The Latest Coffee Break

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.

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.

So yeah, yesterday was Summer Game Fest, and AGS had an announcement they had been hyping up for literal months. They released their DLC last year, which was.. lackluster, I guess you could call it. They did rework an entire area, added new mobs and all – I have no doubt there was a lot of work involved, but since we lost things while gaining these new things, I guess that contributes to us all feeling it wasn’t really a gain. Atleast not of any large margin.

But, it was still a bunch of stuff – just maybe not as much as one would’ve hoped from a paid DLC. I had friends that didn’t even buy the DLC because it was lackluster – among other reasons, true – and I had friends that played through all the DLC had to offer within weeks and even stopped playing after a month and a half. They haven’t logged in for almost seven months by now.

While this has been going on, we’ve waited for new content – anything new, really. The DLC was Season 3, and it was, as I said, lackluster. Then Season 4 came around, and with it came the Group Finder; a new dungeon, the Glacial Tarn; a few new artifacts; MSQ updates; controller support. So, the added content was a new dungeon and a groupfinder to find new ways to play the almost-endgame, because ofcourse the Group Finder wasn’t even for the endgame – Mutation level 3 was exempt from Group Finder. All we got was a few new artifacts – most of which I haven’t even seen being used anywhere – and one new dungeon. The rest was update to the early-to-mid game, in preparation for new players.

Ok, so that leaves us three months to go through with the same old as before for us veterans then, we’ll power through and wait for next season. Which was delayed for almost an entire month, first of all. Then, what did we get with Season 5? A new 10 man raid, which, granted, has been played a fair amount – they even did do events about it – a few more artifacts, also most I havent seen in use. And they changed cooking-skill a bit, and the coding of the combat. Oh, and they added the ability to use mounts in Out Post Rush. The rest was basically just readjustments of previously released stuff, like more MSQ updates, controller support adjustments, etc.

So, I say again – what we got for endgame was one instance of a 10-man raid, a few artifacts and nothing else. So when Season 5 came out, we had all been waiting for ~4-5 months, and all we got during this time was one dungeon and one 10-man raid – which was a re-use of their earlier “Soul Trials”, or MSQ-instanced story snippets – and a couple of new artifacts. That’s all the endgame we’ve got added in half a year. I’m not considering controller support, Group Finder, and those things as endgame stuff – as that’s mostly changes to how you play the early-to-mid-TO-endgame. Not endgame.

I mean, overhauling the MSQ and all of that isn’t bad, and I’m all for it. But it’s not adding anything to the endgame. It doesn’t give the players, who have been playing endgame for months-to-years already, anything at all to do. We’re basically been told to just…keep playing the same thing over and over for months. And that’s in a live service game, mind you. All we got during this time is a 10-man trial and a dungeon, and some new artifacts, most which isn’t used by anyone.

We’ve been waiting for so long now to get new stuff to do in endgame, and we’ve been told to wait for Summer Game Fest to hear “exciting, cool announcement of what they’re working on”, so ofcourse we were hoping for loads of stuff – atleast a new dungeon, a new raid, new weapons, a new entire area, maybe some boat/ship stuff. Stuff for us to do at endgame.

What was the announcement? Console release, cross platform play – meaning PC players can play with console players – and remappable buttons on controllers. Besides that, we got a new character creator, an overhauled MSQ, new UI, new combat code, a 10-man “long-raid” – I’ll get back to that one later – and swimming, new mount-type, a gearscore increase to 725, a PvPvE area with a new type of currency to buy PvP-gear, matchmaking and they made all the MSQ “Soul Trials” repeatable. It sounds alot when you stack it like that, but let’s parse it a bit.

