The Fatal Flaw of New World

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Good Morning Friends. There are times as a blogger when it pains me a bit to write the words that I write. There are times when I write negatively about things that I deeply love. This morning’s blog post is going to be one of those times because I deeply care about New World. I’ve loved this game since the moment I set foot in the game’s second major phase of external alpha testing. There is just something about the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay that I enjoy greatly. I’ve also been deeply disappointed in this game at times, namely the first several patches and the developers not seeming to “grok” what was wrong with the game. However, things have improved greatly and as a result, you are getting bombarded with the good news of New World right now.

At the moment YouTube is filled with videos like this one talking about how now is the perfect time to rejoin New World and how best to get started again. There are think pieces talking about the concept of a “fresh start” server and rallying a large number of players to poke their head back into the title and explore it. I am not saying these things are wrong. Once the Brimstone Sands update releases, New World is going to be in the best state it has ever been in period. It would be a great time to come back and check out the game, but at the tail end of this post, I am going to talk about my fears. However, for the moment let’s just revel in the things that are going right. I’ve written about significant improvements in the game before, but here is a bullet point list in no particular order of some of the major changes since we played at launch.

  • Lowered travel costs to a cap of 20 Azoth and removed the inventory weight component.
  • Significantly more fast travel points spread throughout the world making traversal much easier.
  • Unifying all of the storage sheds so that you can access them free from any town.
  • Removing the keystone system from dungeons, letting players run them for free.
  • Flattened the crafting reagents so that there is only one tier for each profession and it can be gained from level 1 all the way up to the endgame.
  • Added Out of Combat regeneration so you no longer have to spam food to regain health.
  • An expertise system was introduced to give a visible number of the previous invisible “watermark” system for per slot gear score.
  • The gypsum system was introduced to give you several ways to get a predictable expertise bump every single day by crafting items of a specific type.
  • Structured PVP modes of Outpost Rush and 3v3 Arenas were added and then given the ability to queue for them from anywhere in the world rather than having to keep going back to a faction vendor.
  • A PVP rewards track was added to give a predictable method for gaining rewards from participating in any Player Vs Player activity or just leveling out in the world while flagged. We still desperately need some version of this for PVE however.
  • Reworked all of the main story quests so that you can complete them solo and that dungeons are no longer roadblocks to progress and are instead optional.
  • More than doubled the number of high-end harvest nodes in the world so that those end game materials are much easier to come by.
  • Introduced aptitude chests that you start receiving after 200 in a profession which rewards rare materials that were otherwise only gained through very lucky harvests.
  • Ammunition is no longer required to use a projectile weapon and instead gives your weapon a buff meaning it is still desirable but can be skipped while open-world grinding.
  • Housing taxes have been capped so that a Tier 4 house is roughly 150g per week and a Tier 1 house is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40g per week.
  • Coin drops are significantly more plentiful and you regularly get them from killing mobs and opening chests. You also reliably get them from salvaging gear.
  • Mutated Expeditions have been added to the game which give you WoW Mythic+ style affixes that modify the difficulty of the dungeon while scaling up the rewards.
  • With the launch of the Brimstone Sands patch there will have been three new weapons added to the game:
    • Void Gauntlet
    • Blunderbuss
    • Greatsword
  • Leveling has been sped up significantly both for combat and for professions, and they have standardized the XP curve for crafting so that 20,000 level 1 item is no longer the correct way to level.
  • Respec costs have been significantly lowered so it is no longer onerous to change your character build around, and this I believe is leading to a “loadout” type system that will allow you to swap things more quickly.
  • With the Brimstone Sands release, the entire new player experience has been reworked with an improved layout of the starter areas and actually letting the player engage with some of the later story themes immediately.
  • Similarly, with Brimstone Sands there have been significant improvements to the layout and design of the starter towns.

There legitimately is a ton of things to be excited about when it comes to returning to New World. However, there are some aspects of the game that still concern me. New World had a phenomenal rise and a slow and steady fall. While the game has addressed a large number of the issues that came from the launch of the game, there is one fundamental problem that has yet to be addressed. It is my belief that New World failed, because it did not attract the social PVE-only MMORPG players in droves, and it is these players that make up the majority of the player base that made World of Warcraft succeed and have now caused Final Fantasy XIV to take that throne.

