D(ee)PS on the war leaderboard

 Went to war in New World last night.  Got in my DPS (aka deeps) but ultimately couldn't nab many kills and we lost the war.  Good learning experience though.

New World Content Creators I Follow

 As part of Blaugust 2023's Creator Appreciation Week I wanted to share a hit list of New World content creators that I follow.

 The bedrock of the New World content creators is the team over at StudioLoot (formerly New World Fans).  BDLG and Redbyrd were following and podcasting about the game years before we saw a launch and since launch have been the recognized stewards of the community.  Redbyrd has pulled away from the game recently, but BDLG continues to be active.  As far as I can tell their New World To Go podcast is the only New World podcast left standing.

 The next set of creators I want to surface are the folks over at M11 who put together the top PvE builds after every patch.  If you are looking to do well in PvE mutated expeditions look no further than the build and guides at https://pvebuilds.xyz/

 If the concept of "territory wars as a spectator sport" interests you then I will direct you to the one and only YaBoiWilly on Twitch.  He is a prominent shoutcaster for all things New World wars.  It has been awesome to see his enthusiasm for the game pay off in the streaming content world.  He has been doing it longer than anyone I know.

 Next here are a few generalist Youtubers that are always on top of New World updates:

• BDLG https://www.youtube.com/@BDLG.
• Jay Oddity https://www.youtube.com/@jayoddity
• 5 Head Survival Gaming https://www.youtube.com/@5HeadSurvivalGaming
• Newb World (really just love the channel name!) https://www.youtube.com/@NewbWorld
  

 Last I wanted to copy over a list of "PvP build Youtubers" that I dumped on a Reddit reply; all of these folks are worth following if you want to get into PvP builds for New World.  Copied in full, without edits, below:

For PvP it is harder because so many possible builds are viable but a few stand out above the rest and then build X works in one mode like OPR but not in another like arenas. Ultimately I have yet to find any reliable build websites for accurate PvP info so instead rely on a collection of youtubers

• https://www.youtube.com/@TorikuToriku - has a knack for meta defining builds; is mostly credited with the shirking heals spear/SnS "leeching bunny" build that is the rage these days.

• https://www.youtube.com/@MiKalol lots of insight for war and war builds/strategy.

• https://www.youtube.com/@KristoferESO covers lots of builds and curates builds from other curators making it easy to branch out. He also links to some of his written guides

• https://www.youtube.com/@Krotha has several good build guides for PvP; goes in depth on them

• https://www.youtube.com/@knightni7890 and https://www.youtube.com/@atlasfishmo the PvP tank legends in the flesh. not active with recent build videos but older build videos are pretty on target for the PvP tank builds.

• https://www.youtube.com/@Tootulzz/videos various PvP builds; posts on Reddit here a bit as well

• EDIT: forgot to include Mecr0w the mad man of science (aka he really maths the sh!t out of New World PvP) https://www.youtube.com/@mecr0w

GamesMadeMe: Actual Games + My Gaming Origin Story!

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today.  Since I've covered specific moments in games and related topics like gaming magazines it is about time I actually talk about some games that made me!  Today let's take a jaunt down the gaming history that has informed my current day preferences.

 We'll start at today and work backwards as best as my memory can recollect!

  New World is my current jam and holds the record of "most played" across my entire gaming career.  As of this post I am nearing 2,500 hours played!  Whats most amazing is that I never planned to play this game.  I only found out about it because it was hosting an early preview event at the same time as the Crowfall beta test.  

 While testing Crowfall the population numbers plummeted one day and when I asked why the New World preview event was mentioned.  I decided to give it a go because I just wasn't feeling Crowfall and I was absolutely hooked from the moment I set foot in New World.  I am still hooked.  I love New World.

 

 Guild Wars 2 (GW2) is next on the list.  Between New World and Minecraft (which we'll hit after GW2) there were a lot of games but Guild Wars 2 was the one that stuck around and kept coming back around.  I own and have played the first three expansions but admit I am all about PvP so spent a lot more time in World vs World vs World (wuvwuv for short).  

 Also as I mentioned in my Game Markets post I was a huge investor in Guild Wars 2 and truth be told that is where most of my /played time was invested in GW2.  I earned so much gold and converted so much of it to premium currency that I have piles of stuff and knick-knacks on my account. I also have several level 80 characters.

 I never really got hardcore into GW2 even though I played a ton (1,000+ hours).  I didn't have a guild and never played with one during my time in the game.  The game is very solo friendly so it was never pressed upon me to need to group up.  I did a lot of things but aside from playing the market one specific thing never grabbed hold.  I never finished the original story, never did dungeons/fractals/raids, really didn't finish any living seasons, and outside of some ascended gear pieces and a single legendary greatsword don't have much gear.  I own the first two expansions but barely played their stories/areas.  But I still loved the game and should I ever break up with New World it's likely where I'd go back to.

