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Anita Dickinme
Jan 24, 2013


Grimey Drawer
Thank you for your service Discospawn. You keep me up to date without having to go anywhere. If the game gets good or dies I will be in the know and I am grateful for your efforts.

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BadLlama
Jan 13, 2006

DaitoX posted:

You could also stand in a doorway and just block it. Locking people in was peak AoC gameplay.

could you crouch or prone through people? I don't remember but thought there was a way around that.

Doom Rooster
Sep 3, 2008

Pillbug

BadLlama posted:

could you crouch or prone through people? I don't remember but thought there was a way around that.

You could turn on stealth, but basically nobody knew that for some reason.

Givin
Jan 24, 2008
Givin of the Internet Hates You
This was a Goon Age of Conan video I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaexnuE7kEQ

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

Anita Dickinme posted:

Thank you for your service Discospawn. You keep me up to date without having to go anywhere. If the game gets good or dies I will be in the know and I am grateful for your efforts.
I appreciate it, I know you held out hope for the game longer than most. I felt bad when I had to tell you that none of the servers listed in the OP existed anymore and didn't seem to migrate goon guilds wherever they got merged into.

I legitimately think the best way to play this game if you've already purchased it is to fire up the PTR the week before every monthly patch, so you can browse through the new content with pre-made max-level characters. For lapsed players who don't have an active company or friends list anymore, it's not much of a difference from what they'd experience on the live servers, except they can avoid whatever additional layer of grind AGS will have added to the game.

You might think that playing on the PTR would be a lesser experience because it would have more bugs than the Live version of the game but... that has not held true thus far. Case in point, I mentioned in my earlier post that the PTR server was going down at 2:00 for an updated build, and around the same time AGS posted this in the official forums:


The 1 remaining PTR server is hosted on... US East. This is purely speculation, but I think they might have accidentally taken down all US East servers instead of just the PTR one, or maybe caused all US East servers to look for the PTR client. It's hard to say because I can't actually find any threads by players complaining about server issues, but the game's population tracker shows that something weird definitely took down 4 of the 7 live US East servers for a while.

There's a lot of changes listed in the latest PTR patch notes but, a lot of things that probably would've made for a better stream this morning, but we'll have to wait and see how closely the notes match reality.

Givin posted:

This was a Goon Age of Conan video I think.
Oh, man, I didn't even realize that the game you all were talking about is older and completely separate from Conan Exiles, which I mainly know about because of the Monster Factory they did for it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Q1acNbgiA

Discospawn fucked around with this message at 00:38 on May 13, 2022

Barreft
Jul 21, 2014

You provide funny content so please don't stop. sorry if this causes you mental illnesses but we all need a laugh

Ranzear
Jul 25, 2013

Discospawn posted:

There's actually another PTR patch scheduled for 2:00 today, right after these streams end, with no patch notes released yet, so it'll be weird if that patch addresses some of the obvious Arena problems but they didn't push these 1st streams back a day.

Ranzear posted:

At least they managed to be a day ahead of a Path of Exile league launch. I do wonder if they're dumping money in to get it frontpaged.

Not to imply there was any foresight or intent to avoid their stream getting dunked on by a better game. It's just as likely they're in full stick to the plan mode as you inferred.

Also: Wait, what? There were two Conan games?

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
yea one was a bad MMO and the other is a still running bad survival game.

Also this game is p. fun honestly, I expected to start this thing up and get drowned in poo poo but I'm enjoying just running around leveling

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

(and can't post for 25 days!)

I played the conan survival game when it first came out. Hard for me to judge it as I don't really like any survival games once the initial novelty wears off. Hell out of the whole genre the one I played most was Minecraft and I got bored of that before it left beta. To me the appeal is treating those sorts of games more like lego and building stuff rather than the survival aspect itself.

Bar Patron
Jun 12, 2015

Ort posted:

People playing this game (if there are any) are not really posting in this thread, it’s mostly you doomposting and framing every piece of new world news in the worst possible light (which is probably not much different than objectively observing given the trajectory of this game) then people who don’t play chiming in to say “lol, lmao”. I guess really the same as the thread has always been, to be fair, except with more doom posters when it started!

