Wrong direction, just wrong

General Discussion General Discussion
#1

Steam numbers are below 100k now and the data proves that the majority left, and may never return.

I personally saw this coming from the start, the grind then given another grind update. The chase to obtain Gear score ( whatever that system really is ) i believe has hurt the community so much so.

Is this really the direction the Devs want to go? Or is it too late to fix what is really the problem?

I hope it goes in the right direction, but the way i see things now is… Everything they have introduced is against all game makers NO sense in Development. You can not keep people grinding out quests, tradeskills, and fill in the gaps to attract players.

I have been playing MMO’s since the start of computer gaming. You just cant follow some of the issues i see in this game. It just does not work in the end.

Just saying i hope they fix the system, but the way i see it… we lost a huge chuck of gamers because of these decisions.

Damage control now, or you will lose your primes.

Best of Luck, lets hope we can attract players back.

10 Likes
#2

The funny part is, they updated the grind to all crafts after seeing streamers hitting 200 in all categories. Then the streamers all left. It’s pretty apparent 15-20% of the remaining population is bots.

And using nwdb gives a better number of players at a given time. It shows the population server by server. Whereas steam just counts people that have the app running.

5 Likes
#3

It might help more if they lost the orbs for the “end game” dungeons too to help with the crazy Expertise grind. I think that is one system I like a lot better in all other mmos is you don’t need to grind to get a higher gear score. The content drops certain gear score. So the harder the content the higher the gear score.

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#4

In General, the game HAS indeed become even harder while offering the SAME content as before. I even stopped leveling Crafts, and I know many that stopped too, cuz it’s harder now. For regular folk, and even harder for casuals.

I can only hope they will make the game easier on some areas later, as they add more content. We’ve seen this in other games.

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#5

I don’t get it.

They could do some easy stuff for crafters and gatherers that would keep them playing, but they instead… meh. It is a solid system, a good chunk of MMO players want to craft and gather, a lot. They like doing it, they like making stuff for others and selling stuff… yet NW seems out to crush this area. Why? It makes no sense.

They don’t make UI changes or PvP responsiveness improvements (granted PvP lag and other bugs are not easy to fix, but this is a core aspect and certain things need to be worked on, even if progress is slow any progress helps to keep players playing. Like weapon switching… fix it)

They wall off expeditions, time-gate… etc. ect.

They choose to force everyone to do the GS grind… say goodbye to players with less than 20 hours a week to play or who mainly want to PvP, which is over 50% of the potential player base…

Huge great looking world… where gameplay is being funneled into a few areas.

All data says most players (and any new players) are still leveling… yet most changes and what not are for the 5%… why? Because they complain the most? Any MMO will die without new players coming in.

Many gross imbalances that need to be addressed yet never are, that will cause long-term problems in both the economy and end-game wars.

OK, AGS did do transfers and merges fairly quickly (with issues, but they did them, and many MMOs have issues). They also tracked down some dupers and bots, and banned them. Cheating is always an ongoing issue but at least they are attacking the problem, it is a tough problem in all MMOs and games. They have fixed a number of bugs, some were really bad. So some progress is being made and that is great.

But the direction AGS is taking NW… it will turn NW into a small pop niche MMO. Some will like that a lot but it will greatly limit future developments due to a lack of funding, which probably means a P2W cash shop at some point. I don’t mind niche MMOs, have played plenty, but AGS (IMO) is not a studio that will happily run a niche MMO. The devs might be fine with it but management will not. Devs will get re-allocated off this project to something else that is using this engine.

10 Likes
#6

OMG what hyperbole. Just more FUD.

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#7

I really don’t understand the reason behind HWM & now Expertise. Its as if the designers decided to add another game at end game to increase player retention but alas its had the opposite effect.

Expertise is a pointless mindless grind fest. It should have never been part of the game from the start (in the form of HWM) and should have been scrapped in the latest patch.

Remove expertise, allow players to chase perks & rarity instead of hunting another 100 levels of gear score and then hunting perks/rarity & RNG 600gs…

Gear Score should have followed level path (10-100 level 1 to 10, 110-200 level 11-20, 210-300 level 21-30 etc etc 510-600 level 51-60) Once you hit level 60 items can drop at 600gs, with legendary items being rarest.

