Rabbit's Revenge is back in New World starting 4/12 and with it comes this creepy poster image! Also it comes with some quality of play improvements; rewards are now guaranteed after 200/400 slain rabbits (last year there was no guarantee; I gave up after 600+ kills without the chest reward).
First; I ran into a bug where refining Tier 5 materials doesn't seem to count towards the activity card task. The first 5 counted, but the rest did not so the task sits at 5/50 and cannot be completed as far as I can tell.
The next bug I ran into was that you sometimes cannot change the skin on your gear. This is irritating considering you are awarded several skins in the season pass (and there are skins on the Twitch drop currently). It is also random which piece of gear will not let you change skin and then on your next login it changes which gear is bugged. For example; I could not change my chest piece skin this morning but all other slots were fine. Yesterday it was all gear slots I couldn't change.
While frustrating; these are not game breakers. I am still over all enjoying the season and finding myself doing more and more of the card activities. I tackled the first couple of quests in the storyline and hit level 39 now on the season!
New World Season 1 hit the servers this week and yesterday I posted about Day 1. Day 2 is now in the books.
I like the season journey as it gives a good cross section of activities to try out in the game. Two of the activities, duels and playing music, brought me to parts of the game I've not touched in months. While they were brief visits back to these systems it was good to be reminded they are there and to get rewarded for participating in them. This, to me, is the best way for battle passes to work in games.
The activity cards are mediocre. They do hit that theme of encouraging players to explore different parts of the game, but I question why there was a need to add the complexity of the bingo card system. There is too much time spent looking at menu screen for the card and tasks; time better spent actually playing the game. I would much have preferred just a simple daily/weekly task list where a quick glance tells me what to go knock out.
At least the task list on the cards can be refreshed because there can be a big discrepancy in level of effort between tasks. One task will be "complete an expedition" that will take 30 minutes while another will be kill 10 enemies that will take a couple minutes while yet another will be "eat 10 food" which takes 30 seconds. Refreshing, which costs azoth the more you refresh, can result in a simple bingo completion. And again this micromanagement is happening in the menu taking away from engaging in the game.
Another gripe of the activity cards (and season journey) is that it's all housed in the menu. I would have loved if I could add tracking to the overlay UI so I could see progress the same way that I can pin a quest or recipe. I spent way too much time in the menu and it took away from my engagement with the game world.
These complaints may seem like I am not enjoying the season, but that is not the case. I am enjoying it a bunch. I really dig battle passes in games as it gives me defined purpose to my playtime that is not just a repeat of what I've been doing for the last year (gypsum + OPR/arenas + the same faction quests in Ebonscale). It will wear off as the season winds down but then I look forward to season 2. I also don't mind the cost of premium as the rewards are outstanding in my book as a more casual player.
If AGS cleans up the card system to be less annoying they are on the right path with Season 1!
So what else is on the agenda with Season 1?
New World Season 1 hit the servers yesterday and with it a ton of changes. So what did I do with my time on Day 1?
The first thing I did was log in and drop $100 on marks of fortune. Then I bought my six additional gear sets. Following that I grabbed the Premium season pass with the +20 level boost (because time is my limiting factor these days; I'll just have to forgo avocado toast this month to make up the dollars).
Then I just... did... nothing. The original plan a lot of players had, which involved saving up a ton of stuff too turn in, was nipped when the production version of the Season XP Booster was found to only apply to passive experience and not all experience gained so those saved up activities were not going to be a "complete the pass in two hours". Honestly this was a good change for the health of the season pass and the content surrounding it, but it did shoot my day 1 plans in the foot.
I also watched BDLG's stream.
I also started theory crafting my next build. I wanted to go back towards heavy armor PvP tank or maybe a sword and shield/lifestaff build (aka the New World Paladin build). With the changes to heavy armor it may be more feasible this time around. Until then I am just rocking the sword and shield/greatsword build I've had for months.
More to come as I move forward into more content later today.
New World Season 1 is rolling out as this post is being written (morning of 4/4/2023). Hype!
Two more days of waiting; 4/4 for the Season 1 launch in New World.
Looks like we'll be waiting a few more days for New World Season 1. April 2nd is the new target.
