My First Suggestion is Testing, AGS had NW in Alpha/Beta for quite some time and although many bugs were squashed, since its launch, the number of game-breaking bugs/exploits has skyrocketed. Management should be careful when doing decisions like “shut-off all transaction exchanges” when doing something like that breaks the Town upgrades, causing an even worse duplication glitch plus some more glitches. When Testing depending on the size of AGS test/dev team it will be very time-consuming to find and eliminate unknown glitches, now is probably too late and will have to crunch but for the future, please why don’t create experimental servers where people can join in and manually test new features and give feedback? or alternatively, if it’s a small change or a quick fix, why not deploy the change on a few servers and monitor them before deploying in all servers, it will help in many ways. (like the issue we are having now, this is software testing basics cmon you all know this.)
I love the game I think the idea is awesome and the mechanics are very good, but many of those are broken here and there, we’re not in beta anymore so mistakes are very costly now, my Second Suggestion would be to put the PR team to do some apologizing, It will also be nice to know the priority list of Bugs that are being worked on by AGS, similar to a changelog or roadmap (but for bugs).
Last suggestion is related to the game systems, I don’t know the system, only AGS Devs are the ones that know better, but when something like trying to block all transactions causes to prevent gold duplication causes a HUGE gold duplication bug itself with town upgrades, something must be seriously wrong, enough to pull emergency maintenance. What comes to my mind Is Modularity, all systems in the game must interact with each other but if one fails the others should not be affected to such an extent and just remove the functionality to interact with the defective system, I like the new Crafting system, for example, also I haven’t heard any serious bug from it. But for Currency, being one of the most key elements there has to be some serious code put in the back of it so it doesn’t completely break the other systems dependent on it, I seriously can’t imagine how that bug escaped from AGS eyes when blocking transactions, it’s something that baffles me.
There is a Rocky road for New World in the next few days, just hope the AGS team can get it back on track and not to a cliff. I seriously do, I like the game after all.