New World

Good Morning Friends! It is another day and another time I am posting my login screen to New World as a way of marking progress. I cannot fully put into words how much experience you gain in this game as compared to the way it was at release. I remember clearly that I essentially had to bounce from town to town grinding out objectives on the town boards in order to push my level bar forward. Now instead I am 53 having finished Monarch’s Bluff, Windsward, Everfall, and Brightwood… with over half the zones in the game still out there and loaded up with quests. My intent is to do them all in order to remove the markers from my map, and also soak up all of that “free” gold. The quests are worth a lot more of it than they were in the beginning as well. I’m currently sitting somewhere near close to 10,000 coins and still have so many more zones that I have yet to even visit.

My very short-term goal is to visit Restless Shore and Mourningdale, so that I can open up banks in those territories as well. At the moment I have been in questing mode, but while journeying across the map I am picking up every rare resource I can get my hands on. For the most part, I am just dumping these in the various storage sheds in the territories I have already opened. At some point, I am going to have a grand craft-a-thon to see how far I can push my skills up to using this stockpile. I posted this screenshot largely to show how full the various banks are. At one point last night I crafted up over 1100 Iron ingots for example to compress some of the space. As far as questing goes I am currently working my way through Cutlass Keys, which is chock full of uncontested materials since no one seems to go down there much.

In other news, Themiscyra is open for business once again if any of you were hoping to join us there. There seems to be a bug happening right now with company invites where they are taking a significant amount of time to resolve. They do eventually go through and I have been getting folks invited as I can. If you are looking for an invite to our nonsense throw Belglaive a friend invite as that is my character on the server. Transfers work as well because yesterday we had a few folks do just that. I really should have timed it better so that I could maybe catch someone transferring off of Valhalla and smuggle some gold over to me on Themiscyra. I sincerely doubt I will be returning to my Valhalla character because I am already pretty damned attached to this one.

We are once again Syndicate because purple is a good color, and I would rather be team science/magic than team religion or military. If you are hoping to join up with the company, you will need to make sure you choose Syndicate as your faction when you go through the series of quests in Everfall. That is one point of frustration with the new flow of quests, which is that it takes forever for you to choose your faction. Previously this happened around level 8 and I could speed clear my way through to the faction choice in about 15 minutes. Now, this takes place after you have cleared the first zone and are well into the second zone. I didn’t get my faction as a result until I was well into my 30s. This is a seemingly long time for folks to be hanging out in limbo waiting for a guild invite. In my opinion, guilds/clans are something that you should be able to do immediately in a game.

As far as progression goes, my proudest achievement of late is that I can now officially start harvesting Orichalcum. I even managed to get my first piece of void ore, and I believe I will need five more in order to eventually craft a full set of voidbent armor. This is one of my long-tailed achievements for this re-roll is to get back to my cool-looking armor set. My lumbering is lagging the most, and I probably need to devote some time to catch it up so I can begin doing my full route of orichalcum and ironwood spawns. I am also lagging a bit on harvesting, but I am not terribly far behind there as Cutlass Keys has been terribly lucrative when it comes to silkweed. Though it would be nice to start stockpiling those red weeds as well as I find them.

Another thing of note is that you should probably pop by the in-game shop soon. There are a couple of canopic jars for your house that you can claim, and a set of Roman Vexillarius armor that you can snag for free. There is also a really slick set of armor called Fallen Spirit that can be farmed through 4 hours of watching a participating twitch channel. You might watch the twitch drops space as well because there is another event that will be happening soonish with the drop of the fresh start servers. Essentially teams of streamers are going to be completing specific objectives, and each one unlocks a unique set of drops for their viewers. I will probably give more detail as it is released but it should be even more unique appearances that are available.

I’ve been frustrated with New World and the decision process of Amazon Game Studios… but I wouldn’t keep playing it if I did not also love it deeply. There is just something about this world that lands for me. It nails so many things which is what makes the glaring issues so maddening. Weaver’s Fen may be one of my favorite MMORPG zones ever, and it really exudes this foreboding nature. New World does dark and scary places so well, and when you get up to Shattered Mountain, it is maybe the closest game representation of something like Mordor I have experienced. The entire world feels dangerous and just roaming around out there sets me completely on edge. I am very happy that the experience curve and questing have been improved to maybe hook more players into sticking around a bit longer.

Good Morning Friends! I thought I would give a bit of a progress update on my adventures on Themiscyra and the re-roll in New World. The server is still very much on lockdown from new players which is unfortunate, but it does mean that there appear to be zero problems actually getting in and playing. I crashed to the desktop around 9 pm last night and made it back into the server without any queue. Given that our peak last night was only around 2000 players, I fully expect the gates to open up at some point soon. I am accidentally level 36… and by that I mean I have mostly been focused on gathering and crafting and the levels have just sorta happened without me really intending them.

I did focus a bit on questing last night because I wanted to go ahead and choose a faction. Previously you could sort of rush the faction choice and get there by around level 8. That is no longer the case and you will not encounter factions at all until you are in the second zone which is Everfall. Since we went with Greysky Expedition previously, I chose the tried and true Greysky Armada for our re-roll adventures and once again went with Syndicate. Firstly team Science is better than team Religion or team Military as far as themes go, and purple is a pretty damned solid color. The huge benefit is that pretty much everything you get from Twitch drops… matches the faction theme. While green is my favorite color… in my experience since launch Marauder players tend to be the crudest of the New World community.