There is one common desire that stands above pretty much any other for that player base, and that is the ability to play with their friends. They form large guilds and move in packs, and even if playing solo… still want to be on the same server as the people they actually know playing the game. Most of us have been gathering a friend network since the moment we set foot in our first MMORPG, and have gathered more friends each time we move games. I know when we started our Elder Scrolls Online guild, it had over 150 players at launch. If you counted the acquaintances of those folks that may not want to be in a guild but want to at least be on the same server… you end up with an extended social network that can number in the thousands.

New World as a game was designed for 1500 players on a specific server and is scaled to be more like a Rust server than a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. While they have bumped the server caps up to 2500, this is still a core flaw in the design of the game that seemingly cannot be fixed. At launch, they spawned literal hundreds of servers, attempting to soak up the player population and let them play the game, and have since been constantly collapsing server populations trying to fight the impression that the game “felt dead”. If a large influx of players returns to the game… we are about to go through the same problems that we did at launch because their server model is not flexible enough to reliably guarantee the one simple process that the social gamer wants… to be able to reliably play on the same server that their friends are on.

I know this with absolute certainty because right now the server that I play on is experiencing a peak population as players are returning to check out the game. That server is both locked to new player creation and player transfers, and those poor souls who did not already get characters moved to that server will likely never be able to. We’ve yet to even receive the critical mass of returners because the Brimstone Sands patch has not been released. I can guarantee with certainty that we will once again see server queues in the multiple thousands on launch day and in the days proceeding it. MMORPG players come in waves and the “day one” folks will be enough to saturate the available capacity, let alone the “day two”, “day three”, and the “first-weekend” folks.

The improvements that have been made to New World are extremely impressive, and I want more than anything to give this game a full chance to be the success I hoped it would be. However, until they have a more flexible server model… I am questioning if it will ever succeed. Playing with your friends and reliably rolling on the same server they are on… is the fundamental requirement for a social game and this game still cannot promise that. I personally would love to start over from scratch and the AggroChat folks have talked about maybe doing this thing, but I cannot with any certainty guarantee that the server I would pick to start on… could support everyone else that will be coming over the subsequent few days of character creation. Most people do not have the freedom to log in within the first thirty minutes of a patch launch, and as such would be once again locked out in the cold.

I want so much for New World to be the game I know it can be… but fundamentally in order to get there, they are going to have to change the server model to something more akin to the “virtual” servers that Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online use. Most players are never going to engage in the PVP territory conquest of this game, and as such most players won’t care who holds a specific territory. I would love to see some sort of opt-out for the PVP aspects of the game that throws you into a flexible virtual server, that simply allows you to play with your friends. Since guild names and character names are unique across ALL servers… the core framework already exists to let players group freely with each other. There however must be some technical limitation to the core design of the game that is holding it back.

This is the fatal flaw of New World, the inability to promise the most basic of desires… to reliably play with your friends.

Brokerage Service

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Good Morning Friends! It is another day and another Path of Exile post. I thought maybe breaking the atlas complete boundary, would end up taking away my desire to play the game but thus far it has not. In fact, I seemed to have a grand ole time last night running maps for experience and actually manage to push over the level 90 barrier. When I dinged I got an achievement called Diminishing Returns, which apparently only 6.5% of players have ever accomplished. My rarest achievement is Atlas of Worlds for completing the Atlas and only 2.2% of players have accomplished that. Now in theory I begin working on gaining a reputation with the Maven, Searing Exarch, and Eater of Worlds.

I’ve been woefully neglecting that side of the game while grinding out the Atlas since I was laser-focused on getting the maps completed and getting the map bonuses. In theory, I probably should have been letting the Maven watch my victories, but adding the Maven makes them ever so slightly more difficult and at that point, I wanted to get those bonuses before anything else. This morning I took care of my Tier 12+ Maven invitation, and now must have her witness my victories on Tier 14+ fights. Based on the wiki, this is the last step in that sequence, and will give me her final invitation to the crucible. If I were min-maxing this apparently choosing specific bosses to have her witness changes the odds of getting specific unique drops. I’ve made zero progress on Searing Exarch or Eater of Worlds, so I guess I need to focus on getting some progress there as well. I know all of this is ultimately what unlocks access to boss invitations, and in theory, my next BIG objective would be to down all of the “ubers”.

