Yesterday was the launch of the New World Brimstone Sands expansion content and with it the potential rebirth of the game. On the 8th of October, we had set plans in place to roll on Themiscyra which at the time was the lowest population of the US East servers with an average population of around 300-500 players. It was in the same server group as three other servers, which would in theory allow it to merge down later and still be a reasonable place to play. My hope was that this would allow us to weather whatever burst in activity came with the launch and still have a viable population after mergers.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the New World team directly conspired against these plans as on the 10th they released this population heatmap post. While I realize that the team has no clue who the hell we are or the plans that we were making, this was compounded by the fact that yesterday according to folks in chat Themiscyra was the server that was being suggested to brand-new players. The end result is that over the course of several hours, we went from being one of the lowest pop servers to one of the highest population servers. This also means that by around 6 pm CDT last night, if you did not already have a character on the server you were effectively locked out from creating one or transferring. So once again I know of at least a handful of people who did not manage to get onto the server before the window closed. I am sure over time it will open up and apparently anyone who has not logged in since February got an additional server transfer token, so maybe over time, everything will sort itself out.
I guess the positive is that the door slammed shut at pretty much the optimal time for playability. I disconnected in the middle of the night when the game crashed on me, and it took me maybe 15 minutes to get back in through the login queue. So while Themiscyra is locked off from anyone who did not pre-stage a character on the server like a number of us did, it does appear that those who managed to get into it can play freely without much concern. Valhalla the server my original main is on had an estimated 16-hour queue last night, so I really do think that the re-roll was a great idea. Unfortunately, it appears that you have to log into your character before you can transfer off to another server, so that means anyone on these higher-pop servers is largely stuck.
It is impossible to ignore the impact that the last few months have had on the game, and the onslaught of players is palpable. On Steam last night the game had the 9th highest active population behind a number of the usual suspects and beating out Wallpaper Engine… which is a thing that is just always running in the background so it rarely drops in concurrency. It isn’t just returning players however because at one point yesterday New World was the third highest-selling game of the day behind Destiny 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, so some heavy hitters. This is a pretty significant feat and if they can hold this out, the game might make a legitimate comeback. Unfortunately, we are already straining under the poor system design.
I have talked about this so many times before and I will mention it again. The core remaining problem with New World is its server infrastructure which greatly impedes maintaining a reasonable population, while also allowing you to play freely with your friends. It is that last part that is extremely important to most MMORPG gamers, and we are less than 24 hours from the release of this patch and already the doors have slammed shut for anyone who might have wanted to play on the same server we targeted. Thankfully Ace, Kodra, Tam, and I pre-staged characters on Themiscyra but creating the character and then logging out in the starter experience allowed us to pick up from there when we logged in yesterday. Anyone who did not have the foresight to do that however is out of luck.
I spent most of yesterday working on trade skills and I am deeply thankful for my memorization of harvest routes. Over the course of alpha and beta I did spend quite a bit of time in the Monarch’s Bluff area, and while I do not know it nearly as well as say Windsward, Everfall, or Brightwood… I do at least know several good spots for much-needed low-level resources. Funny enough is that I have not been spending almost any amount of time questing, and instead through almost harvesting alone I am already sitting at level 19. My key focus has been getting all of my harvests up to 50 so that I could easily gather random rare resources as I stumbled across them in the world. From there I am working on leveling Armorsmithing first to 50, and then will pick up and focus on Weaponsmithing to 50. Then raise those both to 100, and so on until I eventually get both to 200. After that, I will probably work on leveling Engineering and Furnishing since they will both be extremely useful late game.
You can see my progress for the first day, as I have all harvests but skinning up to at least 50 as well as all of my refinings except leatherworking. Unfortunately, Monarch’s Bluff lacks a really great resource like the near-instant respawning boar valley near Everfall. Across the board, I would say that Prydwen is one of the rougher starting areas for raw resource gathering. I do wonder if that was intentional, in order to get folks to spread out a bit more across the map. First Light has phenomenal Iron Ore and Windsward amazing Flax with then Everfall being a bounty for lumber and leather. While there are pretty much all relevant resources near Prydwen in Monarch’s Bluff it is not exactly plentiful, which probably does a good job of dispersing the player population and keeping them from “turtling” around their first hub city.
As it stands I am running up Greatsword and Sword/Shield first and favoring the first former leveling and DPS and the latter to eventually tank. There are a ton of weapons that I greatly enjoy but most of them are strength-based so at some point, I will work those up, probably the first alternate duo being Warhammer and Blunderbuss. I am deeply excited to have a real focus in New World other than just running Orichalcum and Iron Wood routes on my main. It legitimately feels like a fresh start. It is however tarnished by the fact that I know any friends who contemplated joining in but were slow in getting started are now locked out. I will be monitoring the situation and if our server unlocks I will be talking about it over on Twitter.
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Good Morning Friends! Today begins either the redemption story for New World or the ultimate demise and the next few weeks will determine which direction it progresses. There has been a lot of hype surrounding the release of the Brimstone Sands content expansions that come along with it a brand-new player experience. As a result, several of us have been amped by the thought of a new start with brand-new characters and seeing this game with fresh eyes. However, this is also going to underline what lessons if any the Amazon Game Studios team has learned over the last year. The server population is going to precipitously increase, and it is important to see how they handle this. Since I am going to be re-rolling today, I am wishing for the best.
Everyone loves a comeback story, and New World is on the cusp of exactly that. You can notice that starting in August the game saw significant increases in player population. We have essentially rolled back the clock to the sort of numbers we saw last around February, and erased a good chunk of damage from the last year. The game really is in a great state right now and the team has made so many correct calls lately in tailoring the game experience to be less punitive to the player. I am still deeply concerned by the fixed server sizes, but I think that is a core design decision of the game and not something that they can easily resolve.