So, for a new player, they’ll get a completely new and improved character creator, which is awesome. Hopefully stuff is better explained and all, so a new player will be able to quickly get in and know what to do. Besides being able to play on console and PC, and play with eachother, with remappable buttons – and this is huge, considering the default controller scheme they introduced the controller support with was horrible – and that with new UI and animation changes. With the current Group Finder and the new Matchmaking they’re going to introduce, it’ll be quick and easy to find people to do both instanced PvP and PvE with. They’ll enjoy a new tutorial, an overhauled, updated MSQ, with a bunch of Soul Trials and Dungeons and Trials and Raids, swimming and a PvP area. All this all the way up to 725 gearscore.

It’s huge. It’s definitively a massive game to start from the beginning with. They’ve also tweaked the game in such a way that you’ll able to play it alone or with friends, so hopefully you’ll never be “locked out” of anything by not having anyone to help you through something. If I were to buy the game on console, my son and I could easily play the game together – and we’ll have a blast levelling up together.

But. For existing players that have been playing the endgame for months already and are in desperate need for new content, what did we get?

We can go back and re-do Soul Trials, a 10-man “long raid” and PvP area, along with matchmaking for instanced PvP, while re-gearing from 700 to 725, and a few months after console release, the console players will reach endgame to play with us. Oh, we also got surface swimming – no more lakebed walking – and a new mount-type. As for how the mounts work in the game atm, it’s all basically just skins, so we got a new skinline for mounts; Bears.

Matchmaking for PvP and the PvP area is mostly for PvP’ers, and what that means for them is that they’ll….keep playing the same PvP stuff they already do, except for being – hopefully – matched against equally skilled player, however that is calculated.. And honestly, I do believe the PvP area will be old quite quick, even for them. Players usually love to find ways to “break games”, and PvP’ers in particular. My bet is that the “meta” within a week will be something that abuses the hell out of players that is unfortunate enough to walk in there alone, hoping to find out what the area is all about. Like coordinated ganking, just for the sake of griefing other players, for instance. Sure, on paper, whatever is done in that area, they’ll get something called “doubloons”, a new currency that will be used to either purchase, craft or upgrade PvP-gear. Whether or not that will replace Azoth Salt will remain to be seen. But on paper it seems like an awesome thing, but knowing PvP’ers, they’ll find a way to play that in a way that is unintended, that makes the game mode “unfun” for others as much as possible. PvP communities rarely let the chance to be a bag of dicks go to waste.

For PvE players then, we’ll get the ability to ride Bears – reskinning of mounts, basically – and we’ll get the ability to swim on the surface of water. No words of whather or not we can dive, but atleast we’re not gonna walk on the bottom of the lake anymore. And then we’ll get to replay Soul Trials, and if I’m not mistaken, I think they’ve said we can bring in teams into them. We’ll also get an increase of Gear Score, meaning all our current gear is obsolete and we’ll have to grind to get the new best stuff, and apparently one of the most efficient way – or perhaps the only way? – is to play the new 10-man “long-raid”.

So what is a “10-man long-raid”? It’s a mix between dungeons and the raids they’ve had so far. A dungeon is a 5 man instance, where you fight through hordes of mobs, solve puzzles, reaches checkpoints and kill bosses, culminating in a hard bossfight, after which you win, gather your loot and leave.

Raids, so far in New World, has been a group of players just fighting a boss, one way or another. The first raid was the hatchery, which was a 10 man arena, where you had to fight a few waves of mobs, and when those waves were killed, any player that had died had the ability to rejoin the arena, at which time a new wave of enemies came. Rinse and repeat a few times, and eventually “The Boss” were fought. When succeeded, you got loot and left, and you had an hour time-limit for doing this.
There also was a 20-man raid – a huge arena where you were fighting a huge sandworm along with a bunch of smaller mobs. On launch, it was hard, and lots of attempts were failures, despite the three hour time-limit. As people got better, they managed to figure out ways to complete it, and eventually the world record is just over two and a half minute. However, since, the gearscore has increased from 625 to 700, and the rewards for the game is still the old rewards, 625 stuff.
Besides that, it has been another trial, the “Winter Rune Trial” as mentioned, it’s a 10 man fight with a small puzzle, which goes from a few mobs, to a large lizard, and when that’s done, you run deeper into the instance to fight the last boss, with a similar, but slightly more complex puzzle as you’re fighting.

