What You Know about New World is Wrong

by

New World launched to great acclaim on September 28th of 2021, and then almost immediately took a massive nose dive into infamy. It suffered through economy-breaking gold duplication bugs, combat-breaking bugs that gave players nigh invulnerably, and a wide arrange of PVP siege bugs that caused territories to flip to whoever was cheating the hardest. It suffered from a horrible server design and a lack of a steady hand at the wheel that caused actions to land too little too late and made it nearly impossible to be able to play on the same server as your friends. The overcorrection caused them to suddenly spin up almost three hundred servers… most of which were rapidly empty and incapable of doing any form of group content. The game plummeted from a peak concurrency of just shy of one million players down to an all-time low of just under thirteen thousand players.

This is the New World that players think they know, as outlined in the “New World – Timeline of a Failure” YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes. In fact, I presented my own string of blog posts lamenting the sorry state of affairs and what I would do to fix them. The game was in exceptionally rough shape and I even thought at several points it was largely unfixable. The thing is… I was wrong and most of the major points that I had have been addressed and vastly improved. However it was while watching a contorted “reactionception” video of Gaming Kinda reacting to ZeplaHQ who was reacting to Ginger Prime’s 5 reasons why he is choosing New World over FFXIV video… that I realized how wrong the community has it. The game that was actively being memed on by Zelpa’s chat just no longer exists.

This is how we land at the somewhat provocative title of this post. If you have been following the game closely, then sure you probably know the score. However, for most of you, I would imagine that you tuned out by this time last year and never looked back. New World however has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance and with it a resurgence of players coming back to the game. This is well earned because over the past year the team has put in the work and made significant changes to the way that the game functions. At the time of posting this, the game has experienced a 24-hour peak of 119,390 players, while also slowly pushing up their average player numbers. Nature is healing itself… or at least the game has been.

It is at this point that I am going to address some of my own complaints made in my 11/15 New World Concerns post. In that post, I made a series of accusations about the game, and most of them have been resolved in some way. So this morning I am going to go point by point and address them. If you would rather just see a list of the major changes, then I highly suggest this video from Demone Kim.

Point 1 – Bad Support Structure for New Players

This one was one of my less cogent points, but largely I felt like it was very difficult for new players to progress through the game. The main story was gated at several points behind dungeons that required you to find a group in order to run them. The scarcity of keys and lack of rewards for higher-level players made it very hard to find anyone willing to do said dungeons.

In New World now dungeons as a whole are far more rewarding to players. I ran through the very first dungeon the other day and was just handed a bag with 1000 gold in it for completing it. In addition to that, I got a number of rare crafting materials that can only be obtained from that dungeon, and weirdly enough even at the higher level I ran it… I found a significant upgrade. Dungeon keys have also been eliminated from the game for normal dungeons, so there is no “cost” real or otherwise to run that dungeon with your friends, and as a result, it seems like they are a bit easier to get going.

On top of that, the New World team has completely revamped the new player experience and not only added better quests and significantly more of them… but also alternate paths that you can take to avoid needing to do any of the dungeons. At any point the game would have normally asked you to do a dungeon, you can get an alternate version of that quest that is open-world and easily completed solo. Previously you were effectively required to do Town Board quests in order to get enough experience, and now… I was level 40 before I even chose my faction. The world gives you so much experience both from questing but also just gathering materials, that you are going to consistently be over level for any of the content allowing you to mostly steamroll it.

Point 2 – High-End Materials Are Worthless

New World suffered from this problem that players were farming the high-end materials at length because the only truly profitable items were extremely rare drops that required you to be wearing a set of luck armor in order to obtain them. The spectrum of resources was flipped on its head meaning all of the Tier 1 resources were extremely expensive and all of the Tier 5 resources were dirt cheap.