Video embedded below:
To speedrun the Season Pass, the key is to pre-stage objectives and have items ready to turn in, which many regular players likely already have. Once the player has prepared, they can use a 2x season experience potion and turn in all the pre-staged objectives to receive double the experience. This way, players can maximize their returns within the short time the potion is active and quickly complete the pass. While it may not be possible for every player to complete the pass in just a few hours, this method demonstrates how players can make progress much faster than the estimated 50 hours.
I'm not against maximizing return in a video game, but I think this shows a poor design to the season pass where experience is rewarded lump sum and the potions apply to those lump sums. This is counter to pretty much every "battle pass" I've come across. Just using the Battlefield 2042 Season 4 pass as a comparison; any experience boost only applies to passive experience gained for actions taken. Any mission completed that rewards experience is not affected by the pass. Also you can't save up to "turn in" a mission later on; it just completes when you reach the criteria.
The main two issues with the New World season pass as I see it: passive experience is negligible and there is too much tied to the moment something is turned in (aka lump sum).
Passive experience is what is gained by just playing the game. Kill a wolf; get season experience. Complete an arena match; get season experience. For some reason New World decided passive experience was going to be so small that it would be impossible to use just passive experience to complete the pass (even though they try to say it's possible in their video). Yet, in the "card" system player's can get a lump sum reward for things as simple (and dumb) as eating 10 stacks of food. Not even eating 10 stacks of food over normal play where you have to let the food buff expire; you can just ram down 10 in 10 clicks and be done! Yet going on an open world adventure and fighting through hordes of enemies will barely be noticeable on the progress bar.
Since passive experience from just playing the game is not the way then what is the way? That is the lump sum card system where players get a literal bingo card of objectives to complete (like the eat 10 food). However, the bingo card spots don't autocomplete. Player's get to choose what part of the bingo card are completed after fulfilling the requirement. This is why Lemoni's method works: you just keep saving up completed items to cash in during the boost.
There are also lump sum reward challenges for the season; quite a few as Lemoni notes in his video you can get ready ahead of time since they are all turn-in related actions and thus you can cash in with the double experience. It is so bizarre that lump sum rewards get doubled by the boost potion. Unaware players are going to be punished for not knowing and those that do know are going to progress faster than the developer planned 50 hours. No doubt speed runners will then complain about a lack of content for the season.
The sensible way for this to have worked is that players get passive experience for almost all of their activities and the boost potion doubles passive experience gain for a short period. Lump sum rewards should be static and unaffected by the boost. This would mean players get more rewards for just playing the game instead of putting together a shopping list / completing a task list and lumping it all together for one giant boost.
Also while I have not played the pass on PTR myself just watching the videos I am not a fan of the bingo card system. The game didn't need another system to define objectives; it needs to drive players to existing structures such as town boards. The season story quest line and challenges are fine, but the addition of the bingo card as the proposed main way to progress is overly complex compared to just rewarding us for playing the game.
Season 1 is still delayed from the original planned 3/28 launch so we still have some time to wait. What are your thoughts?
Still no Rodgers news so I guess the answer to the question I posed before vacation, "I wonder if we'll have final Rodgers news before I get back?", was a no.
Trump was also not arrested as he told me he would be.
New World's Season 1 update was also delayed from March 28th to March 30th.
Diablo 4's beta actually ran a day longer than expected so I got to give it a whirl.
I guess I should say thanks for the universe pausing while I enjoyed not catching any fish while on vacation.
In my And Nope post the news broke that New World would not be introducing the ability to upgrade 590+ randomized epic (purple) gear and the patch note was struck from the record. The patch note has now been unstruck from the record with a few modifications (for now; we are still getting the whole thing it sounds like in the future).
Still some details to hammer out with the statement. It says OPR gear already does this but last I checked that was only Rusher weapons and not just your random 590+ purple armor or weapons from OPR caches. War is still a cool kids club; one that really honestly doesn't need any more of a reward than it already gives but I can let this slide. Invasion reward upgrades are a good deal though; it is honestly getting hard to field invasion defenses. Gear from gypsum casts is the real big one for this change and I am glad I have 100+ orbs saved up!
As noted it sounds like they want to bring it to the rest of the pile of junk items in the game (at least the purples) so holding some outside optimism on where this is going. I for one love the idea.
