I have been an avid player of New World since release and have greatly enjoyed it. The world is stunning and I have had near zero technical issues at the player level. I wanted to post some thoughts based on my play experience; I play on a low population server with 100% focus on PVE and Crafting. I apologize in advance for any snarkiness in my post, it comes from frustration and a desire to see the game improve.
Below I have listed a number of improvements, mostly crafting related, that I believe would improve the game. However, the issues with this game largely stem from the overall design vision. In game design, it really boils down to two concepts - Content Hours and Stickiness; or more precisely âwhat do players doâ and âhow to keep them playingâ. PVP is not the strength of this game; in reality it is the crafting/gathering aspects. Donât believe me? Check the play logs - Crafting/Gathering creates by far the most game hours by a massive margin. Almost all MMOs are driven by game play in this order; Solo PVE, Crafting, Group PVE, and then all the niche elements like Raiding or PVP. New World is no different - place less emphasis on a niche element of a niche market.
The good news is Crafting/Gathering in New World is very engaging, challenging, and is a sticky way to keep players. It absolutely drives game hours and feeds the economy (I cant even think off-hand of any major items that are sold that are not crafting related) and can be the road to success for New World. The bad news is many of the major design elements are anti-crafting! PVP companies incompetently managing the towns, invasions destroying the crafting stations, no control over critical crafting buffs, weight and storage issues that hamper where you can craft, etcâŚ
Every design decision should be framed with the question, "How will this change impact crafting and/or the player economy."
Suggestions:
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Settlements - I think we can all agree that the Company / Settlement experiment has failed. Need to find another way to incentivize Wars without having companies controlling crafting/trading and using towns for personal gain. Allow players to select what upgrades they want on the town boards and work toward building them. Turn off the ability for Companies to embezzle settlement taxes. Scale costs and upgrade build time based on server population.
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Basic Functionality - I am sure all this in on the roadmap but we need a mail system, Company level houses, revamping of the trading post and better communication tools, etcâŚ
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Inventory - Need to be able to access inventory at any time. Do not stop me from running when I open inventory. Break out trophies and wisp/essences into their own inventory categories. I would also like to be able to sort my storage by alpha. - Change Pending
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Crafting - I dislike the concept of not being able to see recipes unless you have key ingredient in inventory (e.g. trophies, etcâŚ). Driving players to use a 3rd party website to see what can be crafted is not ideal. Would also be able to be able to open crafting stations from anywhere, not to craft but to see what is required for recipes.
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Cooking - Too many Cooking ingredients with too many similar recipes. Cooking ingredients cannot be crafted to consolidate up to higher tier ingredients. Requires massive amount of storage space. Suggestion: Consolidate ingredients and recipes, reduce weight of cooking ingredients by 50% to 75%.
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Cooking - Why the massive rarity of some ingredients? We are not crafting thermonuclear weapons, we are crafting short term buffs. Why is salt (a naturally occurring resource) far rarer than sugar (a refined resource). Make some of these ingredients less rare; add salt to boulders for example as an uncommon drop. Town Board cooking quest should require few or none of the rare materials (Salt, eggs, tarragon, etcâŚ) or the reward needs to amp up considerably.
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Food - Players are reluctant to carry too much food because it weighs too much. To make food more useful and desirable, reduce weight of food products by 50%-75%.
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Faction Material converters have a huge tax bill attached to them, making them very costly to use for their intended purpose. Considering the converters already cost faction tokens and an exchange of materials, the tax is way over the top
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Quest Items - having quest items maintained in our inventory is pretty old school. I do not mind it too much except the Crafting Quest items have weight. I find myself often with over 100 kg of quest items which is a bit crazy. Reduce the weight of quest items by 75% - 100%
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Potions - Most potions are situational and HEAVY. An encumbrance potion weighs .3 KG! Players will not buy and carry situational potions due to the weight, reduce weight of potions by 75%-90%.
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Town Boards - Great idea - just not quite implemented correctly. Players cannot take town board tasks if there are none available on the board. This is part of the much larger problem of PVP companies incompetently controlling towns. Focus on ways of making the Town Boards a critical part of settlement administration that benefits both the company and the players.
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Crafting Stations - Organize the crafting stations so that the most used recipes are at the top. Ideally, players could customize the menu. Menu should remember itâs last state, if I collapse sub-menus, they should remain collapsed until I reopen them. Timeless recipes need to fall into a single category at the end of the menu.
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Crafting Stations - Some areas (e.g. Motes/Wisps/fuse gems) should have a Craft All option. There should be a Salvage All button with check boxes so I do not have to individually select salvage on the 57 spears I just crafted. I would like to be able to filter by profession (e.g see only engineering recipes).
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Crafting Training Items - Typically games have specific recipes that are used only for leveling up that profession. These recipes create a otherwise useless item that is worth more crafting experience and more salvage compared to normal items. Need one such recipe for each tier of the profession so that the marketplace doesnât get flooded with 1000s of Orich Arrows selling at a fraction of the material cost.
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Player Economy - Removed crafted items from chests and caches, this will increase the demand from crafters. It will also reduce the frustration of fighting through a dozen creatures to loot a coffer with 8 Iron arrows. Set Alchemy coffers to use the same validation table as the standard supply coffers.