This was in part resolved by upending the crafting system and completely replacing it with something that made more sense. Previously the most efficient way to level a crafting profession was to craft 300,000 level 1 items. That is a bit of an exaggeration for impact purposes, but suffice it to say players ground through copious amounts of low-level resources to slowly tick their levels up. This drove up the value of Iron and down the value of Orichalcum, for example. Now the most efficient way to level is to always be crafting the best items that you can make. This gives purpose to all of the tiers of resources and lowers some of the pressure on that first tier. Additionally, they made almost all tiers of resources more plentiful, especially the last two tiers creating way more potential for farming Starmetal and Orichalcum for example, which the crafters now actually need.

Point 3 – Unobtainium Problem

Connected to the points above, the high-end materials were farmed not because people needed that much Orichalcum, but instead because they wanted to rare drops that could come from them. In order to combat this, you can now craft rare drops from a given tier of resource… by just pouring raw resources into them. Do you have a pattern that requires Fae Iron? Well, you can now just pour 50 Iron Ore into crafting a single Fae Iron. While it is a significant loss of resources it gives you a deterministic way of getting the resources you need rather than relying on luck alone. This changes the equation on a lot of materials and also serves to make the rare drops from nodes feel like a bonus rather than something you are grinding away for.

Point 4 – One Shot Group Quests

Previously there was an issue where like dungeon quests, there were a number of group quests scattered throughout the game that would require you to find a team in order to survive. The problem was that these areas could only be entered once, meaning that if you did not keep up to the same level quest-wise with your friends, you could find yourself locked out in the cold. Unfortunately, this is still a bit of a problem, in that you have to be on the quest in order to get into these areas. However, none of the bosses contained within these areas require a group and are now easily soloable even if you are using something like Healing Staff.

Point 5 – Item Watermarking

At launch, there was a system in the game called the “High Watermark” system that required you to get drops in order to push up your average drop range. This was an invisible system that mostly required people to keep track of their drops via spreadsheet… or simply keep the highest version of every slot in their inventory. This was sheer madness and honestly… the system still exists. It has been converted over to the Expertise system instead, which gives you a visible readout of where your item level is. Getting upgrades are guaranteed through running the end-game dungeons and there are also a number of ways to collect “gypsum” which can be converted into a guaranteed upgrade every day. These two combined have made the process of watermarking far less egregious and no longer require you to farm the same boss for sixty hours trying to farm incremental upgrades.

I still think the gear score system and watermarking are somewhat dumb processes, but it is more something that just happens on its own now instead of something you have to purposefully grind for.

Point 6 – Crafters Don’t Have Influence

This point was also a little contorted, but the problem being addressed was that crafters and PVE players in general had little control over the “health” of a given territory. This was made important for a lot of reasons that led players to essentially set up camp in a single town and then never leave it, making them entirely reliant upon whoever controls that territory. So a ton of small changes went into effect to chip away at this relationship, the first being that travel is now practically free with a maximum azoth cost of 20 and no longer takes into account your current weight. Next, they made it so you can access your storage in one town from any other town for free, making it way less important for you to focus all of your efforts on a single territory.

In order to lower the negative effects of territory changing hands, the team capped the taxes in a territory and also took a number of steps to make it so that every territory is viable instead of just Everfall and Windsward. When a company gets gold for holding a territory, it is a calculated amount based on how far progressed that territory is, making it beneficial for them to make sure all of the crafting machines are upgraded as far as they can be. Lastly, there is a change that is currently on the PTR that will make it so any “base” crafting items no longer require specific tiers of machines so you will be able to level freely regardless of how progressed a specific town is. You will still need higher tiers for specialty patterns, but since most of what you craft while leveling are base items… you can effectively do that anywhere now.

So while they implemented none of my ideas, the problems that needed addressing are more or less fixed now.

Point 7 – 2000 Player Limit / Fixed Servers

Technically this was the first point in my post, but I reordered them on purpose because I did not want to start on a downer. While most servers have been bumped up to 2500 players… this is very much not a solved problem. We even encountered this issue on our recent re-roll. Given that all of the above changes have been implemented over the last year, it tells me that the server infrastructure is a bit harder to tackle. We tried to make the best choices we could possibly make for choosing a place to re-roll on, and still ran into an issue where the server got locked out against new characters or transfers for a week.