It’s nothing crazy, it’s fairly straight forward – fight waves of small mobs, culminating in a bossfight, varying degrees of difficulty, scaled up in difficulty to adress the fact that you’re ten people fighting.

It might not sound like it’s that much difference between these two things, but it actually is. Trials, so far, seems to be a small arena which you fight timed waves of enemies and hard bosses – call it gladiator fights if you want, and you wouldn’t be terribly far off. Dungeons, meanwhile, is a complex instance, where you fight enemies as you progress further and further into the dungeon, and you can even ignore them if you want, reaching new checkpoints after checkpoints while you’re trying to fight the bosses.

However, it seems that this new 10-man “long-raid” is more of a dungeon rather than a “Trial arena”. It’s supposedly a complex construction where you progress deeper and deeper while ultimately fighting three difficult bosses as a ten man group. In my opinion, it sounds amazing, and the best part of it is that it’s dropping better and better loot, giving you the ability to upgrade all the way up to the new gearscore cap of 725. Sounds good, it’s awesome, sounds fun.

But it sounds too little, too late. We’ve been waiting for months – half a year or more – and we were basically just told that we are to wait for atleast four more months, before we get meaningful new content.
Which, honestly, is kind of in line with many other games – how often does, for instance, WoW release “more content” between their expansions, which is roughly two years apart? They dont – however, they release such an extensive expansion that it actually holds most players for that time, be it the new cosmetic goals they put up – I was grinding for so long just to get the Dragon Mount, Vial of the Sands. That alone took alot of time. I also remember the vendor mounts, if I’m not mistaken, they cost so much that it took time just to get those alone – let alone all the other stuff you had to do. New World doesnt have that type of content release. It has a “seasonal” release of content – every three to four months they drop a smaller-than-WoW-expansion content batch, and in between they fixes bugs and what not. But the issue is, the sizes of these content batches has been abysmal, and are simply not enough to retain players, making the playerbase smaller and smaller each month. I wish New World would adopt the content release schedule WoW have – with enormous content batches once every year or every two years, enough to actually last us that long – and on top of it they’d have these “seasons” where you basically get this pass filled with rewards for leveling up the season pass.
As it is now, the season passes with rewards for just playing the game seems to be the intended content they drop. It’s ridiculous and very frankly, not enough.
But the reason I say that it’s too little, too late, is the fact that we, the current player base on PC, had been asking for content for so long, and every time we asked for it, AGS just said “we’ve got cool stuff to announce for you in June, we just cant talk about it yet!”, as if to tell us that what we, the PC players, are waiting for will be announced – they will announce content for us, just be patient and wait. They told us that for months.

And now we just found out that the majority of the announcement was..
…that they’re releasing the game, completely reworked, on consoles, with crossplay, full controller support, overhauled character creation and MSQ. The majority of this announcement wasn’t for us – it was for people who had never played the game, but might buy and play it on console.

When we asked for updates on more content and a roadmap to let us know what kind of content we have to look forward to, they told us to sit quietly and wait – just to then basically ignore us and try to sell in the game as if it was a fresh launch to consoles. That which we were promised, never happened. We were promised content, a roadmap to see what we have to wait for. And all we got..

Was a console commercial. The content aimed for us were, simply too little, too late.

I have no doubt I’m going to buy the game on PS5, delete a character on my PC and play with my son, experiencing the start of the game and leveling up along with him. If nothing else, I’ll buy the game and play it while on the couch myself whenever I feel like it. Dont misunderstand – I really do think the console release announcement is great, and what they’ve done with the game in preparation for that is nothing short of awesome!