Last night I dove further into the trading system than I have ever before. Up until this point I had only been involved with purchasing items, but last night I sold a Divine Orb in order to get some liquid Chaos for other purchases. This was a bit of a disorienting mess and I quickly realized why folks run the POE Trading overly as it catches the messages and buffers them for you. Within minutes of me putting up my Divine Orb, I was flooded with messages and in less than 5 minutes from pricing it I had sold it. Essentially at this point, I have done enough trading that it seems to follow a specific sequence of operations.

  • Buyer clicks message link from Official Trading website
    • This sends a canned message indicating which item and what stash slot the item is located in and its price.
  • The seller teleports to a location with a stash box, usually a hideout.
  • The seller chooses one of the incoming messages.
  • The seller invites the player to a party.
  • The buyer teleports to the location the seller is at, with currency in hand.
  • The seller opens a trade window and drops the item being sold.
  • The buyer drops the currency in the trade window.
  • Both sides have to mouse over the trade to verify it is what they are expecting.
  • The seller usually seems to hit trade first.
  • The buyer hits the trade and completes the transaction.
  • The seller kicks the buyer out of the party.

I’ve seen this exact same sequence play out over and over, and often times not a single word was exchanged during it. It happens so quickly and efficiently that it might as well have been an auction house transaction.

Why I was bothering with selling a Divine last night, is that I was attempting to play broker and purchase some items for a friend. The trade aspect of the game is daunting and not everyone is willing to deal with it, but there comes a time in most builds when you need some items to beef up your progress. The other problem with the trade game is that you are trying to find the best item at the moment you are searching. It is extremely rare that you are going to find the perfect item, or if you do… it might be prohibitively expensive. For example, I was trying to follow a guide and the guide got the gem colors wrong… that is easily fixable. What is not fixable however is that the helm I got had the wrong implicit… which is apparently super important. The cost difference between the item was 35 Chaos for the slightly wrong item… and 3 Divines or roughly 600 Chaos for the correct implicit. I know when I got my gear I made some slight sacrifices and have largely been fine, and I am hoping that the same will be true. Otherwise, I will keep shopping for that perfect hat.

In other exciting news… I got an email yesterday in my inbox that I had been waiting for. I finalized my purchase of the Steam Deck and am now waiting anxiously to see a shipping confirmation. I went with the 64 GB model because the price was right for my interest at the time. I am also not concerned with upgrading the SSD inside after the fact, but based on the testing I have seen there is not a massive difference between loading off the SSD and loading off an SD Card. So for the moment, my plan is to use a 512 GB SD card for storage. Expect some coverage of my first steps into this world at some point in the future.

Atlas Complete

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Good Morning Friends! I am still mostly sickly, and as such, I spent most of the weekend parked on the couch and playing Path of Exile. When I last talked about the game I spent a large chunk of in-game currency in trades to get the four uniques that make up the foundation of my build. I cannot underscore just how much of a difference they made, and now I can pretty comfortably run through red maps without taking many deaths and often none at all. I’ve also come up with a reasonable way to handle the bane of my existence… elemental reflection. Essentially I swap over to the minor pantheon ability from Yugul, and equip Sybil’s ring in the left slot… which collectively gives me more than 100% elemental reflect damage protection. Combined all of this has allowed me to churn through the remaining maps that I had left on my altas.

Yesterday evening I managed to finish the last of my 115 maps and earn not only the completion achievement but all of the bonuses that grand atlas passive tree progress. This was the main overarching goal that I had for this league, and I managed to make it through in slightly less than a month’s time. The Kalandra league started on August 19th, and I managed to wrap things up on September 11th. The next obvious goal would be all of the seasonal achievements, but that might be a bit more grindy than I am willing to go after right now. One of those achievements requires the running of maps with 6000 explicit modifiers, and at last count, I was sitting at less than 900. I might be able to finish out the tier 2 set of cosmetics with enough low-hanging fruit on the achievement stack… but there is no way I am getting through tier 4.

I think my goal now becomes helping those in my guild who are interested in getting Atlas completion to reach that goal by feeding them maps. In theory for those who are curious I employed a handful of practices in order to get to the end of the list. Firstly my Atlas tree has a lot of nodes that are designed to feed me maps and it is very rare that I run ANY map and not walk away with at least four new ones. Other than that there are a handful of tricks that you can use to get the specific maps that you are after.