And just like that the New World development team is back to what I like to call "alternative winning".
This was actually a really exciting change that the developers had not talked about as part of this PTR so we were pleasantly surprised to see the patch note. This would have given an entirely new spin to purple gear that was 590+ gear score and opened more ways to get best in slot gear.
It was closest, at least in my mind, to the mystic toilet from Guild Wars 2. Take some junk, toss it in the toilet (upgrading to 600 GS in New World context), and random chance to get something good out of the deal.
I am hoping New World is considering this change and it just needs more time to bake before it is brought to PTR. This would open another path than crafting to gain best in slot gear. There is a ton of good 2-perk epic (purple) gear that a player ends up with so it'd be great to be able to upgrade it to 600 at a chance for landing that best-in-slot perfect 3-perk combo.
Since the gear binds to you when you upgrade it this would marginally impact the market and for the most part leave crafters unaffected as they'd still be the single path for best-in-slot gear that can be sold/traded.
With the plan to "shake up" balance every season it can't continue to take a year+ to get best in slot gear. I have close to 2,000 hours played and I have yet to fill out an entire set and with Season 1 on the way many of my builds are no longer worth investing in so I am starting over.
So here's hoping the developers are listening! Get back to winning already!
Tons of patch notes this morning from New World, but it's this update posted to the forums that has the community up in arms.
3 free gear sets? A limit to how many extra you can purchase? What game are the developers looking at? Three is criminally low. Let's count through how many gear sets an average player will have:
Let's just stop there... as you can see we are already at 16 and this is just if you do one role in the game such as just DPS. If you, like me, dabble in tanking and like variety in PvP add eight more sets to this list. And they are adding another ward/bane (human) as well this season!
I am less worried about paying for extra slots and more worried that since there are only 3 free sets that the total limit will be much lower than what is actually needed. The only way this small number would make sense is if they were getting rid of refining, gathering, crafting sets (doubt it) or if ward/bane were being changed so you didn't need different gear for different types (doubt it).
Over the last two days I've defended the New World developers a bit, but this is another "shoot yourself in the foot" moment for them. Just baffled here. Hopefully AGS takes action on the community uproar and increases the free slots and places no limit on max. Seriously; I was just reading through a more hardcore player's list and they have 37 -- THIRTY SEVEN -- sets!
Yesterday the New World developers couldn't win. To which the developers said "hold my beer" and dropped an updated 2023 roadmap, a brand new developer update, and the long awaited PTR update. Apparently the New World development team can win so shut up and sit down community.
Watching the developer update here are some thoughts.
Seasons aka battle passes were announced. This will be bundled content with a theme. We've known since the game launched that this was coming and it is finally here. The seasons will have goals which will help returning players know what to do when they come back. I like the approach and agree with the structure.
There will be a free track on the season passes and a premium ($20) track. Premium was noted as having "more stuff" than the free track but nothing will be unique the premium. This is fine with me and prefer this approach. Tracks will be advanced by "just playing the game" with some challenge activity cards that you can flex around to complete what you want.
A new expedition is coming featuring the Varangian knights. My only concern here is that the Varangians are a new enemy type and so I assume means current +ward / +bane gear will be ineffective. Does this mean new ward and bane types? If so that is irritating. I don't necessarily mind having to balance multiple sets of gear for different content but I also wasn't wanting to go start up yet another one for one piece of content; especially without gear set management... which leads to!
Gear set storage in March. IN MARCH. YES! This is honestly the biggest piece for me and I have high hopes for this as it was one of my main negativity drivers when playing. I have too many gear sets and got tired of managing via a spreadsheet (and anyone that knows me knows I love my spreadsheets -- seriously I do -- so this is saying a lot!)
The main story quest (MSQ) is being updated for Brightwood and Weaver's Fen. Fine, but irrelevant to the majority of the playerbase.
Events were mentioned. The spring event is coming and looks to be on par with the winter/summer/fall events and fills in the fourth "seasonal" events (not to be confused with seasons aka battle passes). Also sounds like we are getting more smaller events like the current Legacy of Crassus. I love events and I don't care if you don't. Combine events with the seasons and it should give players a set of changing content to always be working on while still have the regular non-seasonal content available.