This is what I come here for. Also I've never played the game.

sharknado slashfic
Jun 24, 2011

Bar Patron posted:

This is what I come here for. Also I've never played the game.


DumbWhiteGuy
Jul 4, 2007

You need haters. Fellas if you got 20 haters, you need 40 of them motherfuckers. If there's any haters in here that don't have nobody to hate on, feel free to hate on me

Ort posted:

People playing this game (if there are any) are not really posting in this thread, it’s mostly you doomposting and framing every piece of new world news in the worst possible light (which is probably not much different than objectively observing given the trajectory of this game) then people who don’t play chiming in to say “lol, lmao”. I guess really the same as the thread has always been, to be fair, except with more doom posters when it started!

I was the last of the original goon guild that started on Royllo (I think??) and eventually ended in Maramma so even though there might be a few sporadic players, there is no organized goon presence in the game anymore.

Pandaal
Mar 7, 2020

DumbWhiteGuy posted:

…there is no organized goon presence in the game anymore.

For that, we should all be thankful.

Meme Poker Party
Sep 1, 2006

by Azathoth

DumbWhiteGuy posted:

there is no organized goon presence in the game anymore.

Wondering if the word "goon" is necessary here.

BadLlama
Jan 13, 2006

gently caress goons imo

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

Meme Poker Party posted:

Wondering if the word "goon" is necessary here.
There is still some form of organization, because one of today's top Reddit posts is about how the game still automatically bans players if they get mass reported, which is still being abused to get players banned before a War is about to begin or to just to grief players after PvP matches. Amazon has never acknowledged the existence of an auto-ban system.

1 of the other hot topics in the community is the prevalence of organized 'shell companies' on high-population servers, where the company population-cap is sidestepped by creating multiple companies to house the same guild that simply uses external means to coordinate with each other. This has implications on War declarations & territory defense, and essentially guarantees that the same small % of people are involved in every War.

They updated the PTR again at the end of last week (the 3rd time this month), but almost nobody is bothering to log on to the PTR to continue to test these weekly builds (it's hard to blame players for not providing AGS with free testing, especially when there has been so much obviously broken content with each PTR release this month). A community moderator posted a question in the PTR forums asking if players were still getting infinite loading screens before Arena matches since last week's patch, and received 2 anecdotal responses from random players that it seemed fixed, which does not seem like a sign of a healthy development environment. I get the sense that the May patch at the end of the month might be their worst-received patch to date.

As far as having an 'organized presence in the game,' I think the players might actually be doing better than AGS' staff at this point.

Edit: Also, as an update, I'm sorry to report that New World did not win the Webby award for Best User Experience. It was beaten by the game Unpacking, a cute little indie, pixel-art puzzle game. Other nominees in the category were Call of Duty: Vanguard, Switchcraft: Magical Match 3, and 12 Minutes.

Discospawn fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 18, 2022

ZombieCrew
Apr 1, 2019

Discospawn posted:


Edit: Also, as an update, I'm sorry to report that New World did not win the Webby award for Best User Experience. It was beaten by the game Unpacking, a cute little indie, pixel-art puzzle game. Other nominees in the category were Call of Duty: Vanguard, Switchcraft: Magical Match 3, and 12 Minutes.

Vanguard was absolute garbage...my friend conned me into buyin it to play with him and then stopped playin.

30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006
Unpacking was nice. 12 Minutes was uhhhh... well.

30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006
Hey it's a little tiny game by the creators of Outer Wilds, with celebrity voices! What could go wrong?

DumbWhiteGuy
Jul 4, 2007

You need haters. Fellas if you got 20 haters, you need 40 of them motherfuckers. If there's any haters in here that don't have nobody to hate on, feel free to hate on me

Discospawn posted:

1 of the other hot topics in the community is the prevalence of organized 'shell companies' on high-population servers, where the company population-cap is sidestepped by creating multiple companies to house the same guild that simply uses external means to coordinate with each other. This has implications on War declarations & territory defense, and essentially guarantees that the same small % of people are involved in every War.

