I’m a huge fan of the game and have over 2,000 hours played time. I will say that since launch, the game is in a much better state over all, and the large monthly patches have chipped away at some of the worse parts of the game, so that’s a good thing over all. However, the rate at which bugs are being fixed is slowing to a crawl, and it’s being noticed by the player base. There’s been a rumor that New World now only has a “skeleton crew” of developers assigned to the game, and I believe the only reason that’s actually a rumor now, is due to the speed at which bugs are being fixed. Since June 1st, there have been 3 patches. They have a combined total of 23 changes (some of which aren’t actually bug fixes, but nerfs or other changes). But giving the developers the benefit of the doubt, let’s just say there were 23 bug fixes. That’s 23 bug fixes over the course of 22 days, which is almost an average of 1 bug fix per day. Even if you only had one developer assigned to bug fixing, they should be able to fix more than 1 bug per day on average. This is nowhere close to where this game needs to be. If you look at the known bugs list, there are literally hundreds of bugs listed. If we continue at the rate of 1 bug fix per day, we will literally never have anything close to a stable and reliable game, especially considering that new patches will also bring new bugs. Of all the issues with New World, my main issue is feeling like New World is being swept aside, and the developers either don’t care enough about the game to improve it faster, or (more likely), don’t have the manpower or resources to fix the game fast enough.
We need far more than 1 bug fix per day. I still can’t even open up the scoreboard in OPR after leaving an arena, and OPR is 80% of the game to me. A lot of the PVP perks introduced a month ago still don’t work for the most part. Shirking empower, mortal empowerment, invigorated punishment, the list goes on. I believe this is why a lot of people are quitting. Do you know how demoralizing it is to grind days and weeks for a PVP item, just to get it finally and find out it doesn’t even work? And then to watch as multiple patches fly by without it being fixed. Some of these bugs literally can be fixed by altering one symbol or one word in one line of code. This has been proven by people in the Morrolan community. So in certain instances, it would take a developer literally 30 seconds to change one line of code to fix a bug, and the impact of that change is actually huge and far reaching and can impact a lot of people. Why is it that when some of these bugs are so easy to fix, that we can go 3 or 4 weeks without them being fixed? Is it a bureaucracy problem of there being 5 different versions of the game being worked on simultaneously, and the process at which changes get tested and/or approved? Players are having a hard time swallowing this line of reasoning because it’s clear that many (if not most) of these changes and new features are not tested at all. Perks and features are released that are completely broken in some instances, so being told that the testing and validation process takes a long time is not holding water for a lot of us.
Can someone please tell us what’s going on, and why these weekly patches aren’t more substantial? We don’t want to have to wait another month until the July patch for some of these issues to be rectified. Some of us will be patient and wait, but a lot of players are just going to quit, and you might never see them again. We the players are asking for a substantial speed increase at which bugs are addressed and fixed. I know what people will say to this comment. They’ll say “if they go any faster, you’ll just see more code regressions and broken features.” While this may be true, it can’t get much worse than what we are currently experiencing. The bugs that can be fixed by changing one word in one line of code are likely not to be code regressions, and at the very least, it will show the developers still have a passion for the game. When players open up the weekly patch notes to see only 2 bugs fixed (1.5.3 as an example), 1 of which is just a small graphical glitch, it makes us feel like the developers have lost all passion for the game and just don’t care enough to get the game fixed. I know this perception is likely not the actual case. The real problem might be the fact that Lumberyard doesn’t make a great MMO engine, or lack of resources, or managerial issues, etc.) I don’t know what the actual problem is, but I can tell you what the perception is.
tl;dr: Weekly patches are too small, bugs aren’t fixed fast enough. Please increase the number of bug fixes in the weekly patches, particularly in months that don’t contain a “major” patch, like this month.