This has now largely resolved itself, but it will always be a challenge guaranteeing that you can play on exactly the server that you want to play on. This is really the remaining Achilles heel of New World and something that I hope they can resolve in the near future. They are adding a cross-server queue for Outpost Rush, and it sounds like they are working on ways to do a cross-server group finder as well. So hopefully bit by bit they will start to chip away at this problem so that you can play with your friends regardless of what server you might end up on.

With this post what I am trying to get across is the concept that the game is not the same game that was openly memed into oblivion a year ago. I was one of the game’s harshest critics, and you can go back through my blog and read a number of posts where I was terribly disappointed and frustrated. However, I hung in there because there were certain aspects of the game that I enjoyed and just were not being replicated anywhere else. If you already own the game, you owe it to yourself to start a new character and see the game with fresh eyes. I am so happy I did precisely this because I am honestly having more fun now than I did even in the best of times at launch.

I am spending my time over on the Themiscyra server in US-East and playing a character named Belglaive. Character names are unique for the game as a whole, and as a result, Belghast is already over on Valhalla because I could not bring myself to delete my original character. if you happen to check it out ping me in-game.

Why is Birdsite a Thing?

by

Good Morning Friends! I’ve been talking quite a bit about the Fediverse or as the media is damned determined to refer to it Mastodon. For me, Mastodon is the software that most ActivityPub federated instances run, and the flagship instance is run by its originator Mastodon.social. Side note: I would never suggest anyone create an account there because it is a bit of a mess that is constantly struggling to maintain itself… both mechanically and from moderation terms. I refer to the whole proceedings as Fediverse or the community of websites that federate with each other utilizing the ActivityPub protocol. While most sites run Mastodon there are also a lot of sites running Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, or Funkwhale just to name a handful of alternates each designed for their own purposes. While we have a habit of referring to things by the “brand name” version… I personally am going against that practice here.

There are a lot of things about the Fediverse that come off as odd to someone migrating from Twitter. I’ve talked about this at length in a number of other posts, already so I won’t labor those points now. One of the almost immediate quirks you will notice on day one… is that most people are extremely reluctant to ever say the word “Twitter”. You will see it referred to as things like “Hellsite” or simply “That Other Site”, but most commonly you will see the term “Birdsite” used. At this point I am used to it since like I have said before, I first came to the network in 2018 during the Wheaton Exodus. While I do not have the exact reason for why the popularity of the term has taken hold, I will attempt to give you my understanding and why I chose to adopt it myself.

The WoW Tourist Problem

This is something that likely only MMORPG veterans are going to understand, but when a brand new game launches it is inevitable that general chat will be filled with an endless stream of fights about World of Warcraft. It is natural for something new to be compared with the industry leader, but it also gets really annoying when you are trying to experience something new… and you are constantly being reminded of the thing that you are not actually playing. To be truthful this is one of the big reasons why I almost always turn off general chat in any game alpha/beta that I am testing because I know without a doubt there is going to be a pissing contest between those who hate World of Warcraft and those who seem required to defend the game’s honor.

For all of the folks being transplanted into the Fediverse from Twitter, there is always going to be a group that is sick to death hearing about it. They have moved on past it, and keep getting dragged by chat back into dealing with it. Sure you can say “well just don’t read local or federated feeds” but a lot of the experience of the Fediverse is the browsing nature of being able to read what people you are not following are saying. Being on an Instance is in many ways like playing an old-school MMORPG with a fixed server population. While every Instance is effectively an island… the other folks are your neighbors on that island. Even if you don’t follow each other, you notice the folks who are regularly chatting.

The Trauma Problem

I’m a CIS White Man, and when I use twitter I have the privilege of not really drawing the attention of many attackers. Sure I got some DDOS attacks during the height of GamerGate for some comments against it on this blog, but I’ve never had to suffer any real lasting consequences of my social interactions. That was not the case for a lot of folks on the margins of what was considered acceptable by certain segments of society. There are folks who live on the Fediverse now that came there to escape torrents of abuse that they received on Twitter. The Trans community especially has been actively hunted down and made to suffer by conservative groups on Twitter, and now for some… the mere mention of the platform brings up deep-seated trauma.

