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.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to hit level 40 in New World, which means a bunch of things. Firstly it unlocks the next gear set available from the faction vendor, given that a few days ago I knocked out the quest to unlock access to it. Another thing that unlocks at 40 is the next tier of Azoth Staff which is gated behind the main story quest… which I need to spend some time catching up on in Weavers Fen. The last thing and the one that I personally consider the most important is the 4th tier of the player camp, which functions as though it were a Tier 4 Kitchen for crafting basic foods. This meant that in order to access this I would need to head out to Restless Shore and do the Lupine Observations quest.
In my travels, I unlocked a wayshrine over by the cave needed for that quest, and while roaming around the area I kept hearing what sounded like a major battle, especially when I was in a valley between two rocky outcroppings. One of the triumphs with New World is the way that sound carries. It is absolutely terrifying rolling up on a field of untouched resources, knowing the second that you start mining that everyone in the area will be able to pinpoint your location based on sound alone. This works for folks actively fighting in a region as well, and this sound lead me to the camp that I marked in green on the above map. I am not sure if I was prepared for the experience I was about to have.
There are a lot of glitchy areas in the game, with either way too fast or way too flow of spawn rates. This camp is one of these, and as I rolled up on the spawn I noticed two things. Firstly there were groups of players actively trying to keep the instantly spawning boars farmed down. Secondly that there were tons of precious boar carcasses littering the ground unskinned because no one seemingly had the time to stop fighting long enough to skin them. It was not long before I was invited into a group, and apparently, this was my life for the next hour or so. During that time I took my skinning from 125 to 200, put on an entire level between 40 and 41, and a truly dumb amount of weapon experience so that my Sword and Shield is one level from maxed and I put on about 10 levels into Warhammer and Great Axe as well.
The loot also just kept flowing, and shockingly I got my very first purple items while sitting at this camp. It reminded me of the way that farming camps used to pop up in Everquest back in the day. I keep having to pause and salvage greens in order to make way for more blues and purples. Sadly all of the purples were bind on pickup, or I would have happily shared the wealth. I got a duplicate of exactly the same item which was a level 51 totem of sorts that equips in the trinket slot. The blues I took back to Windsward and threw up on the auction house for pretty cheap prices in an attempt to move them quickly. Most of the weight though was in thick leather, which I admittedly had gotten very little of before this point.
The lack of queues has really cut down on my YouTube time, and after about an hour of farming, I had completely filled my bag and took a teleport back to my house. It was around this time that I finally tabbed out and tried to catch up on any pertinent videos when I saw this. Firstly Demone Kim is great and I have been following him since the early days of Genshin, and now that he is super into New World I have been enjoying his tips and tricks videos. Apparently, this farm is known and has been talked about in the community for the last few days. It was only happenstance and phenomenal audio system that lead me to investigate what in the actual hell was going on.
There has been some talk about whether or not this is an exploit, but truth be told this is far from the only place in the world where spawn rates are jacked up. I remember rolling up on a church in Brightwood to complete this one quest and the NPC was instantly spawning over and over. There was a handful of us in the church there for the quest and we kept killing it over and over, not necessarily to farm it but because it kept respawning and aggroing on it before we could leave. It kept dropping potions and gear, so the boar thing seems an awful lot like that. Now that it is well known it is going to get patched because I noticed in the notes that instant spawn church quest had gotten patched as well. If you need to level your skinning and are in the vicinity of Restless Shores, then it might be worth your time to pop over to the camp for a bit. I might go back out there and level my weapon skills some more pending there is actually an active group.
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.
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.
