Alright I’ll try to break it down as simple as I can. This isn’t even directed towards about my experience, but just in the general sense for all players. I have done well over a hundred wars, I am not a war logger really, and I haven’t done the amount of wars some people have, but I’ve still done my fair share.
-A second job for company leaders
First, I would like to just show my appreciation for those players who lead companies and slot rosters. Its almost a full time job for them dealing with everything they deal with and taking their own time to do all the planning and strategizing etc. Dealing with all the drama and non sense behind the scenes. Its a lot for people who manage companies and deal with roster stuff. They deserve to get some sort of payment from AGS tbh.
-Extremely limited
Wars obviously are limited to 50v50 so its literally impossible to give everyone a opportunity to play. With what rides on the line, no one rarely gets into wars with out war experience and getting good war experience isn’t very easy to get these days. People might make a bunch of hoop la argument’s about just getting gud blah blah blah but the reality is even if AGS came out and made a super PVP server where all the top pvpers and pvp companies go to play on one server, there are only 12 zones to fight over. So even if there was a war in every single territory’s every night, that’s 1200 people of the 2500 population. So its impossible to get everyone into a war especially with how the current declaring system is. Now I don’t want to give out participation awards but at the same time every other mmo I have ever played has never had extreme gates to the best content of the game like new world does. Plenty of people have the goal of getting into wars but never make it for so many reasons, which ultimately cause people to lose interest in the game, at least the pvp side.
-Politically Driven and Drama filled
Now AGS can’t really do anything about this but as long as players are in control with who gets to participate and who doesn’t, these 2 issues will always be involved. Imo skill doesn’t get people into wars as often as politics does. Drama also is just infested with Wars to its core. I have never played a video game that has so much politics and Drama like new world does. Players obviously want to play and when you either don’t get picked or benched or whatever people get upset. Everyone thinks they are better than someone getting slotted over them and it causes drama. Its just impossible to give everyone a chance to play and wars will always cause drama and stress etc which is just unhealthy, I have know handful of players that have to “step away” for these reasons.
-Recent War changes
Here is my servers current map. One green and two purple company has 2 territories and another purple company has 3. The changes were designed to try to help more people get into wars but it really does the opposite. For example the company that has 3 will most likely get double or even triple deced. They can obviously not defend more than 2 lands. Meaning that territory will have a war with 0 out of 50 people on one team and the majority of the time they can’t even defend 2 so that’s two wars that are not real wars. This has been a reoccurring trend since these changes have gone through. Companies want War content. Some companies are extremely dominate where people don’t really want to attack them. So they go around and attack everyone else and take their land because they want war content. Thus resulting in this vicious cycle where 1 company gets a handful of lands and then multiple wars happening at once with 0 out of 50 on one side or rosters that lose in less than 5 minutes.
happens more than it should.
Also The merc limit needs to be addressed. attackers allowing to have 25 mercs just makes lands flip far to often. They can slot the best 25 people from the neutral faction and have a much higher chance at victory and if they do win, then almost every time they can’t defend it when they get declared on because they don’t either have the members or have the same thing happen to them, the attackers merc out 25 slots and just steam roll.
-Territory pushing
this is by far one of the worst aspects of war and IMO the BIGGEST thing that kills the game more than everything I have talked about. When the game first came out pushing land wasn’t that big of a deal, having hundreds of people out pushing, you would be done insanely fast. Now over a year later, most companies struggle to get 20 people out to push land. it takes hours and hours of doing mindless, horrible, boring, painfully boring quests that make you run in circles on top of it. You push for HOURS for a 30 minute war… and sometimes people can steal the dec from you. how many times have we gotten a “lets go push 10 percent and see if we get the dec” in discord? Needs to change.
Now imagine pushing for HOURS and then getting war camped for 30 minutes? sounds wonderful. It has happened to everyone at some point. Your company might try 1 or 2 more times before literally no one wants to push anymore. No sane person wants to push land for hours to just get completely steam rolled and even when you don’t get steam rolled and just lose people will often give up after a couple of tries and thus people lose interest in the game entirely or go join another company and maybe they have better luck. This is something that needed to be changed 1 year ago. Sure they are working on it, but it will probably be too little, too late at this rate.
-War is new world only competitive/purpose for PVP content.
What I am trying to say, is OPR literally has no purpose other than enjoyment or fun. If wars weren’t a thing, then OPR is all we would really have and there just isn’t any point in doing it besides to have fun and we all know how fun OPRs have been for the last few months and since the majority of the pvp population doesn’t do wars and OPR and Weapon balance have been trash for months, makes sense why players quit.
New world has no competitive mode at all really, sure wars can be competitive but like I said Take wars away and there isn’t any competitive game mode. Also competitive is just kinda relative, this game isn’t an e-sport, its just a mmo. Where one of the devs basically said they want the combat to be fun and wild and where anything can happen. New world Needs something competitive in nature or that has value to players outside of wars since the majority of players can’t participate. Sadly I don’t think new world has the player count or the team to be able to have a flushed out ranking system. Leader Boards won’t really help players stick around since they just reward jobless gamers. It needs something to retain players interest over long periods of time that’s obtainable for everyone.
New world needs a zone like Cryidil from ESO or WVW in GW2. Where anyone can just load into the zone and its faction vs faction vs faction over loads of keeps or forts, camps and other objectives over a giant zone. Always objectives to fight over bringing the best of open world and wars together in one.
New world has no real purpose besides war imo. Pve has no real purpose besides getting umbral shards and some gold. The Named items in pve are far from bis and its very very rare to get a “Bis” drop from an m10. The majority of us craft or buy gear off the trading post. So the pve content which is also caped and just has no real purpose compared to other games that have flushed out stories and gear progression through PVE unlike new world. OPR is just for fun and if its not fun then there is no point in playing. Leaving Wars the only purpose thing to strive to do at end game.
Wars are super fun but imo they have far more setbacks and negative/toxic aspects than positives and ultimately cause more people to quit than stick around. Perhaps i am wrong, but i think while wars can be really fun I think in general just the way they currently work just pushes more people away than keeps encouraged to keep playing. When you have wars every night of the week, the game is super fun and when you have 0 wars the game gets kinda stale, for me at least. perhaps I’m wrong but I feel like I have a lot of good points.