But consider, last October AGS released their DLC. With that release, and since, we’ve gotten an area reworked – not added, one existing area reworked – and we’ve gotten mounts, artifacts, two dungeons and one raid, they introduced “influence race” – new type of open world PvP to trigger wars – a groupfinder for regular dungeons and Mutation 1 and Mutation 2, but not for Mutation 3, a level increase for both player level and skills, and Gearscore raised to 700. That’s it. That is the content that is supposed to hold us over until the 15th of October this year. An entire year. That content was supposed to last us an entire year. Sure, they say that they’ve remade a whole lot of the Main Story Questline and starter areas and such – but that’s not content “for us”. That part of the game is past us, months to years ago. That part of the game, that content, are for “potential new players”, not us. Sure, a few of us have started a new character to experience it, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was not endgame content that we’ve asked for – and besides, existing players starting over to experience it doesn’t add players. It just moves them around where they are in their progress – while we want more endgame stuff, some players just moved to the early game, which isn’t endgame affecting. And when they’re max level again, most of them are just going to go back to their main character again anyway, so nothing endgame-related has actually been gained by the playerbase.

For already existing players on PC, this was basically just AGS saying “hold my beer” when asked “how does one ruin a reputation the fastest?”

..is not only the name of a game I recently bought, but also how it feels playing New World at the moment.

One thing at the time, and let’s start with the game named No Rest for the Wicked. It’s an top-down ARPG, with a slower pace gameplay than, say, Diablo or Path of Exile. It’s more like an Isometric Souls-like than Diablo-like, from what I can tell. It seems really awesome, despite only being in Early Access. I’ve promised myself to stop buying Early Access games, but when the games in Early Access is only roughly €30, and as polished as this already is, I feel like I can make an exception – especially when it’s so close in combat to Souls-like as it is.

I’ve also bought a few more books for the collection! Over the years, I’ve been collecting some tabletop roleplaying game stuff that I was in contact with as a kid. It’s just me re-buying some of the books I had back in the day, and buying the ones I didnt have – which was most of them.

There’s a few sections of this collection – first off, it’s the miniature models I’ve shown a few times here already. I dont really collect the “old” stuff of these, but I just try to get as much variety as possible – militias, skeletons, monsters, beastmens, etc. Last year, I kickstarter-backed a company making miniatures, and a few weeks ago I got the shipment finally – 400+ minis, almost 15 kilos of it!

Secondly, the publisher of the main tabletop rpg I’m collecting, also published some fantasy books. It was a series of 51 fantasy books, some being Conan the Barbarian books, Gary Gygax’s books about Gord, a few books of Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World series, and a good chunk of the Elric series – and finally I’ve gotten my hands on the last one. Now I proudly own all of them!

Not only that, there’s quite alot of books and boxes I’m trying to collect, of the actual tabletop RPG itself. There’s four different editions I want to get my hands on, and a total 17 boxes and 42 books – and so far, I’ve gotten 11 of the boxes and 28 of the books – not all of them complete, though. I still miss some items, mostly maps. It’s getting close to being complete! It’s a mix of rules, expansion rule-sets, sourcebooks, bestiaries, adventures and handbooks, and in this case, I’m mostly aiming to get everything from Edition 2, 3 and 4, as well as the “Expert rules”, which was a sort of “expansion” to Edition 2. When 2E first came out, they expanded upon it in lots of ways, with extra rules and such, which came to be known as “Expert”. It was simply just an expansion of the rules. 3E only updated the basic ruleset of 2E, which meant that the Expert-ruleset still functioned with 3E.
When finally Edition 4 came out, they reworked it in its entirety, integrated the “Expert-rules” into the base ruleset. Therefore, basically any “Expert-material” is fully functional with both Edition 2, 3 and 4, and as long as you do some minor conversions between them, all three editions are fully functional with each other, so long as you mind the Expert-rules. Any adventure published for 2E, will absolutely work for 4E, as long as you do minor adjustments and conversions, just as an adventure published for 4E will work with 2E or 3E the same way.
Back in the day, we used to play Edition 4 along with some material from the “Expert”-rules, but the books I had access to myself was the 3rd edition stuff, so with a bit of tweaking, I made 2E and 3E stuff compatible with 4E, and it worked like a charm. I’m definitely not opposed to get the books and boxes from Edition 5 and later – but my main focus is to get everything published between 1982 and 1994, which is the year fifth edition came out.

