Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I am sorry I didn’t end up blogging yesterday but I was feeling out of it in general. I woke up with this crazy headache and it never really went away. I sorta felt like I never fully woke up until last night and went through the day in a bit of a haze. In that mode I just could not muster the “oomph” to actually put digital pen to paper and write a post. I’ve also been feeling a bit of mixed feelings about New World right now, and I most definitely do not want to help in bringing it down. That said as much as I love the moment to moment game play I have some concerns. Essentially if I had not made the push to level 60 when I did, it would be considerably harder to achieve the same sort of leveling pace today.

This morning I ran around for a bit and collected some screenshots. Ironically Brightwood a higher tier zone is the only one actually keeping the project board full. While this only represents four of the eleven claimable territories, they are all more or less in this state or worse. Other towns like Monarch’s Bluff and Fight Light for example, generally only have the single town upkeep task running. There are a lot of things at play here, not the least of which is an impromptu and unwanted civics lesson. Governments do not make money, that is unless they are absolutely ignoring the needs of their citizens. When you claim territory, like it or not, you are taking on the responsibility of taking care of all of the citizens of your territory. That means your number one job should be keeping the town boards humming in order to keep everything upgraded so that the citizens are best taken care of. Instead we have folks in a situation where they are just not making enough money in taxes from the territory to keep things up… which again works just like rural areas in America.

The problem is right now owning a territory is a hole in the ground that you pour money into. This is compounded by a couple of things, not the least of which is the invasion mechanic which legitimately ends up penalizing you more for trying hard to beat it than just throwing and wiping with the first wave. When you lose the game chooses random upgrades that have been applied to the town and removes them, so for example you could luck out and lose only fortifications to the territory which won’t really impact your citizens. Then you have a situation like last night when the defense of Monarch’s Bluff did fairly well against the waves… and lost 4 crafting machine upgrades and 1 fortification as a result. Making it even worse… holding a territory is not really certain because there are some exploitable mechanics at works that make territories flipping fairly unpredictable. Hopefully however that last point has been addressed with some changes in last nights patch. Essentially in practice what happens is if a territory is expecting an invasion or war, then any money spent could be lost entirely so the companies that hold territories just don’t keep projects running.

At this point you are probably thinking “Gee Bel, Minda seems fucked” and on one hand you are correct, things are pretty rotten in “Denmark”. However we are also not the only server struggling right now. This is what the server population looks like for US East, divided into the three buckets that Amazon uses to classify servers. Currently there are 200 servers in the US East data center and of those 1 is classified as High Population, 9 are Medium and 190 are Low Population. By this metric, Minda is a Low Pop Server along with the other 190 servers, but in practice we are firmly in the middle of that pack based on prime time numbers. We are likely doing significantly better than some servers, and worse than a handful of servers. In fact I have been using my secondary character to create alts on other servers to test the waters just to see if things are better somewhere else. So far after a half dozen or so of these jaunts, everyone seems to be pretty much in the same shape we are.

The problem with New World is that the game feels at times that it was designed by spreadsheet and relies on systems interacting with other systems, but did not take into account how players actually play games. There was deep concern that the coin duping bugs would lead to price inflation, but all I am seeing is that most things have little to no value, yet the taxes associated with things are fixed costs not based at all around the health of the general economy. Here is an example of a legendary item and quite honestly one of the best shields in the game… going for 24 coins. I bought a version of this when I dinged 60 for 200 coins and I thought I was getting a steal. There are plenty of fixed cost gold sinks, but not near enough gold faucets so unless you are a trade cartel, pretty much every player is going to be hurting for money in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been saving for my third house because I want it to be a Tier 4, and I am not sure when I will feel comfortable enough to actually spend that initial 20,000 gold on it.

In my perfect version of New World, a single faction would control the entire map and that controlling company would be made up of representatives of the other factions. The profits from the wealthy territories could subsidize the lower profit territories and improve the state of New World equally. However as I am sure you are aware this dream state of the game does not exactly jive with a game that folks still consider to be purely PVP based. Additionally the even more astute will have realized I have more or less described a federal plan of government. The challenge that we have is that real world Governments who have had hundreds if not thousands of years of experience… can’t figure this shit out. This game chooses to place the reigns of power in the hands of a bunch of dudes with rage boners because the only viable PVP in the game really… is through waging war with other companies for control of territories.

