I have tons of experience with MMOs, playing their economies, and playing the PvP elements within MMOs. I have backed NW for years and will continue to support the game. I just feel it is important to make a few suggestions in areas I see major flaws. This is just my ideas I feel could drastically improve the quality of the game and player retention.
Economy:
Remove all the random gear drops outside of Legendary and Named items or make them all bound on pickup. Preferably, remove them. The insane number and quality of random drops flooding the trading post makes crafting gear and items to sell on the TP almost pointless.
Crafted gear should be the primary source of gearing your character. Either crafting it yourself or buying crafted gear from others via the TP. This would boost the economy and make crafting vital. Crafting is very well done in this game and needs to be more important and a primary focus. Take a note from games like Albion where all items are crafted by players.
Gear should also break or be lost in some fashion to create a loop to require new items to be crafted. If not, the economy will become stagnant when everyone has BiS items. Maybe make Legendary/Named items able to be repaired with crafted kits. Extend the durability on other items and have them eventually break, but can be salvaged for mats. This will promote a continued need for weapons and gear to be crafted creating a vital gameplay loop and making an active TP.
Watermark System:
Remove it, period. As with all random gear drops, remove it. Have legendary and named items drop at a set GS. Have all other items come from the amazing crafting system. Keep crafted items at the forefront of progression and gearing. This will also help with elite zones and the zerging for watermark will go away.
Elite Zones:
Forget whatever you just did, that was terrible. By removing the watermark you can remove most of the zergs. Have these bosses/elite chest have better chances at dropping the legendary/named items along with legendary/rare crafting mats. Then you will only have people looking for crafting mats or specific legendary or named items running the areas. Don’t make it impossible for 5 man groups to run them or solo players to sneak around. The recent update screwed 50+% of the player base simply because of some zergs. Punish the zergs, premote challenging 5-10 man content and let the solo players sneak around and get a few chests so they can still play their style. Purposefully taking away their spots and making this content require even bigger zergs was a terrible move. The whole luck system was designed for smaller groups, get these areas back to aimed at smaller groups. Find other ways to balance these areas and challenege players beyond increase health pools. All increasing health pools does is make it take longer and boring.
Legendary Items:
Make these actually legendary. At the moment 99% of them are trash and not worth the effort. Most random drops have better perks and stats. Removing all the random drops could help with this, but these still need attention and to be better items worth the grind and label.
Azoth:
Azoth need to have a way to increase the amount you can store as you level or through bags etc. Or you could make it where it can be stored in vials via the arcane crafting station.
Traveling:
The recent update and idea to make traveling on roads faster was a great idea. However, 10%? You might as well have not even done anything at 10%. Make this something that actually makes an impact. Like 30% on main roads, 15% on small roads. Or just give people the mounts and make them travel at a 50% increase and only useable on roads. 10% is just pointless.
War:
Why is Outpost Rush 1000% better and more involved than wars? Wars need the server/client issues fixed to remove exploits and address the lag. Beyond that, they could use some reworking to be more involved than a CoD domination match for 3 points followed by 10 seconds of fort attack to reach another domination point.
These need to be more focused around fighting in and around the actual fort. Companies upgrade the forts with real materials between wars. Maybe give them storage like OR has with the tents where they can stockpile materials for use in repairing/supplying during the war. OR has some great mechanics that could be moved over to war. If you really want to keep the capture flags, make it where after capturing one, that gate can be damaged. Each point allows each gate to be damaged. This capture all 3 to even attack the fort is broken and boring. This should feel like a war and be more spread out not just stacking point.
Other Thoughts:
Look to games that came before you for ideas and features. WoW has lasted this long by not being scared to use what others games do right. Most of its features, other games did first. You can have your own original ideas, but you don’t need to reinvent the wheel on everything when other games have done it well. Look at Guild Wars RvR, WoW 40v40 sieges, TESO RvR these games have solid mechanics for largescale wars and siege. Albion Online is a very similar game with some great loops for crafting/gear.
Stop ninja patching, it looks sus. Be upfront and honest with the community. Most of the community has more experience with MMOs than people working at Amazon Games. They can provide valuable feedback and can tell when they are being given BS. In the end, being honest and upfront about the issues and state of the game will go a long way with retaining players. Look at No Mans Sky, they owned the state of the game when it wasn’t what people wanted. They lost a ton of players fast. However they stuck with it, they corrected it, and while they had a rough start their community grew back and everyone loves them for what they ended up providing and their reputation is solid.
Any work being done of future content should be put on hold. The primary focus should be fixing issues that are driving away the current community. Stabilize the game, balance what we have, fix the server/client exploits, make the current content playable and meaningful to maintain a player base. Then start adding content again. Again, this comes down to learning from those before you. So many games have failed by focusing on providing new content instead of focusing on providing solid and meaningful content. Stabilize content, release content, stabilize, release.
Your community has waited this long and have stuck around through drastic changes in the past. If you own the state of the game and put in the effort the community will stick with you and love you for it. This is about the long game not the short game. Currently, we have a game that was pushed back a year and a community being told it was to polish up endgame. Nothing in this game was polished and the endgame didn’t work at release. That’s what I mean by being upfront and owning the state of the game. More than polishing was going on, the game wasn’t and in ways isn’t complete. I am glad its out and thank you for going ahead and releasing it as I enjoyed playing alpha and enjoy playing the game no matter the current state as it has great elements I love spending time doing. Just own it and fix it as the package as a whole has major issues for maintaining an economy and player base long term.
For those that are going to comment and tell me I have no experience with this. I am a programmer and indie dev with 3 published games. However, the relevant experience I am basing my ideas on comes from playing in alpha/betas/releases for pretty much every mmo since Ultima Online. I have tons of experience and far too many thousands of hours in MMORPGs and sandbox style PvP games.
In the current state, New World is a point A to point B game. Meaning you level up then you hit a spot where you have no meaning to play most of the content. The game needs content loops to retain players and keep activities relevant. It needs to build loops around it’s best features like the crafting. Crafting should be the center of all items and gear progression. This is not Diablo or the Division. We have an amazing crafting system, lets use it and make it vital for progression as a whole. From level 1 to 60 crafted items should be center focus. That will bring life to the economy and create value for all these .01 valued items that stagnate the markets. Currently you can buy random drops to gear from 1 to endgame and in many cases they are better than anything crafted or legendary. That has to go away.
Anyways, that is my 2 cents. I hope I wasn’t too harsh and I am sorry that became so long. I am very passionate about the game and want it to do well. The game is good and has a lot of great elements. I will always recommend everyone try it and I will continue to support the team and game. Just needs tweaking to create the loops needed for long term player retention.
