If I had to pick my major issue with New World is the city grind. Constant invasions that downgrade the crafting stations coupled with the constant need pour gold and time into upgrading the stations again is ridiculous. Gold is scare. Players on my server are scarce.
I love how the game keeps crafting in tandem with adventure until ~lvl20. After that the progression curves differ immensely. The scarcity of storage, the lack of gold, and the constant downgrading are design issues they need to address.
That should get better once players can beat the invasions. Of course, that has its own issues, since you can’t dictate that participants have trophies, coatings, etc.
Just think how bad it would have been if endgame progression has been slower.
We had discussed measuring a MMO’s success 90 days in, earlier in the thread. This is typically when the drop-off is severe. Well we’re there now, and New World lost 89% of its population.
I really am pulling for them, there’s a lot I like about the game and I would like to see it grow and improve so I can come back and enjoy new systems and content! But it’s been one of the few games like this that I’ve played where for my particular tastes and interests, they made the game progressively and consistently worse with every update. I felt like I better press the pause button there and wait to see how things shook out, there’s no gain in banging your head against a game that you’re not enjoying anymore.
The top comment in that thread:
The “people agreeing” part doesn’t mean much because you can always find people to agree and disagree on the internet, but he expresses a similar sentiment to what I felt.
EDIT: All that being said, there’s still a lot of of active players last I looked. Around 100k? It’s still in the top 10 active games on Steam. Compare that to poor Battlefield 2042 which isn’t even in the top 60 on Steam last I looked (yes, I know there’s Origin as well but I imagine the dropoff there is similar). Today has 2042 at 18,500 peak players so… New World could certainly do a lot worse. :)
If there’s broad player consensus, which is typically extremely rare, you ignore that at your peril.
100k at peak means (based on the usual math) probably 500k active players total, and we know they probably have 5 million total accounts that can play the game. This means they could release a content patch and get 1-2 million players back, for a time at least. It’s far from dead, it just isn’t the juggernaut some were predicting.
Very true. To be fair, I would say it’s also vastly more successful than others were predicting it would be as well. Understandably, many people were looking at this as a flop before it launched. If I’m Amazon and my prior two games cratered, I think I’d take the W and be happy with it. Of course, I don’t know what the budget and the returns have looked like.
Having played the Lost Ark beta after New World, I think they should have reversed the order they launched the titles. New World really could have used another 5-6 months to polish things up and shore up the tech side. Playing Lost Ark, I was confused why that one was labeled as the Beta. Maybe more localization work to be done later in the game or something?
I don’t know what was behind the relative schedules but since they developed new world in house and are merely the publisher for lost Ark maybe they profit potential was much greater on NW? Or maybe they needed to stop the money drain with New World and finally push it out the door?
I could see that, given how extended the schedule for New World already was. New World as a project may have been out of resources no matter how large of a pile of money Amazon in general was sitting on.
The thing that really hinders a return to new world is the world requires a certain critical mass to sustain. My world has 154 people on it right now - I wouldn’t be surprised if that was 80/50/20 in terms of faction numbers, so one faction is likely boned and not likely to recover outside of something bringing a lot of players back, and even then if the faction numbers get too skewed, it might be unrecoverable. Then there’s the impacts on the trade stations from invasions. Even when my server had higher numbers, some of the provinces were getting trounced, that could be even worse now. You’d think they’d make station damage based on server pop, but I dont think they did…
I’ll try to log in today and see what my world looks like…
I know I’ve seen a fair amount of complaints about players being unable to level up their crafting because all the crafting stations had been degraded through invasions and their servers lacked the population to repel them. I do think they’re doing server merges now which might help with that, but it does strike me as a system that could use a tuning pass or two.
Yeah they’ll need to do server merges, certainly. This is the same refrain with every MMO. It’s just been awhile since one came along as the flavor of the month moved to MOBAs and then battle royales.
Well, true, except that most MMOs don’t have regular and repeated attrition built into the game model which just compounds the problem of low population servers.
I’ll be playing more over the holidays. Normally I hang out with my GF in the evenings but her daughter is coming home from college so they will hang out together and gab. I can isolate in front of my PC and not feel guilty. This is my choice for now. I’m only level 20 so I’m enjoying it just grinding levels. The game is still full of discovery for me and I only craft what the crafting stations let me make. I don’t go out looking for materials otherwise.
No, but there’s an invasion mechanic that permeates the design. In more detail:
Each province has one town
Every town has one of each station, the stations are either for crafting(potions, armor etc), or refining(wood, stone etc), i think 12 stations in all(6/6?)
Each station has 5 levels, and at each level only things of/below that level can be processed (so if you want to make the highest level armor, you need a level 5 armory, and probably some level 5 refining stations to make the ore/linen/leather/whatever).
Each level is significantly more expensive to build(i think level 5 is like 10k, level 4 like 2k? Can someone elaborate?)
Buying a level, actually is a more complicated process enacted by a controlling company (the one that runs the city), they buy a quest in the town hall (for the amount noted above), and it puts a quest on the town board that must be completed in order to raise the level of the station to the quest level.
I’m not sure how many quests can be underway at one time, but i’m pretty sure it’s more than 1 and less than…6?
For even a single quest to complete, you need a lot of activity (like collect 5000 widgets).
So basically it takes a good deal of money, the will of the controlling party, and a good deal of effort from the player base to raise the station level of one station by one.
And every so often (at least twice/three times a day? I dunno?) there’s invasions that hit each city. If the invasions aren’t repelled(which needs a significant population), one or two stations lose a level.
So it requires a great deal of effort to build and maintain stations, and this constant attrition by the game world destroying them.
At least this is my (non-ever-controlling-company) view of what happens. If i’m mistaken, someone please correct me!
Indeed, and it’s quizzical to me that they aren’t doing megaservers in a MMO released in 2021. I mean, seriously? Even WoW has had megaservers for a long-ass time.
The issue is more complex than that. On our server, no one beat an invasion that wasn’t glitched somehow, though we got to the last wave on multiple occasions. The thing is, I’m pretty certain it could have been done if everyone had corrupted combat trophies, coatings, and whetstones.
The problem with that is that the defenders don’t get to choose 40/50 participants. On the surface that’s a good thing, because it lets more people participate without having to be in a big guild. However, there’s no way to mandate people having those things. There’s also no way to distinguish a fresh 60 (which will be important with the new changes) from someone with much better gear.
@pyrhic i don’t think a territory can get invaded more than once every 48 hours, but 4-5 crafting stations can get hit sometimes. But you’re main point stands
