Bigger is Better

Good morning folks! So I thought I would start this morning’s post with a little bit of a tip. In New World, there are a lot of resources nodes that come in various shapes and sizes. This is not just a cosmetic thing, the larger the node the more resources you will get from it. This means that if you ever roll up on a cluster of nodes, always focus on clearing them from largest to smallest. What is often going to happen is another player will roll up and start to harvest a node beside you, which means you are in a race to gobble up as many resources as you can as efficiently as you can. This for example is Iron and it is among the most hotly contested materials and given that your mining skill, your strength, your faction standing cards, and the quality of your tools all determine how fast you can gather as compared to other players. Always start on the big node and work your way down from there.
Yesterday I spent most of my time wandering around and mopping up lower-level quests that I probably should have already taken care of before now. Of course, while going on a walkabout… I would discover resource nodes that would distract me from my goal. This is the core gameplay loop for me and honestly what I enjoy about this game and games like Skyrim or the modern Fallout series. I set forth on an adventure with a goal in mind, but the process of traversing the distance in between provides a real meaningful journey. The truth is in these sorts of games I tend to use fast travel or mounts very sparingly because it is that cross country trek that really provides me with joy. In New World, I like that I pretty much still need resources that I can find rarely out in the fields and forests on the way to my destination, so stumbling across a stand of hemp for example means I am always going to stop and gather it before continuing onwards.
So far surprisingly I have only really encountered a single bugged area, and that is surrounding a quest where you need to kill a named mob down in a cave. The problem with this quest is that it seems like folks are camping the area constantly and the spawn time so infrequent that whenever we do get a pop… it is almost immediately killed by splash damage. I am uncertain how much interaction is needed in order to earn credit for a quest, but it seems like I am always short because I am pretty sure I am interacting and dealing damage but never actually finishing the quest. I am hoping to roll over there really quickly after publishing this post and maybe just maybe the early morning crowd has moved on past this area.
At this point, I have made it to level 23 and I am thinking about maybe taking a bit of a break from the game and returning to my leveling over in Final Fantasy XIV. The key turn-off right now is knowing that I pretty much have to idle with the game running in the background all day if I have any hope of actually getting some playtime that evening. Then what makes that worse… is knowing that it is highly unlikely that any of the people that are starting the game are going to be able to roll on our server and join us. This whole only 2000 characters per server thing is a pretty debilitating problem, and it threatens to kill the experience for a lot of players out there that will likely bounce, or spend two hours in queue and be unable to return the game. I think someday this will be a great experience, but until they sort out the technical limitations it feels like a really fun game that is only available for a limited few players who can manage to land on the servers in a reasonable manner.
As far as the server goes, the other company still holds First Light but is at risk of losing it. There is a war that has been declared because Marauders have taken the fort and make war on the territory to claim it. Based on what I just raid on Twitter it sounds like the Marauders are playing dirty as the Trading Co. has just had a number of their highest level members given temporary bans. I guess this is the problem with contested territory and games that more or less have automated enforcement systems. I have no clue which group is gunning for the territory because the fort doesn’t say which force claimed it, but I am going to guess it is the Spartan Legion that controls Windsward, and that they are going to be taking their progress in that territory and beginning to take over the map. Honestly, I would be completely fine with that group taking more territory because they seem to be charging fair tax rates. As a citizen of Aeternum and not a combatant… I have a completely different view of these territories because quite honestly all I care about is having a beneficial overlord that isn’t going to charge odious taxes.
I am greatly enjoying the game, but the fact that I cannot reliably play with friends… because my friends cannot reliably get into the game is somewhat damaging the experience. As I said earlier, I am getting tired of feeling like I need to stay connected in the background in order to save the said connection for the moments I can play the game. There is simply no viable way to make it through the queues during prime time hours and I think for the moment I might just move on to doing other things with my time and hoping that at some point the server sizing problems are fixed and we can all move forward together. As much hype is surrounding this game can easily turn bitter if these growing pains are not resolved quickly. More servers are not the answer… bigger servers that allow more people to play together are the only path forward. If Amazon cannot provide that, then this game will die on the vine. Otherwise, folks are probably just better off playing something like Valheim if they can’t actually experience this reliably with friends who didn’t take off work to log in at non-primetime hours. The post Bigger is Better appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The Forest is Burning

Well, folks, we colonized the New World yesterday and… I have to say on some level it is exactly what I would expect a land run on new territory would look like. For those who managed to log in, I think the experience was pretty solid. There was EXTREME resource scarcity for those who were there at 8 am when the servers turned on, and while everyone was trying to crit path their way to choosing a faction. I know largely because I was there with them because a last-minute change of heart meant I too was trying to get things set up and running and get a company functional for invites. Mind you I had no intention of doing this thing, but as we got closer to the launch of the game I started feeling that maybe that big company wasn’t really my scene.