How To Get Specific Maps

  • Vendor Pattern – You can sell any three of the same map to the vendor and you will receive a new map from one tier higher. There is some dark calculus in the way this works and every map has a unique id, and different combinations of different unique ids will produce different maps. So if you have six of the same map, try listing different combinations of those six maps to see if you can get the specific one that you need.
  • Kirac Atlas Missions – Kirac offers daily atlas missions and these are a godsend for completing the White and Yellow tiers of maps. They become a little hit or miss once you get into reds, because in order for you to get bonus credit the map has to have been corrupted. If you see a red map that you have not completed and it is not corrupted… go ahead and run it because there are things you can do later to get a clean copy of that map.
  • Kirac Inventory – Kirac is also a vendor and sells a selection of white, yellow, and red maps. These are extremely costly and in theory, you could probably buy the maps cheaper from players via the trade economy… but in a pinch especially for early tiers of maps, these are a quick way of getting some specific maps.
  • Scouting Reports – As you run maps you will encounter scouting reports, which are used to re-roll Kirac’s missions. This is an extremely good way to get unique missions because often times immediately after a re-roll there will be one or more unique missions available.
  • Horizon Orb – I happened across a ton of these while grinding out some of the lower tiers of maps, and thankfully saved them for the red map grind. Essentially a Horizon Orb will change a map into any other map of the same tier. This is completely random, but I did manage to luck into several conversions along the way that got me the “clean maps” that I needed. By “clean maps” I mean a white no-modifier version that I can use to craft whatever I need.
  • Harbinger Orb – These are extremely rare items, but they allow you to reforge a map and turn it into a random map of one tier higher. In absolute desperation, I tried using one of these to get the map I needed one tier up… and succeeded, but it could have gone completely wrong as well.
  • Map Favorite Slots – On the left side of the map, you have a series of slots that unlock as you achieve various requirements. The easiest slot is attained the first time you complete a T16 map, and then others are mostly tied to elder/shaper maps and specific bosses. Remember earlier when I said it was a good idea to go ahead and run red maps even if they were not corrupted? Once you have cleared a map it becomes something that you can favorite, and then you have a higher chance of seeing that particular map drop from that point forward. I absolutely utilized this to get the last two maps I needed.
  • Trade – The last resort is to just buy the maps for currency from other players. Most maps go for 1 Chaos Orb each, with a few highly lucrative maps going for significantly more. One of the unique maps that I needed was going for 29 Chaos… but thankfully using Scouting Reports I was able to get access to it through a Kirac Mission.

Now that I am finished with the Atlas, I am probably still going to continue to run the occasional map mission because they are still pretty enjoyable. More likely though I am going to start diving further into Heist and Delve, which are alternative game modes that I’ve not focused as much on in this league. Other than that I am probably going to be spending some more time in Diablo III and finishing up my season’s journey over there. I have a fully kitted-out character, and just need to devote the time and effort to getting Set Mastery and three Conquests. I could stop playing Path of Exile this season and be pretty happy with the process I made. I might take a pass at some more of the elder bosses, but I need to spend some time unlocking The Maven fully before I can dive too deep into that. Side note… all of the currency I spent on gear, I have long ago made back completely so it was a good “investment” as far as easing my access to higher tier content.

AggroChat #403 – Digging Nostalgia

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

Tonight we attempt to record a show that is only an hour in length but fail again overshooting by about fifteen minutes.  We are down a Tam because life happens, and Kodra had to travel to Ash’s house to get internet…  but we get a shot out the door regardless.  We start off with a quick recap on the experience of starting Ooblets from scratch, then dive into a discussion about the next Shovel Knight game from a different studio.  Ash talks a bit about his experiences with PAX West and we discuss games that evoke the style of a specific era in console games.  This dives into a whole discussion about our console gaming experiences throughout the years.  Bel talks a bit about the upcoming patch to New World and how it is completely changing the starting game experience for the better.  

From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how spending some in-game currency on a build can make a massive difference.  We talk about narrowing down the hunt for Atlas completion as Grace and Bel get close to wrapping that up.  Then we dive into a side topic about how easy it is just to write off bad performance when maybe it is something you did to cause it.  Essentially running Path of Exile on a mechanical drive makes a massive difference, and you really should use a high-quality SSD.

Topics Discussed

  • Ooblets
  • Shovel Knight Dig
  • PAX West
  • Retro Styled Games
  • New World Revitalization
  • Path of Exile
    • Spending lots of currency on a build
    • Closing in on Atlas Completion
  • Dealing with Bad Performance

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