So, I was playing alot of New World lately as I’ve said, and having a real blast. It got a new expansion that seemed to sit well with a lot of people as well, however, it also brought issues.
The first issue you’re hit with is the queues. Like right now, I’m thinking if I should get on or not even bother – even if they increased the limit of players per server to house three thousand players, I’m looking at a queue of fifteen-hundred people. That’s over an hour in queue, if I’m lucky.
If I’m unlucky, I’m gonna sit through that queue just to crash immediately upon entering the game. Going in and out of dungeons – which is the main reason I’m playing the game basically – carries the risk of crashing as well. Teleporting anywhere is a coin-toss. That’s the second issue.
The third issue is that most of the items I would like, or even need you could say, is locked behind PvP. Now, I definitely dont mind that PvP is in the game; I think it’s healthy for a game to serve a lot of different populations, intertwine them of sorts, so that they need each other – gatherers need buyers, crafters needs customers, dungeoneers need crafters as well, PvP’ers need people filling the tradeposts, and so on. However, I dont find it reasonable to put items behind forced PvP, which basically is what has happened. Almost everything that you find in dungeons is Bind-on-Pickup, which means there’s nothing to sell, so little to no money are gained from doing it. So if you need something, you better get it yourself, because you’re not making money anymore. And if you wanted any of the new items that is best in slot, you now also need to play PvP in order to get them, unlock their perks and even to get the mods you need to get them, basically.
I havent played PvP in this game for a very long time, for a reason. To force me to play PvP just to be able to do the things I do like to do is utterly insane. And I dont really care what anyone says – it’s not the same thing to “force PvP’ers to play PvE to get an itemdrop”, as it is to force PvE’ers to play PvP.
First off, you need to get your way to an area. That’s never difficult. Then you need to “farm” a mob, which might be quite boring, but everyone else is doing that very same thing; you to type a few words in chat to ask to be added to the raid-group doing the farming. Then you sit there for at max an hour or two, while either participating in killing said mob within seconds on spawn, or you just go do something else, like read a book and watch tv and just pick up the loot that drops from the mob everyone else kills for you. When you get your stuff, you move on to the next spot and do the same thing there.
However, to get the item that I wanted, as a PvE-player, I had to play dozens and dozens of hours of PvP, just to have a chance to get said item to drop, and a random amount even more to actually get it to drop, and then I had to play even more dozens and dozens of hours just to get the player-kills I needed. And that was for one item. I was lucky and got two drop fairly close together, meaning I got a shield and a greatsword that I could equip at the same time to use while farming. But then there’s a pair of pants, a chest piece, an amulet, a headpiece, and a blunderbuss to get as well, and they’re just even further into the PvP than the other things. I wanted the shield Michael and the greatsword Serenity, which both could drop after track 20, and that took dozens of hours to just get to, and even more to actually drop as I said. However, I still havent seen the pants that has the same drop-range. I’m not at all close to the amulet or the blunderbuss – which drops at track 50+!
I can just forget the headpiece and chestpiece as well, since they’re deep down in track 100+! And that’s just to have a chance to get them drop, which isnt even a guarantee.
You cant compare playing PvE for a few hours to “farm” – meaning, standing there watching a group of fifteen to fifty other people actually do the killing – a mob to get your desired item to drop, with the absolute garbage that is being forced to play PvP for upwards of literally hundreds of hours just to get what you need and then upgrade it. Ofcourse it’s bad to “lock” an item behind a particular game mode alone, but it’s one thing to make it hard for the other “population” to get, and another to make it impossible for them to get unless they get involved with that kind of game. If you made the “PvP-track-only items/mods” extremely rare drop in PvE, and have the “PvE-farming items” extremely rare and expensive on the PvP tracks, that’s one thing. Atleast both populations have a chance to get them without being forced to do something they actively despise.
I actually caved in and ran a bunch of PvP-missions in the game, just to get my PvP-track levelled enough to get that greatsword. It’s three missions of “go here, pick something up, be in this are for ninety seconds, drop something off at that location and go back home”. I ran that bullshit for almost an entire week before the greatsword dropped – and before that dropped, the shield dropped as well. I got it, just to find out that I needed to play actual PvP in order to actually get the bricked piece of scrap metal to be something useful. I bit the bullet and actually did it, because that was what was required of me to “unbrick” them. And I succeeded, and now I’ve got two artifacts which is really good for what I wanted to use them for, and I thought all bullshit was done with. Until I realised that I needed to upgrade another artifact with a perk….that was also locked behind PvP-track, or if I wanted to spend forty thousand gold on the trade post. That’s per craft mod, meaning that every item I wanted that perk on, that’s another forty thousand gold, each. Unless they increased in price, which is very likely.
