Agree with most everything in particular jettisoning the expertise/gypsum system.
Nothing in this game has pissed me off more than the stealth nerf to emerald gypsum. And the fucking cooldowns of course. I was going to try the new releases next month but likely I’ll just uninstall this game which should please AGS as it is clearly the goal to get players to play as little as possible. It’s like governments and taxes: tax the fuck out of something and you disincentivize it’s utilization.
I think a general improvement idea is to let people run whatever content they want, as often as they want.
It’s better to lock or diminish rewards than blocking out Actual content.
Main questions for me are:
How can you stop the exodus ?
How can you keep remaining players motivated?
How can you acquire new players?
NW must be turned into a different direction. More of the same wont change anything.
Start with honesty and transparency. AGS is treating New World like it’s a F2P game with only 5 staff. I see CMs, as nice as they are, as only a wall so developers can just ignore players while they feel like they’re being listened to. Other games have done it, and it doesn’t work.
A list or roadmap just to the next update telling us what will be fixed or balanced or whatever would go a long way. That would inform me beforehand whether or not I should continue playing. May sound negative, but saving me from wasting a month of depression and discouragement is actually a positive thing. There’s no way they’ll fix all those known issues.
Want more players in PTR? Reward them. We paid for the game, why should we test it for free? I’m sure a lot have no trouble doing just that, but you know the saying with flies and vinegar and honey.
Give me a reason to craft when I can find a dozen other players who are 595 skill already. Give tiny bonuses for furnishing items in houses, like a fancy bed gives +3 azoth regeneration an hour. Overall, useless, but it gives me a reason to buy a bed from another player for a decent amount of coin.
QoL badly needed. Many things done in the game are obviously not made with thoughts of long-term. Recalling to every house to switch trophies (see crafting paragraph above)… no. I’d rather spend extra azoth for a bit of convenience. Please just let us know what you’re brainstorming and aiming for, even if you abandon an idea or whatever.
Just admit there’ll never be swimming in the game. I’m 99% sure of it. The sadness and hilarity of H1Z1 dodging, ignoring, and eventual admittance they can’t put in swimming because of the game engine’s limitations was just pure juicy drama. This is a $60 game, don’t treat it as less. We can take bad news. Again, just be honest.
Grind → RNG works in the short-term and not end-game content. Grind → RNG → Grind for endgame is disastrous, and that’s what we have. Grind gypsum, expeditions, OPR, portals, elites and chests for random gear, hoping to get that one lucky RNG… only to grind it further in dungeons. Grind resources, over and over, hoping to craft that 600 piece with the right perks you want or need… again, to grind later. Guaranteed burnout. I’m so dismayed my gear is completely obsolete now, and I’ve never found more than three legendaries out of everything I’ve ever done (all heavy with undesired perks that I don’t use, so to the TP they went). Though I have over 1,300 hours, I’m stuck under the same cliff as new level 60 players.
Players choosing to gatekeep content from others is just unacceptable, especially with such little content left to play. Been said too many times. I just hope the February update addresses these issues in some way. Just tell us what you’ve got planned, good or bad.
Believe or not there is nothing to do in this game right now.
Here is the solution make mutation orbs tradable.
So many people will come to play to craft and sell their orbs for gold and so many people will come to buy and do their mutations. I think we are not in a position to apply time gate events. Because there is only one activity actually we have ( mutators ). and if we insist on time based activities in the game there will be nothing to do for a week. I recommend to apply that tradable mutator orb update immidiately because the numbers of online players is decreasing really fast.
I truly believe new world needs time to create new content like arenas, new dungeons or new zones or dealing with bugs and bots. But as far as i comprehend mutators will give the time more than it needed. If we make orbs tradable so many people will enjoy the game till new updates come.
I think if mutator orbs are tradable it helps the players who play solo. Because in the current system it is so hard for solo player to trust other players to accompany with because they can left in mid way and which also breaks the trust of people to each other. Trading orbs will solve this problem.
