An open letter to AGS

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1

I don’t know what’s going on in the world, I dont understand the constant need for unbelievably toxic behavior. What you have created here really has ruined the gaming experience for a lot of people.

I’m not here to talk about bugs, I’m not here to talk about content. I am here to talk about your player base and the unbelievably high amounts of toxicity that you allow to permeate every server in this game. You have created one of the most hateful environments I have ever seen in a video game since Rust.

My wife and I are long time MMO players, UO, EQ, WoW, Rift, ESO, SWToR you name it we have played it and those environments have always been fun and enjoyable. The reason for leaving them is lack of content or lack of any real feeling of doing things that affect the world.

We looked at New World as a way to feel more connected to its community. We thought we could find others with the same goals as us to create friendly and fun communities that you could adventure with become friends with, and once in a while head out and affect the outcome of the world by taking territories are warring over them. Its a very fun mechanic that DAoC and ESO dide really well in their early days.

The way things are put together in this game at its core make it impossible for it to be anything but a toxic hell hole of constant shit talk in global chat, constant bickering, and constant infighting between rival companies within the same faction.

We started on Saragalla with an alliance we created with two other companies on the server. Our purpose was to create a fun and non toxic environment without the endless need for shit talk in global chat. Alas … this is an impossibility.

Our alliance took 3 territories in the first few days of the game, we worked together to make sure everyone in our faction felt welcomed. We created a community Discord where everyone could come together vote on how towns were upgraded, created and even who would be the next companies to take territories. We made it fair and just for everyone. Taxes were kept low, everyone had a say so, and everything was great unitl…

The weekend hits and the mass reports start from opposing factions that feel threatened. The same opposing factions start to use exploits to gain influence and push territories in to war in seconds! (Windsward, Everfall, and Brightwood all thrown into war within 5 minutes of one another all by a single company) Then the toxic environment explodes into a sea of lies, expletive’s, and shit talk in global chat, people within the faction start blaming other for not “defending properly” or “just letting the other factions win”… Did you really think this was going to work?

Mixing open world PVP and PVE is a massive mistake. Many games have tried it, and many games have failed because of it. Those that ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Your lack of QC and care for your product, its environment, and the sheer disrespect you show your customers have doomed this game to fail. you have created this beautiful world only to see it torn down by the people that you created it for.

Its a sad day when I cant even bring myself to log into the game i LOVED during Beta testing. Now its just become a mess. People cant play with their friend, people cant stay in game, people stuck in queues for hours all without any real solutions. This just makes the environment even more toxic than it was already destined to be.

My advice to you is if you want to save this game you need to do some of the following:

  1. Instance PVP from the rest of the world. Set up arenas and / or areas that players who don’t enjoy PVP can avoid. This will allow PVPers and PVEers to play the content they like and not have to worry about being near one another unless they choose to be. Don’t force PVPers to do PVE and don’t force PVErs to do PVP via quests. There is no need for bonuses to exist for either side. Everyone levels at the same rate regardless if you are flagged or not. You are forcing PVErs to have to flag in order to get XP bonuses and do certain quests. This is a terrible idea!

  2. Get rid of global chat. This idea is the worst in every MMO. Why the need for something so immersion breaking. WoW got it right by not allowing factions to speak to each other avoiding massive bouts of toxicity in the Horde vs Alliance scuffle. Sure you can mute it on your own end. But those that seek out drama and toxicity use it to fuel even more hate and bickering between people. They use it to sew discourse and openly insult others.

  3. In game GMs / Chat monitoring. If you are going to have a global chat, it needs to be monitored. You said yourself when the game started you wanted a less toxic environment, you even have to agree to not be toxic before you can log into the game. But you have no way of actually enforcing this. People can mass report others for simply disagreeing with them, yet those that call people names, slang words and are truly toxic remain in game cause they vastly outnumber the amount of those of us who are decent and don’t want those things around us.

