@Monitor What you said here is true for traditional MMOs. However if you take a quick look. You will notice that the traditional MMOs have very low new and returning player retention these days. Most are extremely low populated. That’s because we now have modern style MMOs. That offers a different more inclusive fun mainstream approach. That don’t leave new and returning players out to be fodder for thousands of hours.
Even the Koreans of all people are catching on to this. Hence why the two biggest Korean MMOs in NA and EU. Have added some pretty nice quality of life changes, and catch up mechanics. To boost the new and returning players. Hundreds and not thousands of hours forward in the PvE grind. Actually those two highly populated Korean MMOs have somewhat equalized if not completely equalized Battlegrounds or Arenas. So they can get into the action in a realistic timetable. How can a game like this hope to trounce that?
We are not even taking about the other Western modern MMOs. Where the difference in stats from a 50 hour old account and a 7,000+ hour account is 5% stat difference. Sure AGS can keep the game a minimally appealing niche. To the minority of hardcore PvE grinders. But good luck grabbing the attention of other types of gamers beyond that group. That’s all I am saying.
What if I joined a free trial server and later i want to join my friends at EU Dry Tree for example? I won’t have a free transfer if I buy the game to play with my friends? How do I deal with that?
Thanks, this is really interesting, as some existing servers have similar population to Free Weekend Servers which leads me to think the right thing to do is to also merge all those Low Pop Servers…
Sure the average populations on the free servers “might” go from 3 to double digits but come on. There must be some reasonable explanation for 70+ new servers. AGS can’t be this delusional…right? Right?
The obvious solution is that your “friend” should have rolled a new character on the server you were able to create on. That way your friend could help you learn the game at an appropriate level.
Look, the game has been out for 6 months. It only costs $40 as a one-time fee. Anyone that actually wanted to play the game would have played it by now.
@Scaroz They would be lucky to catch the interest of 150 players with the Try for Free Weekend event. Current at this moment New World has less than 20k concurrent players. During a Free to Try Weekend event. That is not really promising for the game.
AGS is going to have to make combat feel immensely better than it is now. AGS will also have to make visuals immensely more pleasing than they are now.
AGS will also have to lower the PvE grind to be competitive in PVP. To be less than that of what it takes to be competitive in P2W Korean MMOs. PvPers don’t want to grind 3 boring PvE dungeons for hundreds if not thousands of hours. Before they can become a factor in PvP. Only hardcore PvE grinders like such.
If AGS refuses to do that. Then they will have to make the PvE grind immensely more fun than it is now. By adding many more fun and interactive ways to farm gear and expertise. Because currently New World is only fun for a small niche of MMO gamers.
Honestly current day New World. Feels like a MMO, that has not left its Beta phase of development. Which that in itself will make it very hard to convince new players to try their game. More so when there is a number of already established and feature rich MMOs on the market. That has many more viable and competitive playstyles than New World.
I’ll be honest, at current pace, New World has another 3 to 5 years of development. Till New World will be able to start convincing players to play it, instead of ESO, GW2, BDO, LA, and Eve Online.
They are totally delusional to throw up 28 new EU central servers. Probably more than there was for the actual launch when they would have been needed. Did they really think that game with player base of 21K average players would just explode back to 1mil with a very strangely arranged free to play weekend.
The game is already in hard life support, so can’t really blame them, but come on. Would it have been too much to ask for someone to monitor the situation and have only 1 new server first and lock it and open another one let’s say after 1000 players are in. Fun fact: That person would not have had to do anything during the weekend. But instead of having 4-20 people per server there would have been one server with 200-300 new players. Might actually have made available to do the Amrine etc. Looking for party at 4 population server must be fun!
While a huge supporter of worker’s being treated in a humane manner surely someone somewhere would jump at the opportunity to work for a gaming company on the weekends.
Gaming companies have become notorious for their horrid treatment of employees. So wanting to avoid that by putting in a hard time limit on work hours makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is why everyone seems to be off on the weekends. Especially this weekend.
Merge the servers right now so ppl wont experience a dead MMO game experience and lose interest.
You are trying to make a good thing but pls do it right.
I am not sure when they think they are going to get all these new players on the Free weekend servers. I just looked and they are all running low player counts. It would have been smarter to let them just play on the existing servers with limitations like no trading due to botting being a severe issue.
I think someone in management overestimated the appeal for this game. Right now there is a lot of old negative baggage out there from players who tried and left the game. AGS still has a ways to go to reverse a lot of the negativity around the game. Plus there are still balance issues, bots, gold sellers, crafting RNG, and a need for significantly more content (PvE and PvP) just to name a few items that need improvement.
My apologies then for what I thought was a big mistake.
At the same time this might have been communicated in a clearer manner.
When discussing merges after the free weekend it seems to imply that there are free servers and then the rest of the servers. This is further reinforced by the [Free Server] note on the selection window.
For myself this is where the confusion happened. There’s no time to fix it now. Maybe in the future the ambiguity some of us experienced could be helped.
Or next time simply emphasize the underpopulated servers. This would create a far better experience for both current players on those servers as well as the free players.
A statement earlier though still stands. Most people who login to an empty game world are not going to return. It really is that simple.
To be honest I don’t think this is why they didn’t do that. A lot of the professions require you to do weekends, nightshifts etc. Nurses, doctors, fireman, police, amazon server farm “upkeepers”, factory workers, pilots, cabincrew, just to name few off the top of my head.
The easy way was to setup ridiculous amount of servers and call it a week. A bit of a planning and thought before doing it would have gone a long way.
As I mentioned in that post I wondered about this same thing. Even if there were a hard limit that limit doesn’t have to be based on a Monday to Friday work schedule.
Well I appreciate the effort to draw attention to the game and an attempt to right a distressed ship I think the amount of servers for the free weekend actually did more harm than good. It spread out those giving it a try and having low populations ‘ghost town’ servers would leave a negative impression.
I am hoping the recent changes at AGS will turn things around because the direction and decisions that were made has taken a major bite out of AGS reputation, which let us be honest was already ‘less than perfect’ to begin with.
New World is down 96% from peak and Lost Ark is down 68%. Yes some are nature rush to try it out and get burnt out, etc. lose but this is an indication to the way leadership had lead. I have not tried Lost Ark and to be honest the issues of New World actually turned me off from even trying it as I feared the same issues would be there that were here. Reading the forums for Lost Ark tells me that I was not that far off.
A free give it a try weekend is not going to save New World but I understand why it was attempted. This game needs a core organized restructure of the mechanics to refine and blend the piece work of what has been thrown together from all the patches in the attempts to fix bugs and give players somewhat what they been asking for to stop the bleeding numbers.
There are some that will say this game was to be like ‘this’ and never like ‘that’ but no one can deny loosing over 90% of your players is kinda a good indication you may have missed the mark.
Well this turned into a bit of a ramble so to end off on a positive note,
7 April 2022 00:00 - 14,469 players
10 April 2022 00:00 - 20,151 players
An increase of almost 40%! Is that not the same percent that the discount on the game is…
yeah i saw it somehow the result doesn’t seems to be it. You all advertised play with your friends, i am in high pop server in EU, Can you tell me how can i call my friends and ask them to play with me?
When your strategies for free-to-play doesn’t allow to play with friends sadly!
I hope it pays the rent.