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.

 

Here. We. Go. Brimstone Sands is here!

 Brimstone Sands is coming to New World and the patch notes are HUGE and if you are reading this as of 9:30 AM EST on 10/18 you can get the patch and get logged in.  There is a ton to unpack with this update so I will share my thoughts on different aspects as I play through them over the next few days.  For this post I wanted to toss out my prediction for player population expectations and if we will see a bump here or not.

There is a lot of buzz around this update and New World has seen an increase in peak concurrent players since its announcement (15k to 40k peak).  This is a good sign that the changes announced are taking the game in the right direction as it seems many of the returning players came back to get ready for it.

Even with the buzz I am still leery on whether we will see a large bump in players beyond what we've already seen.  Here are some of my reasons why we may not see a bump:

• The previous free weekend event was a total bust and registered no bump to peak player counts
• The big PvP arenas update had good buzz (nothing near Brimstone Sands but still some buzz) and it had no impact to peak players.  The first "official PvP arena tournament" was a total bust.
  
• As mentioned already, many players already returned to get ready for the patch, so we may be at the bump peak.
• Fresh Start Servers, which are the biggest draw for a bump, don't come out to 11/2.  We may not see a real bump until then.
• Last: we may see the big streamers bring a crowd, as they always do, but I am sure it will be short lived albeit painful queues on the servers they end up on.

I may be proven wrong and we return to six figure peak concurrent players and I'll be fine with that outcome, but I also wanted to prepare myself for the possibility the game's popularity is at or close to its peak.  Time will tell and I look forward to finding out!

What are your predictions?  Leave a comment.

Warhaven Playtest Error: Failed to connect to the lobby. Please try logging in again later. - Not DNS

 Day 2 and still getting Failed to connect to the lobby error with Warhaven's playtest.  Oh well.  Probably giving up after today.  Note: the most recent feedback is it wasn't antivirus/firewall/security but DNS and that changing your DNS servers to Google (8.8.8.8) would be the panacea.  Narrator: It was not.

Warhaven Playtest Error: Failed to connect to the lobby. Please try logging in again later.

 This is my experience with Warhaven's playtest; or really not-play testing anything at all because I can't get past this error: Failed to connect to the lobby.  Please try logging in again later.  I've tried everything from ensuring its allowed in the firewall, to disabling things like Malware Bytes and other antivirus software.  Nothing works to fix this that I've found.

Oh well.

Saturday Update 10/15/2022: New World lessons learned and Warhaven Beta

A couple quick items to meet my "post a day" quota for today.  

New World lessons learned

 First, Scot Lane has a guest article posted on Venture Beat: New World: What we’ve learned during our first year.  I will have some more thoughts on this article to post later this coming week, but for now I am really glad to see this quote up front:

There is a saying that live games are owned by the development team until launch, and then at launch they become the players’ game. I couldn’t agree more.

I couldn't agree more myself and feel this is how the New World team has and continues to handle this game.

Warhaven

 Second, I caught wind of a game called Warhaven that is in a free beta period.  Ironically it caught my attention because of New World and the below video posted by Atlas Fishmo on Youtube.  What I like about what I've seen so far, and I hope to play it later today after it downloads, is that the combat has weight to it.  

This isn't the rollie pollies combat of New World; this is medieval combat with some heft and weight to it.  Fights are up close and personal and attacks and abilities are highlighted so the player can understand what is going on without having to rely just on catching an animation or sound clue.  I will share thoughts this week on my experience.