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Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

We're an hour away from the new PTR going live, and Amazon is using all the excitement to advertise their next Twitch drop cosmetic skin:



The description of the set in the article is "“the Azure Plains Apparel Skin is a blue dream of tomorrow framed in gingham.” It might just be the lighting or graphics settings they used to take the screenshot, but it seems to be a much more stylized aesthetic than most of the clothes in the game, closer to WoW than their usual offerings, but that might just be a reflection of the level of effort spent on it. I think it looks ugly as sin.

I'm not sure what's going on with the hat, because it looks like the weird headwrap portion clips through the brim and continues onto the player's forehead. Or that might actually be the upper part of the character's head not rendering and just being a weird black void.

This isn't a monthly Amazon Prime drop that users get for free, this cosmetic requires players to link their in-game account with their Twitch account and then watch at least 4 hours of a qualifying New World stream in order to earn the cosmetic. I'm sure some completionist players will feel compelled to do whatever it takes to earn the skin for their collection, but it seems like a pretty measly carrot to try to get their Twitch metrics up for the month of June.

They also advertised that the New World team will be going to TwitchCon and hosting some sort of PvP event while they're there:
https://twitter.com/GrumpyHobbitt/status/1540005499311210496

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Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

https://clips.twitch.tv/TubularGracefulDiscKappaRoss-0OFmViYcBLy3qC7x

https://clips.twitch.tv/UglyProductiveAirGuitarRiPepperonis-MeRRhes9JGJtaprn

And here's a preview of the skins coming out next month, courtesy of the PTR:

Discospawn fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jun 23, 2022

Saltpowered
Apr 12, 2010

Chief Executive Officer
Awful Industries, LLC
Someone on the art team must be really into bdsm erp. The only outfits that don’t look like something you’d wear in a dungeon are like that blue thing which is just so bad.

Looking forward to them breaking absolutely everything about the game with this update! I still won’t play it again but it will be good for laughs.

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

The PTR Server has been having some stability issues. 1 funny thing is that the developers have asked players to run away from the starting beach as fast as possible, as apparently the game won't let new players join the server if there are too many players already on the 3 starting beach areas.

https://clips.twitch.tv/AbrasiveGlamorousKleeAMPEnergy-JZkSUX_WwBt9oaCz

https://clips.twitch.tv/HelpfulDepressedFungusChefFrank-W8Wf6dOBQYb21AB1

Edit: One of the additions to the PTR is the ability to salvage named drops from expeditions for a new crafting material, and you can use that material to create named items from the expedition (as a sort of bad luck protection). However, it's currently implemented so that it takes 5,000 of the currency to craft 1 named item, and salvaging a named item gives you 30 of that currency. So, you know, guaranteed bad luck protection that still requires 150 runs of the same expedition.

Discospawn fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jun 23, 2022

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

is there a 2x exp leveling event coming up?

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

I said come in! posted:

is there a 2x exp leveling event coming up?
Yeah, it's going on this weekend (starting today) for character leveling, and next weekend for all forms of leveling.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

Discospawn posted:

Yeah, it's going on this weekend (starting today) for character leveling, and next weekend for all forms of leveling.

Sweet! I got to level 40 last night, so my goal is to finish by getting to level 60 and then I can uninstall this mess and move on.

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

I said come in! posted:

Sweet! I got to level 40 last night, so my goal is to finish by getting to level 60 and then I can uninstall this mess and move on.
Oof, you are entering the no man's land. That's the point in the game where an overwhelming number of players quit, and I don't know how much of a difference Double XP will make.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

Discospawn posted:

Oof, you are entering the no man's land. That's the point in the game where an overwhelming number of players quit, and I don't know how much of a difference Double XP will make.

From the rested XP i've had, it makes quite a difference. But we will see. But yeah this is why I stopped originally. The XP required, and how much you get per quest completed under normal circumstances is too low. The amount of effort required is too high for how little the reward is.

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.