This is the reason why I try not to use the word Twitter while on the Fediverse, and have adopted the local custom of “Birdsite”. I don’t really personally care one way or the other, but I know the decision of choosing to buck this custom means that I might be causing someone else out there unintended harm. On Twitter, your voice only carries as far as those who are actively following you. On the Fediverse your voice is out there in an unknown number of federated feeds. Basically, I worry about how my actions might impact someone else out there, and if I can make a simple change that means nothing to me personally… I am going to always err on the side of doing less harm.

I Care About My Impact on Others

Ultimately at the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that I care about my potential impact on others. There are a lot of words that I used to carelessly use before knowing how tangible their impact was on unintended targets. I’m thankful that I have had friends willing to call me out on my shit, and as such, I have evolved constantly as a person to adopt better practices and abandon those causing harm. For me, it was never about being “woke” or some sort of performative action, and entirely about being a better person. While it is unlikely that someone is going to call you on using Twitter regularly, I personally made the choice to stop using the term while on the Fediverse.

It is my way to adopt the customs of the environment I am in, so long as those customs are not harming anyone. It was a simple choice for me. It was not a hill I was willing on dying on, because I had no real attachment one way or the other. Four years later, I just sort of do it as a relfex without even thinking about it.

Buzzer Beater

by

Good Morning Friends. I am what I would prefer as a buzzer-beater. I get things done, but almost always end up doing them right before the deadline. I am the sort of employee that drives their managers insane when it comes to compliance items. If you tell me something is due on a specific date, I interpret it as being done at the close of business on that date and will hand it in without fail at the last minute. It is this way with seasonal events in video games, and last night I finally got around to checking out the Halloween event in New World. You technically can receive the quest at 35, but given how fast I got my ass handed to me by the roaming 60s I decided I would come back later. The problem is that “later” never really happened until last night.

When the fight begins properly you have a big boss called Baalphazu and a few types of smaller adds that spawn around it. The most common are these little pumpkins, which you can destroy and get a pumpkin bomb that you can throw at the boss. Essentially I think the plan is for those who are lower level to be picking up the pumpkin bombs and chucking them at the boss, which lowers its defenses and starts a burn phase. The larger challenge with that however is when it is doing a burn phase, it is also dealing massive AOE damage. The strategy seems to be to dogpile everyone on the boss and throw down enough healing circles to allow everyone to effectively shrug off the damage. When it worked it went well and 30-40 players showed up at the spawn point. When it did not go well, we struggled to burn down the boss until reinforcements arrived.

There were a number of rewards for the event that now makes me wish I had started this a bit earlier. There were three helmets, the one shown above, a pumpkin head, and a witches hat. There was also an armor set featuring a chest piece and helm that are designed to make you look like Baalphazu, as well as a “pumpkinling” that you could get for your home. The bigger reward is that after you had completed the event a few times you got enough faction with the vendor and could start buying item-level 600 weapon patterns. I ran enough of the event yesterday to pick up the cosmetics and greatsword, sword, and shield crafting patterns. Doing the event drops bags of loot that contained the lower-end versions of the weapon patterns, and I believe I managed to get one of those for all the other slots. All told it was a good event and I wish it was sticking around a bit longer, and that more level range variety could have easily participated.

Other than that I continue to quest my way through the game. Right now I have a few competing goals the first of which is to continue harvesting up all of my banks full of material so I can do another massive crafting session. The next is to gather up gold and territory standing so that I can purchase a Tier 4 house in either Brightwood or Mourningdale. Weirdly on my server… the guild that controls Brightwood seems to not care much about leveling up that territory so I am starting to lean heavily toward Mourningdale. Whatever the case I have to hit 30 faction in that territory in order to unlock that max-tier home. I think I am about to wrap up questing in Mourningdale, and not certain where the game will send me next. I would assume more than likely it would be Ebonscale Reach.