Shocking to no one… the whole incentives for flagging up and participating in World PVP are not nearly attractive enough to actually get players to do it. The only time folks flag up is when they are actively trying to flip a zone as a coordinated effort, which again is generally a small group of players that are associated with the larger war effort. The rest of the players state “white named” and are only really impacted by wars by who controls the territory, whether or not there is a teleport bonus, and who is controlling the tax rates. New World needs significant rework to make the systems actually interact in a way that makes sense for the pattern of play. However for all if this post I am still greatly enjoying myself and for all the gnashing of teeth about the server… I have come to love it. Minda reminds me so much of Argent Dawn in that there is a cast of characters that make up who is actively talking in Global chat, and then an army of folks who never speak up in public. In fact when the server transfers open up again I will be trying to actively get folks to transfer onto the server. I don’t think it is beyond saving and my hope is if we increase the population, some of the other taxation issues with start the sort themselves out. My only real concern is knowing that Endwalker is on the horizon and it will vastly cut into my play time in New World. I don’t want to completely abandon things here, but I know I will be focused on getting to 90 and gearing up to be able to raid there. The post Unwanted Civics Lesson appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends! You are about to embark upon a very mathy blog post. If you are as allergic to math as I happen to be, you might need to skip this one. However I have been mulling something over in my head for awhile, and this morning I finally broke down these thoughts and confirmed my theories. Essentially crafting in New World is extremely painful once you pass the level 100 line, pretty much regardless of whatever crafting profession you are doing. For me, I have chosen to focus on Engineering and Furnishing, two extremely grindy professions but ones that can make sure I am supplied in the best harvesting tools as well as the best storage options for my houses.

I have a whole slew of crafting professions and at some point I would love to level all of them. However right now I have two goals in mind. Firstly I want to be able to craft Orichalcum tools which will require 150 Engineering and I am presently sitting at 143. The other goal is to be able to craft Starmetal Storage Boxes… because at some point in my travels I picked up that crafting schematic. In order to craft these I will need to be 145 Furnishing and am currently sitting at 112. So when I started New World I brought with me a lot of assumptions about crafting that were gained through other MMORPGs. One of these assumptions is that crafting the most resource efficient higher tier item is going to be a better option than creating lower tier items. This comes from games like World of Warcraft that eventually “grey out” items so that their crafting rewards no experience. This assumption I made was completely false but we will get into that a bit later.

As a result of my assumptions however I have been crafting the items that I can in theory use currently. It seemed more efficient to craft Mining Picks as opposed to the other items that I could craft based on the experience gained per item, and as a result until recently I had been going through this entire process of running a Starmetal Route to gather a cache of Starmetal and then running a number of Iron Routes to slowly convert said Starmetal into bars. The first thing that you need to understand is that in order to craft a Starmetal Pick you can use almost any wood and almost any leather, and if you are crafting a pick for yourself you want to use the highest quality item you can make of each of these to increase the chances of getting a high item level pick. However for grinding purposes you want to use the cheapest and most readily available materials because quality of material has zero factor on the experience gained per craft. Additionally there is a chance of getting bonus materials when you refine, but that doesn’t happen every time so we are going to assume you got zero bonus materials. So with all of that in mind if I break down a single Starmetal Mining Pick into the most simple version I can craft you get the following raw materials list:

• Starmetal Ore – 84
• Iron Ore – 336
• Green Wood – 404 (needed both for timber and charcoal)
• Sand Flux (or better) – 98
• Rawhide – 8

One of the challenges that we have with New World is that the game does not do a great job of giving us access to all of the necessarily information to make decisions. For example I can see that I have 9658 Experience left before I hit level 144, but there is no real clear indication of how much experience I have gained currently. So for the sake of estimating I view that progress bar as a little less than 1/6th of the way full which based on my fuzzy math would make me guess that there are something in the neighborhood of 12,000 experience points needed to get from level 143 to 144 in Engineering. This is the assumption we are going to go with, but admittedly this is a flawed assumption. However with that as our base… in order to get this level I would need to craft 9 Starmetal Pick Axes at 1425 Experience gained per craft. If you extrapolate that out to total pool of materials… this single level is going to cost me:

• Starmetal Ore – 756
• Iron Ore – 3024
• Green Wood – 3636
• Sand Flux – 882
• Rawhide – 72

That is a staggering amount of resources and it includes two things that are HIGHLY contested in game. Essentially Wood and Leather are enough of a renewable resource and come from enough different sources that you as the player can always reliably find an endless amount of them available to you. Metal and Cloth however are highly contested resources that only appear in specific areas of the map, and as a result players tend to run reliable routes in order to gather up enough resources to make it worth their while. Cloth is considerably easier to find than metal, and my best Iron route usually gets me about 1500 to 2000 Iron ore in 20-30 minutes of running around depending on how contested the route is at that moment. Similarly there is the problem of what the game refers to as “resources” which are the materials needed to convert one material into another. For example if you want to make anything higher than an Iron Bar you are going to need a constant supply of Sand Flux or one of the later variants. These come exclusively from looting supply chests out in the wild. During the very brief crafting summer of love when they were dropping 20 or more at a time and the market for them crashed. However after some nerfs they are dropping more slowly which means I have run out of sand flux at numerous times along this journey.

It was this drought of resources that lead me to start exploring other alternatives, namely looking for something that does not require Iron ore. However more than that it got me to start assessing the value of each item crafted based on the experience gained from it. One of the curious things I noticed about New World is that items never really become “trival” or stop giving you experience per craft. That means over time crafting enough of a low level item will gain you the levels needed to push through to higher tiers. With that in mind I tried to identify the cheapest item that I could craft with the most sustainable materials I could find. The end result is the humble “Treated Wood Bow” which rewards 204 Engineering experience per craft. A single bow requires the following:

• Green Wood – 48
• Rawhide – 12
• Fibers – 8

All items that are relatively easy to get within a short distance of any newbie town. While that is a lot fewer resources, it is also a significant chunk less experience. So I was trying to come up with a way to determine some sort of index to value the item crafted. While this is imperfect, the best idea I coudl come up with is to simply add all of the resources needed and divide it by the experience gained per craft. So for example a single Starmetal Pick requires a total of 930 gathered resources for an experience gain of roughly 1.5 xp per item needed. This humble bow however has a total item footprint of 68 items and gives 3 xp per item required to craft it. The core problem with bows however is the sheer number that I would need to craft in order to get a level. If we take the same 12,000 xp needed to hit 144 and divide out the experience gained per bow you end up needing to craft 59 bows per level. However for sake of comparison lets do the same thing we did earlier for Starmetal Picks and create a list of the total resources needed to gain a level crafting these bows.

• Green Wood – 2832
• Rawhide – 708
• Fibers – 472

I think ultimately where my mind is at is that in order to craft Orichalcum items, I am going to need a ton of Starmetal as well as a ton of Iron. I would rather sit on the stockpile of what I have gathered so far and gather up the significantly easier to find list of items above. In truth I can probably gather all of that multiple times over in the amount of time it it would take me to find the Flux and Metal needed to make a single levels worth of Pick Axes. In fact I have been doing this recently and have made faster progress in Engineering than I had in the previous weeks. Basically… I think in New World we need to unlearn what we have learned from other MMORPGs and approach these systems with somewhat fresh eyes. I absolutely thought wrong of how best to level crafting in this game, and I am wondering what other systems I might have failed to grasp as well. From now on when I approach new crafts, I am going to Math out my path rather than just making what “feels right” to make. The post Rethinking Crafting appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Friends… I am standing in a Marauder occupied Everfall and I have some feelings about that. Making it worse it was claimed by “Run It” which were effectively the slumlords that already held Monarch’s Bluffs and were not keeping that terribly well maintained. The positive is that so far they have left the tax rates completely untouched, which is good because Everfall was extremely profitable with some of the lower taxes in the game. What I did not expect however is how much not seeing the purple banners of Apex Fishing flying over the town would impact me. I’m among the most PVE of Carebears but over time I had begun to gravitate more and more towards Everfall with it sorta being the unofficial capital of the purple empire. In fact I was planning on buying my third home there and going all in on a Tier 4 house at some point. The irony is that the entire time I have played on Minda, Windsward has been held by the Marauders and I have still continued to more or less have that as my primary base of operations.

