So yeah, it’s basically a meme at this point. New World player population is basically driven so far into the ground as possible without having to shut down. They have finally merged the servers, but it was too little, too late. There’s still not alot of content, and that’s even a week after Season 5 actually went live.
Sure, there’s more artifacts, and they integrated the old trials into them. However, with the “pity-system” they also implemented, people played like 15 trials in total and had everything done. They also came up with the 10 man raid – which was reused old content from “soul-trials” from Season 4.
Yes, they took the Story Mode singleplayer trial and upscaled the difficulty to have a reason to make it a 10 man raid. However, I’ve done the raid a whooping 4 times already, and it’s… well.. Too easy. I also managed to get the artifact that came from it, and except for one piece of gear, I have no real reason to ever play it again. It’s already obsolete from “content”-standpoint. That piece of gear is a pair of gloves that comes with a defense perk and a healing buff, “Keen Beacon”, and if I upgrade it, I can put bonus health on it. However, it’s just a “quick way” for me to get a pair of gloves with that perk on it, that is cheaper than to craft it otherwise. Personally, I would like a pair of gloves with Keen Beacon, Health and Enchanted Ward, but crafting those are expensive, and finding a pair with exactly those perks along with the right stat is nigh on impossible. That 10 man raid have the possibility of dropping gloves with the right stat and “Physical Aversion”, which, while a defense-perk, is a worse perk for me than Enchanted Ward. And since I can only get one piece of armor every time I to the 10-man raid and there’s 15 different pieces, and I can only get rewards for doing the 10-man raid two times every week… the odds for me to drop those very gloves are quite bad. I’m honestly better off just farming the materials required and craft them several times over, so that I can put different gems in every pair of glove.
Other than that, what did they do? They came up with native controller support, and the two default layouts are horrible. It’s also not possible to re-map the buttons, which just makes the controller usage very bad. They did make changes to Magnify – a variant of stats that, earlier, just boosted your highest stat with more stats. That was just bad, as you couldn’t balance your stats the way you wanted, but they changed that in Season 5 – now you can choose if you want Magnify to increase your highest stat, or a specific stat.
They also changed gold-cap from 500’000 to 1’000’000, added a target-lock for PvE, stat-respeccing cost cut to 25% of previous cost, and added mounts to OPR (as if I was even playing that game-mode in the first place), and changed the combat code to be more optimized and just overall better – which is all is good things, but not actually any content. We’re talking about QoL-changes – Quality of Life-changes. And they also changed cooking. They presented it as an “overhaul”, and sure, they did cut down on the amount of recipes available – instead of having, say, four recipes for Strength and Dexterity food, one that gave Strength only, one that gave Dexterity only, and one that gave both stats in various split, they now only have two – one that only gives Dexterity and one that only gives Strength. And honestly, I can not really tell if that’s good or not, as the magnify-changes happened at the same time. But what I can tell, is that I’m very annoyed by the fact that they now require more amount of ingredients to be able to craft at all.
Before, you could spend your ingredients to craft a determined amount of portions, and you could chose that amount of portions. If you only had enough ingredients for 11 portions, you could do all those 11 portions – and if you had the gear and trophies and buffs for it, you could get more portions out of those as a bonus. But now? You need to have the ingredients enough to craft three portions for every “craft” you make, so you can’t make only one, or only two, you have to make sure you get enough ingredients for three. Sure, you probably wanted to craft alot in one go anyway, and not just one or two. But having to craft in increments of three is dumb, to be frank. You can’t craft four portions, you have to craft six. You can’t craft 50 – you have to make sure you have ingredients for 51, etc. That’s just inconvenient though, I’ve got to admit, and not a gamebreaking thing. But for a patch that introduces a bunch of improvements, QoL-stuff, it sure is weird that they implement a nerfed and inconvenient cooking, which was something they wanted to try to make players engage with more. It’s like, “We want players to cook more, how do we do that? Right, we make cooking annoying and inconvenient!” The dumbest was that they also tried to introduce that you needed five times the amount per craft, but only get three portions out of those five-timed increased amount. Yes, they tried to make you use five times the ingredients, and only get three portions out of it. This was a “QoL” they tried to make more players engage with cooking with. And this is not mentioning that they nerfed the stats of food from +48 to +44, and then introduced a +48 stat food that required fishing. Granted, if you want +48 constitution food, you’ll need sumptuous rabbit, which isn’t fishing – but all other stats you needed legendary fish. And the droprate for those legendary fishes are made lower and to even get it you need to get expensive fishing gear and.. it’s a mess. There’s a reason so few players fish, and what they’ve done now is basically just incentivized more fishing-bots. It’s straight up a mess, all of it.
