Turns out, that New World – as we know it – will seize to exist in October, and until then, the developers basically said “good luck, we’re out”. Which is a shame, since there’s tonnes of bugs out there, that they’re simply not adressing anymore. It’s roughly three more months of the same bug-ridden mess for us.
That said, the game – when it works, where there’s no bugs – are still very fun, as long as you’ve got people to play with.
Ah. Yeah. The old reliable 3099 players online, with a peak of 8394 worldwide.
If it wasn’t for the Company, I would probably have quit playing too right now. I’m watching streams, and all I see is people playing PvP – for one of two reasons;
Either that’s all people want to watch anyway – and lets face it, it’s easier for a streamer to be interactive with the chat while playing PvP, as PvP doesnt necessarily require as much attention. If they die, there’s still a huge amount of other players around them that still carry on fighting, and it’s a lot more forgiving in a way, since desync often saves them – compared to, say, ancient archers that oneshots you when you’re not prepared – and the tactics are way different in PvP than PvE.
The other is that; In the streams where the streamer are interactive with the chat, this is where viewers go. They often dont want to tune in to a streamer running dungeons, because that means the streamer will focus on the dungeon and not them. Even as a viewer, many want to have the attention they crave, so it’s easier to get that from a PvP-streamer, than a speedrunner or any other type of dungeon-runner.
Which means, streamers who wants viewers turn into PvP, partly because they want viewers and partly because that’s the gamemode where they can interact with viewers.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, sort of. Hence – that’s basically all the content that is being streamed; PvP.
And because of that, that’s also some of the last gamemodes that is still populated.
But, even if PvP is effectively dead, atleast that has a population going for it.
Trying to “PUG-up” for dungeons is kind of harsh. The few PvE-streamers I see – or in my own experience – are forced to spend the majority of the time to just…wait around. Sakis, one streamer I watch regularly, only plays PvE, dungeons mainly, and often his first run of the streams are one-and-a-half to two hours into the stream. Granted, he spends a long time fixing inventory from the day before, capping forts, gathering – so there is still “content” streamed by him. But for someone who wants to run dungeons all the time, he spends a huge portion of his streams just waiting for a full group to assemble.
My own experiences are basically the same – either I try to create a lobby myself, or I join one, and anywhere between 45 minutes to one and a half hour after lobby-creation we enter a dungeon. Unless the lobby creator gets tired and just shuts the lobby down after 50 minutes of waiting.
It’s not impossible, but it atleast feels very rare to find random people to run with. Most of the runs that takes place – as can be seen from the leaderboards – are often premade groups, or “semi-premade groups”, where there’s a group of three or four that are a premade, only looking for one or two random players. Those gets filled up fast. The other version are “streamer-groups”, where a popular streamer decides to create a lobby, then that will be filled up almost immediately – and I’m no popular streamer.
Heck, as much as I like Sakis, not even he is “popular” by that definition, as even he as a fulltime streamer struggles to fill groups.
My own experiences when I boot up the game whenever my company is offline consists of just.. waiting. My record for getting a full group going for a dungeon – be it as a lobby owner, or someone who joined in and notice the lobbytimer before we start – is a whooping 33 minutes. That’s the quickest we got into a dungeon, that wasn’t just shut down. That one run also included a failed lobby creation attempt that I shut down myself at 27 minutes, before I joined that lobby. Record longest time? I think if we were to sum up all the time from I booted up the game and logged in and decided to start looking for a dungeon, until I actually managed to get into one, we’re looking at over three hours. And that dungeon two people ragequit because they didn’t like the tank, and all of a sudden that dungeon was dead as well, forcing me to go back out to wait even more.
If that was all the experience I could get out of this game, I would’ve definitively stopped playing as well, but..
As it turns out, the company actually started up again. Not as much as it used to be, but all I needed was four more people, and between Napkin, Fleur, Andicus and Bogdan, and I, we’ve got a full group. Any extra who sometimes joins in are just a bonus and means we’ve got people to rotate in.
And honestly, a total of five people is all I need.
And with five people, this game is just amazingly fun.