I'm not positive about this but I think the reason the shell companies are used so much is that a company can only set one time window for all of their wars/invasions, so if your company holds 2 territories then at some point you're gonna need 100 decent players on at once which is like impossible.

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.
Yes. You only need 50 people instead of 50 per territory.

Ad by Khad
Jul 25, 2007

Human Garbage
Watch me try to laugh this title off like the dickbag I am.

I also hang out with racists.

DumbWhiteGuy posted:

I'm not positive about this but I think the reason the shell companies are used so much is that a company can only set one time window for all of their wars/invasions, so if your company holds 2 territories then at some point you're gonna need 100 decent players on at once which is like impossible.

this is 100% the reason, going all the way back to day one of the game

Third World Reagan
May 19, 2008

Imagine four 'mechs waiting in a queue. Time works the same way.
Shell companies is an old mmo problem and just lol for that still being a thing.

We are like 15 years behind asias pvp market in terms of development

Ad by Khad
Jul 25, 2007

Human Garbage
Watch me try to laugh this title off like the dickbag I am.

I also hang out with racists.
yeah its absolutely not limited to just new world thats for sure

managing shell companies is why I have spare atlas accounts

causticBeet
Mar 2, 2010

BIG VINCE COMIN FOR YOU

DumbWhiteGuy posted:

I'm not positive about this but I think the reason the shell companies are used so much is that a company can only set one time window for all of their wars/invasions, so if your company holds 2 territories then at some point you're gonna need 100 decent players on at once which is like impossible.

It also affects the “war bid” mechanic afaik. The game attempts to reduce your chance of winning the declaration roll if you have existing territories owned by a company, so you can get a better chance by shuffling the people doing the influence grind into a shell company that won’t have that penalty.

It’s yet another system that is so obviously broken to anyone who has ever played an MMO.

Tempora Mutantur
Feb 22, 2005

causticBeet posted:

It also affects the “war bid” mechanic afaik. The game attempts to reduce your chance of winning the declaration roll if you have existing territories owned by a company, so you can get a better chance by shuffling the people doing the influence grind into a shell company that won’t have that penalty.

It’s yet another system that is so obviously broken to anyone who has ever played an MMO.

god drat I wish I could find that tweet someone made after the NDA dropped about how stupid the alpha process was, and how they and some others were flown out to the dev team who basically confirmed "yeah we never worked on, or played, mmos, we just like making bideo james!"

could've been fake but was up for a long while

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

Yeah, there are lots of problems/benefits/issues that shell companies create, but they all kind of roll up into the more basic problem that it isn't fun to not be a member of the most powerful company within the most powerful faction on a server. People complain about companies who take advantage of every exploit possible to remain on top, but if those people didn't exist then I'm pretty sure every server would just consist of a single faction and 1 company subsidiary for each territory. In the same way that somebody mentioned this game could be a great social experiment because of how Amazon accidentally merged servers with different primary languages, it would be another interesting experiment to see if players eventually adopt a form of socialism/fascism on each server rather than engage with the tribal system that the game presents as an option.

I think you'll see these same kinds of issues emerge with Arenas as well, as people motivated by the mode's loot will only care about each match ending quickly, whether they win or lose. There is no meaningful difference between XP gained or rewards earned if it's a 3-0 sweep versus a 3-2 victory where every round lasts until the ring of fire completely closes, and there's no punishment for losing a match besides getting less PvP currency than the winning team. From an MMO mindset, It would be best if everybody approached the mode as only having 1 round instead of being a best of 3, where whoever loses the first round just suicides the next 2 rounds as quickly as possible to help everybody grind faster.

On a related note, there have been scattered posts on the PTR about the mode's matchmaking being exploitable (e.g. somebody said that if they synchronized solo-queuing for arenas at the same time as a friend, and then added that friend to their party, they'd wind up in an arena match on the same team with 0 opponents), but I think you could probably devise a way of win-trading that AGS couldn't fix/prevent. These are the kinds of issues that a PTR environment isn't good at finding, because any real player who identified this kind of possibility is incentivized not to report it but instead to just make use of it as soon as the patch makes it to the live servers.

