags that drop containing diamond gypsum. The other big change I noticed is that the bottom has fallen out in some of the rare materials. When I last played Void Ore which is a rare drop from Orichalcum, was selling in the neighborhood of 10k gold each. I just bought five of them on buy orders for 150 gold each. Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the skill level required to make a full set of Voidbent armor, but I had contemplated trying to convert my cash stockpiles into armoring levels.

The community seems to be hopping in spite of being MUCH smaller than it was and seemingly gone is the era of the “2k buy in” for a group. I am not entirely certain what quality of life changes lead to this but so far the game seems to be much more playable than it was when I last left. I doubt I will be spending a ton of time in the game, and the crafting system in its current state still feels awful… but maybe just maybe it has found its niche and can slowly start moving the needle in the positive direction. New World was a really fun game up until the point it abruptly stopped being fun, so a few tweaks here or there might be enough to save it. I will of course let you know if I continue to play from time to time and how that process is going.