All in all, though it was probably a good thing I had that last-minute change of heart. While we did not get as many invites as I wanted… it wasn’t for lack of desire. There were a lot of folks who just simply gave up on the server queue, and since I logged out around 9:30 pm CDT I also wasn’t really around for invites. I’ve tried to pass out officers to a bunch of people, but far as I can tell there isn’t really a way for people to see who is on in the company if you are not already in the company? One of my big takeaways the social structure of this game needs some tweaking. For example, I don’t have a Message of the Day set because if I start typing… the second I hit space my character jumps and it exits out of the interface. It also doesn’t support cut and pastes… so I can’t even “jury rig” it into working that way either.
Other than just some general concerns I had about the attitude of the leader, my main concern and what ultimately prompted my action is knowing that we were dealing with a very limited pool of possible invites. From what I understand the larger company filled up without actually managing to get everyone in that had signed up on the roster. I knew in my case that I had friends who were wanting to play this game that might not be able to create a character until the weekend, or god forbid a week late… and there would be nothing I could do about it. I refuse to adopt a “got mine, fuck you” attitude towards my friends. Back in World of Warcraft, I had a top tier raid guild courting me for one of their main tank slots… but I ultimately gave up on that notion and helped found a “friend and family raid” instead because it felt wrong to go off and abandon the people who helped me get where I was. I didn’t want to lead a company… but doing so absolutely made me feel better about the whole situation.
This is what our territory map looks like on Minda, the server I am playing on… and it is nowhere near as Syndicate dominated as I would have feared. Right now the Marauders aka Team Green controls the territory I hang out in Windsward as well as Monarch’s Bluffs. Over night the big company that I was going to join managed to snag First Light, which was the last of the four starter zones to be claimed. I am guessing they went for the route of raising 100,000 gold in order to buy the claim. Everfall is likely going to be in a constant state of flux because I believe when I was last there yesterday it was held by Covenant, and now is held by a Syndicate company with a pending War. I am impressed that Cutlass Keyes has been taken, but not shocked given that zone has a lot of higher-end resources in it and is ultimately in heavy contention. The rest of the zones are probably not held simply because folks are too low level to reasonably venture there.
As for me, I rushed ahead to start the company started and then idled in the background since I knew there was no way in hell of getting back into the game. It took me about 30 minutes in the morning and then I spent several hours last night leveling and managed to hit 18. There is something to be said about familiarity and knowing more or less where various resources are. I’ve had so many starts in this game in all four of the territories, but I think I lucked out and Windsward is probably my favorite. As a result, though I pretty much knew the critical path to get what I needed, and for example by the time I hit the first town I had already collected my 40 stone, 40 wood, and 40 leather for the later quests.
My real focus however has been getting my trades up so I could start making my own gear. Given that they changed things up quite a bit I am now focusing on Engineering because I really want to be able to make my own crafting tools. Ultimately I want to be able to craft Azoth Extraction tools in order to keep a steady flow of that for crafting or teleports. At some point, I will probably focus on Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing, but with everything being so freaking cheap on the market board I can pretty much buy whatever I want without denting my bank account. My hope is by the time I do get up there in skills… the glut of cheap items will have ended and I can actually start making goods for profit.
