New World

Hope Chest Quest

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Morning folks! Last night was a pretty rough evening. We were under a Tornado Watch turned Warning and that really started to escalate around what is normally our bedtime. So that meant a somewhat fraught evening of sleeping with the channel tuned to our favorite weather station. Oklahomans have developed this skill which is to half-sleep and half-listen to the weather report at the same time. I remember specifically waking up at various points in the evening when the meteorologist cut in with important updates, and then blending back into sleep… to the point where I am not even sure if I was actually waking up or if I was just dreaming about the weather? Whatever the case it is going to be a long day as I am pretty sure that neither my wife nor I got anything resembling restful slumber.

One of the positives and negatives about New World is how easily you can level just by doing pretty much anything. The positive is that the levels come quickly and it always feels like you are making incremental progress. The negative is that there really isn’t a way to actually slow down your leveling in an effort to let friends who started later try and catch up. For example, I spent the podcast on Saturday night fishing, since it was a pretty relaxing activity and wound up putting on most of a full level while doing it. Last night I was trying to catch up with my town reputation in Everfall and wound up doing most of a level as well in town board quests. Then there is crafting which always adds a not insignificant boost to your leveling. Suffice to say at this point whether or not I want to be… I am going to be level 60 and waiting on folks to catch up.

My crafting priorities shifted around a little bit last night when I noticed sitting in my bags the pattern for a Starmetal Storage Chest, or more correctly the Hope Storage Chest. I have been slowly working on my furnishing skill, and I guess I should spend a bit more effort trying to get it up to 145 so that I can start making these. I could have sold the pattern for a pretty penny on the market board, but in truth, I want to be able to craft my own furnishing so I guess this just gives me more purpose in leveling. I’ve reached a point where I am completely out of storage in both Windsward my main crafting hub, and Everfall my backup crafting hub. This means I will need to expand out further into another city… and I am trying to decide if I would rather do this with Brightwood or Weavers Fen. Both are currently held by my faction which would give me rapid (but costly) access to items from that bank.

One of the nights this weekend I happened into a group that was farming Rifts… aka Corrupted incursions or whatever this game calls them. I will always think of them as Rifts because they show up randomly, involve defeating a boss and then go away quickly rewarding you a chest in the end. The key differentiator so far is that Corrupted Rifts are way more rewarding than most of the tears were back in Rifts. I’ve pulled some decent gear from even the minor loot chests, and the majors give you the currency that you need in order to craft dungeon keys. I need to do this more often because it was rather enjoyable and also fairly rewarding.

Over in Final Fantasy XIV, I am working on my last job and have it up to 75 as of yesterday. I completely blew off maps night last night unintentionally. We were downstairs watching the weather and I was slowly prodding along in New World, and simply was not watching the time nor did I have any messaging clients active on the laptop. So I completely missed the message from Waren reminding me, and it wasn’t until we were shutting down for bed that I even began to realize that I had completely missed things. I feel bad, but also given the weather patterns I might not have been the most reliable group member last night anyway. I do need to make sure I make next week because I really do feel bad about completely missing it two weeks in a row.

AggroChat #362 – A House Divided

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we return to some discussion about New World and how the promised server moves don’t seem like they are going to work out as we thought.  The end result is the server queues are gone from Minda but we have a handful of people isolated on servers in a different region.  We talk about some of Kodra’s woes in attempting to run PVP Faction missions solo.  From there we talk a bit about Tabletop Simulator and some of the interesting ways it allows you to play board games virtually during the pandemic.  We talk a bit about Tales of Arise and some of the issues it has with not really explaining clearly where a player should go next.  We wrap things up with some discussion of Kodra finally beating Celeste and moving on to the modded version of the game including Glyph.

Topics Discussed

  • New World
    • Awful Server Move Strategy
    • Issues with Solo PVP
    • Good Systems
  • Tabletop Simulator
    • Virtual Miniature Gaming
    • Magic Commander/EDH
    • Playtesting
  • Tales of Arise
  • Beating Celeste
    • Moving on to Modded Celeste
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Fragmented Community

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I don’t want to jinx things but the queues appear to just be… gone. I spent some time popping around various zones and I did not encounter a single “wall runner”. For those who might not have been following along this saga, the term wall runner is used colloquially in New World to refer to someone who is exhibiting a behavior designed to evade the AFK Timeout functionality. There were various schools of thought here, but the most basic seemed to be toggling the run hotkey on and then pushing up against some obstacle that would keep you running into a corner. Moving around the zones you would find people in random corners of the world furiously racing against some rock, or gate… all in an attempt to make the game think they were actively playing.

Yesterday Amazon patched in some updated tech designed to detect these folks and punt them from the game. Then magically it was like we had enough breathing room to simply not have to worry about login queues at all. I popped in yesterday morning to take a few screenshots and unsurprisingly there was no queue. Then I logged in after work… and still no queue. Throughout the course of the night, I logged in and out a few different times, with one of them being around 8 pm and still no queue at all. In fact, it showed that our server population was only sitting at around 1700 players. So I guess the question is, was all of the activity by folks afking to reserve their place in line?