I said come in! posted:

From the rested XP i've had, it makes quite a difference. But we will see. But yeah this is why I stopped originally. The XP required, and how much you get per quest completed under normal circumstances is too low. The amount of effort required is too high for how little the reward is.

Especially at 45+ where you have to spend more time running than doing anything.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

Okay so the 2x XP stacks with rested xp giving you 4x XP. It is really nice and how the experience should be all the time.

Maigius
Jun 29, 2013


Tacking on a rhythm game seems like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Just an odd thing to add. The clip also made it look kinda hard.

Scruffpuff
Dec 23, 2015

Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?
Whenever a game is floundering and has critical, possibly terminal issues, it's especially painful to watch their community engagement descend into focusing on this or that upcoming event. It's like a way of saying "everything is fine and normal, we're a healthy game, see?" without actually saying it out loud, which could raise questions among potential new buyers. That kind of selective blindness seems to indicate that it's more important to give the appearance of health to trick new players into dropping cash than it is to keep the players that they already roped in, and who already know the state of the game.

I get the feeling that they know what all the problems are, and they also know why they can't fix them. At some point there was a "then what can we do to make back as much money as possible before" discussion that led to where we are now. They're in the "Weekend at Bernie's" phase.

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.
I mean it’s possible some people just enjoy the game and want to talk about the game they like.

ShowTime
Mar 28, 2005
Do you guys think this game ever has a chance at recovering even a small, small percentage of the playerbase it lost? I don't think it could ever top the kind of turn around FFXIV had, but what kind of things could they do to get the playerbase to a steady 100k players? 15k-30k players I guess could be sustainable if they cut back the team quite a bit and consolidated servers regularly. I just don't know what kind of drastic turn around they could do to make this the AAA MMO they wanted it to be and it was slated to be.

Jack-Off Lantern
Mar 2, 2012

The name of the game is already loving tainted. Even if they turned it aroused people would still remember it as a failure

causticBeet
Mar 2, 2010

BIG VINCE COMIN FOR YOU

ShowTime posted:

Do you guys think this game ever has a chance at recovering even a small, small percentage of the playerbase it lost? I don't think it could ever top the kind of turn around FFXIV had, but what kind of things could they do to get the playerbase to a steady 100k players? 15k-30k players I guess could be sustainable if they cut back the team quite a bit and consolidated servers regularly. I just don't know what kind of drastic turn around they could do to make this the AAA MMO they wanted it to be and it was slated to be.

Probably not. I think a console launch or a free-to-play approach would help, but I’d expect to see a spike and then the same drop off we saw with the PC release. The game has a beautiful world and passable character/combat systems, but the current numbers show that most people hit the end game and go “lol gently caress that”

As someone who played hundreds of hours at launch and went very abruptly from playing hours a week to not at all, I don’t think anything would interest me enough to lure me back.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


Jack-Off Lantern posted:

Even if they turned it aroused

well, this might be one way to get players back

Hra Mormo
Mar 6, 2008

The Internet Man
If they got the bugs, exploits and missing features to a tolerable level, reset the totally hosed economies, revamped the trash progression systems and added content that incentivised commitment to the game other than FOMO, yeah I could totally see the game breaking 100k again easy and myself playing to boot.

Jack-Off Lantern
Mar 2, 2012

Jazerus posted:

well, this might be one way to get players back

You know, that was auto correct, but I'll take it.

RagnarokZ
May 14, 2004

Emperor of the Internet

Hra Mormo posted:

If they got the bugs, exploits and missing features to a tolerable level, reset the totally hosed economies, revamped the trash progression systems and added content that incentivised commitment to the game other than FOMO, yeah I could totally see the game breaking 100k again easy and myself playing to boot.