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Crafting - Trophies should be changeable from the Bio screen for all houses without having to visit each house. Having to travel to 3 different locations so I can prepare to craft one item is nonsense.
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Salvage - The fact is that 99% of the armor/weapon drops in this game are salvage. With Salvage being such a huge part of the game - this an opportunity here for a great sub-system. Perhaps by leveling up Salvage via Town Board quests, you can improve the results of your salvaging efforts. Highly skilled salvagers should have a chance to get crafting mods, extra mats, gems, etc⌠The goal is take a negative and make it a positive.
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Aptitude System - Brilliant! It just feels unfinished - where are the capstone benefits? Other than the occasional chest reward, shouldnât there be more? Maybe my 30 aptitude in Logging can give me a 3% increase in resources. A woodworker with Level 5 Aptitude could convert Petrified Wood (Green) to Whisperwood (Blue), etc⌠Take this system to the next level with real effects and persistent rewards.
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Static Resources - This causes quite a few issues, from not scaling to providing an easy roadmap for the multitude of farming bots. Leave the static resources as is but give a small chance of respawning resources will respawn as a higher tier resource. Why not have this small percentage increased by the Aptitude of the person that harvested the resource? Mine Iron ore? Small chance it returns as Starmetal with a bigger chance if the player is a seasoned miner.
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Paper Dolls - could we have more than one? How about a combat doll, a crafting/gathering doll and a PVP doll? Let me have one screen with my PVE gear and then another where I can equip my crafting gear. The PVP Dolls might only apply when you are in PVP instances.
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PVP Gathering Buff - Frankly, a very dumb idea, promotes griefing more than anything else. Basic MMO design law - Reward in Kind. PVP should have PVP rewards, just as raiding should offer raid-related rewards. Perhaps part of the issue is there seems to be no PVP reward / advancement system. I sure this needs to be addressed but in the short term, quit forcing people to PVP and remove the gathering buff. Better yet - apply a gathering buff based on settlement level, attitude or crafting level etc⌠A likely unintended and negative consequence of the PVP gathering buff is it causes this weird Flagged/Unflagged situation when players of various factions want to adventure together.
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Item Transfer between Storage - One of the splash screens mentions you can move items from one storage to another storage if both are your faction for a SMALL fee. The fee is not small, its quite large in fact. Tried to move 80kg for items from one storage to another, the fee was in excess of 500 gold. - Change Pending
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Fast Travel - I understand the desire to make Azoth a currency but it very negatively effects crafting. It is not uncommon for me to be 700+ kg in weight with just my basic; crafting gear, crafting food, etc⌠(lets not mention the 100+ kg of quest items) and trying to fast travel from one location to another often costs 500+ Azoth. That is nutty - I spend a great deal of time running which is not sticky. Reduce costs for travel based on weight and increase Azoth cap to 2500ish. - FIXED - Great Job
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Trading Post - Need to be able to identify what recipes/schematics I do not know. Need to be able to sort based on level range and to use wildcards (e.g. I want to see all items containing the word Flux). Sold items need to be time stamped, hard to tell when things sold.
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Shared Storage - That ability to place items in shared storage that can be accessed from any storage unit. Since this is pure convenience, it could be an item purchasable through the store (see LOTRO).
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PVP - The key to success for PVP is having combat encapsulated in an instance so that PVP rules can differ from PVE (e.g making healing less powerful in PVP). For the most part, New World has adopted this - would like to see something more like arenas.
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Corruption Portals - They seem to be largely ignored and often times annoying. Not sure why they need to be so big, seems you could reduce the circumference by 30%-40% and have the same effect with less annoyance. Reduce the darkness/fog surrounding the portals to a few meters beyond the edge of the portal.
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Invasions - Scale, Scale, Scale!!!. Small populations servers cannot contend with these invasions or repair their damage. One major issue with Invasions is they have a huge penalty for players if they lose but no reward for winning. The current ârewardâ is you do not lose something you already have; howâs that a reward? Invasions need a rethink and rework in general.
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Settlement - Remove the cooldown from water wells in settlements. Settlements that do not have fresh water are at a disadvantage.
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Settlement - Move the town board in Restless Shore to near the Bank. Current location is terrible and makes a undesirable town even worse.
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Settlement - Territory standings should be expanded more, its a big part of the game. The Rent reduction perk is now pretty useless. Would like to see a perk that increases crafting/gathering quantities? Was expecting to see some âGreatâ benefit at the 50, 75, 100 mark; was disappointed. Is there a place in the UI where I can see all my bonuses from Territory Standings?
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Interface - No native Left-hand key mapping. Cant seem to remap the salvage key.
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Salvage - Gear with special abilities (e.g. Armorer Hat) should not be salvageable.
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Empty Crates - loot a supply crate and get nothing, my experience has been this is related to a misspelled or missing template name.
Update -
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Settlements - With the capacity change to storage chests, the +25 storage bonus from Settlement ranks could use an increase. It was already quite small and now pales in comparison to a storage chest (while significantly harder to acquire).
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Questing - A number of areas have few chests/hidden chests (Clearmonâs doubt) or all the chests clumped in one locations (Walsham / Karburg). Incomparison, some small villages like Croneâs Rest have ample crates. Could use a pass to balanced out.
Thanks for the chance to vent.
Seggal