 Minecraft launched in 2009 which was a special year as that is when my oldest was born.  I tried Minecraft off the recommendation of a co-worker.  At the time there was no survival mode and the game was a very basic block building game.  The UI still showed how many players online; I used to have a screenshot showing there were about 500 total users online!

 The beauty of Minecraft way back then was that it ran on our work computers.  When the survival mode launched my co-workers and I filled our breaks and lunch hours with Minecraft.  We had our own server and played the crap out of the game (some of my Minecraft videos from this era exist on my Youtube 1 2 3).  

 As a first time father Minecraft was the perfect game in those first few years of my oldest son's life.  Relatively non-violent and abstract blocky graphics = perfect for a kid to watch.  I played Minecraft pretty hardcore for it's first four years.  Lots of fond memories and I wish to this day I'd of stuck with making videos (I could be super famous now!).

 And that would have been the end of Minecraft after I moved on to other things, but right as I was breaking my addiction my oldest son hit Kindergarten and Minecraft was every kids world at the time.  My son picked up Minecraft about 2013/14 and he still plays it to this day.  We've played together on and off and we even got mom (not much of a video gamer) to play.  Some my fondest gamer dad moments are building stuff in Minecraft only to find out my son cheated and spawned a wither the next day and destroyed it.  I still have the worlds saved and a personal cherished digital artifact is when screen recording accidentally recorded my son exploring a new castle I had built for him.

  Before Minecraft my passion was Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR for short). WAR also holds the record as the game that broke me.  I was the uber fanboy for WAR. As a long time Dark Ages of Camelot player I was confident that Mark Jacobs could do no wrong.  WAR was going to be the best game ever.  It was the World of Warcraft killer (remember we are going new to old so we haven't gotten to WoW yet).

 WAR is also unique in that the entire rise and fall of the game is captured in this blog's history (see tagged posts here).  If you were interested you could watch as I go from eternal fanboy to ex-cult member.  I loved the premise of the game and had a great group of folks to play with.  

 We formed the Casualties of War guild on the back of a bunch of World of Warcraft/MMORPG bloggers (400+ members at its peak).  Running that guild taught me I never want to run a guild again even though in every aspect of real life I am a leader (people leader at work, leader when I was in the military, leader in boy scouts, always my kid's sports team coach, etc).

 WAR was really fun to play when it launched. Unfortunately the game was never really finished and it showed.  End game zones were mostly devoid of content and the advertised end game of city sieges never really worked.  When it did work it was exploited heavily.

 WAR ended up crashing and was shutdown.  Fortunately I broke my fanboyism long before it was in shutdown and even though I revisited it for a little bit it never got it's hooks back in me.  It did forever change how I want to interact with new MMORPGs.  I'll be optimistic about games.  I will play them hardcore like I do New World and be a cheerleader.  But never again am I going full fanboy and expecting a new MMORPG to be the next big thing.

 November 23, 2004.  A day after my birthday.  World of Warcraft launched and there I was on the Azgalor server with my mind blown (even though I had played in a beta phase before launch).  How could a game be this good?  12 hours later I realized I hadn't left the computer.

 World of Warcraft (WoW) holds the spot in my record book for the longest gaming sessions.  I could not put the game down and my addiction was aided by an odd work scheduled at the time where I basically had half the month off and the other half 12 hour shifts.  I was also in the military in full on real-life-war-mode so interest in anything other than work and then getting home to play WoW didn't exist.

 I loved playing WoW launch.  I was fortunate in that I never really had problems accessing the game and playing.  It was just a magical time to be playing online games.  So many new players, and gamers, coming to check this once-in-a-lifetime game out.  I played as a Horde Troll Shaman but refused to heal; I was all about the DPS shaman with windfury on the great axe.

 My time playing WoW was focused on PvP.  I really didn't care about dungeons and did very few.  I never participated in a raid nor did I have interest in raiding.  I wanted to do nothing more than prowl the Alliance zones looking for trouble.  Since there were PvP servers I was given that opportunity.  Later on battlegrounds came out and that was my jam.

 As magical as WoW was though it didn't hook me long term.  I gave up playing before the first expansion came out and it was months later before I gave The Burning Crusade a try.  I really don't know why I went from playing 12 hours straight to not interested.  Partly it was landing an amazing girlfriend who then became my wife, but mostly I just stopped playing.

 Before WoW it was Dark Ages of Camelot (DAoC).  DAoC launched Oct 9, 2001 and I played it faithfully until WoW wrenched me away.  I loved the Realm vs Realm and played a Runecaster for Midgard on the Merlin server.  I was at or adjacent to many of the world firsts in the game: there when the first relic was captured, in the race to be the first player to 1 million realm points, and there when the guy that did make it to a million realm points got part of the game world named after him (screw you Dakkon!).