But 5E is not on my “to get”-list as of now. If they were, it’ll be 15 more books and boxes, however, it was generally regarded as a huge step down in quality from the previous editions, and we just never got around to play with it at all. It was set in a different area of the planet that was the official game-world, and it introduced more races that was vastly different than what we had been used to, and all the rules were apparently made different for the sake of being different. I know that our DM didnt want to deal with it too much, so we kept playing 4E. Me and some friends were actually making our own stuff according to the 4E rulesets for upwards ten years after 5E came out.

The editions that came out even later, we dont talk about, loudly atleast. It was a completely different dev team and publishers – the IP got sold to someone else, who thought they could breathe new life into it. I think they failed, pretty disastrously. That, which was basically trying to lable itself as 6E, 7E and 8E, was published with few addendum-books and few years between the editions, and was set in a completely different world than the first 5 editions. Personally, I consider them a flop, and not actually 6th, 7th or 8th edition of the game. They’re a completely different TTRPG altogether in my opinion.
Several years later, they tried to re-release the game, basically just republishing their own version of the game, to “celebrate” the 30 year aniversary of the original IP – Yes, they bought an IP, remade it in their own vision and set it in a completely different world, and then years later republished their own stuff as a celebration of the IP they bought and vandalized. Some years later even still, they tried to republish the 3E mixed with the Expert rules and 4E. I mean, they published it, so they didnt try – but I dont think it was a huge success, as they later sold the rights to another company, which also made a kickstarter for it.

Their version was more of a continuation of 3E with Expert ruleset. While I – in a way – got disappointed, because I liked 4E more and hoped this version would be more like 4E, I must say that I do like this edition alot more than the “flopped 6E” – so much so, that I actually consider this the true sixth edition of the TTRPG. Atleast it’s set in a world, that for now is implied to be the “original” gameworld, which is a huge win in my book.

Also, as a side-collection, I’m trying to get my hands on the Falcon books too, by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson. They’re solo-adventure books, basically a book filled with paragraphs that, when read in different orders, make several adventures in one book. It’s a sci-fi setting with a time travelling agency, where you play as one of the agents trying to hunt down criminals – and depending on your dice rolls and choices, you stop reading one page, and start reading a specific paragraph on another page, riffling through the pages back and forth in order to read “your” adventure. There’s six of these books; The Renegade Lord, Mechanon, The Rack of Baal, Lost in Time, The Dying Sun, and At the End of Time. So far, I’ve got the first three books, two of which I grew up with and played alot. They were my older brothers, but I probably spent more time with them than he did, and when I moved out I didn’t bring them with me, as they were not mine. But I made sure to get my own books later – it just took almost twenty years! The first two I got almost a year and a half ago, the third I got now just a few weeks ago. Now I just need to find the last three..

So, what’s happening in New World then? Not much. I still do the same thing as usual, trying to get ingame funds, playing M3’s, waiting for more content so that my old company members come back to the game. There’s not much else to do. I did however sign up for a competition – I dont really know all the details, as of yet, as nothing has been officially announced yet. But from what I’ve gathered so far, AGS is sponsoring a Speedrunning event of one of their latest raids, and they’re apparently working with a known speedrunner of this game.
So from what I understood, they’ve appointed a few content creators to be “team captains”, and over the weekend, there’ll be a 4 day event, where the “team captains” will be running this new raid. Which members of each team is completely up to the respective team captains, and the rumor so far is that for the North American region, two of the best speed running teams will get together and form one 10-man team. Usually, the North American teams are the winners in all other speedrunning events, so everyone is fairly sure they’ll win this too – however, it seems there’s regional competition. NA competes against NA teams, European teams against other European teams, etc., which actually makes this interesting.
How many team captains there’ll be? No idea. Will it actually be a regional lineup, or will it be a global one? No idea. What’s the detailed rules? No idea.