With the present track record, every single one of those steps will fail and make everything a billion times worse.

blatman
May 10, 2009

14 inc dont mez


Hra Mormo posted:

If they got the bugs, exploits and missing features to a tolerable level, reset the totally hosed economies, revamped the trash progression systems and added content that incentivised commitment to the game other than FOMO, yeah I could totally see the game breaking 100k again easy and myself playing to boot.

what if instead they took away all your cosmetics and introduced swimming that's somehow so broken that you're always swimming on land but walking in water

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

1stGear
Jan 16, 2010

Here's to the new us.

This is the kind of innovation that sets New World apart. Every MMO has you collect bear asses, how many have you collect stag assholes?

DaitoX
Mar 1, 2008
At least the player numbers seem to outperform the latest entries of Halo and Battlefield on PC. I bet AGS would have signed up for that in a heartbeat a year ago.

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.
So how many things did this massive patch break?

Edit: I’m dumb and thought it was live, not ptr.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

lmao New World has a quest that asks you to hurt a bunny, and then a ghost shows up to kick your poo poo in.

FreeWifi!!
Oct 11, 2013

Okay, that's true. Good point, Marquess. Point for you. But you get a point taken away for being a dick. So, back to zero.

blatman posted:

what if instead they took away all your cosmetics and introduced swimming that's somehow so broken that you're always swimming on land but walking in water

SIgn me up...

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

PTR STATUS
After watching some Twitch streams for the first few hours of the PTR going live, I took a few days off from my daily monitoring of New World's ever-hastening collapse. It quickly became obvious that the PTR is actually a really poor environment to test most of the game's changes (and it turns out the expedition group-finder and the new expedition isn't going live on the PTR until next week), so it seemed easier to just wait for the PTR forums feedback to come in.

It turns out that most of the community seems to have agreed with me, as after an initial influx of ~500 people playing on the PTR when it launched, it hasn't broken 100 concurrent players today. Maybe the PTR will experience another boom of players when the new expedition launches next week, but historically the PTR population never gets as high as it does for the initial release day of a monthly release. Keep in mind that the PTR still requires players to create new characters, enter the game through the starting beaches, and then travel to a city to unlock a bunch of loot crates in order to gear up and start testing the changes, so even at it's peak of 500 players most people probably only played long enough to equip their character, play an instrument a few times, and then log off.

All told, I'm pretty confident this patch will do nothing to 'save' the game.

GUITAR HERO WORLD
The new rhythm-based mini-game essentially doubles the number of skills players have available to level to 200 (5 different instruments that level separately), and the rhythm game is not nearly complex enough to attract players on it's own merits (not that any of the skills in the game meet that criteria, although a small number of people still primarily focus on fishing/logging/etc.). There are multiple difficulty levels, but the easiest songs already have some players complaining because they 'are just bad at rhythm games' and the hardest songs won't be satisfying for people who enjoy difficult rhythm games (I would estimate that the hardest New World songs are equivalent to a 4 out of 10 song in Guitar Hero, though I may be under-rating them as I've always enjoyed rhythm games). It's possible they couldn't make the songs any more difficult because somehow the songs seem to rely on communicating with the server, so lag or desync can cause you to miss your note, and it won't be until the patch goes live that people try to play songs on a halfway populated server. The game has hardcoded the button prompts, so users with non-QWERTY keyboards, left-handed keybindings, or those using controllers still have to use WASD, Space Bar, & Mouse Clicks. There's even the same problem as with other skills like Fishing, where the AFK notification will warn you that you will be kicked if you spend too long playing songs (because despite obviously providing button inputs while playing a song, the afk timer only cares about whether your character has physically moved recently), and the XP generation rate being really low, meaning it would take forever to max out even a single instrument (and there's 5 instruments that all level separately).

People on the forums were quick to point out that this is another system that seems like it would be easy for bots to take over, as playing songs allows other players to 'tip' you with small amounts of gold, and playing an instrument creates a large radius around you that prevents anybody not in your group from playing a song near you. I wouldn't be surprised if botters decide that playing songs isn't profitable enough, as it still doesn't seem like playing songs is rewarding enough to incentivize spending the time needed to max out your music skills, as all the songs do are provide limited buffs with meager benefits (like +10% gathering yield for 30 minute) and allow other players to tip you small amounts of gold (as in a single gold piece). Since the songs don't directly let you craft anything or place anything on the auction house, it just seems like another 5 skills/trades that are only worth leveling for completionists or people role-playing as bards.