But yeah, the player population have taken a nose-dive. As you can see, the numbers are pretty bad.
Granted, the season came out 2nd of April, and the graph “only” shows from mid-day on the 4th. But the first two days weren’t that much better. Last post I did, back in March, showed a 30-day peak of 16’851 players. Today, that 30-day peak is 14’210. And that is including the Season 5 release – and a week into Season 5, the 24-hour peak is 10’159. That’s world-wide. Over five server-regions (US-West, US-East, South Asia-East, EU-Central, Asia Pacific-South East), and twelve servers in total, and we peaked with just 10’159 players the last day. That should probably tell you how screwed this game is, when we had 77’000 last October – granted, it was the Expansion at that time – or almost 138’000 players November the year before – granted, that was Brimstone patch. But going from 138’000 players down to a low of 20’000 players, to rise to 77’000 players and slowly going down to 20-30’000 players… compared to now, when Season 5 have a max of 14’210. It’s laughable. Another laughable thing is that they couldn’t even decide what they wanted to call the Season. They’ve got two different names for the Season 5;
Both of them are referring to Season 5 – that’s the actual names they’ve given it.
It was actually fun the other day though, we got a bunch of the company back together to try out the 10-man raid, so atleast something positive came out of it. And I guess I’m being unfair, it’s not really as if the Winter Rune Forge was bad – it was just disappointing that it was reused, upscaled old content, but it’s still good. Unfortunately, Andicus couldn’t join in as he hasn’t bought the DLC yet, so he haven’t levelled beyond level 60, and it was mostly he that was the reason we got together to try it. But he was still with us in a call, watching Napkins stream of it. Me, Napkin, Fleur, Obed, Ansved, Arto and Jimm1n went in, and we had a great time. We got someone more, a friend of Jimm1n’s, and two random players from the global chat, so we got a full raid group atleast. And it was great to hang out and play with everyone again. Sadly, Jefery, Hell and Bogdan wasn’t able to join in, which would’ve been fun.
Meanwhile, since everyone have been away from the game, playing other things, working alot or having taken a break for family reasons or school, etc., I’ve been trying to find other people to play with. I’ve been making friends with people, shocking as it is! I’ve mostly been playing with Sakis, but I’ve also been playing alot with Shake, Deniz, AwhyJ, Muse, and Kulzac – who actually is in my company.. I’ve also played some with EfeAlanbel, Wolfstein, Valairon in PUGs. I’ve even played a bit with R2pp2r, FCDoomsday, Hrodgir and Baggins over the last few months. Although, Baggins and me wasn’t necessarily playing with eachother, I guess – we were playing “next to each other”, so to speak. We accidentally did the same open world-content, helping each other out a bit.
I’ve had fun, still. It’s not the same as playing with the company – I miss playing with them, to be completely honest. But considering the state of the game, I do not blame them from not logging on. New World is basically a game of waiting at the moment. The “roadmap” for New World will be presented in June apparently, which is where we will know what to expect for the rest of the year.
As Sakis, I believe it was, so neatly put it, the devs have basically said that we are to piss off until June, when they will ask us to piss off for a couple of more months until they actually gives us any content.
The issue with that, is that as we do not have any information about what the announcement in June is, it might very well be something along the lines with “We’re releasing on console in August!” and that’ll be all. So what the announcement and roadmap in June will be… it might even be “piss off until June, at which point we will tell you to piss off for an entire year while we launch on consoles and learn how to code for that too!”
Sad is what it is.