 Mixed in with my time in World of Warcraft and Dark Ages of Camelot was Star Wars Galaxies.  I was an early adopter as I was heavily involved in the Star Wars roleplaying forums the game hosted before launch.  I was in the early beta/alpha tests when all there was to the game was an empty sand zone and speech bubbles.

 Star Wars Galaxies had some of the best possible MMO systems ever created.  It is a shame they never got the time of day if they were not strictly combat or Jedi related.  As I tell people I want to be the moisture farmer so as the game steered more to letting anyone become a Jedi the more it wasn't for me.  But systems like housing, vendors, gathering, and crafting - no game has done it better.  No game even comes close.  Damn it game developers; give me SWG 2.0! (No; I am not interested in SWG emu servers).

 Ultima Online is the first graphical online game I played.  It is the first game I bought when I had my own PC and my own place as a young adult.  I rushed to get internet solely because I wanted to play Ultima Online.  

 I was introduced to Ultima Online years before that moment when I was working in a grocery store as a teen and my manager played it.  I would get a chance to go to his house and watch him play on a potato of a computer.  At the time it was original Ultima Online with all it's craziness: no safe zones, red players killing anyone that walked out of town without a plan, player run cities, game masters that would literally play god in the game, and houses you could lose if you lost your key.  To illustrate how early we are talking: there were still tons of open spots to place a house.  I never got to play, but watching was enough for me.

 Fast forward back to being in my own place with my own PC and I was joining right as Ultima Online Renaissance came online.  The Renaissance expansion brought a mirrored version of the world, called Trammel, that was completely safe and it opened up a flood of new land to fill with houses (the "open spots" having long ago been taken up in the original Felucca realm).

 Being a new player I had zero idea what the land grab was and other than some memory of watching my old manager play the original game I didn't know what I was doing.  So I treated the game like a virtual world; more intent on interacting with other players in a social aspect than getting the next progression item checked off.  If that meant just picking up garbage people left on the ground (oh yeah; items could be dropped and picked up by other players... how novel) then that's what I did.

 Eventually I did catch on that I needed to progress and that spun into having multiple different accounts so I could abuse all sorts of systems like the faction system, housing, and more.  Unfortunately I was so late to the housing party the only way to get a house was to buy it off eBay (yes, I bought my UO houses off eBay!) because all open spots were taken so even if you wanted to place a house you could not.

 I was very fond of PvP in UO.  I was not a player killer, but I loved faction warfare (player killing without becoming a red player).  I also got into the provoking skill which was basically the easy mode of end game PvE content as you could entice monsters to fight each other while you hoovered up the loot they dropped from killing each other.  

 I also got big into taming anything the game let you tame; my favorite being the white ice dragons.  Anyone that knows taming in UP knows the saying "kill all"; nothing more satisfying than a half dozen dragons suddenly vaporizing an enemy.  While in today's PvP metas it is "kill the healer" back then it was "kill the tamer".  Many a fight was won based on how many dragons were brought.

 Now I need to fill a gap between my gaming origin story and Ultima Online because before graphical MMORPGs I was addicted to text MUDs (multi user dungeon).  Without MUDs we wouldn't have the MMORPGs that we have today.

 The one that got me started was a MUD running in IRC on the Xnet IRC server.  I stumbled on it joining a chat room and a bot posting a puzzle; once you figured out the puzzle it let you in fully to the MUD.  It was like virtual Indiana Jones! I have no other recollection other than those pieces, but it was tons of fun and featured perma death PvP.  I killed my younger brothers character at one point.

 Probably my most invested MUD was a Star Wars themed one.  I don't remember the specifics and the websites are long gone, but I do still have notes I took on paper about it.  I used graph paper to map out areas of the game and take notes about things like "droid here" or "viewport overlooking space dock".  It had space flight as well as many planets.  I do vaguely remember getting into some drama and getting banned at one point. 

 I played plenty of other MUDs as well along with MUSHES and whatever other acronym soup we used back in those days to differentiate one from the other.  I even got into Medievia MUD for a bit which was the largest MUD ever and still running to this day.  It was mind blowing they were aiming for things like 20,000 players online and wanting to get to 200,000 (not sure what they ever peaked at).  I was used to MUDs with 5 people online; thousands was crazy to think about.  One of the coolest part of Medievia and many other MUDs was player created content.  It was just text so the barrier to entry to have your dedicated players help build was very low.  I honestly wonder if some of my poorly worded room descriptions are still floating around somewhere in Medievia!