Here's a YouTube video showing somebody playing the same song on guitar at all 3 difficulty levels, followed by a song with each of the other 4 instruments; I've skipped ahead to the highest difficulty guitar song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne0DvBLODgA&t=218s

PERK RE-WORK
I predicted that it was a mistake to address the game's perk imbalance by redefining every single perk in the game, and I think I've already been proven correct. Players have been reporting lots of perk behavior that seems incorrect, but can't be 100% sure if it's not working as intended because reworking every perk means players can't make assumptions about anything anymore. There are also issues with the game's new way of rolling for perks on weapons, which is supposed to reduce the frequency of skill-based perks being mixed with combat perks, but also seems to have a lot of unintended consequences that seemingly prevents a lot of combat perk combinations from rolling.

One of the biggest problems with testing these reworks is that the PTR environment doesn't allow players to equip/craft items with specific perks. Instead, players are limited to testing the gear that the developers give them and whatever random drops they can obtain from the wild. With all the different offensive and defensive perks, and their various permutations, there was no way the PTR players were going to be able to test everything, but this limitation prevents them from testing almost anything besides the default gear they're given in their PTR crates. Even then, it doesn't allow for detailed testing that you would want, like testing the low and high end of the %'s for a certain trait, or testing the additive/multiplicative qualities of multiple copies of the same perk. If AGS really are relying on players to perform all of the game's testing before release, they should understand they're probably seeing < 10% of perk use-cases being equipped in the PTR, and even then the perks aren't being tested in a rigorous, methodical way like they should be. Honestly, I don't know how the developers could use the feedback from the PTR forums, because the signal to noise ratio is awfully low, and even the well-written, detailed posts aren't usually formatted in a way where a coder would easily be able to connect the problem to a specific requirement or piece of code they need to fix.

OTHER CHANGES
Some parts of the PTR are so buggy that they shouldn't have been released to the PTR yet. The new crafting system that lets you salvage named items from expeditions so you can earn a new material that let's you craft expedition-specific named items is completely broken, showing gear you can craft at 1000+ Gear Score (the current maximum in the game is 625) that provides 10 times the attributes that weapons or armor pieces are supposed to provide. Of course, this system is probably never going to be tested in the PTR anyways, as currently you would need to salvage hundreds of named items from expeditions to craft a single item with the new crafting material, which is literally impossible to achieve over the next month with the new weekly dungeon limits.

On top of the perk reworks, most weapons received some general balance changes to their abilities, and they also changed split-stat armor to give more total stats than single-stat armor. The split-stat change has caused a lot of negative feedback because it means every competitive player will need to grind new Best in Slot split-stat armor for the free extra stats, compared to the current meta of using single-stat armor. The weapon rebalancing has lead to disagreements between forums posters that makes it difficult to judge how good/bad the changes are (especially when combined with perk reworks, because that's just so many variables being changed all at once).

As I mentioned earlier, the new expedition and the expedition group finder won't be released until next week, so we can't judge those features yet, but I'm not sure how well the group finder will function on a PTR with < 100 people on it (many of which will be people playing music or fighting training dummies).

WHAT'S CHANGED IN NEW WORLD
AGS released a new article advertising what's been added to the game since most players left back in December, along with letting potential players that the game is 40% off now. It's interesting to go through the list, because I don't think it looks particularly impressive when everything is summarized so succinctly.

They mention 2 new expeditions, with only the fine print pointing out that the Barnacles & Black Powder expedition hasn't actually been released yet. They also talk about Mutators for expeditions, since those were only released in January, but I'm not sure how easy it will be for new/returning players to grind the ranks to get to the highest-difficulty mutations once the weekly expedition limit disincentivizes players from helping lower-level players get through the lower-tier mutations.

