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.
