I appreciate the post is quite long but I promise you are probably thinking the exact same thing!
Lets start with the servers, I am from the EU, we have the highest player base on the game, as I am writing this we currently have 50% of the online player base (56,000). Server progression and stability in New World relies on numbers and active players, the max server pop of servers is on some servers 2,250, on EU servers only 9 servers are hitting half of that maximum population and this is reducing by the day. Around 75% of the servers are at less than a quarter capacity at peak time each day. Amazon! Please! Allow! Transfers! Immediately! Or! Server! Merge!
My server for example hasn’t had anyone running restless shore, reekwater and weavers fen for about 2 weeks, so zero progression. It’s painful.
Lets get into the gameplay -
I log in every day with the aim of progressing, the only way I can do so right now being level 60 is by improving my gear or improving my skills, lets start with improving skills.
They have made a change to crafting to weight more towards XP gain at the higher level craftable items to encourage you to craft higher level items, but this has made 0 difference to how things are crafted. You still have to grind out the same amount/if not more metric funk tonnes of base level crafting ingredients and all you have to do is buy the higher level ingredients e.g ironwood or orichalcum off the market which are virtually priced at 0.01 gold despite being end game gatherables, because the amount you need to use of it to craft is considerably less than the base ingredients. Simple fix – increase the amount of the higher level gatherables required to craft higher level items and reduce the amount of lower tier items needed to get to that point. YOU DON’T NEED A DEGREE IN ECONOMICS TO SEE THIS!
Next let’s get to improving gear, ahhh the Watermark system, I’m not going to go into detail because I’m sure you are sick of hearing about it, if you want some context and understanding watch this video (Watermark Gearscore Explained - New World Gearing | Push Your Gearscore Higher - YouTube) … The system isn’t that bad, it slows peoples progression slightly which this game kind of desperately needed (unpopular opinion) I myself like the grind I don’t like stuff just given to me, buttttt, Why in the F in a major update did this chest opening simulator of a grind just get made a whole lot harder (which isn’t the issue) it’s the fact that you can now only get weapons from elite chests, this issue hasn’t been hot fixed and to me this is pretty detrimental to game play, people have been grinding to gain gear score to be halted because there is pretty much no way of improving this? Amazon haven’t even addressed it properly, not once have they said we are aware of the chest issue we aim to get it fixed by X update or we will deploy a hot fix for this. Yet they introduced a hot fix to disable the harvesting of elemental dogs because you were getting double the amount of motes as intended, wtf are they smoking?
Onto combat, what in the world are they thinking, tell me how this makes sense! Dependent on what armour you wear depends on how much you heal, not how much focus points you spec, tell me where that change makes sense, this change would make sense if people couldn’t sit in heavy armour and run two of the most brain dead weapons e.g hatchet and great axe and hit higher than any other weapon and they will never die because amazon decide to nerf every other weapon to the ground. I personally play fire staff and since this latest update I have no high kill potential, I am virtually useless, I cant attack as fast as other weapons, my two special attacks rely on skill and timing to use but now they do a considerable amount less damage, especially now that I am forced to wear medium or heavy armour to even slightly negate the damage of a great axe or hatchet.
I used to have some of the best movement abilities in the game as I run fire staff / rapier, but now they are virtually useless with high cool downs and the great axe and hatchets ability to just magically hunt me down.
Two things that really stand out to me and shows the complete lack of understanding of game development are these:
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If my storage in a particular place is full, I can’t post anything on the market, so if a listing I placed of all of my tier 1 ingredients that I have had to farm to try and level my skills ends up running out of time or I don’t sell what I listed it gets put back into my storage, if this fills my storage I need to then place this back on the market at a cheaper price to try and create some space in my storage to be able to store things, but there is the issue that my storage is full so I can’t post anything…… WHAT! Surely that should be the first thing I am suggested to do, if my storage is full, sell things to make some space.
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The second issue is with the trading post, I have to gather all of these different things and store them to use to level skills or quest etc… because of this my inventory is cluttered and so is my storage, If I want to sell something I have to scroll through 50-100 items to try and find a particular item I want to list on the market, WHY is there no search bar on the trading post. My mum who has never played an mmo in her life would look at that and say why can’t I search for the item I need to sell.
Personally because my server is so dead now barely even hitting 300 concurrent players at peak time every day, I basically cannot take part in any essential end game content that they have said is a balance of end game content. Like portals (can’t get a big enough group ) since the buff, outpost rush (not enough 60 players on at once), this is really halting my progression so now until the next lot of transfers or the server merges, all I was able to do is login at the same time every night and do my elite chest runs, which have now been broken and aren’t really worth my time and effort since the difficulty changes considering we cant get a large enough group to do it. With that out the window I decided to just start trying to make some money using the trading post and levelling some skills, then the skill changes came but because of my server population, it’s really hard for me to farm some of the ingredients needed. I also now can’t access the trading post because they have disabled trading post usage because of their mistake with money reimbursements.
- So I can’t do outpost rush
- I can’t do portals
- I can’t level up my gear score efficiently due to chest bug
- I can’t make any trades using the trading post
- I have to spend a ridiculous amount of hours farming tier 1 ingredients
My main issue with the game isn’t the fact that amazon have made an unfinished game and the game is quite a grind because It gives me something to aim for, that illusive end game. My issue is with the never ending hurdles that they are literally launching at my head every time I want to progress in the game. The pain is that they try to make a positive change and I can appreciate the direction they are trying to go but it’s the complacency when a mistake is made and an issue arises that they just can’t seem to understand that every mistake they make and don’t fix quickly is more and more people leaving the game and less and less people buying cosmetics. This is going to eventually affect the money they have to produce the game which means these issues get fixed slower and slower as they lose resources.