All in all, for a launch day it went pretty smoothly. The only larger concern I have going forward is that I am not sure Amazon fully understands the importance of being able to play with your friends. Right now it appears that the servers are capped at around 2000 players, combined with Companies, in general, being capped at 100 players… makes me question if they understood properly the scale of a large MMOPRG or if we misunderstood what sort of game they were going for. 2000 players and 100 per player unit… is more like a larger Rust or Ark than a proper MMORPG and I wonder if that is ultimately what they thought they were building here? My hope is that the 2000 player thing is an artificial metric to help force players to spread out a bit, and that given time they will increase that limit. However for pretty much all of the servers last night, the queues were as large if not larger than the population of the server based on what I could see from this third-party tracking website. My hope is that they do some shifting and buffing of resources and that we can all actually get on the server we want to be on and play together. Ultimately that is the most important part of the MMO experience, is being able to play with a group of people that you enjoy playing with. I am glad I started Greysky Expedition, and I am happy that we are going to have room for folks… pending they can actually get on the server. So this was not a bad launch but there are some structural concerns I have going forward that would keep me from calling it a perfect launch. Did you manage to get in? What server are you playing on and what was your experience? Drop me a note below. The post The Forest is Burning appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Greysky Expedition

Hey Folks! I am a liar apparently, but a completely unintentional one. On the 23rd I created this long post, largely in my head as a justification to why I was not leading a Company going into New World. I tried extremely hard to follow that plan, but something just didn’t feel right. I am certain that everyone over in what is intended to be the East Aeternum Trading Company is great, but I just could not go through with it. Part of this is that I am old and stuck in my ways, and part of this is due to the fact that after hanging out in discord for a while I started to question if it really was my scene after all. I adore Grakulen, and thought that I would be joining a company lead by him… someone I trust. Instead, it was lead by someone that I had significantly less faith in after quietly watching them in chat for a few days.
I am sure they are probably a lovely person, but PVP crowds tend to be a little rough around the edges and I just am not terribly used to that anymore. It was very clear that there was a difference in focus, with all of the discussion going on about rushing to get money and claim the territory as fast as we could and making sure that we had a strong PVP team at the ready to defend it. So much so that they locked new membership yesterday in part because you can only have one hundred members in a company and partly because they needed to make sure those last few key invites were PVP-focused. Then there was a discussion about everyone needing to rush and make 1000 gold and donate it to the Company on that first day so that they could acquire said territory.
The cold reality is… not a single bit of that interested me. I want to be a super chill casual in this game, break rocks, beat zombies, and skin all of those bodies that people are leaving behind. I played New World completely by myself in several Alpha and Beta phases and had a grand ole time. The major benefit of the launch was the idea of being able to hang out and be dumb casuals with my friends. However, if I was part of a Company that already was locked against new players… what about my friends that don’t feel the need to rush around on day one? What about those friends who purposefully askew the concept of launch day, and the hustle of trying to fight for mob spawns. Are those friends just going to be permanently left out in the cold?
Instead, I am going to do my own thing, and with that comes an invite to anyone who is interested. I am still rolling on Minda and going Syndicate, but instead of joining up with the main force of folks… I am quietly forming the Greysky Expedition. I took the Greysky bit from Greysky Armada our Final Fantasy XIV Free Company and tried to set the name in this world. It is the age of sail, and I figured we would be the expeditionary force of the Greysky Mercantile Company looking for new exotic goods to ship back to the old world and sell. The fact that we are also a front for the Illuminati aka Syndicate is just a coincidence because I have a feeling that we are going to be spending most of our time exploring Aeternum and looking for new and interesting things.
Do I feel bad that I am abandoning Grak and his company? Yeah, a little bit. However, my dreams did not align with their dreams. I was not really into the whole funding the war effort thing, and I am more about roaming around aimlessly and picking daisies… in between smashing zombie skulls. I am on the same server which still makes me available for nonsense at a later date, but I am just not super interested in the territory game or honestly being super serious about the game in general. I want my chill crafting game with combat and to occasionally run some of the expeditions, but also don’t want to do it in a super organized manner. I am hoping that as soon as the servers are live I see lots of territory held by that group because I wish them all of the luck in the world. However, I am going to be over here doing my own thing, and now that I have rushed ahead to create a company… I plan on chilling the hell out.
I could not have wished for a better start to the game. I ended up with Windsward as my starting zone, which is ultimately where I was planning on migrating to eventually. It is one of the zones that end up being the most active as far as the market goes. Given that I want to focus on crafting and PVE, it makes for a pretty solid base of operations especially as it is also close to the higher level areas. As far as the company I am going to open it up to any friends and their friends and family. Basically, the sort of thing that House Stalwart started out as and Greysky Armada is. If you are interested in being casual as hell, then hit me up in-game on Belghast. However to summarize I am going to bullet point all of the important bits below.