They promote the new 3v3 Arenas mode and the new PvP reward track, but most of the community seems to believe that PvP is currently in the worst spot it's ever been, since AGS nerfed the incentives for open-world PvP around Great Cleave. Apparently OPRs have been reduced to mass bow-users on both sides as players are incentivized to just do as much damage as they can so they earn enough points on the OPR scoreboard to maximize their rewards (regardless of whether their team wins or not), and few people play Arenas because the game mode is terribly unrewarding for anybody who isn't a 3-stack with a 90% win rate.

They advertise the Void Gauntlet and Blunderbuss that were added after the game's initial release, but both weapons have a reputation for being underpowered now after an initial period of being very strong.

Then they just start a bullet-point list of additions, some of which aren't actually positives in the minds of most players. For example:

quote:

-New cross-region transfers: More easily play with your friends in the same region/server.
-New Expertise System: There’s a new progression system called Expertise to increase your Gear Score over 500 once you reach level 60. The more powerful the creatures you defeat, the more likely your Expertise will increase, which means better item drops.
-Less cheaters: The Development Team issued 85,237 cheating penalties, which covers bots, cheat programs, and players who attempt to exploit in-game bugs like duping.
-Less hackers: The team also penalized 1,160 hackers for attempting to change the game’s files and exploit New World.
They don't mention that the cross-region transfer costs $15, and is likely a necessity for new or returning players who find themselves on dead servers (the game still recommends dead servers to new players during character creation).

The Expertise System has always been disparaged as a blatant attempt to add artificial grind to the game, and it's announcement corresponded to a period of time where the game was losing 20+% of it's population a week. It's a weird thing to put in the list, because it seems more likely to remind old players of why they quit rather than entice anybody to jump back in.

The numbers for how many cheaters and hackers they've penalized is interesting, because I don't think AGS has given numbers on that before. Given the history the game has had with economy-ruining exploits & botting, those numbers actually seem really low. Even now, with the game's population being so low and continuing to decline, there are regularly threads in the forums of people documenting bots that have existed in their servers for months, and the recent ban wave of bots in Lost Ark that caused the game's population to drop by 75% really makes me wonder how much of the game's current player count is made up of bots.

In any case, the advertisement doesn't seem to be very effective, as steamdb.info still shows New World as being outside the 700 Top Selling games on Steam (this number is dynamic, and sometimes it shows New World as being outside the top 1,000 Top Selling Games, but the best I've seen it shown is at #791 on the Best Sellers list). It seems pretty clear that every player who might potentially be interested in a game like New World has either already purchased it or made their mind up to never purchase it, as the game's Free Weekend and 40% off sales haven't affected it's position in the Top Sellers list.

GENERAL PROGNOSIS
The month of June has been rough on New World, as it's lost about 2,000 players a week based on peak concurrent user counts (the equivalent of 1 full server a week, when their current population could theoretically fit on 10 servers). The new PTR is unlikely to be released before the final week in July, so that's another 4 weeks in the wilderness before the big update, which is brutal now that the game isn't able to break 20,000 peak players in a day.

Obviously, I don't think reworking everybody's existing gear and adding 5 new slow-grind skills to the game is going to do much for player retention, even with the addition of a rhythm game that seems directly copied from a 2005 Playstation 2 game (I'm assuming AGS doesn't have the video game chops to know about Fequency or Amplitude that came out several years before Guitar Hero did). We'll find out in a month, or maybe next week's PTR update will show a dramatic increase in PTR players interested in the expedition and justify a more optimistic outlook. At this point, every official announcement that isn't an article detailing the schedule of the game's sunsetting surprises me, but maybe I'm just too cynical.

Discospawn fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Jun 26, 2022

1stGear
Jan 16, 2010

Here's to the new us.
"Hey, you know the instrument playing they have in FF14? What if we made it worse in every possible way?"

