I think this is inevitable anyway. Endwalker is a major, major release for the most populated MMO currently, and it will draw a lot of players away from NW for a while.
I am not sure AGS cares much. NW is a box sale game. It’s unclear what the plan is for monetization of future content releases, but it’s unlikely that they will be free, because there isn’t much monetization through the shop happening. ESO has the same basic model, and they have openly said that they expect the playerbase to wax and wane around content releases and periods between them, and this is just built into the game’s economics. AGS is probably expecting something similar for New World, really. They don’t need to have a constantly high playerbase to be successful economically.
It’s also important to keep in mind that Lost Ark is coming in Q1. The open beta is later this week, and that will also pull quite a few players away from New World in the short term. In the medium-term, it’s a source of income for AGS, because although Lost Ark is F2P, unlike New World it has a real shop monetization scheme in place, and so it is likely that Lost Ark will outpace New World in terms of profit for AGS, even though AGS is only the publisher of Lost Ark, and therefore has to share the profits with the developer.
In all, expect the playerbase to go significantly lower in the next month. The key issue for New World won’t be that – at this point it’s unreasonable to expect anything else. The key issue is what happens in 2022, and what their plan for their first content release is.
You laugh, but Lost Ark is gaining a lot of traction in the NA market.
How monetization will play out here will make or break the release. If they move away from the Korean P2W style it could at least be something fun for people. They have very specifically said they understand this system will not thrive here and want to move into more of a subscription based platform for NA.
And that’s what I think we all hope for. The game this could be with just a few correct choices made.
But 6 months of great art direction or balancing will still mean nothing if the trust from the community is missing; if they don’t take every step possible to patch up all the exploits, remove the exploiters and firmly forbid it and enforce it in the future, re-balance the economy and remain communicative and transparent through it all. It’s a big task for a team that missed it all in the first run.
Or they could not really care about the bugs and exploits, fix them as development time permits because in the end they aren’t causing as much harm as people think. Obviously the serious exploits need to be handled quickly (like being invulnerable) but balancing and basic weapon perks bugging out and such is whatever.
The end game right now is a 3.5 step process. Hit 60 > Faction Gear > Voidbent Gear > Pay Taxes.
Servers are going to die off and the players that care will transfer to populated servers. Over time you’ll have a couple dedicated servers at max capacity with most of the bugs with weapons fixed and everyone in Voidbent fighting over Terrority.
That will continue until the First content patch, which is likely a decent ways out.
You can dupe all the gold in the world, but there isn’t anything to spend it on
I feel glad of my decision to jump ship when 1.0.3 was announced.
I also enjoy watching ships sink while sipping tea. My server didn’t break the 1000 threshold this weekend, it’s absolutely hilarious.
Can’t you read? I enjoy disasters. On a similar note, why are you wasting time getting mad at bad smells on the forums instead of having fun in Aeternum?