And there will be unfair competition on buying orbs because big companies could even buy all the orbs in the server their gold inputs should be cut to at least %10 percent. ( i hardly believe its needed.)
Also i think making orbs tradable also will help new players to catch up because right now its hard to farm gold because all players are focused to mutators. farming gold was already compelling because of bots. And now this situation added as a inhibitor to the economy.
die in a few weeks if no more staff is added to work on progress to the really slow progress of the game.
At this point I would say gut territory control to take away all monetary incentive. Add more BGs and a queue system for expeditions that can be done without the orbs. Fix crafting so the majority of items crafted or farmed have value. Balance, make the distance between the meta and everything else very very small.
Basically everything AGS has known is wrong with the game but won’t or can’t take the time to fix/add.
Remove Tuning orb.
If your reason for keeping it is that people would only do dungeons, consider why that is.
Either dungeons are overwhelmingly better for gearing up, or they are overwhelmingly more fun than the other activities.
If they are so much better, bring the other activities up to par, so people can have fun instead of being misserable playing your game.
If they are so much more fun, let players have fun playing your game by doing them.
If you are afraid that your players will get bored due to lack of content, make more content.
Pvp is the simplest form of free content, as players themselves are the content. So make different versions of OPR ect (where’s the OPR without all the pve nonsense). And make the queues global so people on dead servers can actually play the game.
Hell, make a war map that is just an open field and 5 controll points, 50v50. Would take you all of 30 minutes to make.
Counter point: If crafting endgame gear is more accessible to the masses, players have less incentive to sell their cooldowns, driving up the price for endgame materials. Those territory owners with exorbitant wealth lose their advantage, which is purchasing valuable materials from players who can’t otherwise make use of them. Having all that gold does nothing for them if they can’t corner a market. Their money buys power because the keys to endgame crafting (rare drops) block most people from engaging in endgame crafting. Which, in of itself a confusing choice to me. Why block the majority of players from experiencing one of the highlights of the game? Anyway, higher rare material costs puts more money back in the hands of the players, better distributing wealth. Maybe 
And yes, this whole mutator mess is a good idea gone bad by tasteless decisions, once again. I’ve said many times since BEFORE the patch that umbrals should be a catch-up mechanic (which again, is a band-aid to the earlier point of gear/crafting accessibility).
I stick around the community because I see the potential in the game, I just can’t invest my time into actually playing it until AGS shows me they can pull their heads out of their asses.
Message me your server and I might make an alt to come visit you every now and then though 
So what, I’m meant to do this YET AGAIN, just to be ignored?
No thanks.
I wrote out some very simple ideas I think would make the game better. Just some adjustments to current systems.
I think gypsum is fine, but instead of 7 different ones. Why not just keep the experience bar once you reach 60 and everytime you fill it up you are awarded a gypsum orb. Up to 7 times a day, doing whatever content you enjoy without bottlenecks. When you reach 600 GS receive umbral shards. They did this with crafting with apptitude. I think the same logic could apply here and keep the momentum from the early parts of the game.
The game has a lot of golden opportunities. They either are not seeing them or have so much they are working on that they cant see them. It seems they keep adding more difficulty to the already played out content when there should be a large focus on new content. A lot of what’s missing from this game can be summed up to “this island doesn’t have enough stuff”.
Need to be able to sell houses.
More Solo content
More PVP content
More Crafting content
More PVE content
Remove the Expertise system and add new tier gear that is harder to obtain.
Hey thanks for the response. I’m glad the team will see this but I was also really hoping for some outward communication from the team on what they think of the issues I brought up. Or at least to be told they’re not talking about it to players at the moment (preferably with a reason why).
** Do you think I could get an answer on the questions I brought up? **
Additionally I’m going to remainder of this comment to draw your attention to other issues in this thread and elsewhere I think are well written and usable feedback the team can use.
This comment by Halcyon going over some issues he sees in the direction for endgame crafting and the droves of low quality gear you get late game. It also goes over and reiterates what I said in my post about players being encouraged to move away from the content they enjoy the most.
