The most common argument for fresh servers is bringing everyone in on a level playing field and how enticing this will be to new and returning players. This is true, and since Survival games like Rust get cited often I’ll go ahead and make an example of them.
In Survival games, the path to endgame is fairly short, especially if you know what you’re doing. Knowledge, skill, and luck can catapult you through the progression sequence. Years ago on Ark I reckoned I was about 8 times as productive as a casual, and even though I’m fairly crafty at New World, I would never progress 8 times faster than another player. Modern MMO’s go out of their way to make sure all players progress, while Survival games hide dozens of skip-ahead strategies.
One of the major appeals of an MMO is that you can nearly always catch up. Just by playing a few hours each day you can hit max level and get top tier gear, and New World is on the easier side of the grind. Pushing New World into a “race” style game actively cripples this. Angry at the dominant outfits? Well guess what, they can’t get better than they are, and you’ve got 24 hours 7 days a week to catch up. You can do it right now. “But they got BIS!” it doesn’t take a genius to see how much value drops off after the second or even first perk. That one guy having 20% more freedom isn’t ruining the game for you.
Lets focus a bit more and compare “Fresh Start” experiences to a race. We can divide people into two groups, those who are currently 625 GS with all 2-perk or better gear and those who aren’t.
Imagine a 5k race, then imagine someone sitting at the 1 mile marker pouting. They say they would have all the motivation to finish the race and enjoy it so much more if so many other people haven’t already finished. Also they blame their failure to complete and/or enjoy the race on the lack of a more constricted timeline. See how monumentally absurd that is?
If you aren’t 625 2-perked then this is you. You’re grasping at excuses for why you didn’t enjoy New World.
But what if that’s not you. What if you have already “beaten” New World, and you want to relive the early days. Well you can do that right now. Start a new character. Easy peasy. “But…” no buts, as I’ve already explained, turning NW into a fresh server race is actively bad for you. Unless you have 49+ friends, most of whom plan to take vacation from work (if they have jobs) on the fresh start launch, then you will be considerably worse off than you are right now.
We might get fresh start servers, it matters less on whether its a good idea and more on if AGS can make money off of it. But I can’t help but to think how tragic its going to be, when so many people take vacations and no-life 80 hours a week just to hit end game and have someone else ask them, “Wait, so you just no-lifed 160 hours on a new server without having a gamer crew to start with?” they’ll answer yes, the others will laugh, then max the taxes on the settlement, raid their base, kill their dinos and grief them off the server.
This isn’t for AGS. This is for you. You’re going to fail. You’re going to fail and be disappointed and come back here with a mountain of excuses why you yet again could not enjoy this game.