 We'll finish on the origin story of gaming for heartlessgamer and recount the day I won a Sega Genesis.  I had played Nintendo and Super Nintendo at friends and extended family houses, but in my house we were still stuck in the "black and white" television era.  Without easy access to them video games were no different than any other toy to play with when visiting friends and family.  

 That all changed the day that I won a Sega Genesis.  The Sega was a possible prize from selling magazine subscriptions as a fundraiser.  I (really my mom) had done a good job getting folks to sign up so I was in the running.  It was towards the end of the school day and classes had just let out and announcements were coming over the intercom.  I hung back in the classroom to hear them.  I really, really wanted that Sega Genesis.  Then I heard my name and to this day I can remember looking at my teacher at the time and seeing the biggest smile on her face as I sprinted out towards the office to get my prize.  I hoisted the box over my head and for a few glorious moments I was the king of my school.

 I walked to school so had a few blocks to get home with the prize.  I really don't remember my parents reactions, but they were supportive of me getting it up and running.  I wasn't kidding when I said we still had "black and white" televisions.  Our main set was too old to get the Sega working and after phoning a friends parents we were able to get it set up on my mom's tiny little kitchen TV.  From then on I spent many an hour at the kitchen table playing Sega games in black and white. Some favorites from the time; Wrestlemania, Shining Force, and of course Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

 I will never forget winning that Sega Genesis and I swear the movie 8-bit Christmas is loosely based on that time in my life (I already had an awesome treehouse my dad made though; I just needed a video game console).  And that is the gaming mode that started it all and therefore is what truly made me a gamer!

GamesMadeMe: Game Markets

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today.  Playing the Palia closed beta a little bit one thing that shocked me was the lack of an in-game market to trade with other players.  I consider the in game economy one of the three pillars of an MMORPG.  I love my game markets.

 Let's start with the best game market I've had the pleasure to enjoy: Guild Wars 2.  Early on in development they hired an economist that had direct input in designing the game's economy and boy did they hit some home runs.  First: the auction house is global to all players regardless of what server they play on.  Second: there is an exchange available to swap gold for premium currency for the cash shop. Third: a public API is available so third party websites can crawl the auction house data.

 I made a lot of gold and bought a lot of premium currency in Guild Wars 2 simply through playing the global auction house.  There were many tools such as GW2TP that break down whats trending up and whats trending down that also feature tools to find easy profit flips.  More than anything in Guild Wars 2 I was a market flipper and I would not be surprised if 50% or more of my /played time was at the auction house.

 In my current game of choice, New World, I spend a large amount of time in the trading post as well.  The tools and interface are not the best, but there is a lot of "inefficient" areas in the market of New World.  Those inefficient areas let me slide in to make a gold or hundred.  These areas are always shifting as different things happen in the game and it's as much a part of the "player vs player" in the game as the actual "go kill players" aspect.  The market in New World is cut throat and the bigger you climb the harder you can get crushed by the true market makers.

 Another market I look back on fondly is how trading worked in Ultima Online.  There were two main facets: player to player trading and house merchants.  

 Players could own houses in the open world in Ultima Online and place merchants that they stocked with wares to sell.  As a player you needed to know who sold what where and how to get there in order to buy.  Many times in towns you would see folks offering to portal folks to their house and entire shopping malls of houses sprung up to offer a centralized area to buy.

 The market in the game towns also served as a place for folks to advertise their wares and find buyers.  Some "player towns" (close groupings of houses) also became extremely popular not just to go and find wares but to also stand around shouting what you were selling.

 One of my favorite activities in Ultima Online was to jump on my tamer and tame wild horses.  The horses would follow you into town and then you could transfer the tamed horses to another player.  As you could name the horses custom names it was always funny to see A, B, C, D, etc flowing in behind me as I rolled into the town center.  You could also tame dragons and other big bad creatures which were even more fun to figure out how to sell!

 Another more recent game with a neat market mechanic is Albion Online.  In the game all items are crafted by players; even the rewards given out as dungeon loot.  The game cycles items through the "black market".  As the game needs items of a certain type to put into chests it places buy orders on the "black market".  Players can then craft (or buy) items to sell to the black market and the game in turns puts those player crafted items directly out into the loot pool for other players.  It is an absolutely fascinating concept and something players make their entire career around in Albion.

 Game markets.  They are games in and of themselves and they made me the gamer I am today and that reminds me need to go check those buy/sell orders in New World.

 Oh and Palia... seriously... no market? WTF

Heavy bois represent!

 Just Atlas Fishmo and I holding it down in Outpost Rush last night.  We both ended up back capping and at one point it was 2 vs what felt like the entire enemy team.  Atlas plays a heavy PvP tank build and I play a heavy "wheelchair mage" build.

New World: My hopes for territory control revamp!