I think you have a few things at work. Firstly like every game, the newness has worn down a bit and those folks who took off days from work to play 24/7 have run out of vacation time. Secondly, there is the challenge that it was impossible to play on the busy servers reliably, so if our little group is any evidence… many folks voluntarily rerolled elsewhere and started from scratch because they had not made enough progress to make that painful yet. Thirdly, of course, there is always a significant drop-off in a new game after a week or so, and we are seeing that play out here. For all of those folks who crushed the server on the opening days, there are going to be a chunk that for one reason or another didn’t really find what they were looking for. New World is not going to be the ideal game experience for everyone, and as a result, you are going to have a significant chunk of players that just completely bounce off the title no matter how good it might be.

All of that said… I really do think the improved detection made a significant difference and the early signs that maybe just maybe folks were going to get banned for the behavior. What we are left with is a situation where those original few servers now don’t have queues but are still in a locked-down state to prevent new players from rolling on them. Similarly, we have a fragmented community of folks waiting on the server transfers to allow everyone to once again play together. That said I find myself questioning what the next best steps are going forward. I am left with the majority of a community on one server that has no queues, and an isolated but growing number of people taking up residence on other servers. Is it the best choice to try and get everyone on Minda, or is it to abandon ship and latch onto a completely new server?

If we united the community, we have maybe in the realm of fifty players. Coordinating that many people landing at the same destination is going to be a bit of a challenge. At least with the loss of the queues, it takes away some of the immediacies of needing to do this. My hope is we can take a bit of a wait and see as the server transfers open up. I still think that the server status website is our best bet in gauging active populations, but I do wish it had a 48-hour peak number or something to that effect so that you can see what the potential for a server load looks like, not just what the active one is. In the meantime, I am nearing level 40, and probably need to stop what I am doing for a bit and focus on some faction currency given that I would love to buy the level 40 set of faction gear.

I do feel a little bit bad though in that the worst seems to be over… and now a handful of folks have scattered to the wind. I hope we can reunite the community and get everyone back together on either Minda or some new destination. I will of course keep folks updated as to where we decide to land. For the short term however I want to see how folks shift before choosing a destination to leap to.

Two More To Go

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Morning friends! It has been a few days since I talked about my core mission over in Final Fantasy XIV. This would probably lead someone to believe that I had given up on my goal of leveling all of the things to 80. However, what it really means is that I am mostly just doing the easiest and most beneficial leveling opportunities each day rather than grinding every possible drop of experience. Essentially I am logging in every day and at a minimum doing the daily roulettes for Main Story Quest, Alliance Raid, and Frontlines. Generally speaking, I also do the Faerie quests in Il Mheg while waiting in one of the above queues. Combined they represent more than a level’s worth of experience and through that, I managed to level to 80 on my Astrologian yesterday.

New World has absolutely slowed down my progress, but it did not halt it completely. You can notice that curve flattening out a bit but that probably looks worse than it is because I also got out of the habit of recording data points. Essentially there are now two classes left before I get my Amaro mount, and I have purposefully left two classes I enjoy quite a bit. I am now focusing on finishing off Dragoon which I got to 77 yesterday as well. That will leave me with a tank to level as my very last class, and given that it is my favorite style of gameplay it should be extremely easy for me to grind that out in dungeons if need be with near-instant queues. The ultimate irony… is me, who almost exclusively plays tanks and melee… maxed out all of my healers and magic DPS first.

On to New World… the queues seem to be dying away. Last night I spent most of the evening playing Final Fantasy XIV and the around 8:30/9ish last night I popped into the game and only had a 26 player queue which breezed by in a few minutes. I am not sure if this is due to the fact that the new smell is wearing off or the 24/7 tryhards are finally getting some sleep. There is also the possibility that a sizable amount of players manually rerolled on a lower population server. Whatever the case I am super happy to see Minda be something that you can realistically log into in the evenings without much gnashing of teeth.

New World is currently undergoing maintenance, but I did patch up my game and log in to see that we now have a code of conduct screen that players will have to agree to before entering the game. Given that a large chunk of the patch notes involved methods to detect and kick AFK players, it makes me think that we are only a few weeks away from a massive ban wave. So if you are doing anything untoward to avoid getting kicked from the game, I would highly suggest you halt that activity now. New World employs Easy Anti Cheat, which should in theory be able to detect pretty much anything that is running in the background. My hope is that they start acting upon some of the bad behavior I am seeing in chat because the community is pretty uncouth. I’ve been spoiled by Roleplaying servers for far too long, and most recently the very amazing community on Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. Having the waves of the obscene masses come crashing over me… has been a wake-up call to just how generally awful gamers can be.

Yesterday I managed to hit 37 and also wrap up one of my huge overarching missions in-game, which was to upgrade all of my tools to Starmetal. This means even if we do end up server transferring someplace else, that I should be in pretty good shape for the rest of the leveling curve. The biggest thing gained by Starmetal is that each of the tools has three perks instead of two, and they also do a much better job of chewing through things like Starmetal nodes and Wyrdwood trees. The skinning knife is so freaking quick when it comes to lower-level carcasses which admittedly is still a lot of what I skin as random cats and wolves attack me. Right now I am splitting time between Cutlass Keys, Brightwood, and Weavers Fen as I knock out some of the quests there. Still greatly enjoying myself but also very happy to begin mixing in more Final Fantasy XIV.