I just… dont have it in me. I used to love this game. But sitting in hours of queue, just to be plagued with bugs and crashes that gets me back into queue, and while playing be forced at every corner to play PvP? It’s taking a toll.
Especially since the “Summer Gang” almost stopped playing as well. Almost every time I log on, I look at the ingame list, and all I see is new names that I havent played with yet, or that I have played with…and most of I would prefer not to.
We got a new member a month ago or so, which is a really good recruiter. We were suffering a small player population in our company, and he’s been doing really well by getting people in. However, it’s been very indiscriminate – we wanted max level players who was interested in doing high level mutations, that was fun, friendly and interested in cooperating and learning if necessary. For a few weeks, we got a bunch of returning players, who wasnt maxed level. We got a solid amount who was mostly interested in PvP. We had a good bunch that wasnt interested in joining discord to hang out or coordinate anything. We’ve gotten a good bunch who was set in their ways of how to play – which either was very chaotic and stressful, or simply just…not really very good, and they just didnt want to listen or learn any tactics at all.
It doesnt matter how many times you’d tell them that “we cant do this enormous pull you’re trying, you cant hold the aggro and we cant kill them fast enough” and they still do it. And then complain that someone else does something bad – like the damage dealers aren’t doing a good enough job killing, or the healer not healing. Like… you’re getting zerged and fail to hold aggro. That’s on you since you decided on this massive pull. Not ours.
We have healers that waste all of their massive heals and high cooldowns on…the players who is full health. The best in slot healing staff always have a perk that lowers every cooldown with every normal attack you’re doing, and we’ve got some players that understands the function of it, but still does not seem to use normal attacks, and some have even stated that they dont think it is a good perk. Like, listen dude, the fact that you can not succeed in doing overlapping spells, does not mean that it can’t be done – it only means that you dont want to put in the effort in doing so. I dont even understand why you chose that role, if you cant play it and refuses to learn it or improve on top of it?
We have damage dealers who thinks the best weapon to do damage with in dungeons is the ones that have mathematically been proven is the absolute worst in the game. I dont care how sweet that musket looked, you dont randomly pull it out for a boss fight that is known to also behave irratically if too many players are at too long distance away, especially not unannounced.
We also have damage dealing players who’ve been explicitly told, that you cannot bring certain weapons into a dungeon, because there’s already another player bringing one – and multiple of those interferes with each other – or that it’s not useful, or that we need them to bring something else, and they’ve promised that they wont. And “oops, I did it anyway”.
We’ve had players being told that we need a certain combination of weapons, and they offer to bring them – just to realise, that at first opportunity arisen they’ve swapped away from those.
Sure, it’s their game. They play their game that they bought for their own money the way they want. I understand that sentiment. But if they want to play in groups as if they’re playing with randoms, why dont they just join in with random groups and do that? Why do they have to play with people who have specifically said that they want to coordinate efforts to play a certain way, when their “random playstyle” completely wrecks that effort of coordination?
It basically means that even though I play with the company in name, I’m effectively playing with a group of randoms, who all talks over each other, disregard any tactics, uses the worst possible weapons imaginable.. if it was actually a “PUG” I was playing with, I would’ve assumed it was someone trolling everyone and would’ve just dropped that group upon finishing the dungeon and found someone else to play with. But this is people in a voice chat, people in my own company. They’re meant to be the people I play with, and somehow, over the last few weeks, it’s all become this…frustration-pit, of random people playing their own game while being more and more annoyed with each other because noone listens.
Out of dungeons and other missions, they’re fun. I like them – atleast most of them. But as soon as we start playing, it’s like…
I dont really have a proper word for it. But some of them, I feel like they could just have been one of the random PUGs you find while just randomly group-finding.
And I know, I’ve had a few fun such PUGs; at one point during last season, I found a medium armor rapier tank, once I played with a hatchet damage dealer, I have played Void Gauntlet damage dealer myself. This season I’ve played as a flail-healer, which actually worked in the dungeon I did it. This season I played with a blunderbuss and flail-and-shield-tank, and it was fun – although, not in the absolute highest mutation there was, we stuck to M2.
But most of the time, it’s just frustrating to play with randoms, and playing with my own company is starting to feel more and more like playing with randoms. And it sucks, because it used to be so good, so fun.
I know I’m hardly in a position to “make demands”, seeing as I always was the newest member with the least experience and knowledge this summer, and I did a lot of mistakes which needed to be compensated for in all the dungeon runs – and a lot of these new company members is probably in the same situation as I was. I know it’s a poor way to “pay it forward”, to be impatient and not show the same courtesy to new players that was shown me.