 Having gone through the war cycle in New World recently (we won a war, got a territory, and then promptly lost that territory in a follow up war) it had me thinking a lot about the territory control and war system which is slated for a full revamp in Season 3 later this year.  Here are some hopes I have for the new system.

 The most important aspect for the new system is to get rid of the current PvP mission model to push a territory to war.  The mission objectives are static and so freaking boring.  There is also no real way to defend against a coordinated push. Also after the first wave of kills players are not worth any rewards for killing until their rewards timer resets so it gets tiring real fast as you can't ever stop players and you get no reward for stopping them.

 The dev team has hinted that the new system will be a timed event and focus on concentrating players into the open world zone that is being contested.  Control points/towers were mentioned. I am hopeful this means lots of open world PvP and long enough windows that players can get into the action without having to set a clock but not too long that players feel like they have to treat the game as a second life.

 One of the other things with the current territory influence mechanic is who gets the declare the war at the end of it.  While most often its just one company pushing a territory these days there are times when its more than one and the one that gets to declare and do the war is a toss up.  That is a lot of boring PvP mission grinding for nothing so I am never surprised when players don't want to do it. The root issue isn't that declaring the war is a toss up; the problem is there is only one war as the result of the action.  

 My hope with the new system is a tiered set of war brackets where every company should be able to declare war and get matched up (or not) with a defending company.  While one company owns the territory it should be a faction-wide event when it comes to the war.  If I'm a small company that contributed I should be able to get a war and fill out a roster against the opposing faction.

 My vision would be a set of tiers of company wars.  The top tier is for the faction control of the territory and governed by the winning company.  The lower tiered wars would be for a slice of the territory pie; basically wars would be for a stake of the prize.  I would even be open to the idea of a company in an enemy faction winning a stake in another factions territory; though at a reduced percent if their faction isn't the owning faction.

 Anyway they do it they need to make war more accessible to more players.  The only way to avoid the "war logger" (players that only log in for wars and often have several accounts to get around account restrictions) is to ensure the wars all happen at the same time so players have to pick where they are fighting for that war.  

 I'd love to see a war calendar where a new territory is going into war every three days and the opposite day is for territory control fights and invasions.  Then if you win a stake in a territory you can rest longer than a couple days before you are cycling back up for defense.  The current pace a territory can be pushed is exhausting.

 In summary: make pushing territory into conflict an event and ensure more players can get into wars while spreading out the rewards for territory control to more companies.  Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

Sexy OPR win!

 

Gamer Lady Plays New World

 For the second day of Blaugust 2023 we are checking in on Gamer Lady who logged back in to play some New World.

I am happy to say that Amazon has made some significant changes to New World and I’m pleasantly surprised at how much fun I’ve been having. 

 Gamer Lady is still in the leveling process (level 38) so is not in the end game loops.  She is also going through the updated main story quest which she is giving positive nods towards.  Personally I didn't like the changed questline as it's very different than the original, but glad to see others enjoying it.

 I also have to chuckle a bit as early in the post she explains "you’ll know that inventory management is a big deal for me when it comes to enjoying a game" and then later "The gear drops also feel generous and I’ve been able to pick up and try out every type of weapon in the game as I’ve done quests."  

 Oh my sweet summer child! Eventually that generosity of drops turns into inventory management hell as in the end game New World drops so much crap that takes up space and has to be dealt with that there is no doubt a number of players that have quit over having to deal with inventory management!

 Anyways; Blaugust rolls on.  Jump over and say hey to Gamer Lady.

How to increase your PvE damage in New World

 I wrote up this long reply on Reddit and figured I'd copy and paste it for the blog record. Here is my checklist for increasing PvE damage

UPDATED 4/17/2024 for Rise of the Angry Earth expansion changes and Season 5 changes to armor weights

• Bane weapon (increases damage against specific target type) - +15% damage melee weapons / +24% damage ranged weapons

  With the rise of the Angry Earth expansion and level cap rising to 65 and GS cap to 700 the Bane perks are no longer relevant.
   

• Powerful Honing Stone - +7% damage increase - applies to both weapons by using one stone

• Infused Corrupted/Lost/Angry Earth/Ancient/Beast/Human Coatings - +15% coating only applies to one weapon so need to apply to each weapon

• Minor/Basic/Major/Ultimate Combat Trophies - 3/4/5% x 3 (so up to 15% total) extra damage against specific types. Note: ultimate trophies simply combine major trophies together so are still the 5% per trophy increase as majors were.