This post by Noother going over Crafting, Dungeon Difficulty, OPR matchmaking and Healing gameplay loop. While I dont agree with many of the changes they suggest I do this it highlights with a little bit of reading into it the cause of some player frustrations in these systems.
Here he gives a very good idea on how to make crafting feel more organic.
At the time of writing this I was on Valhalla and it would be understandable for the devs to wonder if the valhalla meta represented the whole game as other large servers like Eden had a different meta. After the top 3 valhalla companies have come and ransacked Eden despite the enormous defender side advantage It’s pretty obvious valhalla meta is the meta and the my post below accurately describes what the meta is and goes over many of the reasons it is that way.
Also sorry in advance @Shadow_Fox I shit on you and some of the things you say in this post quite a bit however you’re the only CM actually communicating so I didn’t have many other examples. However the issues are still issues and I think they’re important to be addressed. If the communication section is too toxic please still read the rest.
Apologies if it’s been mentioned before but in my opinion I don’t think mutation orbs should be time gated, also think they should be sellable, or at least anyone in the group should be able to open the desired level if they have unlocked it, with the orb of a different party member. There’s plenty of people who want to run the hell out of the dungeons so I think giving that option to them should be a thing, it also helps with the casuals who can pick up the game at any point and not be missing out on too much (i.e rotation runs).
I hate to say it this way but any member of a company that owns a town shouldn’t be part of the taxing problem discussion. While I understand there may be 1 or 2 decent town owning companies the mass of them have clearly proven they simply do not have the maturity to handle this sort of power. This tax system is a direct draw on the ‘entertainment’ I’m receiving for a game I personally purchased. The tax system is absolutely nothing but a hot bed of toxicity and is simply bad game design. It must be completely deleted from the game and a new system where factions own towns as opposed to player guilds must be implemented. The era of the ‘mega-company’ within New World must come to an abrupt end. New mechanics should be implemented for the upkeep of benches that revolves around faction ‘work’ as a whole. While this system is being implemented the town tax revenue should be locked from personal withdrawals from any player.
This is an unrealistic suggestion and you know as well as I do it will not happen.
I made like 20,000 pairs of gloves to get my armoring to level 200. Out of those 20,000 pairs of gloves not a single pair was worthy of either personal use or selling on the market. Think about for just a minute. Developers think about that for just a minute. Do you see a problem? Do you see good game design in that fact I stated? Yes I exaugurated the 20k number but it was a lot of useless gloves I made just for the sake of making them and only to delete them. Insane!
100% this. Instead of making the content fun and/or making more FUN content, we’ve been forced in a direction in order to make our characters viable. That is extremely frustrating and why a lot of our company has quit.
I would like to see some World updates. I know there are tons of other issues and more pressing items, but just for ambiance sake.
Make the nights darker or have a setting option to be able to have night darker and those who don’t can have it lighter like now. I am not talking about an overlay either where it is like just changing the opacity but really make it feel immersive.
All the great critter/bugs/bird sounds are amazing, however, I never see any. I see no birds in the trees. No swamp type critters like frogs etc. Owls at night would rock as well.
Fixing the housing tax. We all know/knew companies would be keeping it at extreme. For a casual player, they will have an insanely hard time paying the tax due to all the grinds in the game, it takes awhile to make money until you get your professions up. IMO companies should not be able to control the tax like that.
Obviously I have a more but this was more of mostly ambiance in the world requests along with the housing tax issue.
There’s simply nothing to do in endgame…All of the sudden there’s 1 damn way to improve your character, these damn umbral shards that you only get in one place. That place, the MOST BORING DUNGEON in the game. Elite run’s wont help anymore, which honestly was one of the last things that provided any sense of community post 60. Now, nobody even bothers. I usually get this excited feeling when I’m about to log on, despite everything that’s gone wrong. But now, the feeling I get is more like, uhhhhhh I don’t even want to log on but feel compelled to for some stupid reason, which goes away more and more each day. Now I just don’t even want to anymore