What a difference a few days makes in the fate of the server. On the 21s server transfers were open and I was making a stump speech to have people migrate to the server and join me. At that point Syndicate held seven territories including the deeply unprofitable and disconnected First Light. Over the course of the weekend First Light was more or less allowed to fall because it was a losing proposition. Everfall was defended successfully, put into conflict again, and finally lost last night. Now there are upcoming wars for Mourningdale and Restless Shores by Covenant forces and an attempt by Syndicate to flip Reekwater to purple once more. So one of the things you have to understand is that I have never really felt faction pride before and could not have cared less about the whole Alliance versus Horde debate. I’ve also never felt anything about a sports team and I thought maybe just maybe I did not have whatever it was in me to care about being a spectator. However with this whole Everfall thing… I think maybe I finally understand how a sports fan feels on the day after their team lost.

One of the defenders that goes by Soju streamed the War and I can finally see what people have been talking about regarding lag and warfare. I assumed that it was just the normal sort of “too many things happening and the game feels like molasses” style lagging, but this is more insidious. It appears that the green side utilized a tactic known as “Lag Capping” or “Freeze Capping”. Essentially the idea is to go to a point and get it moving in your direction and then start bombarding that one location with as many ice attacks as possible. If you watch the VOD, you can see that the end result is that it locks up the game for players causing their actions to not really have much impact, but at the same time the capture continues ticking down as though things were normal. This would have been a close match regardless because the sides were stacked with best players Purple and Green had to offer. However this tactic I think made the difference and caused the zone to flip against our favor.

I am certain that we will flip the zone back because a fire has been lit under purple to reclaim their capital city. I will say that in the meantime… it is going to feel a little bit less like home when I am doing the over-encumbered walk of shame back to it. I also have a sudden desire to spend a bit more time in Brightwood which I think now becomes our capital city for the time being. If it were not so late already I probably would have joined in the effort to flip back Everfall into conflict so we could declare war. If there is a directed effort happening tonight then I will probably flag up and join in the questing. That is a new experience for me because this weekend was the first time I had ever been purposefully flagged at all in New World.

I spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday running PVP faction quests in Reekwater. This is one of the easier places to go in order to have low effort faction currency because until recently… no one gives a shit about Reekwater. Friday night as multiple wars were waging, I was slowly flipping the zone a little purple with my activity which I believe accounted for around 5% in total. Over the two days I farmed up the 100,000 tokens needed to buy the full set of heavy armor and I have to say… now that I own it… I am a little unimpressed. Stat wise it is completely great but having gone through this I would never suggest someone do it because not only did it take the 100k tokens but it also cost 3000 gold. Eliyon spent about 1000 gold after dinging 60 and is already way more kitted out than I am. Additionally I have to say the armor looks kinda dumb for something that is supposed to represent “Heavy” armor. The set on the right is the low level faction armor and I loved it. Now instead I am just going to rock the Halloween skeletal armor until I get something more appropriate.

Lastly I did manage to get my shit together and actually log in for a maps night in Final Fantasy XIV. There was much cognitive dissonance as I got readjusted to the controls of FFXIV but it was nonetheless enjoyable. All in all it was pretty successful with I think only three of the maps being duds and not spawning a portal. There is talk about farming up level 70 maps and trying our hand at those since they have completely different drops. I guess I need to pop in every day this week and farm up a 70 map then so I can be stocked for shenanigans. We have just over three weeks until the head start for Endwalker and I am very much ready to get back in the swing of things properly. In the meantime however I am loving New World and want to get into a much better position gear wise before I ultimately put it on the back burner. The post Everfall has Fallen appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.