Ash1138
Sep 29, 2001

Get up, chief. We're just gettin' started.

DancingShade posted:

I played the conan survival game when it first came out. Hard for me to judge it as I don't really like any survival games once the initial novelty wears off. Hell out of the whole genre the one I played most was Minecraft and I got bored of that before it left beta. To me the appeal is treating those sorts of games more like lego and building stuff rather than the survival aspect itself.
Conan Exiles has improved considerably over the years, but yeah if you don’t like building it’s a middling to bad game. Mods can improve the combat and endgame progression quite a bit though. Most of my time has been playing with friends on a modded private server and we all somehow love these dumb, janky survival games so it’s actually fun.

I wonder if anyone has modded in the chopping and mining sounds from New World yet…

Rexicon1
Oct 9, 2007

A Shameful Path Led You Here

Ort posted:

People playing this game (if there are any) are not really posting in this thread, it’s mostly you doomposting and framing every piece of new world news in the worst possible light (which is probably not much different than objectively observing given the trajectory of this game) then people who don’t play chiming in to say “lol, lmao”. I guess really the same as the thread has always been, to be fair, except with more doom posters when it started!

lol lmao

milkman dad
Aug 13, 2007

To be clear, please keep posting.

lol, lmao

Ash1138
Sep 29, 2001

Get up, chief. We're just gettin' started.

daily peak players down to 2% of the all time high

lol

lmbo

BadLlama
Jan 13, 2006

Na this game is great, has no problems and was ready for release.

Discospawn
Mar 3, 2007

CREATORS VS NEW WORLD
The 2nd round of 'Creators vs Devs' streams went ahead yesterday, and the results were largely the same as last week's. Both teams were not using meta builds or trying hard to win, and the Arena mode was still buggy and unfinished. The highlight of the stream was probably this bug, where the Ring of Fire mechanic started instantly doing damage to 1 team once it started contracting, rather than being tied to the actual visible ring of fire:
https://clips.twitch.tv/TolerantBoredMeerkatMau5-ZW319uKyszPc4DYw

There's supposed to be a 3rd and final stream next week, but 2 of the streamers are still listed as 'TBD,' and I'm starting to think that means they just don't have anybody lined up rather than it being a tease for big streamers like Shroud to be the mystery creators.

PTR PROBLEMS
They also released another PTR patch yesterday afternoon, after the streams, which establishes that they decided to create a weekly patch tempo for the PTR for May, as this is the 4th Thursday afternoon patch in a row. This has been interesting to follow, because it seems pretty obvious that their development team cannot handle a weekly tempo, nor are they are giving their internal QA teams an opportunity to test these builds before they're pushed to the PTR server.

For example, immediately after yesterday's stream where that clip came from, a New World developer (not a community moderator, but an actual dev) posted this to the PTR forums:


This implies that for some reason they cannot test the current PTR build internally to try to duplicate the issue, or they don't trust their test environment enough to be able to troubleshoot the problem. This process of testing/developing/iterating a test build using the player forums is not very efficient, because you get response trains like the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM3nQ0hoavA


You wind up with anecdotal evidence that conflict with each other, a lack of useful debugging information from those who experience the problem, and extraneous information about new bugs that may or may not be related.

On top of the ring of fire issue and new problems with invisible walls, this week's patch also introduced a problem with the new PvP jewelry loot:


AGS is a week away from delivering it's new 3v3 PvP mode, and there are known issues with the mode's map geometry, end of round stalemate-breaking mechanic, loot, and more. These are just the problems that the 30 people making use of the PTR have volunteered to help AGS identify within 1 day of the latest PTR Update. I think it is safe to assume that more problems will be discovered once hundreds of people try to play the new mode on live servers.

On top of this, the May patch is still planned to introduce a lot of gameplay design updates that have received a very polarizing response on the PTR forums, most notably from healers and players who do not want to see stamina/dodge mechanics nerfed/changed.

MAY DEV UPDATE
AGS released their monthly YouTube vidoc today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQQZ-LVEspM

Like every other one of these videos, it is much longer than needed and doesn't provide meaningful information about the direction of the game. I would not recommend trying to watch it.