Bar Patron
Jun 12, 2015

1stGear posted:

"Hey, you know the instrument playing they have in FF14? What if we made it worse in every possible way?"

I hear actual songs being played in FFXIV. Like, actual real life songs. Shame that doesn't seem to be the case with new world. I would love to play 'Doin ya mom' on some lovely banjo. Another missed opportunity I suppose.

Vilgan
Dec 30, 2012

As someone who dropped in December along with many others, their list of poo poo they've done seems to completely miss the point of why so many of us left.

Changes should be:

We've added mounts/almost free fast travel/other things so this feels less like a running simulator and more like a game
The quests were redone to feel less generic and be more rewarding
Leveling speed was increased 40+ to make it feel less awful
Territory ownership was changed to make the experience suck less if you aren't the dominant faction

I don't care about new weapons, a new rhythm game, and whatever the gently caress else they've been doing. I just want to have fun when playing and that's something I lost when I hit the 40s. No clue about end game other than it didn't sound like people were stoked about it.

1stGear
Jan 16, 2010

Here's to the new us.

Bar Patron posted:

I hear actual songs being played in FFXIV. Like, actual real life songs. Shame that doesn't seem to be the case with new world. I would love to play 'Doin ya mom' on some lovely banjo. Another missed opportunity I suppose.

The instruments in FF14 are a really good demonstration of that game's design ethos which is to just give players poo poo to do. It does haven't to make them more powerful, it doesn't have to be behind a horrendous grind, it just has to be fun. And whaddya know, now players are holding nightly streetside concerts in cities, having open mic nights at clubs, organizing in-game cons just to show off their music and dance acts, and everybody involved is having a blast.

Meanwhile, New World doesn't let musicians play too close to each other lmao

Ort
Jul 3, 2005

Proud graduate of the Andy Reid coaching clinic.

Vilgan posted:

As someone who dropped in December along with many others, their list of poo poo they've done seems to completely miss the point of why so many of us left.

Changes should be:

We've added mounts/almost free fast travel/other things so this feels less like a running simulator and more like a game
The quests were redone to feel less generic and be more rewarding
Leveling speed was increased 40+ to make it feel less awful
Territory ownership was changed to make the experience suck less if you aren't the dominant faction

I don't care about new weapons, a new rhythm game, and whatever the gently caress else they've been doing. I just want to have fun when playing and that's something I lost when I hit the 40s. No clue about end game other than it didn't sound like people were stoked about it.

It’s funny because they actually made those top 3 changes but just didn’t mention them.

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

Ort posted:

It’s funny because they actually made those top 3 changes but just didn’t mention them.
Yeah, I think it was for their big February patch that they promoted the new expedition and the blunderbuss, but the community was most excited about the QoL changes to tax rates, housing costs, shared storage between cities, & reduced fast travel costs. Even with their new article showcasing the 'progress' the game has made, they save all the QoL changes for the 3rd-from-last bullet point, and use sub-bullets to list them as though they are the least consequential things they've done in 9 months.

I wonder if there's a culture within AGS where polishing/improving game features doesn't do anything to improve their internal metrics, so it rarely happens. Then they assume that players are evaluating their game by the same standards as their management, so they don't even think to mention small enhancements when they happen. It would explain why they reworked literally every perk rather than focusing on balancing the biggest outliers, and introduced 5 new skills for musical instruments rather than figuring out a way to make the Fishing skill a meaningful activity. It's like they think iteration on a feature is a sign of weakness, or maybe they recognize that they aren't capable of understanding how to make small changes to improve a system so they just always rework the system to cover up for the fact.

cosmicjim
Mar 23, 2010
VISIT THE STICKIED GOON HOLIDAY CHARITY DRIVE THREAD IN GBS.

Goons are changing the way children get an education in Haiti.

Edit - Oops, no they aren't. They donated to doobie instead.

Vilgan posted:

As someone who dropped in December along with many others, their list of poo poo they've done seems to completely miss the point of why so many of us left.