Balance changes were discussed and they want to "shake up PvP" and what was discussed is all coming in Season 1. This was an absolutely stacked section; rapid firing through the changes so apologies on scattered thoughts here.
Also tucked into the balance section was a mention that world drops of ammunition
types will scale up so you should no longer get just iron ammo; you can
now get all the way up to orichalcum ammo in end game zones. This was loooooong overdue
and so glad to see the change being made. I may even consider playing a
ranged ammo weapon again!
Cross-server OPR is still coming but also more OPR changes were announced. Scoring changes to focus on objectives, ranged damage reduction on the forts, restrict sniping baroness, and updated siege. All great changes. Keep in mind that full details were light in the video.
A new arena map was announced. Fine, but don't really care.
The the territory influence game is getting updated under the title of "Influence System v2". "Less grindy and more fun" was the quote that caught me. I hope they can deliver on this and the plan mentioned with scheduling windows for the influence push should help concentrate action. Open world PvP is the best PvP this game has to offer and this change should bring some of it to the forefront. I still believe they have to change the quests that go along with it for it to be any good so we'll see what the "capture a tower" aspect looks like that they mentioned.
The "super deep" (their words, not mine) roadmap was updated at the end of the video (embedded in the beginning of the post).
Summer will be season 2. Transmog is the king of this season and I can't wait. I miss "Fashion Wars 2". Season 2 will also include a PvE raid called a "seasonal trial" that is waves and then a boss. This is separate from the "hardest PvE content" promised with the giant sandworm raid that is also coming in Season 2. Cross-server OPR is in season 2.
Fall will be season 3 and will have a full expansion! Mounts! New weapon! "Influence System v 2". Big deal. Big fucking deal. Cannot wait!
Winter is season 4 will feature mutators of the seasonal trial from season 2 and a new expedition. A little far out for me to get too deep into the list here.
Over all and in summary:
If we take a step back earlier this year the New World team provided their road map for the first half of the year. The community feedback was: "this isn't enough!". Legacy of Crassus was NOT on that road map so one would have thought the community would have praised getting more content delivered. Of course that is not the case as we are seeing with the event being live now; there is a high bar expectation.
What is that high bar expectation? The content needs to be challenging and have good rewards. Those are two areas that seem to come up a lot with New World content; especially when it is open world content like this event where there is no control around how many players may show up or what they will show up with.
Let's talk "challenging" first. As mentioned this is an open world event. It features a set of bosses and their friends spawning in a single spot. This inevitably leads to the same behavior as the seasonal events: a zerg of players shows up and beats it down. With enough players there is little challenge; just stay out of the big hitters and you won't die and you'll get your reward. However, if not enough players are there the content gets much more challenging.
I can agree with the community here: the event is too easy. We had some promising events with Halloween and Winter in 2022 where the world bosses, while not super challenging, did come with some unique mechanics and required you to be awake at the keyboard. Legacy of Crassus does not match those events.
With that said if the content was too hard players won't do it. Open world content that is concentrated in this manner is hard to get right. The New World developers need top change these events to be less centralized and more spread out and they have to figure out a way that the content scales in difficulty with the player count involved (which may mean instancing some of it or blocking more and more players from piling on).
Moving onto "good rewards". This is tough. If this event gave out "best in slot" rewards there would be an uproar. If the event gives up rewards of junk (anything that isn't a legendary and even legendary if the perks suck) then the perception is it's not rewarding. If the event gives up "good rewards" (anything legendary with good perks), while being too easy of an event, then players that got "good rewards" from harder processes such as crafting or mutations feel slighted.
My personal view is I think they got the rewards right with the event for it's difficulty level. Players can get guaranteed legendary rewards each day and if they do it each day they will get each of the unique rewards. It also rewards gypsum and umbral shards; always useful for any level 60 player. Also the chance at the new craft mod (not sure what it is; didn't get it yet and haven't looked it up). After that daily reward players get a crate which like most crates in New World rewards garbage players will just salvage (for example; I got a green Great Axe today).
The guaranteed daily rewards are great (see screenshot below of my first day's rewards). Are they best in slot legendary? No, because the community would complain if they were. They look pretty good though and worst case you salvage them for the salvage materials. Salvaging legendary items is nothing new in this game.