• Equip load also impacts damage (changed with Season 5)
  

  • Light equip load = +15% bonus damage

  • Medium equip load = no bonus damage (default equip load as of Season 5)
    

  • Heavy equip load = -15% damage
    

• Runeglass gems on armor (not recommended; too expensive and you swap gems all the time for mutations - but noted here) - +2% per gem on armor; so in theory +10% damage increase if on all armor pieces

• Runeglass gems on weapon (also not recommended; expensive but unlike armor you rarely have to swap your weapon gems so it is at least OK to invest - though a regulary gem is more raw damage %) - many of the runeglass gems can apply a damage over time (DoT) ability so for some builds this can be a net gain in damage

Other tips

• Make sure damage attributes are maxed; eat max level food and you should be getting to a total of at least 500 attributes.

  • A common split for newer players is 300 in your main damage skill and 200 in CON.

  • Then over time you reduce CON and keep pumping damage attributes as you get comfortable with not dieing.

  • The end end end game is to be in the "5 CON club" where you have no CON other than the base 5 and all 500 invested into damage stats. Glass cannon.

New World Daily Checklist (Updated for Season 2)

This post last updated 9/25/2023 for active event changes

 Recently I've seen more and more new or returning players to New World asking "what should I get done every day?".  New World has "daily chores" to a degree but not in a way of "daily quests" that other MMOs feature.  New World players have to have the knowledge of what to do as it is not well explained in game what daily rewards there are.  

Here is my checklist I play by every day:
Note: this list is geared towards a solo player that is level 60 and 600+ gear score.

• 3x Faction Missions
• Daily gypsum (up to 10 orbs a day which at 625 gear score is 4,000 umbral shards a day)
  
• 2x Emerald (refining/gathering)
  
• 15x Topaz (potion + kill level 55+ enemies)
  
• 6x Obsidian (kill named open world bosses)
  
• 3-6x Diamond (varies over time)
  
• 2x Garnet (pvp arenas)
  
• Daily legendary refining
• Asmodeum
• Runic Leather
• Phoenix Weave
• Glittering Ebony
• Runestone
  
• Event actions
• Update 8/17 - Luck of the Bones event - kill Rafflebones at a portal up to 3x times for shards and random drops.
   

For more details on these items read below.

Daily faction quests

The first 3 faction quests you complete each day grant bonus faction tokens, bonus gold, and experience.  To maximize the output each day I recommend:

• Get 3x bags with "Loyalty" which increases faction tokens earned (+14% tokens!)
  
• Dedicate 1 of your 3 houses to a town where you increase faction token gain rate with your town cards (for me it's Ebonscale Reach and I have 36%+ extra tokens)
• Don't be afraid to do the PvP faction missions.  
• They are generally the easiest to do and in many cities grant the highest returns (for example in Ebonscale I get 8,000 tokens per PvP mission vs at most 6,000 for PvE).
• The PvP missions are static so are the same mission each time.  2 of the 3 PvP missions will be in the same area and one at the fort's war camp.  I always do 4x a day; skipping the war camp/fort mission and taking the other two twice.  It takes me 10-15 minutes and I net 20k+ tokens, PvP experience, and 500+ gold.
  
• PLUS you gain PvP experience which can unlock PvP tracks that now have great rewards.

Daily gypsum

Gypsum is turned into gypsum casts.  Casts turn into either expertise bumps or after 600 expertise turn into umbral shards (a cast for a 625 expertise slot gives 400 umbral shards!). There are daily limits on the number of gypsum you can gain via certain activities.  Having a plan can maximize your daily umbral shard gain. As a baseline with 625 expertise across the board I am netting at least 4,000 umbral shards a day via solo play.  It takes me maybe an hour at most to cycle through these and many are done in conjunction with the other daily items I noted.

Here is the gypsum I target each day

• 2x Emerald (refining/gathering)
• As you are out doing other stuff make sure to gather.  If you are 200 gathering and gain an aptitude you get an emerald gypsum.
• The other way to get emerald is from refining at 200 and gaining an aptitude level.  You likely hit 2x of these a day doing legendary material refining.
  
• 15x Topaz (potion + kill level 55+ enemies)
• I drink a potion before I do faction missions in Ebonscale Reach.  Then I usually have to hit a couple hot spots to get to 15.
  
• 6x Obsidian (kill named open world bosses)
• I just hit the named bosses in Ebonscale reach as I do my topaz and faction missions.  If you do elite chest runs you likely will hit this as well.
  
• 3-6x Diamond (varies over time)
• Depends on the current event on where you get diamond and how much you get.  It is almost always the easiest of gypsum to get.
  
