The reason MMO’s are fun and interesting is because their environments emulate a lot of real world social dynamics, particularly the economy…
But when the smartest people in the room on public policy can’t even make our real world social systems function properly because human behavior is unpredictable, the fact that MMO systems have problems - especially when creating a “new world” from the ground up - seems like a no-brainer.
I’m an automation and controls engineer in my day job. I also spend a lot of time thinking about economics and public policy from a perspective of “social engineering”. Thinking about how social systems and economies and public policies work together is somewhere between a hobby and a pathological addiction for me. I spend time on policy forums and social media talking about how to make the real world a better place by deconstructing exactly where our problems are, and trying to figure out workable solutions with an eye towards both the “traditional” way things have always worked, and the best parts of newer ways of thinking that seek to solve the problems created by inadequacies within the existing structures.
I’ve also been enjoying New World in my free time. It’s a great looking game with a lot of potential and a satisfying game play loop. I’m reminded very much of Anthem in both the impressive quality of the initial offering, and the fairly significant threat of this turning into one of those games that was really spectacular for the first month, and then fell on it’s ass to become a huge disappointment in the long term.
But the biggest difference between this game and Anthem is that Anthem had a REALLY strong basic structure to the core game play, but no plot to speak of, and not creative direction about where to go in the long term.
By contrast, as far as I can tell, New World has the opposite problem. It’s got a novel and interesting story, an incredibly integrated world with TONS of groundwork laid for fleshing out the world from a content perspective, and MASSIVE problems with a lot of the core game play mechanisms, in both combat and the back end economic aspects of the game, that cause the game play to break down and become disappointing despite having all of the foundational potential that Anthem never had.
I loved Anthem. I often participate in forums for games I like to play - particularly early in their implementation to try to help the game grow into its potential. I spent many hours on the WoW forums early on in Vanilla talking about the need for hybrid classes to be able to flesh out all of their various class roles in end game raiding, for example.
The problem I saw with Anthem is unlike WoW, the answers to the early challenges weren’t particularly self evident. Identifying the core problems was impossible because in the end the game had no purpose and no story driving it forward to keep the player engaged. Games like Destiny have strongly developed lore that goes so deep that “lore nerds” are often the ones driving the most difficult mainstream content. Even for casual players and hard-core sweaty kids that only care about the end game, that background of having a lore driven purpose is what makes these games work.
New World seems to have that foundation.
So my goal here will be able to identify what the hangups really are, and then do a deep dive into why these problems are manifesting. and put an engineer’s eye towards implementing solutions.
The main problems I see are with the economy, and the combat/questing loop. We’ll go into the combat loop problems first because those are actually the easiest to solve in my opinion.
The primary problem I see is with spawn rates, particularly when there’s a unique monster that then has to be harvested for the quest item, and only one person can get the quest item.
World of Warcraft solved this problem by giving everyone who tapped the mob the ability to loot it for the quest item. This is a viable solution, but it also takes away some of the competitive nature of the PvE game WoW destroyed compared to older games like EverQuest. It’s subjective as to which you prefer as a player, so the problem is how to make every type of player happy (because you can’t).
It seems like the worst possible outcome is one I’ve seen play out, where there’s a skinnable mob that spawns on a 3-5 minute timer at a fixed location, and six to ten people waiting for the mob to spawn so they can fight over the chance to skin it for the quest item. There’s nothing immersive or truly competitive about this. It’s like shopping on Black Friday at Walmart where ten people are fighting over the last of the $500 60" 4k TV’s.
The solution is to make this mob spawn At a random spot in a large area instead of a fixed location. You have a gorgeous game world. Make people run around in it to find what they are looking for. Make the whole biome a potential spawn location for the unique mob.
Everquest did an AMAZING job with these rare spawns, but they put the mob on a 12 hour timer when it could have been just as satisfying for casual players if it had been on a five minute timer. Wow does this very effectively now with their rare spawns. New World can do it even better because this world is much nicer to wander around through.
The second problem with the game play and questing loop is that respawn rates for mobs are very obviously designed around the assumption that every location is going to get zerg rushed by players 24 hours a day. You can’t balance content between solo players and a zerg rush with a constant spawn rate.
The solution here is very simple. Make spawn rates vary based on local player count in a given area. You’re already mapping when players are within the boundaries of a named point of interest. Simply count the number of players in each point of interest, and the rate at which those players are killing the mobs, and adjust spawn rates accordingly. This way a solo player can actually go all the way through the cave knowing that respawning mobs aren’t going to zerg them, and twenty people AoE farming the same PoI can get just as big of a zerg rush in response to the rate at which they are clearing the zone, increasing the challenge to the point that you can push the boundaries of your server hardware and net coding playing out Tolkeinesque battle zones.