It comes off as self-congratulatory about every aspect of the game, and lacks the sense of urgency I would expect from a game that continues to face a lot of serious challenges. The top reddit comment of the related thread summarizes the video, but the most important thing I saw is that the developers are already setting low expectations for the June patch (the monthly patch after Arenas are introduced), so there's going to be a significant period of content drought after May's update.

GAME POPULATION NUMBERS
We are now a little more than a month removed from the game's Free Weekend & last round of server mergers. In that month, the game has lost another 25-30% of it's population, depending on how you want to attempt to measure it.

If you only measure the peak concurrent player population each day (using steamdb.info) you wind up with a 30% drop:


If you measure the sum of each region's daily peak concurrent player population (using https://nwdb.info/server-status) you wind up with a slightly lower 25% drop:


The 2nd site also lets you track each individual server's population, and you can see that the ~25% decline in players has not impacted all servers equally, as some companies have decided to make use of their serer transfer tokens to move hundreds of players from 1 server to another. As a result, the most populous server in each region has maintained a steady population (and in some cases, even grown over the past month), but many servers that had a medium population after last month's server merges are already back to being close-to-dead. It also seems that some international players are using their server transfer tokens to migrate to US-East, as that server has shown the least decline, whereas the EU region (traditionally the game's most populous region) has shown the greatest decline. With both South America & Australia having peak populations below even a single server's player cap, those players will soon have to decide whether to spend more money to leave their region (if they want to continue to experience end-game content).

It looks rough. The only sensible thing AGS can do is use the PC version of New World as a platform to slowly improve the game and increase the amount of content in it, in preparation for the game's re-launch on consoles at some point. Obviously they can't state that plan publicly, but hopefully that's being communicated internally to lift morale because otherwise I imagine the mood would be pretty dismal around the offices.

BadLlama
Jan 13, 2006

Id give new world a shot again two years from now.

CubeTheory
Mar 26, 2010

Cube Reversal
So I'm doing a GOTY Podcast thing with friends tomorrow and I'd really like to talk about the hot mess that was New World at release. I remember some things like window shaking invincibility, AWS seemingly losing all characters for like a day, upgrades giving you money instead of taking them. I was hopeful that some of you could list some of the other wild poo poo that went on near launch and the months following.

Bar Patron
Jun 12, 2015

Make sure to include the sausage thing. That was peak gaming.

RagnarokZ
May 14, 2004

Emperor of the Internet

BadLlama posted:

Id give new world a shot again two years from now.

The only shot you'd get is the inevitable documentary on Youtube about how completely hosed everything was.

Digital Prophet
Apr 16, 2006

"..and then came the black crow, herald of doom, who foretold the coming of death."


Im truly shocked that 20,000+ people are still playing this.

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

(and can't post for 25 days!)

Digital Prophet posted:

Im truly shocked that 20,000+ people are still playing this.

Inertia. Give it a couple months.

Unrelated but has anyone seen the product page of upcoming mmo Archeage 2 I mean Archeworld?

https://www.archeworld.com/

quote:

ArcheWorld
A virtual world that recognizes users' ownership of digital assets
ArcheWorld is the first seamless, open-world MMORPG that utilizes NFT(Non-Fungible Token) based on blockchain technology.
We recognize the users' ownership of various items such as land, houses, pets, vehicles and gears in ArcheWorld by minting them into NFTs.
In ArcheWorld, 'Archeum' that obtained in gameplay will be used as main material for character progression.
You can get BlueSalt(BSLT) by trading Archeum and other materials obtained through production and hunt with other users via in-game auction house.
BSLT can be used to either trade for NFTs or exchanged to BORA.

That's a lot of words to basically shout "scam run immediately".

DancingShade fucked around with this message at 14:47 on May 21, 2022

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Bar Patron
Jun 12, 2015

DancingShade posted:

Inertia. Give it a couple months.

Unrelated but has anyone seen the product page of upcoming mmo Archeage 2 I mean Archeworld?

https://www.archeworld.com/


Finally, a game for us big brained adults to sink our bored ape teeth into. Made by my new favorite k-pop band.

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