  4. Server instancing - allow more players per “realm”. This was a massive under sight by you guys. Did you not know your sales numbers? Did you not see you sold millions of copies of the game yet didn’t have enough server capacity to contain it? I don’t even know how this is possible. You should have had double or triple whatever your sales of the game was times x amount of players per server on day one! Again this just feeds more toxicity and anger in people having to wait in long queues. Server instancing would have also fixed this allowing more players to connect in game yet having them instanced from one another. Bethesda nailed this with ESO. Blizzard nailed it with WoW… Whydidnt you see what happened to them and take note?

  5. Starting Zones - Whos brilliant idea was to make it so you have to run 500 miles to go play with your friends. Genius move there … Allow people to choose where they want to spawn so they can spawn together. * god damn character’s made in a row, all ended up in the same place for both me and my wife. Me in MB and her in First light … You guys are pure genius let me tell you.

I truly love this game and its mechanics, but being older the wife and I cant be around this kind of hostility from the rest of the playerbase. We thought new World could be different, I guess we were wrong. I hope one day to see this game live up to its potential, but as it sits currently, its merely Rust as an MMO… So beautiful yet so sad…

I fully expect all your carebear comments and toxicity so spare us the drama, you will just get your posts reported. Then again its not like AGS will do anything about it.

Regards
Kuthel and Atumara

8 Likes
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Mixing open world PVP and PVE is a massive mistake. Many games have tried it, and many games have failed because of it.

Lineage, Aion and early WoW achieved open world pvpve a little over a decade ago just fine. Sounds more like a personal frustration than an actual fact.

You are forcing PVErs to have to flag in order to get XP bonuses and do certain quests. This is a terrible idea!

Nobody is forcing you to do anything buddy. You just want the perfect of both worlds. Just like there’s people out there who bought this HEAVILY PVP advertised game to, you know, PVP. Something that they can’t enjoy if nobody flags for it. Thus incentives.

Get rid of global chat. This idea is the worst in every MMO. Why the need for something so immersion breaking.

Pro tip to save your ‘immersion’: Turn off Global chat from the settings.

Honestly sounds like you had an emotional day and got affected by everything people typed on a global chat, which the suggestion above solves just fine. You don’t need to watch Global chat or care for what people say.

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This game just need remove flag system, its designed for open pvp, not for instances or session pvp swamp. Any conflict have winners and losers everytime, its more motivate if your opponent lose something…

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A few responses.

Separation of PvP and PvE: Instancing PvP and separating it entirely from the PvE aspect of the game would simply be an entirely different game than New World. The game started as a PvP game, and PvE was added later on to broaden the game. But the entire design of the game is around factions, territories, wars, influence flipping and the like, taking place in a seamlessly connected environment, such that the entire faction is impacted, in both PvE, PvP and crafting, by who owns and controls what, and who gets the money. That’s the entire game design from A to Z. To separate it out like you suggest would be a completely different game. It’s OK not to like the design that New World has, but your suggestion is nothing other than to remake the game in its entirety.

Server Instancing: This doesn’t work for the same reasons. Again, the core here is who owns what territory, who controls the towns, therefore who gets the money, who sets the tax rates, who determines development and so on. It’s all driven by who owns what and who makes those decisions, and who underwrites them with fighting and defending. You can’t divide that into different layers or sub-shards of a server without destroying the content. Again, this is because the conflict content is unique to each server, it isn’t fungible. And you can’t make copy A, copy B and copy C of a server without having three different versions of the one conflict that is taking place outside the gates of Windward where one faction is trying to do its PvP quests and the other is trying to stop them … you can’t instance that without destroying the content.

Server Caps: AGS says that a lot of people purchased at the last minute, like within the last 24-36 hours prior to launch. You can disbelieve them if you like, but it seems plausible to me the way that people make decisions today, and the fact that you could pre-order up until right before launch and so on. So, if they are being truthful, then there are just many more players than they expected based on pre-orders up to the time that is relevant for how many servers they initially set up for launch. No doubt, they knew in the hour before launch went live that it was going to be overloaded, and they likely were already scrambling to add new servers even then in the hours leading to the launch. This does happen from time to time. It happened when WoW released in 2004. It happened when AAR released in 2013. So it has happened before, and in both cases those became very successful games after having disastrously unplayable launches.

