This will be a long post, so I will put a TL;DR at the end.
First of all, thank you AGS, you are doing a lot of work and are (from what I’ve seen at least) underappreciated. The patch rate for this game is solid, and with a few exceptions I think you have done a fantastic job. Even with server merges, the topic of this feedback (which is largely a complaint, but I will try to provide ideas to fix things where I can), the work was done well, and with good reason. That said, the server merge ruined my server and my, and my friends’, experiences with the game.
Before the merge, we had a couple hundred active players, well balanced factions, decent amounts of pvp (wars, duel groups, world pvp, etc.). More importantly, we had built ourselves into an overwhelmingly positive community. We all worked together on invasions. We unflagged to group with cool people from other colors. We had weeded out virtually all toxicity. It was great. Not to say it couldn’t be better; I was in favor of a merge to increase our overall population myself. However, the merge was too much too fast, and had some predictably negative outcomes.
Since the merger:
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Running any content in the open world is essentially removed as an option. You can either zerg it and stroll through without a challenge, or get swarmed by another zerg while you attempt to do it as a small group. Trying to do a 5 or 10 man Myrk run now takes planning around what 100s of other players are currently doing.
Possible fix: instanced elite zones, or reworked bosses that will pose a challenge to swarms of players.
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Gathering is no longer something you can choose to do if you are a primetime player. Nodes are camped for significant portions of the day.
Possible fix: Randomized node locations, irregular respawn times, a system that prevents the same player from getting the same node consecutively.
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Invasions are now something heard about instead of experienced.
Prior to the merge, we worked together to fight against corrupted invasions (you know, like the main story of the game). We consistently got very close or won. It was a great bonding experience for cross-faction groups. Now they might as well be replaced with periodic downgrades to towns. The company that posted the message in the above image controls multiple towns and kicks anyone who isn’t part of their company or one of their allied companies.Possible fix: Require a vote to kick for removing players or limit the number of kicks allowed.
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Toxicity has returned. Global is no longer a way to communicate to the server. It’s now a place for bots, WTS messages, and trash talking. Where before I could use it to advertise an impromptu duel event or just chat with other factions, now most players (from what I have heard) ignore it completely or have it outright turned off.
Possible fix: Automated, short-term, global chat bans for players who receive a significant number of reports; starting with very short times and increasing cumulatively or upon review by AGS staff. Trade chat.
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Intentionally disrupted economy. The company that controls the two most profitable towns uses their absurdly high income to manipulate the economy in a way that is detrimental to other players. For example, end-game metals are being inflated (2.50 or more for orichalcum ORE, and proportionally high prices on ingots and asmodeum).
Controlling a town should have value, but the insane amount of income all directed to one company is disruptive. I’ll probably make another post about towns and how dysfunctional the current economic systems tied to them are, but that is only part of the problem here. The bigger problem is that a company made of all the best PvPers from their old server have taken over the economy of their new server and are causing people who don’t even PvP to quit the game.Possible fix: To keep it brief, the economy of this game is a cool concept, but does not work across the various scales of populations. It should be re-worked to account for population differences on the server as a whole. One short-term fix could be to upgrade neutral settlements to t5 stations and re-work the income distributions to be crafting/refining heavy so that bad actors can be effectively boycotted.
The sum of most of the problems post-merge have to do with too many people being thrown together too quickly. It disrupted communities and didn’t give them a chance to get to know each other before the numbers were to a point where a small number of bad actors can be lost in the sea of new faces. There is no accountability or a way to enforce accountability by players in a largely social game. The rest of the problems are mechanical and related to a problem of too many people in one place. I, and virtually all the people I have talked to, do not like how crowded the game has become. It is reminiscent of the first days where we sat in queue and fought over iron nodes. Two things that we don’t miss.
Smaller merges with cross-server Outpost Rush queues would have been a better option in my opinion. Our server was fine, and would have been fine with perhaps double it’s previous active players. Now, with four or more times the active population, we’re just waiting for people to quit so we can play again. We have even started using our discord for people who are looking for games to play until New World is fun again.
I don’t want to leave this on a negative note, because New World is fun, AGS is doing a lot of work to make it better, and I believe it will be better in the fairly near future. So please don’t take this post as a salt/wine/crying post. It is constructive criticism that I hope leads to a better experience for people.
TL:DR: The server merges were too much too fast. End-game content (except expeditions and arenas) are not designed to accommodate the volume of players that are participating. The economy is not designed for one company to have significantly more income than the rest of the server combined. The result is a less enjoyable experience for many people. This is all changeable though, and so long as changes come soon, this game (or at least our server) will survive.