Bosses across New World should have compelling loot tables. Expeditions should have better itemization with rare items. Having the above gear score follow your level would make the dungeons (expeditions) viable from immediately hitting 60 instead of saving the orbs until you had a chance at 600gs once expertise (hwm) was max…

Its just a straight up awful system.

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#8

It is christmas. People are traveling, at lodges with family, so on & so forth. Getting grilled for playing instead of being with family etc. Chill out.

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#9

According to steam charts their are 109k players playing right now and the peak in the last 30 days has been as high as 177k.

Wouldn’t be sounding any alarm bells yet, the game is trending in the right direction.

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#10

That’s a bit misleading.

The 177k peak you speak of was the 28th of November, almost literally a month ago. In six days it won’t say that anymore, and that peak has not been achieved by New World since the 28th.

The 29th of November peak was 30k less players (145k) than the 29th, and New World has never achieved that peak again either.

Does that mean the game is floating face down? No.

Just some context on what that means in terms of “trending in the right direction”, which is to say it doesn’t mean a whole lot.

1 Like
#11

These post are always funny. Someone always writes some long post about the direction, the grinds too long, PVE ruins the game, time gate blah blah blah.

Yet just look at how shitty pure PVP MMO’s rank, and how shitty the amount of players is. Then you look at MMO’s that are PVE heavy, long grinds, hard work, and they have millions of active players daily.

So let’s not talk about wrong directions, when your suggestions lead to a history of failure.

3 Likes
#12

Gonna disagree, hope you agree to not suck the teet of inevitability.

#13

@THX-1138

O.K. let me out it this way, in my opinion in 6 months the game will have a healthier player base then it does now.

Been through many MMO launches and I will admit a couple weeks ago I was somewhat worried myself about the games future. Not so much anymore I like the direction things are going and only seeing it attracting more players long term.

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#14

I stopped crafts too.
Too expensive now to lvl and when you finally reach 200 you need to buy 3 houses and pay tax and on top of that you need to buy 3 trophies 50k each… for ONEcraft… then 3new trophies if you want another craft… (I leveled 3 professions to 200 before nerf but i dont craft… its just too expensive). The money I earn on chestruns opr and portals just cover tax and repairs.

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#15

If you’re going to play a game, that is the healthy attitude to have!

I like the mutators concept, I hope it’s successful.

Merry Christmas.

1 Like
#16

The biggest issue about the expertise system is that there is absolutely no reward even after completing such a huge grind which is the 600 expertise because the grind only continues even further actually getting much more complicated once the mutations get released.

It will be useless to have 600 expertise if we will not have the proper stats and perks to fight the mutations which will add a whole new layer of RNG to crafting and looting.

This game is actually about to turn into a huge mess because if i am considering this right then we will need a new and different set for each and every monster type that will be part of the mutation with us having sets for AngryEarth, Corrupted, Ancient and Lost to say the least. We will also need three houses with fulll trophies and so many consumables.

Anyway, this game has been released for three months and so far all that we did was to level up professions and farm gear score.

p.s. i am curious to see how the mutations will look on PTR next month because that will be the deciding factor for me

1 Like
#17

IMHO it’s not even the grind but the timers that are sending players away.

A whole bunch of daily timers that are not even synced, so that if you want to use them you need to be online 24/7.

Changing these stupid timers to weekly would do wonders. Players who play only a couple of days a week (typically weekend) would then at least see a point of grinding these things and they could take advantage of timed stuff in a one weekend session.

#18

Who cares about the numbers… you either like the game or don’t just stop crying about it and move on.

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#19

Dunno man, we got a stable 100k+ peak players 3 weeks in a row now. Seems like it stabilised.

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#20

Steam numbers for CONCURRENT players are down to the crazy low level of only being the 5th most popular game on steam and the most popular MMORPG on steam and around the 5th most popular MMORPG in the world.

This is a VERY popular and successful game RIGHT NOW.

On top of this the drop in CONCURRENT players have stopped and we even saw an increase over the last week for the first time since launch.

How many players that have quit we do not know as we don’t have any data whatsoever of active playerbase. What we do know is that it’s normal for players to play less after the initial launch hype and that will affect the graph over concurrent players.

2 Likes