All of my efforts have been on pushing Armoring and Weaponsmithing up. I hit level 100 yesterday on Armoring and should be able to easily hit 100 on Weaponsmithing today. Similarly, I have reached the 100s on all of my gathering professions except Lumbering… which just means I need to grind that one out as it seems to take longer due to the resources being more plentiful. Nothing is better honestly than chopping down trees while watching a movie, series, or even a YouTube video. Gathering in this game is legitimately the best feeling version in any game, and I think that might be part of why I am so attached to the game.

The worst part about starting in Monarch’s Bluff is that it is weirdly horrible for all gathering professions. While there exist some harvest routes… none of them are terribly good and the zone is especially awful for hemp. It is at this point that I share my secret with you all, and the side benefit of having memorized so many resource spawns. Since the routes are in general awful… I suggest camping out at a location that has what you need. Outside Prydwen is a hut shown on the map above, and this one location has basically everything you are going to need just in small quantities. Along the ridge, there are three Iron nodes, surrounding the hut on either side are a half dozen hemp nodes, some herbs, and some carrots for harvesting, and then pathing around the hut in and out of the trees are low-level wolves. Essentially while I was working up my trades I lived here and would alternate between grabbing the resource spawns and hunting wolves for leather.

Eventually, as you need larger quantities of materials you will need to roam the world to find better spots. The area between Monarch’s Bluff and Windsward is notoriously good for hemp and has Bison that each harvest for a huge amount of leather. Similarly, there are better places for farming Iron and other resources that you might need, but that Hut will get you started on your tradeskill journey. I stumbled across a great sacrilege though yesterday, where someone was killing all of the Bison but not skinning a single body. So of course I followed along in their wake and raked in the benefit of all of that free leather. I guess there are folks out there who simply do not engage in trades at all… or else did not get the message the town board quests were no longer lucrative.

Things are about to slow down for me significantly now that I am fighting for heavily contested resource spawns. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fat stack of cash in order to bankroll my tradeskill leveling, so instead, I am going to have to rely on my knowledge of resource spawn locations to get what I need. This means that I need to migrate out of the starter zones and up into the higher areas to start farming nodes as they spawn. I have my trade secret and ideas about where I am heading next. I do know that I am going to still need so much iron in order to progress but that is at least something I can get trivially. Starmetal, Wyrdwood, and Silkweed are my next major targets, and while I know a ton of spawn locations… I figure the longer I wait the more contention there will be.

My long-term goal for this adventure is to get Armoring to 200 and Weaponsmithing to 200. If I can do that and then craft myself a new set of Voidbent armor, I will have felt like I have replaced the progress that I made on my original character. I am having a heck of a lot more fun on this adventure than I did tooling around on my “main” over on Valhalla. It feels good knowing I have so much of the game ahead of me and can do things right this time… as opposed to a lot of the mistakes I made the first time. It feels like everything is so much easier to do as well, and while I know I have a grind ahead of me… it is so much less of a grind than I have already been through getting armoring to 200 the first time. That said other professions seem much worse to level like Cooking and Arcana because the easy “hacks” which involved gathering a ton of very cheap materials no longer seem to make a dent.

I get that it probably seems like nonsense that I am sitting at 36 already, given that the patch dropped late Tuesday afternoon. I think instead it is just a testament to how much faster the early game goes than it did previously. If you are interested in joining in this nonsense, you might watch my twitter as I will be announcing when the server opens again.

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.

Good Morning Friends! Today begins either the redemption story for New World or the ultimate demise and the next few weeks will determine which direction it progresses. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the release of the Brimstone Sands content expansions that come along with it a brand-new player experience. As a result, several of us have been amped by the thought of a new start with brand-new characters and seeing this game with fresh eyes. However, this is also going to underline what lessons if any the Amazon Game Studios team has learned over the last year. The server population is going to precipitously increase, and it is important to see how they handle this. Since I am going to be re-rolling today, I am wishing for the best.

Everyone loves a comeback story, and New World is on the cusp of exactly that. You can notice that starting in August the game saw significant increases in player population. We have essentially rolled back the clock to the sort of numbers we saw last around February, and erased a good chunk of damage from the last year. The game really is in a great state right now and the team has made so many correct calls lately in tailoring the game experience to be less punitive to the player. I am still deeply concerned by the fixed server sizes, but I think that is a core design decision of the game and not something that they can easily resolve.

In the lead-up to the launch of this content expansion, they have added a handful of servers. I find it funny that they are recycling names from servers that were originally merged into other servers. I remember Frislandia which just showed up again was the server that Minda got merged into, and was then later merged into Valhalla. Right now we have banked on Themiscyra for re-rolls which will ultimately roll up into Eden more than likely when the next round of mergers happens. I’ve now set the machine in motion and many of us have stubbed out characters on that server. Had I waited just a bit longer to make my decision, I might have banked on Heliopolis instead. I still think the whole one character per server cluster nonsense is a bad idea and is ultimately going to limit how successful countermeasures to overpopulation are.

The patch is currently available in steam and the patch notes have dropped as well so you can read all of the detailed changes. That said this team is notorious for having undocumented changes as well, so you might watch Reddit later today for a thread of those to show up. Here is hoping that the New World team can pull this off. They have been granted a second chance, and I hope they do not squander it. The game is deeply enjoyable and I am hoping that maybe they can start to win back the legion of PVE-only players that they lost during the tumultuous launch. For me, my plan is to largely focus on trade skills at least until I run up Armorcrafting and Weaponsmithing. My hope is this is going to buy time for the rest of my retinue to catch up to me in levels, as just by my nature alone… I am probably going to be putting in way more hours in total.

I guess that begs the question then. Are you planning on returning to New World? Are you planning on doing the nonsense thing we are and rolling a brand new character? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.