  • Name: Belghast
  • Server: Minda NA East
  • Faction: Syndicate aka Team Purple
  • Company: Greysky Expedition
Ping me over various social channels if you want more information. I wish Grak and the East Aeternum Trading Co. the best of luck. I hope to see lots of territories taken for the Syndicate in their name, and with me bowing out that makes room for them to recruit more folks to help support their initiatives. For now, I am just going to be a chill dude hanging out on the sidelines of the larger conflicts. The post Greysky Expedition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Friendship is Weird

Good morning folks. I am going to drop my usual “morning friends” business but I will talk about that a bit later. First off I am failing you because the well has officially run dry. I made it through twenty mixtapes for MixTape Mondays, before ultimate running out of juice. You can always view the archives here, but I am uncertain if or when this series is going to return. It was a pretty good run and I am fairly proud of some of the blends of music that I presented, but also more or less out of creative juice when it comes to music. That said it still serves as one of my longest-running series, so I guess there is that. Instead this morning I am going to talk a bit about the nature of friendship and the internet. I had something happen yesterday that once again reminded me that internet relations are not necessarily guaranteed to be a two-way street. More specifically this is referred to as “Parasocial Relationships” and I have even blogged about this construct before in the past. However I myself just allowed myself to get bit by that and I feel this mixture of stupidity, shame, and sadness. This is not a drama blog, so I am not going to go into details… because quite honestly they are pretty boring. Ultimately it was someone I tried to be friends with and has once again shown me that I am not really in that group for them. I am a pretty simple monkey as far as monkeys go. I use the word “friend” pretty liberally, and start off posts with “morning friends” because quite honestly if you are here on the regular it seems like you are at least interested in me as a human being. I’ve never stuck to a single topic long enough to really be a “theme” blogger, even though this blog once upon a time started off that way. Sure when I am on a Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft bender… this becomes a blog where I almost exclusively talk about that one thing. However, if you are going to stick around for more than a few articles here or there, my assumption is that you at least on some level care about me as a human being. If that is the case I count you as a friend, which is a term with a lot of gradation to it. I try to meet everyone with the possibility of making a brand new lifelong friend. I grew up as an only child and worse… an only child living out in the country separated by any possibility for neighbor children to play with. I wanted nothing more than a sibling, but that never came to fruition so while I spent copious amounts of time entertaining myself… I always wanted to be able to hang out with another human being. Granted I am very BAD at doing so because oftentimes my idea of that is “you go do whatever you want to do, and I will do whatever I want to do… but we will technically be inhabiting the same space”. After years of fining that entertaining myself skill, I am usually off doing my own thing but can be summoned forth for shenanigans at a moment’s notice. This also means that I often cast a pretty wide net when it comes to trying to invite people into my world. Where I fail miserably as a human being, is that because I am constantly inviting people into my “monkeysphere“… I am usually doing a pretty shit job of checking in on the people who are already there. This is especially true when more recently I have been in a bit of a funk and I am trying desperately not to fall into one. That means I have reverted into a “speak when spoken to” sort of mode when it comes to human interactions. I’ve kept my head down and focused on my dumb objective of getting everything to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV and also planning a bit for New World, but otherwise been fairly oblivious to the world around me. I have no idea what necessarily I did to make me unworthy of friendship, but I also don’t necessarily have to know. People gotta do whatever is best for themselves, and that is true even if it means that I can’t be part of that adventure. I am not a great friend. I know this. I keep putting myself out there but once I have made that first contact and invited people into my madness… the whole only-child thing kicks in and I have no fucking idea whatsoever to do with them once I have roped them in. Often times it is a situation of exhausting myself of social energy just in working up the moxie to make that first contact, that I have none left for when they shockingly seem interested. That doesn’t mean I am going to stop trying, however, and I do have a group of folks who have managed to put up with my bullshit for long enough that they are permanent fixtures of my world. I guess I am just constantly searching for more people who might also be “drift compatible”. So mostly this morning’s post is being melancholic, at least trying to get it out of my system. That said I also think it is important that you the reader understand that when I am using the word friend in a blog post I am being sincere… or at least as sincere as I know how to be. I am a deeply flawed human being, but this isn’t some marketing ploy to get you to subscribe to my pyramid scheme… although when I go into recruiting for a new game it very much DOES start to seem like a sales pitch. Ultimately I seek connections because I don’t really want to be alone, even if I have no clue how to actually be the sort of friend that normal human beings are. I wish I did not allow the actions of others, that I have zero control over… to deflate the wind from my sails but I guess that is also part of being me as well. I get my hopes up and also get them dashed… sometimes without anyone realizing they actually did it. I’ve made it to forty-five and am not sure if I know another way to exist. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I salute you. I probably would have stopped reading several paragraphs ago. I hope you all have a great week and hopefully tomorrow I will return to my regularly scheduled nonsense. Today however I had to be a bit sad over something I have no real right to be sad about. My blog is oftentimes how I work through things, and hopefully, after making this post I can toss some topsoil over it and be done with it for a while. The post Friendship is Weird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.