In other news… I lost yet another lottery in Final Fantasy XIV. I know a while back I said I was hopping off the lottery train, and I did for a few rounds… but alas I am back to doing the four-day wait. I do not understand why Square did not seize the opportunity with the Island Sanctuary to give us all an instanced housing plot. That seems like it would have been perfect to just have those hidden among the island somewhere and function essentially like a housing district for one. Right now on my server at least, it seems we are all vying for the same plot each week, so the likelihood of me ever winning one is pretty minimal.

If nothing else I guess it gets me logging into the game every week, though I almost always stay parked at the placard awaiting the sad trip back into the game when the results are posted.

Celebrity Ruined the Internet

by

This weekend I made some drastic choices and have started to begin evaluating what I actually want out of social media. Saturday afternoon while listening to an extremely great synth rendition of the Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers soundtrack, I started removing follows. I went through my list a single person at a time and asked myself… “is this someone I actually remember interacting with at some point”. That seems simple enough, but over the years I have been very liberal with who I followed in a search for more friends out there in the void. Roughly an hour later I had paired down my list and nuked about 500 follows. I am certain that I made some mistakes in this process and there are some folks I accidentally removed that I will regret. However, it was the first step in a process to try and return to the roots of why I originally started using the internet.

The internet for me at least started out fairly simple. There was a certain novelty in being able to communicate on my computer with people from all corners of the globe. It was this communication that was front and center and I hungrily gobbled up as much information about other peoples and other cultures as I could. I grew up in a fairly sheltered environment, in a very small town, in the middle of nowhere, and due to all of this, my world was pretty small. The internet cracked open a window that I never wanted to close. In those early days, we were just bits of text on a screen, and as a result, our value was in our ideas not necessarily the metrics associated with them.

Even the “realest” folks that I know adopt a carefully curated person when they present themselves online. That persona may be very close to reality, but it still exists both as a safety net to keep things from getting “too real” and to filter our thoughts through. In the early days of the internet, there was less need for this pretense. If you saw someone out on the broader internet, it was guaranteed that they too were a geek or a dork because the sheer act of getting there required a lot out of the user. AOL existed as a walled garden, a sort of uber BBS that gave folks some measure of taste of the “information super highway”. However, if you made your way to IRC, it meant you had shaken off the shackles of that garden, found your way to a full-service ISP, and begun your journey into a much larger world.

There is a time I remember fondly when every piece of content you consumed from gopher to wais, to even the fledgling world wide web was “user created”. The creation was a labor of love and there were countless web farms devoted to all manner of nonsense. It was a time when there was very little corporate presence online, and the majority of infrastructure was run out of academia. The bright hubs of commerce were places like WUSTL.edu or WISC.edu where their public FTP sites served as a clearing house for all of the content that mattered from the latest doom wad file to the latest release of mIRC. All of this infrastructure and content was run and created by the denizens of this fledgling internet.

As time passed the internet was tamed by corporations and bent to their whims, all for the purpose of converting our free time and hobbies into currency. Social networks consolidated what was once a series of disconnected GeoCities and self-hosted websites, into an easy-to-use structure that allowed you to communicate with your friends. I remember clearly a time when I was using Blogger and others were using Xanga or Live Journal… but we had connected up a ragtag cluster of websites via links or connections to web rings. Each person in that “community” had complete freedom over the content that they were presenting to the world even though they were functionally operating on someone else’s network.

I think MySpace was the beginning of the modern era of social media, and with it introduced metrics like “friend” counts and the introduction of the aspirational “top 8” list. Attributing numerical success to your internet efforts only got worse with the introduction of Facebook, and subsequently Twitter. Entire infrastructure like Social Blade shown above was erected to prove numerically who was “winning” the internet. I remember when we were dabbling in Google Plus, playing with a tool called Klout and being fascinated by how it boiled a user down to a value. I hate that I cared even for a moment about the supposedly “value” something like that was providing. If I had known how much of the internet has become about chasing clout and popularity, I would have hissed and slowly backed away from it.