Changes should be:

We've added mounts/almost free fast travel/other things so this feels less like a running simulator and more like a game
The quests were redone to feel less generic and be more rewarding
Leveling speed was increased 40+ to make it feel less awful
Territory ownership was changed to make the experience suck less if you aren't the dominant faction

I don't care about new weapons, a new rhythm game, and whatever the gently caress else they've been doing. I just want to have fun when playing and that's something I lost when I hit the 40s. No clue about end game other than it didn't sound like people were stoked about it.

1. Getting around in this game is trivial now as long as you've unlocked all the shrines.
3. Leveling speed has been increased. It's a matter of opinion on whether or not it's been increased enough. It honestly needs to be faster if they keep the expertise grind as it is.
4. Not being the dominant faction isn't really noticeable anymore. Fast travel costs are negligible regardless of faction. You can move things between storage regardless of territory ownership. I honestly don't know what disadvantages their are now, other than at the company level regarding town income.

2. They added and revamped some quests, but they are all still boring in my opinion.


I cannot recommend this game to anyone that doesn't want political mmorpg fighting during primetime hours. Otherwise it's fine.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

Been taking advantage of the 2x EXP event and I am level 53 so far. Just want to get to level 60 and then will probably drop the game because after the 2x event is over, the game will go back to being too slow.

Anita Dickinme
Jan 24, 2013


Grimey Drawer
I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll say it a thousand more: this game would have been infinitely way better if it didn’t have the stupid, typical leveling system and just focused on the gear and expertise grind. I don’t understand why MMOs still have to do the leveling system anymore.

squirrelzipper
Nov 2, 2011

Bar Patron posted:

I hear actual songs being played in FFXIV. Like, actual real life songs. Shame that doesn't seem to be the case with new world. I would love to play 'Doin ya mom' on some lovely banjo. Another missed opportunity I suppose.

When I first started FFXIV I was running some errands in UlDah and passed a group of musicians and then realized - wait that’s Nirvanas Nevermind. I stopped and they played a bunch of stuff, some Beck, some Zepplin and it completely blew my mind.

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Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

One of the top threads in the official forums this week has been from a casual player who was excited to recently reached Level 60, only to then find out about the Expertise system and the grind to 625 GS. Imagine getting to 60 with the help of the Double XP event, only to realize that grinding Expertise matches the slow pace of gaining levels without any XP bonuses, and with the additional factor of RNG now determining how much progress you can make.

And of course, much of the thread is filled with people defending the systems & mocking the OP for not being willing to grind in an MMO. Those same people will probably unironically say, "well, I played for 5,000 hours so I definitely got my $40 worth," as their character and all their gear & achievements disappears when the servers shut down on December 31 of this year.

squirrelzipper posted:

When I first started FFXIV I was running some errands in UlDah and passed a group of musicians and then realized - wait that’s Nirvanas Nevermind. I stopped and they played a bunch of stuff, some Beck, some Zepplin and it completely blew my mind.
Yeah, I YouTubed FF XIV's music system after it was mentioned in here, and it's actually just a legit way to play music with various types of sounds, just like a modern electric keyboard. It doesn't have to try to shoehorn a game system into it, it's just a fun, cool feature that players can mess around with (although I guess it's limited to the Bard class, unless that's been changed). I'm not saying that feature would help New World out of it's problems more than the rhythm game implementation they've added, but it's definitely a better design mindset for making an everlasting MMO that players just hang out in as their default gamespace.

Edit: It turns out the thread I linked was primarily active because a handful of posters started yelling at each other after the first dozen or so responses, which I should've assumed because that's usually the case. This is especially a problem in the PTR forum, since the only people still playing on the PTR and posting feedback are the same small number of people crazy enough test AGS' game for them, and they often have strong opinions and want everybody else to know it. It's yet another reason why AGS' reliance on PTR feedback to fix their dying game is probably a bad idea.

Discospawn fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Jun 26, 2022

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