Thing is, AGS havent gone public with this yet. And apparently, they “forgot” about timezones, so their idea was to publish this event of the morning of Friday, for the event to end on Monday – but timezones makes this event go live Saturday for Australians, for instance, and in the evening for Europeans. And I’m not being sarcastic either – I saw a screenshot between the AGS representative and one of the content creators talking about this, and AGS just said “tomorrow morning”, referensing US-time, while seemingly oblivious that it wasnt the same for the one they were talking to. “Tomorrow morning” would be 6h later for the “team captain” at the time of the screenshot, but that was apparently not correct – as said hours came and went a long time ago. It’s like they’re so US-centric, that “the rest of the world” simply dont exist. I’m going to assume that “tomorrow morning” means “US West-coast time”, and that they wont share anything until 9:00 their time.

Which is all and well – except for the fact that it caters more to the US-player base so much more, as it gives them more time to plan and run it, than the other regions. And as the official announcement haven’t been released yet, people like me – who is not a team captain, but merely a possible team member of the running teams – know very little. I have to piece together the information I get from different sources, which means I’m not a hundred percent sure what this is all about; but this is what I’ve pieced together so far.

In roughly two to three hours, AGS will go public with a “weekly, weekend event”, where some – unknown number – content creators take the role of “team captains”, get a team together and try to speedrun the Winter Rune Forge. As I said, NA have the upper hand here, since they just merged two of their best teams into one and going forward with that team, while the rest of the regions team captains have a few players they usually Speedrun with and have to fill up with random players. As such, the other regions team captains have been probing their communities for prospective team members, and some information as to what it’s all about have been “leaked”, just to let these prospective players know roughly what they’re about to sign up for – which is how I know anything at all about this event.

If the information I’ve gathered is correct, each region competes against itself – so in NA there’ll be a few teams that compete against eachother, in Europe there’ll be a few teams competing against eachother, etc,. Each winning team will be rewarded with 20 Azoth Edition gamekeys provided by AGS – meaning each player will get two free gamecopies of the base game including some deluxe skins, no DLC – and that’s it. There’s also a possibility that the competition is global – meaning that every team competes against every other, no regional restriction, and if so, basically everyone I’ve spoken to so far are in agreement that it’s basically the same as saying that the two merged NA-teams will win this entire event. Two professional hardcore speedrunning teams that have won most of the community-driven speedrunning competitions so far over the last year or so, will almost be guaranteed to win over teams that mostly comprise of PUG-players.

However, the details will be announced later. This includes if there’s restrictions, including if there’ll be “PUG’s allowed” or if the teams are supposed to be comprised of the team captains usual team members – how this’ll be enforced I dont know, so therefore I do not think this will be a rule, but it is AGS, so I wouldn’t be surprised. The exact rules, times, if there’ll be a number of attempts, etc., none of these things are yet public.

And as a member of the discord community one of these team captains have, I saw them searching for potential players to play this event with. There was a vetting process – I had to show my gear and have it being approved, and so on, and improve upon any detail I needed to. No problems, I provided my gear that I use for both healing and dps in the Winter Rune Forge and said I was interested in both roles, whichever they needed.

Strangely enough, during the vetting process, I did not hear a single comment about my healing gear specifically. It was said that my gear was fine, with a few tweaks, but the tweaks mentioned was only for my dps gear, and then I was told that I could sign up for the dps role that wielded Greatsword and Hatchet. Great!, I thought, so I signed up and started to get the necessary stuff together.