I hate everything about the influencer culture that has spawned around internet content creation. My friends jokingly refer to me as an influencer, partially because I have always been way more socially engaged than they are, and partially because they know it pisses me off. In the art world, there is a concept called “Outsider Art” and I like to think I am that, but for internet media. I’ve been plugging away at this blog for almost fourteen years, and the podcast for almost nine years… and while I try and share both freely the popularity or lack thereof doesn’t make me any less interested in the act of creation. I will likely be over here in my corner continuing to do whatever I want to do and continue to be absolutely allergic to trying to monetize it.

As far as modern social media goes though, Twitter was my home. I originally launched my Twitter account as a way of interacting with other bloggers in the Blog Azeroth community, and as a way of promoting my posts. Over the years I have met some of my best friends through this medium, but year after year it seemed to get harder and harder to make any real and lasting connections. Gamergate was a wake-up call and threw a cold glass of water in the face of online social interactions. Getting DDOS’d as a result of my random comments on Twitter, made me way more guarded about what I said there and fear of malicious attacks did the same to others. The Muskrat coming in and threatening to dismantle what little safety net there was there… has made me deeply contemplate what presence I still want to have on that network.

I’ve dabbled with Mastodon/Fediverse since 2018, but I can’t say I have really ever set up permanent residence there. This weekend I attempted to change that, and the pairing down of Twitter was the first step in that evolution. I have to say the interactions that I am having on this alternate social media platform continue to be refreshing. Using the Fediverse feels like stepping back in time to my IRC days when people seemed to just genuinely want to make friends on the internet and share their ideas and dreams. Having conversations on my local feed feels like popping into random IRC channels and getting to know the regulars. Ultimately making friends is the only thing I ever really wanted from the internet, and over time it became one of the hardest tasks to accomplish.

I’ve also been dabbling a bit with a platform called MeWe, where a handful of friends have erected a bastion in honor of the glory days of Google Plus. It has been delightful so far, but the platform as a whole seems to have way fewer guardrails than I might like. The madness of the alt-right seems to have infected some corners of the platform, and there are some questions about just how open everything is. For me though my interaction circles around a handful of individuals and as a result, it is working as intended.

I’ve also spent at least a summary amount of time exploring something called Cohost, which appears to be a Live Journal clone. I am not certain if I will keep using it, because it doesn’t seem to be a great discovery engine. That is the challenge with branching out into new networks is that you ultimately have to carve a place out for yourself and figure out if and how it is going to add value to your life. Having a good discovery engine helps to make finding new people out in the void a bit easier, which is admittedly one of the key complaints that I see leveraged against the Fediverse, and being so fragmented. That said I also feel like no one seems to have a memory of how obtuse Twitter was in 2009 when I started trying to figure out how to find friends to follow.

I wrote this over the weekend and I still believe it. Something feels different this time. In the past folks would start using the Fediverse and then within hours/days/weeks run straight back to the platforms they originally came from. Sure a handful of people would stick around, but the end result created this cycle of “vacationers” and “townies”. I think social media has reached this breaking point where the cycle of chasing clout is unsustainable. The Muskrat making some broad sweeping changes to the platform he now “owns” is merely the trigger of something larger that has been sitting below the surface. I think there is a broad sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the way online human interactions have functioned for the last decade. That said it could just be me projecting my own general sense of dissatisfaction on the whole ordeal.

I have no control over the broader internet, but I do have control over my small corner of it. Going forward I am shifting how I consume social media. It is about human interactions and less as a broadcast medium. I will still shout into the void about the things that are making me happy or excited, but I am going to care far less about whether or not the void answers back. I have this feeling that the Twitter pair-down was only the beginning, and there will likely be more waves of that in the future. For now, I am enjoying yet another honeymoon period with the Fediverse or more particularly Mstdn.social that I migrated to last April. If you too have a general sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the direction they have been going, then you are more than welcome to join me in any of my nonsense.

I’ve written about the Fediverse a number of times, but the two most cogent tomes are my general primer and how to migrate instances. As always I will still be here, on the only platform I have any real control over… my blog, and my podcast.