Something similar is what I used to do every week.
New Week, New Mutations
For almost two years, every single week, I made a mutation post updating what new twists there was on Expeditions in New World. Some weeks even several times, due to AGS screwing with it all.
Even after Aeternum “launched”, I kept on doing it, despite every Mutation was rendered useless, both in loot and in gold reward. They shifted the gold reward to “Random Mutations” instead, a queue-system they meant would solve a lot of problems with people not being able to play mutations because they got rejected from lobbies – and to promote, or incentivize, the usage, they changed all the gold reward to Random Queues instead. That, along with the fact that they changed the ceiling of power, but didnt let Mutated Expeditions follow along with that and let loot be useful… Mutations died off.
The only reason people were playing Mutations, were either new players who wanted to experience Mutations, leaderboard runners who didn’t give a damn about loot, gold or even the sudden cost of running Mutations, or people who only queued up for the Gold-reward on Random Queue. And that had its own issue – people queued up, but then went away from keyboard at the entrance, expecting the rest of the team to finish the dungeon for them for the gold reward, or people joined up, and if the dungeon they entered wasnt one they wanted, either due to “being boring” or “taking too long”, they voted to “abandon activity”, penalty free. Which meant that Random Queue wasn’t even used for the purpose it was intended either.
When will game devs learn? Playerbase as a whole do not want to deal with the hassle you put up in order to prevent certain things – they’ll find a way to do it quicker, or use the system against itself. Your way to “bring Mutations to the masses” only disincentivized people from actually playing Mutations, and only incentivized them to be this toxic hinderance to other people.
For months I kept updating those lists, every week. Now, I cant even remember what was on this week. Fire, I think? I remember Tempest’s Heart being one of them, because I watched a few friends play it last night, trying for a leadership reward for one of them. I know the other was Savage Divide, because another friend wanted to achieve a challenge to make a Musket Headshot of over 40’000 damage. I cannot remember what the last dungeon was.
The Musket challenge was a success, by the way; 40’331 damage. Congratulations again, Beebop!
I stopped doing those posts, because in the end.. I left the company I made them for. They never really needed it, it was mostly for my own sake of feeling useful, I guess. There were bots made for this, that updated other Discord servers about the Mutations, and that is still doing so, and just logging into the game shows the mutations. It was mostly just a small little ritual I had for myself every Tuesday – logging in after every server reset, screenshotting the Mutations and then posting a small, sometimes funny story about them.
In the end, it just felt weird, updating all of this when I also felt like the content it was all about was beyond useless. As endgame content it simply was no more. Not only was it not relevant, it was basically “punishing”, since it still required a lot of consumables to realistically do. Sure, we could probably go in and not use them, but.. as fun as it was playing with everyone, playing that way simply wasnt an option for me anymore.
After Aeternum came out, AGS released a raid, Hive of Gorgons. Which in all honesty was really fun. We played that once a week with the company instead, sometimes several runs due to people having alternate characters they needed clears with. Most of the time, I just sat there, browsing Tradepost, running around gathering stuff, actively avoiding Mutations, or just doing something for the sake of doing things. There was no real point in doing anything else, as many others went on to other games. Eventually we found another company to run a mixed group with, which then fell through – partially because they lacked the interest, or quite frankly, the skill, to actually do it. It eventually felt like a carry service. Later on, we made friends with another company through Bogdan, and we started to expand into playing the Sandworm Raid too, which was all good and well, for a while.
Meanwhile, I had started to play with other people as well, people I met through streams or friends. As time went on, I played more and more with them, due to the fact that, as a company, we simply didn’t play that much anymore, and due to the sheer size of the groups, we needed to be somewhat organized. We had schedules made, and sometimes things clashed between company organised stuff and what my other friends were planning, so I opted for company stuff. Eventually that also fell through – an evening with a particular frustrating event happened, basically causing the co-company stuff to fall through. Which for me meant less and less company stuff, because many of the company stuff was done with this other company, and as I had stepped away from those events.. I kind of only had Tuesdays left.
So, more and more I started to play with these other people. Some whom I now call dear friends. Moji, who streams when he can, theorycrafts alot and is a huge raidleader that I now run Hive- and Worm Speedruns with; Beebop, a streamer who occasionally joins in on these runs; Hana, who is one of the bigger pillars of Moji’s raids in my opinion; Rose, a fun guy who raidleads as well, who saw me as a skilled player and had me basically on a permanent spot on his roster for a long time; Smarty, a guy who have really high expectations and a rough surface that scares a lot of people away, but is actually really cool and fun. Just to name a few. I’ve met so many others, people who can easily fill up raid after raid. My friendlist ingame exploded from just a handful few, to now almost be at the limit.
I’ve also succeded with a lot of my goals I had set out for myself, picked up on the way and decided that these would be my new goals, and so on.
I now have one of every Heartrune – now my next goal is to upgrade them all to max, which I’ve gathered the materials needed; now I just need the gold to pay the taxes for it, which is roughly 90’000g.
I have all the available War-skins, a skinline I wanted so bad even back at launch of the game.
I have all the current Hive-schematics that came out with the new Raid – I actually suceeded with that tonight.
I have all the Glass-skins unlocked, even though I do not have them as items to trade away anymore.
I’ve got three houses, all fully decorated as I want them, and along with it I have all the Ultimate Trophies, all nine; three combat trophies, three crafting trophies, three gathering trophies – one for each house, as well as three loot luck trophies. I’ve also got one of each of the other trophies that have uses – Food Duration trophy, fishing XP, etc. I do not have the seasonal ones, one that give PvP XP boost – which is rumored to come out in another way soon, let’s hope – and I have yet to get the trophy that grants Territory Standing Gain XP, this seasons Trophy Reward. But I still have a few weeks left to get that, I think. All I need to do is to run two more M3’s as an “Unfallen” character – the season is a Hardcore Season, which means you cannot die, or you will not get the rewards.
I have also made the hard decision to leave the company I had spent almost two years with. I will not get into details of why, but I’ll summarize it with that I had thought hard about it for quite some time, and I felt that it was the only thing I could do. I hope they all consider me a friend, as I consider them one. But I met so many more to play with, and there’s so much more I want to do that the company as a whole didn’t partake in. As it is now, I’m in over twenty different discord servers relevant to New World, and I’m actively hanging out in atleast five every day, playing with people from more servers than that.
And getting them all into one company would be hard, as we’re all spread over all of the factions – and in some cases, even across regions. Not everyone meshes well with everyone, but to me, they’re still fun friends to hang out with, push my skill to the limit with, run speeds and trying to break speedrecords with.
Soon, I hope, a new raid will come out, a new weapon, new mount types, new heartrunes.. New anything.