New World is so fun to play right now

 New World is so fun to play right now.  That's it.  Fun.  I love the Brimstone Sands update so spending time there instead of writing anything of length here today.  More comments next week on my impressions.

Brimstone San... oh shiny... New World Buddy

 I beat down the login queue, fixed my crashes (driver updates and a specific driver rollback), and enjoyed some of Brimstone Sands last... oh what is this shiny thing... New World Buddy!?  I will get to my Brimstone Sands impressions (probably next week), but I really want to talk about this tool.  It is very slick.

Oh shiny!

First there is the question "aren't mods against the terms of service?".  

No Games or Mods: sorry, but it's not okay to make your own game using our game content or to create mods. If things change for a particular game, we'll let you know.

Yes, mods -- as can be seen above -- are not allowed.  However, this tool is not a mod.  It does not interact with the game.  It is simply showing the same data that any of the New World websites such as New World Fans or NWDB are showing.  In fact I suspect many of it's data sources are the same as those websites.  

In addition to giving quick access to tons of information about items, crafting recipes, perks/abilities, and points of interest it also has an amazing feature for tracking gear sets.  When I clicked into the gear builder and started putting together my build for tracking I realized how slick this tool was.  You can select any gear and if it has set attributes/perks it brings them in.  If the gear has variable perks it lets you set them to what you have in game.  Then it has a screenshot tool that lets you quickly screenshot the build (see screenshot below - just me playing around to track a build so its not complete).

Output from screenshot tool on Gear Builder

There is also quick reference to information such as umbral shards required to upgrade, XP required to level, and crafting recipes (especially helpful this release with the introduction of Heartrunes and Runeglass gems that require a lot of materials to be collected).  On top of that there are various calculators such as gear score and access to crafting calculators with the ability to import prices from nwmarketprices.com for your specific server.

Over all this is just an amazing tool for a community member who made it "because I got tired of tracking things in spreadsheets".   I absolutely love things like this coming from the community and it enhances my play experience with the game.  I understand why AGS had to crack down on things like the in-game overlay map tools that were being built because its a step too close to interacting with the game.  But this, this little buddy, is amazing and just brings information to your finger tips as well as giving a better solution for build tracking than using a spreadsheet.  I can't imagine AGS would have issues with this tool as it just a glorified website in an app.

Want to give it a try?  First; you do have to trust this developer as Windows will flag it as not trusted.  Proceed at your own risk.  See the info below (and there is a discord server linked on the site if you want to get more involved):

This is an open source windows application (electron app)
https://github.com/giniedp/nw-buddy
http://nw-buddy.ginie.eu/

Brimstone Sands First Impressions

 My Brimstone Sands update impressions thus far...

...which means I haven't gotten to play in the new zone yet (Castle of Steel server).  The times I did get in I hard crashed (PC shuts off) so have been working through drivers and other possible causes on my computer.  Honestly a little frustrated with the queues and the fact you have to be in game to transfer servers (which means I have to wait ~3 hours for the login queue during peak hours if I did want to transfer to a lower pop server) and then only to have my PC crashing with the game.

Anyways; I don't have any actual impressions to share yet and I have a pretty packed week and will be away this weekend so I may be a week late to the launch party here.  Apologies to my faithful reader(s?).

 Back to my pre-launch predictions from yesterday's post: Here. We. Go. Brimstone Sands is here!  I questioned what sort of player bump we would see with the release.  

The answer looks to be about a 25k peak player count increase (40k increase to 65k) according to Steam DB charts.  Note: this is players that have the game open (not necessarily logged into a world).  Today as of 11:30a EST we are back up to 52k but leveling out faster so assume peak may be less.

A noticeable bump to peak concurrent but not the meteoric upturn some predicted (I saw many folks say we'd be back over 100,000 peak concurrent users).  

This is still a good increase and the peak login queues (3+ hours!) on the original merged servers in NA East shows players are coming back to check it out.  We will have to see where it is at after a week and things settle down a bit and then what the remaining effect is in a month.  Twitch viewership was also up but influenced by drops + major streamers returning.

Are you stuck in queue as well?  Drop a comment and we can commiserate together.