So the New World developers can't win with adding new content outside of the roadmap because it has to be "challenging" with "good rewards"; two things that are hard to get right in this game. Of coures I am finishing this post right as the developers dropped their next update and an updated road map. Maybe they can win? Watch below and you decide.
Some fun times in the community with the New World update.
Removed a total of 28 Sarcophagi and Large Chests throughout Brimstone Sands to address global economy concerns.
Community reaction is as expected and summed up as "WTF?".
A developer responded in the forums with the classic "it was too good so we nerfed it"
I am sure this will calm everyone down.
A little tardy (business travel), but here are my thoughts from the New World community Q&A earlier this month.
I want to give the team kudos for tackling community feedback about the speed at which "critical community asks" are worked. Basically: it's hard. As someone who manages a software development lifecycle at work I totally get it, but this message probably falls flat on the community. Still; kudos to the team for being willing to engage in the conversation and even follow it up in another video (where they mention "the door problem" which is very good at illustrating the point).
Back to the community video; bots were discussed. Bots are not the problem in New World anymore that they once were. Sure bots are still out there but it has been pretty clean for a while. I can't remember the last time I ran into a clear bot or felt like the market was dominated by bots dumping 0.01 materials 24/7.
Armor types were discussed and we know balance changes are coming soon. It is good to hear the team confirm they know light armor is too strong currently and needs a change. They seem to be focused on making light armor more risky which I think is a good approach since light armor has such good bonuses compared to the others but has very little draw back. It sounds like light will be a lot less versatile with defensive perks and thus be more of that "higher risk for higher damage" that it should have been all along.
Greatsword and Musket balance... being worked on. Duh.
Zone revamps were mentioned and it was confirmed that zones will continue to be updated as the main story quest gets revamped. While I wasn't sold on the revamps done already (I personally feel like they don't fit thematically) it is good to see games breath life into old areas. I was a big fan when World of Warcraft redid most of their world and really liked when Guild Wars 2 chose to burn one of the main capitals, Lion's Arch, to the ground and then rebuild it. Change is good for MMOs.
Corruption portals are also on the revamp list: less frequent but more eventful/challenging. I look forward to seeing them be more meaningful.
The conversation wrapped up with a discussion on PvE vs PvP weapon and gear balancing. "It's a hard problem" is a correct statement, but the team also mentioned there is already things like PvP only perks and PvE only perks so they've been working on this since the game launched. I personally think they do a really good job of balancing across the modes.
And last but not least they confirmed hippos are coming to New World, but only after we get monkeys.
Under the weather so don't have the energy to share my thoughts yet, but wanted to post that the community Q&A with the New World developers has been posted. Take a look and tune in over the next few days to my blog feed for my thoughts. I will share though that I am happy hippos are coming to Aeternum!
New World posted a short Dev Blog on an upcoming Combat Balance Update.
The video covered
The changes mentioned between timing windows and control point activities are steps in the right direction, but they are small changes on top of a system that is fundamentally not fun. The missions are boring run here and then run back. It is too easy for one side to out zerg the other sides. Once a player dies they are worthless for PvP experience for a good bit so it gets really annoying having to kill someone over and over and over and over and over and over and over and what was I talking about again?
Oh right! The territory push via PvP missions is crap. Which brings us to the community question: What do you want to see happen with the Territory Game?
First and foremost this system has to become more about the faction and not just the individual company. No offense but my faction's companies are equally as likely to screw me on taxes as any other faction so why do I care... at all.. about the system? The Territory Game needs to be more about the broader faction than single companies.
We also JUST started getting way from super companies with shell companies owning the entire map. Even with the changes there is still examples of large companies still owning more than makes sense. These large companies already organized and plan territory pushes so they are really setting "timing windows" already. Official timing windows just means they can take a breather until the actual window and be even more prepared for it.
And this goes right back to point number one: the territory game is for the elite WAR gang. So the answer to the question, in my view, STOP MAKING THE TERRITORY GAME ABOUT ONE GOSH DARN COMPANY! Make the territory game relevant faction-wide!
A few ideas (outside of getting rid of the idea of companies owning towns since that is not on the menu):
How would you answer the community question? Leave a comment and tell me.