Chat Toxicity: Just turn off global chat. It is toxic, yes. I wish it were not so, but that’s gaming. It’s the internet. WoW had toxic chat, too, especially back when the game was more popular. FFXIV doesn’t have toxic chat because they have a very low threshold for bans, and perhaps that is required here, too, but for now just turn off chat.

The stuff on the influence exploits and so on is relevant, and needs to be addressed by AGS as soon as possible. But splitting PvE and PvP, instancing the servers into shards and so on … can’t do that with this design.

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No matter what you do you will never accommodate this type of person so it’s best just to just ignore imo.

Like this person is a real person, but you hope they’re a troll with how demanding they are.

Act how I want you to act or be banned. Everyone who does not agree with me will be reported.

It’s so disappointing. I was taught in kindergarten not to tattle, but apparently it flew over some peoples heads.

The people screaming for tolerance, are the least tolerant. It’s so ironic.

4 Likes
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Kuthel where did you go? What server you on now?

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I believe OP has it wrong in this one; I can only speak from what I personally saw and heard. He created a mega company thinking he could control a major part of the servers economy and hold windsward, everfall and bright wood without ever going to war. They had (and claimed) to be a 500+ strong ESO trading guild or something and they dominated the server. When they were eventually attacked and territory was overturned they were not prepared at all for war which resulted in the OP, deleting the companies discord, YouTube, Twitter and apparently deleting his character and having a complete melt down. This is far larger then a game issue, this seems more of a you issue.

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My personal feeling is that PvP should’ve been instanced large battles and small scale team arenas. That’s not to say I dislike the concept of a symbiotic PvE and PvP relationship where PvP’ers fight for and run the settlements, it’s a good idea, but certainly a recipe for a clash of civilisations, so to speak, as both player types tend to seek different goals.

It sounds like there is quite a bit of toxicity within the PvP side, what with malicious reporting to get rid of opponents and reports of exploiting and companies using gold income from settlements for personal use, what can be done about it, I don’t know.

I think it may be too late though for PvP to be instanced away from the PvE aspect of the game because they are tightly interwoven.

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If they remove the flag system and enforce PvP then you’ll be taking the game back 2 yrs when AGS made the decision to refocus on PvE/PvP.

AGS made this decision following the utter $h!7 show that the alpha was when it was full PvP, the levels of toxicity then were orders of magnitude higher than now. “Players” and I use that term in the widest sense, that did nothing all game but gank, waited outside the starter settlements and just kept killing the lower levels trying to play the game. Gangs of them, there was no policing, gankers everywhere. The feedback (apart from the minority) was over whelmingly negative.

AGS could have implemented a “policing system” to stop the gankers, some sort of settlement/zone guard that would appear and “explain things” to them, with a piece of 2by4.

Instead they went for a more encompassing option.

The whole PvP vs PvE issue is pointless and people need to let it go, the decision has been made.

If you want to a full loot PvP environment (where you lose ALL your equipped gear and anything you carry) then pm and I can suggest quite a few. They all have one thing in common though, they have much smaller player bases, they just aren’t that popular. So you make your bed and lie in it, just please stop with this constant PvP vs PvE whining.

TB.

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First of all, Amazon isn’t toxic.

Amazon Games has done really well and attracted a huge amount of players. This is with the game design and content that they have implemented in this game. And of course the game engine that they designed has produced such amazing graphics with superb optimization.

Not every MMO can be like that.

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Don’t agree at all. First, it’s not the game developers creating the toxic environment. We are. Humans are nasty. Learn to ignore. Life’s tough.

Global chat is nice for people who like to bullshit, whats wrong with that? There’s an ignore function.

Starting zones are to push through the initial basics, you can hold your mates hand in the settlements just 30 minutes later.

Gosh, people are so sensitive.

1 Like
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This would be an epic story downfall of a kingdom should be in the storybooks of aternum

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Yah. It was dysfunction created by this OP himself and was one of the people as well yelling exploit when it was pointed out many times it was most likely just a % turn in issue, but whatever haha.

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How to decrease your playerbase from 5mil to 20k with an update - tutorial by Scaro

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Hey there Kuthel, Covenant player from Saragalla here. Saw you guys implode on the day it happened.