Those are the two biggest problems I see with the game play loop from a PvE perspective. Fortunately they are easy enough to fix.
The problems with the in-game economy are more difficult to remedy.
It’s a known issue that the in-game economies of MMO’s are driven by the same concepts of scarcity and opportunity costs as real world economics. People have written their PhD’s in economics on the in game economies of MMO’s because player driven economies are often some of the purest forms of free markets. They are also subject to the same detrimental effects of bad monetary policy with the in game currency. Print too much currency and you get runaway inflation. Put in too many currency sinks that remove currency from the game and you get deflationary effects that make everyone hang onto their currency to the point that nobody can make enough currency to afford anything the game provides outside the player driven economy.
New World is suffering from a pretty significant case of the latter problem. There’s a significant problem caused by basic economics that many players are literally getting stuck at the bottom of the Pareto distribution, and getting stuck without access to the currency becomes a positive feedback loop that effectively removes many quality of life features from the game.
Azoth is one example, particularly for fast traveling. A decent player can accumulate the resource fairly quickly. But it takes a pretty hefty grind in a given area to refill your tank to be able to move around the world. Because the world is so big, this actually creates a genuine problem for players who want or need to travel quickly.
I get that Fast Travel in an MMO is a hot topic because the ability to move too fast takes away the “stop and smell the roses” aspect of the game. New World benefits from the vitality of the game world at this ground level; getting there is a huge part of the adventure.
But at the same time, creating high barriers to entry that only player skill can overcome is going to push out casual players.
I can say based on experience with games ranging from EQ1 to WoW, that New World is currently set up in a way that the barriers to entry for things like fast traveling are high enough that only about 10% of WoW’s player base is going to continue playing long term.
What WoW got right is that it had something for everyone. Raid finder dialed down the difficulty of raids so that any player could get introduced to the content. Instead of barriers to entry, this actually funneled as much of the player base towards the content as possible. Players used raid finder to develop the basic skills of raiding, then normal and heroic modes to refine those skills, while preserving mythic as the challenge that only the best players could complete.
The most fundamental rule learned by WoW is not to alienate your casual player base in the interest of appealing to your hard-core players. The more content you wall off to casual players, the smaller your player base is going to be. WoW’s casual player base is what provides the income to build end game content. It’s a cycle of mutual prosperity that very few companies manage to pull off correctly, which is why so few MMO’s are highly successful in the long term.
New World can solve this problem easily.
Keep things like taxes for housing to keep trophy buffs active, and other high end mechanics that make the game “hard” for players pushing end game content.
But don’t put basic things like moving through the world behind barriers to entry that are based on skill. Put fast travel on a short cooldown, but it would be better to allow that cool down to be used to go to any travel point rather than a hearthstone type of mechanic. Remember that WoW had flight points that were trivially inexpensive to use, that were a slower form of fast travel that kept players more interactive with the environment. New World needs a happy medium between unlimited fast travel and 280% flying mounts, and no fast travel whatsoever unless you can AoE farm for Azoth.
The final problem is with tradeskills. It’s been mentioned in many threads that high level crafting materials are often worth less on the market than their lower level counterparts.
New World has actually got a pretty solid idea with preserving the need for low level mats in higher level crafting. It keeps new players important to the health of the economy, and encourages high level characters to revisit the old content to harvest low level mats.
To preserve the health of that system, the best thing to do would actually be to data mine the prices of common materials at various tiers, and use the town project boards as the “invisible hand” shaping supply and demand to make prices for materials more predictable.
Is iron ore five times as expensive as starmetal ore? No problem! Have the project boards stop handing out requests for iron ore, and have them request starmetal ore instead.
A lot of the problems with the in game economy are currently being created by the fact that these boards already hand out quests that ask for tons and tons of lower level materials. And when they request higher tier items they are finished items that require the use of the lower level materials in the process. This artificially decreases the supply of the lower level materials while increasing their demand, causing the higher level mats to become worth less than the lower level equivalents. Make the town project boards the SOLUTION to that problem rather than the cause.
I haven’t played much PvP yet so I can’t really comment intelligently there yet. But these are the issues I’ve seen from the perspective of a relatively casual player with some experience playing other games through the early phases, and an eye for what seems to work and what doesn’t. New World has got a ton of potential to be a truly great game. It just needs a few basic changes that are actually well within the capabilities of a good dev team to make. to make the game extraordinarily successful across the range of play styles.
Best regards,