However, the difference is; I listened. I took note. I didnt necessarily understand immediately always, but I brought this new knowledge and tried to apply it, until I got it. Until I saw why specific weapon combinations were necessary, why certain skills was not as good as I thought, because I understood the importance of the “recommended” spells.
I adapted myself as much as I could – I never vehemently disagreed with the one guy in our company that is basically a walking encyclopedia of the game and then make insunations that he simply dont know enough, I dont dismiss it when someone points out to me that the skills I’m using is actually not suitable for what we’re doing because I have hundreds of hours of subpar healing. I never pulled the “I’ve got top-leaderboard rewards, so I dont care about your suggestions”-card to our company leader – although, I’m convinced that if I also did that to said player, now that I do have a good few of those, that he would not listen to the advice I’d give, because he’d still find a way to dismiss me.
I dont completely disregard it when people say that we need to have a certain weapon combination to succeed, just to then pull out a musket that takes seconds to reload between shots, miss most of them and do my thing just because “I think it’s more fun” – good, great, think that, I’ve got no issues with it, just.. take your musket elsewhere.
Not into the dungeon you promised you’d use certain weapons that we needed. Especially not when you had a chance to say in the beginning of the dungeon that you wouldn’t use said weapons, so that literally anyone else could have had stepped in and brought those very weapons.
It’s not all bad – we’ve got a couple of really fun and friendly players along with all of these other players. We’ve got Machi, who suffered PvP-missions with me for a week, we’ve got Thera who came back after a long hiatus just as me, and is currently suffering through side-quest levelling since AGS completely broke the main story quest, and despite now succeeded to grind all the way from late-thirty to early-forty level range, up to sixty-one, still cannot even access either Brimstone Sands nor Elysian Wilds, which is the two highest level areas in the game at the moment. The fact that it’s been over twenty levels of leveling through sidequests is honestly amazing, and I’m surprised she didnt just quit the game already. There’s also returning company players that was known in the company before, such as Bogdan, which has been loads of fun to play with.
But we lost someone from the “Summer Gang” because of the games new system requirement. That, and the fact that the expansion didnt really bring anything interesting enough to warrant buying a completely new PC. The same kind of frustration I’ve experienced has also driven two, maybe even three others, to take longer breaks this last week. Another has been working alot lately as well, and havent been able to log on for a good while as well.
I have definitely not been alone playing with these new company people, but it’s very rare now the last week or two that I actually end up playing with more than one other from the “Summer Gang” – often it’s me and four new ones, or me and one other and three new ones. It feels like if I could just as well have been playing with PUGs without voice comms.
I know this post is mostly negative, something I’ve been trying to keep off of this site. But I guess that the fact that AGS wants to force me to play PvP in their game, which never really was fun to play PvP in, that has loads of new bugs and crashing issues after having spend hours in login queue for, combined with the fact that suddenly our company is full of people not really interested in playing with others, bite back in voice comms instead of cooperating or is just simply bad at their role and dismiss any critique or advice and just try to have you believe it’s not their fault, it’s yours, and the fact that the “old people” I actually enjoyed playing with almost stopped playing..
Yeah, I know, I’m not completely without blame either. I decided to stick it out and play through that damned PvP to get it over with, and I’ve spent the majority of these two week doing just that. But then again, logging on and seeing twenty-five people online have been fun, until you realize that half of them is the ones you dont really want to dungeons with and the other half playing PvP – since that’s their main focus already – and then a few people still leveling up to do the activities you log on to do..well, might as well get that PvP done then, no?
I just.. cannot bear playing more dungeons with an overzealous tank, or a healer that thinks that the best healing spells are best used on already full-health teammates far away from the current battle, or damage dealers who think the best weapon to bring is a slingshot, and reading discord or ingame chat and see people arguing the weirdest takes – like the one that almost speccing themselves out as half-a-tank is the best use of their role as a damage dealer, or that the perk Refreshing Move is, in fact, a “noob trap” and you should bring a damage perk on the Lifestaff to bring up it’s “damage based healing number”, and thus “heal for more” – is, in lack of a better description, disheartening.
I love the Company. But the Company is people. And in my case, the people I spent the summer playing with.
These new dynamics in the company doesn’t sit too well with me, but I’m not sure if it’s just my autism getting the better of me – change is bad – or if it’s a change that has happened that is an actual bad one. Until I figure that one out, I’m going to keep this to myself for now – well, I guess it’s kinda out of the bag, since I know that this website has been found by a few (Hi, guys!), but you know what I mean.
And I think I want to clarify – I like these people I speak negatively about. They’re nice…they’re just so frustrating to try to play coordinated with, since they seem to think they dont have to put any effort into it. It’s less them, and more their playstyle and seeming uninterest in doing anything for the team.
And quite frankly, it just makes me want to go back to playing League of Legends.