• 2x Garnet (pvp arenas)
• For a little bit of your time you an get 2x garnet from PvP arenas.  If you don't like arenas then don't do it.  
• +reward crate for the first two arenas daily
• +pvp experience
   

A couple other easy to get but require a group or more time:

• Level 66 portals - 14 gypsum = 2 orb
• Portals have increased rewards with S2 but I still find them very unrewarding for time spent; you can painfully -- slowly -- solo them if you really wanted
  
• PvE arenas - 2 gypsum = 2 orbs
• Outpost Rush (10-40 minutes required) - 3 ruby gypsum = 3 orbs
• +rewards crate with good PvP gear
• +faction tokens, gold, and PvP experience
• Expeditions (regular or mutation) = 2 gypsum = 2 orbs
   

Daily refining

If you have 200 refining you should be refining 10x of each legendary material per day (asmodeum, runic leather, phoenixweave, and glittering ebony -- runestone if you can swing the materials).  Since these are time gated and only 10 can be done per day per player they are always in demand.  You need to check prices and proactively place buy orders for materials so you aren't spending more on materials than the refined material is worth.  Or you can do it just when you've gathered materials yourself.  

You can also try to sell your daily cooldowns.  While not as popular as it once was there are still players out there that will buy your cooldowns and give you the materials + some gold to refine them.  You can usually keep any bonus refined items.

Bonus: if your faction owns Weaver's Fen fort you get +10% yield.  If time permits go over and cap it; most fort caps are uncontested.  I usually just run over and afk and it is capped when I get back.

Daily event

New World has events happening almost all the time.  

9/25/2023 Update - Luck of the Bones ended a couple weeks ago and the Siege of Sulfur event is live.  The event gives named and randomized item rewards as well as umbral shards and obsidian gypsum.  The first three times you do it per day grant a bonus rewards chest.

The event has been extended to end closer to the 10/3 expansion launch.

I have folded doing this event into my daily rotation even though the named items and umbral shards are not worth much.  The mean reason is because of dark matter that will become a central currency in Season 3 and beyond.  The purple rewards cache, if saved and opened after Season 3 is live, is rumored to drop dark matter instead of umbral shards.  Additionally the named items should auto update to 625 and thus when salvaged have opportunity at dropping more dark matter.

None of this is really hard confirmed but everything from the PTR data dumps says holding out for dark matter is the right call.

Old detail crossed out below: 

8/17/2023 Update - The Summer Medley Faire is over.  The new Luck of the Bones event is active.  See this Reddit post for the breakdown and what rewards are available.

Original:

Currently it is the Summer Medley Faire.  For this event the main item I take care of daily is to visit each town and get a basket.  Each basket comes with event tokens +  50-200 gold.  There are 11 towns to visit so that is an EASY 1,000+ gold per day every day of the event.  If you have no use for the tokens you can buy the event patterns (green or GS600) and sell them on the trading post.  This is easy money folks!

Also currently you can get 3x sportsman baskets from skinning animals.  This takes a few minutes at most and gets a bunch of cooking supplies which are easy to sell or useful if you cook your own supplies.  Additionally grants diamond gypsum if you didn't get that from the event.

Other events will be to kill a world boss which you need to evaluate if you want the rewards or if you can get something worthwhile from.

We won the war!

  We won.  Weaver's Fen is ours!

To War!

 I've been rolling with Evan's Empire in New World for the past few months and yesterday we successfully pushed Weaver's Fen (Castle of Steel) into WAR!  The war will be tonight so expect a report tommorow.

Love this man! YaBoiWilly!

 YaBoiWilly was a surprising find within the New World content creator universe.  He went ahead and took surprising to a new level with this tattoo.  Ya boi!

@playnewworld New World has changed my life. This game has done so much for me its hard to explain. Not only the game, but the amazing Community behind it. This piece means alot. I am forged in Aeternum! Shout-out Devan Smith from Mythical Wizard Tattoo in Indiana! pic.twitter.com/Tj6Yg5hDDt

— YaBoiWiilly (@YaBoiWiilly) July 24, 2023

"We are talking to Reddit now"

 The New World developers put out their most recent Q&A and as they stated in the video "we are talking to Reddit now".

This was a pretty tame set of questions and answers.  If you want to analyze all of it you can use this Reddit thread (zing!)!

 One area that they hit on that did interest me was the topic of azoth salt.  As I've mentioned it feels broken since the season 2 changes and ultimately it really serves no purpose in the game.  I posted this as a comment on the Youtube video.

Salt makes no sense as a currency.  There is nothing other than the tracks to spend it on and now we have to hold progress while waiting for salt to accumulate (I play a ton and it took me 3 days of play just to get salt to select rewards from one track; I easily lost multiple tracks worth of PvP experience holding it up).  And at the end of the day either salt is going to be meaningless like it was before or its going to be too little.  The game would be better if salt was removed. It makes no sense to have to do the PvP activity for XP first and then also accumulate a currency to select a reward: just let us select the reward.  Is 3x rewards per PvP track that game breaking?  

I earn far more rewards for a mutated expedition without having to earn a secondary currency... why insist on continually adding gate keeping to PvP.  While we are at it let's also get rid of the "only the first two arenas a day reward a crate".  If you wouldn't put a restriction like that on expeditions don't put it on a PvP mode.

