Games

Some days back I said that if I were you, and had not bought into New World that I suggested folks wait. I also said that I would give the all-clear when conditions were favorable for new players to start the game. So you might be asking yourself if the server queues are gone, why have I not told everyone to open the flood gates. Truth be told my general hesitancy as it is, is due to the fact that the server transfers have yet to happen. I am uncertain what state the servers will be in after that occurs. Right now Minda is great with a relatively stable population that allows a trickle of new players to roll on the server. However, I am not sure how that population is going to look after transfers open because it is equally likely that the server gains population as loses it once the great shuffling occurs. I honor the trust you have in me, and while I think mostly it is fine to start playing the game fresh if you were waiting in the wings, I am not entirely certain so I have not proclaimed that publicly in a post.

What have I been doing the last few days? Grinding up furnishing and oh god is it significantly worse than any other profession so far saves maybe jewel craft. The problem with furnishing is it lives in this unique place where you have very few patterns available to you from the start, and most of the ones that you might want to craft are found as world drops. Then when you do get a pattern it takes copious amounts of resources in order to actually craft it. Then there is the problem that in general the patterns only returning wood on salvage… when in truth the hard component to get is always going to be the metal bits. Quite honestly the game could seriously do with an overhaul of the salvage system, either that or allow for monster dropped items to return more than just repair parts. I’ve battled my way up to level 85, which means that I can craft all of the first housing trophies and the second round of storage chests.

Housing trophies make a HUGE difference when it comes to gathering. For example with a single skinning trophy, I was getting 19 rawhide off one of the random level 5 wolves outside of Windsward. The effects are reportedly cumulative, so last night I made the decision to pick up my second home. I’ve developed a certain kinship with Weavers Fen and quite honestly once you get past the swampy climate… it is fairly unique located to be convenient travel to Brightwood, Mourningdale, and Restless Shore. My second hovel is a little sad because currently, it has nothing but a set of the five gathering trophies and a tier 1 chest. Over time I am certain I will bring over some furnishing as I craft them so it feels a little bit homier.

It did make me think a little bit about my general housing strategy. You can buy three homes in the game and my initial home is in Windsward where I still do most of my crafting. Currently speaking my Inn is set to Everfall because I also spent a lot of time in that zone. However, I am thinking that I might be better served to move my Inn southwards to Cutlass Keys given that it is a bit of an annoying run. So that makes me think that I should probably place my third home in Ebonscale Reach to give me rapid travel into that region of the world. It is expected that when the next zone opens it will be a desert zone on the far side of Ebonscale Reach. The idea is to create a network of cheap housing travel points that allows me to move around the map pretty quickly and efficiently without having to worry too much about carrying weight.

At this point, I am just shy of 48 and still need to run the second and third dungeon. Still not really trying to level but the levels keep coming. I need to spend some time in Mourningdale knocking out the faction quest that will let me unlock the Cabalist rank. I need to double-check the number of faction tokens that you get from doing the quest so that I can spend down to where I am not overflowing my token cap. Ultimately I will probably just buy either rune of holding for the second-tier housing storage boxes, or some more material converters since both are always useful. I have to admit I am starting to look forward to reaching level 60 so I can start getting some more permanent gear and beginning the various weapon quests.

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.