I crafted a new hatchet; bought a new spear; crafted a new, very expensive Runeglass of Arboreal Opal to re-socket my Greatsword; I upgraded my three Ancient Combat trophies from Basic to Major, which was by far the largest expense; and then I purchased a bunch of the relevant coatings, wards and honing stones. I was spending loads in preparation for this, it was definitely more than I was comfortable with, but it was necessary in order to participate in the speedrun on the level that atleast was required of me. I usually hover around a few thousand golds, but lately I’ve been really grinding to get more funds, like running Elite Chests like crazy to find Golden Scarabs to sell, been running lots of max level mutations to find loot to sell, etc. I’ve slowly but surely managed to get a small fortune – compared to what I usually have – and I have now blown through most of it in preparation for this Winter Rune Forge Speedrun competition.
We’re still waiting for the official announcement from AGS, but in the meantime; a few hours ago, “my” team announced their roster for the evening, which I signed up for.

Edit – As time later passed, the “announcement” AGS said they were going to make, was nothing else but a list of team captains, and times they were supposedly streaming their runs. “My” team captain had a timeslot for three in the middle of the night. Very confused about this, I reached out to some of the people on the list, talked to them a bit, read conversations I saw they had had on Discord and tried to talk to AGS themselves, and I couldnt get a straight answer to anything. Not the rules, not the framework of the event, not if we were supposed to actually speedrun and stream at stated scheduled times, or if it was supposed to be a VOD, or if anyone hosted our VODs somewhere.. the team captain I was supposed to run with simply said that No, they weren’t running at that time, they didnt know why AGS had put them down for that slot, as they had said they were going to run at another time and still AGS put them down for the middle of the night, and that they were going to be asleep at that time.

Nothing against the team captain I was supposed to run for, because I wholeheartedly agree with what was said – but AGS does something like this.. it just confuses me to no end. I dont feel like I can participate in things with no rules or structures like that. And not two team captains told me the same things about how they had been explained how this event was supposed to work.

And AGS themselves? They were very vague about it all, and just referred me back to the “schedule-tweet”, as if that gave all the information necessary. I promise you, it did not explain a damn thing about the rules, structure or framework of anything.

So I stepped down from running, even if I wasnt in the starter-roster for the evening. I just cant do it. I cant run serious speedrunning competitions, at three at night, when I’m a single parent of three kids I need to take care of. Late evening is fine, even if it’s pushing it, but starting speedrunning at 03:00? No way.

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.

..it has been now. Just a little bit more than three months. I didnt get that much time to play DDDA, after all, but it’s still installed. But I am actually more looking forward to the next game, Dragon’s Dogma 2, that will launch in just a few days. 22nd of March, I’ll head off to Gransys once again.
…kinda. This weekend is my weekend with the kids, so I wont be able to play too much, but a few hours during the evenings I should be able to! Provided I’ll get the PS5 for myself, that is – all three of my kids have decided to put their paws on it, all of them playing their own favorite games. I almost wish I have a second PS5, just so they dont have to share as much, but then I need another monitor and it’ll all cost way to much.

So, what’s been happening lately? Well, my “slow-play December” went on for a few days into January, and when I came back to New World, basically half the player population decided to take a long vacation from New World, including my company. I do not blame them – the game is basically put on a shelf by the devs, and the “content” the devs provided with Season 4 wasnt all that much to hang on a christmas tree. Couple that with the fact that the devs straight up told us that we’re not going to see much until summer, when we can see their roadmap – not “get more content”, but legitimately “see their roadmap”.
Like, this summer they’ll share their plans for the future. They most likely are not going to have content by then; a roadmap is a plan for upcoming content. And so, the players was left with very little content, that seemed poorly planned ahead – such as the fact that everyone was basically “enough-geared” before a week had gone by – and now they have nothing to look forward to either. And any bugs or balance-fixes was supposed to come with Season 5 – which inexplicably got delayed. No word on why, and no word on the new release date. What we did get word of though, was that it was apparently “cool stuff!” coming on the roadmap. So..
Dead game? Probably.