Seems to me you had a nice organization for your own faction but you had absolutely no plan for when your opponents fight against you. You figured you could have a great PVE experience in this game and you expected to be able to at least partially control the PVP aspect and how much it will affect you. So, a few notes.

Get your ass back in the game, Syndicate need your help/leadership. The purple have come back a bit lately, Covenant are Struggling. And overall your faction has been doing well. Come back and have a good time.

You cant hinge your play experience on weather or not other players behave as you would. Nobody outside your faction has anything to do with your plans for your own faction. You took a leadership role. and when your plans were dashed by opposition and people looked to you for leadership you vanished. Of course its going to get toxic at that point. That’s the burden you took on yourself once you decided to be a leader.

Your territory flipped so fast because you had been holding it for a few days already (the longer you hold a territory the less effort it takes to flip it) so when the marauders came knocking, they COULD contest all 3 territories within a few minutes. without the use of exploits. You guys got caught unprepared is all. learn from this and get back into it.

You need to remember that this is at its core a player verses player, faction vs faction, game where unlike WoW, we are actively motivated to contest and destroy the other factions. Yeah we can choose to flag up or not but it all comes down to territory contestation and out-right war. That is its focus. If you don’t like that, and would rather have a more calm, PvE. or perhaps play out a empire-building-in-an-mmo experience. you need to realize that A: this may not be the game your looking for… and/or B: realize that a strong defense is integral to a successful empire

Lastly, I don’t think you where prepared for the competition that will take place in this game. you have 2/3rds of the player base operating in direct opposition to you/your faction. And then you are going to have your own faction fighting within itself for who does what. It happens in every faction, all the time. You tried to control hundreds of people and dictate who gets what/when. Of course its going to fail. There are enough people who don’t want to be lead but would rather lead themselves.

Most importantly… always breath out… let that negativity out. learn from the experience, and come back stronger. Hope to see you in server…

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Using one person as an example to prove a point about the entire society seems more of your issue too.

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I completely agree with the OP. First of global chat is filled with homophobic, sexist, racist, hate politics, and even talk about pedophilia. And no matter how many reports I file, people keep coming back from Bans. I know specifically one person who calls himself Ronjeremy16 (or something like that) who has been banned at least 5 times, keeps coming back and flooding chat every freaking minute with sexist and hate speech. Does Amazon ever permaban someone because it’s getting outrageous?

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I agree with most of your statements.

This game needs to be checked again by the team.

What I would suggest is starting areas to have a set faction where PVP is disabled. This way you can chose your faction when you create your character instead of being assigned randomly to an area and each faction will have at least one territory by default.

PvP should automatically be enabled past these 3 starting areas to engage players in battles and give a dangerous feeling to the world. You might say that this does not appeal to PVE players but having territory control should have a meaning instead of everyone running around to farm resources and just join a que for wars.

I was adamant at the beginning against mounts but once they release the next expansion, they should add mounts in the game. Based on how the questing system is done, it get’s annoying fast to run back and forth at the same areas and with the world expanding mounts should not be an issue, especially if everyone will become PVP flagged as mentioned above

The amount of bugs in this game makes me want to quit most of the time. I have been playing every day since release, did all the dungeons and leveled most of my trade skills past 150, you could say that I rushed the game but I still want to play it. It’s just the bugs and glitches that makes me want to quit, it’s something they need to fix as soon as possible if this games has any hope for a future

Game diversity is also an issue. With the exception of Reek Water. Restless Shore and Ebonscale Reach which have great towns, the rest are copy paste. Is it that hard to make each town unique? Each starting area should have a town architecture according to its faction. Marauders could have a tribal architecture, Syndicate could have laboratories and universities for mages and Covenant could have churches or other structures resembling their beliefs. The enemies are also copy paste at all levels. I get that some upper managing director wanted the game to be released early but c’mon, give some love and diversity to the game

As for wars being exploited by players using stacked spells and some players not being able to play at all, 50 v 50 is a huge number of players. Instead, wars could be made to have 3 different flanks to fight on. Each flank will have a 25 v 25 that cannot interact with each other and the side that wins 2 flanks wins the war. It’s not the best example but it’s better than what it is atm

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