 They said they are looking at the issue and I am hoping it is more than just adjusting the salt gain rate or cost of track rewards.  It just needs be removed.

 Outpost Rush (OPR) was also discussed in a couple questions.

 First; cross world OPR has brought more matches (a big win in my book) but also highlighted more one-sided matches.  The devs noted that matchmaking is a big complex system to work on so they are looking at what other options they have. Personally I don't want to see ranked OPR but wouldn't object to solo/duo vs group queue OPR now that we have cross world queuing.

 Secondly siege weapons in OPR were discussed.  With Season 2 they were "buffed" but I'd be hard pressed to say I saw any difference.  They are still worthless in my experience.  The question asked was about bringing in other siege weapons.  Ideally they'd figure out what, if any, role the siege weapons are meant to play in OPR before talking about others coming in.  As it stands they are pointless aside from dumping materials into when trying to top the contribution leaderboards for a single OPR match.

 The real spice of the video was the tail end with a preview on the next balance of power update.  They pretty much stated as a fact the one shot blunderbuss combos are getting removed.  Finally.

 

Screenshot

 2,000+ hours in New World, hundreds of hours in the zone Ebonscale Reach, and first time I've noticed this thing off in the distance.  This also reminds me how good this game looks if you pause for a second to look around.

 

Dumb

 How did this happen Max Summer Medleyfaire Rep FAST | New World Season 2?  Such a dumb design for an event.  

 However, I'm not going to complain as I made 7,000+ gold earlier today being one of the two musicians getting tipped on stage for a few hours of mindless music playing (no, I didn't macro it).

Update: They've disabled this part of the event.

New (World) Ideas: Gemstone Dust From Salvage

  New (World) Ideas is a series of posts in which I present small changes that New World could make that would improve the game.

 In New World players can break down gems into gemstone dust which can be used for brief protection from elemental damage.  Tier V gemstone dust is expensive as it comes from Tier V gems and Tier V gems are needed in a lot of areas in the game; mostly to slot into gear for whatever the weekly mutation rotation is.  Once a gem is turned into dust or locked into a piece of gear there is no getting the gem back.  Thus it is not smart to turn valuable gems into dust and dust is therefore expensive.

 New Idea: If a piece of gear has a gem slotted and that piece of gear is salvaged give players gemstone dust as a salvage reward.  This would make dust more widely available and ensure it doesn't feel like you are giving up a firstborn child's worth of gold for 20 seconds of elemental protection.

CPU+PSU Upgrade: Need Suggestions

 I have been rocking a Ryzen 5 3600X for a while and I think it's time for an upgrade.  My current thought is to go with a Ryzen 7 5800x3D. This upgrade path will take me to the top end of CPUs that my motherboard (Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite) can support and should improve performance in New World.

 The AMD x3D CPUs have been noted to improve gaming performance for many games and seem particularly well suited to gaming performance over other processing tasks.  However, there is a recommendation to upgrade to a 1,000W PSU (power supply) at the same time.

 I have a current 650W PSU that has followed me for multiple builds now.  It has been ole' reliable but with recent crashing issues requiring me to undervolt my GPU the PSU is showing its underpowered nature.  So I will be on the hunt for a 1,000W PSU and open to any suggestions.  I am hoping to find a modular PSU so I can swap the PSUs without having to redo cabling.

 I am having issues logging New World's performance (external tracking is now showing an average FPS of 0.1....).  I do want to figure this out so I can do some good before and after to share with the New World community so open to ideas here as well.

New World Ultimate Trophy Update

 This is an update of the journey started in this post.

 I am cruising on my Ultimate Trophies in New World.  I have now completed 3x ultimate combat trophies and 2x ultimate gathering trophies. I plan to finish the third gathering ultimate and call it quits on the ultimate trophies for now.  I don't craft enough, nor do I have the major crafting trophies, to justify the crafting ultimates.

 On the right is my house's porch in Brightwood with the ultimate gathering and ultimate combat trophy on display.

 

 

PSA: New World Daily Gypsum Season 2

 Just a quick note on some easily overlooked changes to daily gypsum limits in the Season 2 patch for New World.

Players can no obtain the following daily (with previous amounts listed):

• 15x Topaz Gypsum (previously 10x)
• Turns into 3 gypsum orbs (previously 2)
• 2x Emerald Gypsum (previously 1x)
• Turns into 2 gypsum orbs (previously 1)
• 3x Ruby Gypsum (previously 2x)
• Turns into 3 gypsum orbs (previously 2)
• 14x Amethyst Gypsum (previously 7x)
• Turns into 2 gypsum orbs (previously 1)
  

Any other changes I didn't list? 

Updated 7/18