No, to be more real, though, I do believe they’ll keep New World alive for a good while more. They’ll keep the servers up and running, and even make a console release – they’ve recently added controller support, which was supposed to come with Season 5 – and through console release they’ll get an infusion of both cash and players. That is what I believe.
What I hope as well, is that said console release will have shared servers across all platforms. I also wish for it to be cross save – so that I can play on my characters on PC, and boot up my PS5 and log in there and play with the very same characters. It is, after all, a fairly new tech, FF14 had it working three years ago or something? Baldurs Gate 3 have it too, as do Diablo 4, and it’s been added to other games after their release, such as Witcher 3, for instance.
But just beause it’s a few years old tech and that a few other games offer it, unfortunately does not mean that New World will offer either cross platform play, or cross save.
To assume so already, way before we’ve even heard of whether or not they’re actually going to release on console yet, is a mistake.
Yes, it’s logical to assume they’ll release on console – they’ve added controller support, and another game they’re publishing – Throne and Liberty – is multiplatform and supposedly crossplay and cross save, and another game they’re in the making, the Lord of the Rings MMO – which is also on the same game engine as New World – is supposedly going to be crossplay and cross save.
However, they’re just publishing Throne and Liberty, they’re not the developers. And Lord of the Rings MMO is so far into the future, they havent even gotten there yet – they might not even know how to cross play with Azoth Engine, and putting New World on consoles might be their test for how LotR-MMO will act out. It’s entirely possible that the New World game will be released on console with no cross play on release, just to have it added years down the line, and by then there’ll be so many servers set that people wont transfer, and unless they merge “console servers” with “PC servers”, the player bases wont ever touch.

Anyway, my belief is that they’ll keep New World up and running, push it to consoles and hope people buy it and play it there, so that they can use console-NW as a “testing ground” to squash the bugs when it’s still New World, just to have LotR-MMO off to a better, running start, when it is finally released. Regardless of how many copies they’ll sell on consoles, they’ll keep New World operating because they need something of their own up, atleast until LotR-MMO comes out. The “future” of New World is basically guaranteed – from AGS side – atleast until then.
After the LotR-MMO release? New World is on shaky ground, and its future is all depending on how well recieved it has been meanwhile, from now till that LotR-MMO-release.
But even if the devs keeps the game up and running – by life-support, if needed – there’s no guarantee the game will be “alive”. The playerbase could shrink drastically – which it has, I’ll show an image later on – but it could also explode dramatically – which I find unlikely. It could also be that the devs do come back and give good content to the game, enough so that the playerpopulation will come back to atleast a reasonable level again.

This is what I find most probable, but I cant shake the worrying feeling, that the “cool stuff!”-content that AGS wants to share with us, and the future roadmap they’ll show us, wont include anything meaty – it’ll all be pointless, useless, boring.. so much so that people will stop playing all toghether, and that the only players playing the game will be the ones that bought it on the most recent sale. They’ll chose a server, hoping to play with lots of people, and just…run around in a ghost world. They, and fifteen more who just bought the game.

If that happens, the devs will force the game to be up – they’ll need their test environment for LotR, after all – but it’ll be a life-support they’ll unplug the same day that the LotR-MMO comes out. It’s quite a pessimistic outlook, but I can not help it. AGS hasn’t given us much to go on, we have no info, and we’ve been in the dark for months.
Season 5 is now a week past it’s original date, and we still havent heard anything besides “well, news within a month. Probably”.

So, I’ve been playing some small games the last few weeks. It’s been kinda busy at home, so I have not had much time to sit down and play any longer sessions. Backpack Hero is actually kinda fun, to be honest. Besides games, all I’ve done at night to relax is rewatching Star Gate Atlantis. It’s a good series, still!

I also decided to play through some old DDDA, but modding it as much as I can. The first few times was fun, but I’m curious as to how mods can change that experience. Hopefully I’ll have some time over for that soon.

I have to do Christmas decorations this year. I dont like Christmas, but the kids do, so..

Let’s start, I guess.

Welp. Fall damage is a thing.