In the lead-up to the launch of this content expansion, they have added a handful of servers. I find it funny that they are recycling names from servers that were originally merged into other servers. I remember Frislandia which just showed up again was the server that Minda got merged into, and was then later merged into Valhalla. Right now we have banked on Themiscyra for re-rolls which will ultimately roll up into Eden more than likely when the next round of mergers happens. I’ve now set the machine in motion and many of us have stubbed out characters on that server. Had I waited just a bit longer to make my decision, I might have banked on Heliopolis instead. I still think the whole one character per server cluster nonsense is a bad idea and is ultimately going to limit how successful countermeasures to overpopulation are.
The patch is currently available in steam and the patch notes have dropped as well so you can read all of the detailed changes. That said this team is notorious for having undocumented changes as well, so you might watch Reddit later today for a thread of those to show up. Here is hoping that the New World team can pull this off. They have been granted a second chance, and I hope they do not squander it. The game is deeply enjoyable and I am hoping that maybe they can start to win back the legion of PVE-only players that they lost during the tumultuous launch. For me, my plan is to largely focus on trade skills at least until I run up Armorcrafting and Weaponsmithing. My hope is this is going to buy time for the rest of my retinue to catch up to me in levels, as just by my nature alone… I am probably going to be putting in way more hours in total.
I guess that begs the question then. Are you planning on returning to New World? Are you planning on doing the nonsense thing we are and rolling a brand new character? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.
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Good Morning Friends! I took a much longer than originally anticipated hiatus from posting. When I got up Wednesday morning I just was not really feeling it, and then I was off both Thursday and Friday and did not post then either. For those who follow me because of Blaugust, I would say that it is a good idea to just go with the flow when you are not feeling it. Chances are you probably need a break from creating content and so long as you resume at some point taking a break is extremely therapeutic. I can’t necessarily say that I feel recharged, but I was ready to get back to the blog this morning. Over the weekend a discussion happened over on the “Twitters” about Ghost Hunter channels on YouTube and I said that I should really do a blog post where I dump some of my favorites. This morning is the realization of that statement and if you are thoroughly uninterested in the paranormal, today is likely going to be a hard pass for you.
Overnight Channel / TFIL
The Overnight channel is something that branched off of another channel called TFIL, and the premise is that they go all around the country and world to do ghost-hunting videos. Ghost Hunting YouTube is this spider web that branches out, and there are a number of collaborations that ultimately will lead you to other channels. Since this one was my “first” it will always have a special place in my heart, but as I have developed slightly more refined tastes it does come across as extremely over the top. Corey is a sweetheart though and seems to be a ghost magnet, and there have been a few moments that were genuinely shocking.
The Paranormal Files
This is probably the second channel that the YouTube algorithm sent my way. Overall I like this series but there are certain aspects that bug me. Firstly Colin is a little hyperbolic when it comes to his reactions to things going on. I do kinda dig that he is often out doing stuff with his mom, dad, and now wife so it creates this interesting dynamic. It bugs me that he calls his parents by their first name, but that is just a pet peeve of mine because I had a friend growing up that did that. The only time he called them Mom or Dad was when he wanted something. Anyways there are a lot of interesting places that this channel explores, but there tends to be an excessive amount of padding with background setting content.
Twin Paranormal
It was through Paranormal Files that I was introduced to Twin Paranormal, which is a group operating out of the Las Vegas area. Over time this has become probably my favorite group because they release content reliably and it has sorta become my thing to sit down and watch their latest video while eating lunch on Sunday after I finish editing the two podcasts. They have great energy and I really like the brother’s dynamic and their friend Wyatt. All of these channels indulge in quite a bit of hyperbole at times and this channel’s greatest sin is probably its video title and thumbnail game. The videos are much better than this would denote, but they are absolutely playing the algorithm game.
Paranormal Nightmare
This channel brands itself as a TV Series, which appears to be “broadcast” on Tubi, Apple TV, Prime Video, and Pluto TV. After watching several videos, the algorithm opened the floodgates at recommending channels that I had not encountered organically and this was one of the first. The group does investigations and has a religious aspect to it where their goal is to free the family from whatever “infestation” might be occurring. There have been some interesting situations in their shows of individuals who appear to wildly change their personalities that you would think might indicate possession. One of the more professional groups and unlike a lot of the made for the travel channel type crap, it is weirdly not super over the top.
Paranormal Quest
Another group of four guys more or less follows the formula that all of these groups follow. I think it was through this channel that I first encountered the Estes Method. For those who don’t watch a bunch of these channels, it is a thing where they have one person put on noise-canceling headphones and listen to a “spirit box” while another person often times in another room asks questions. The person who is “under” just shouts out everything that they hear through the spirit box regardless of context. When the questions and the “answers” line up it is really interesting, but oftentimes there is a fair amount of nonsense as well. A “spirit box” is essentially a device that scans through the radio frequencies and it is reported that spirits can stop the scan at specific spots to land on words or phrases.
Exploring with Josh
This is probably the most hyperbolic channel on the list. Josh has done a wide number of collaborations with other channels on this list to this point, and as a result, I periodically get fed his videos through the algorithm. If there is any group that I would accuse of playing things up for the camera, this is absolutely the worst offender. These are sometimes interesting but I absolutely do not watch every episode. One of the interesting things that come through these channels though is that often times different groups will do the same locations. It is interesting how many groups get the same results from the same areas.
Paranormal New England
As hyperbolic as Josh is… it at least led me to find this channel. I guess Paranormal New England is a group that he used to work with regularly, and their channel is a gem in the rough. Basically what you get is a lot of very lightly edited footage of investigations, that more or less feel like raw vlogs. They don’t release videos very often with something new landing every few months, but they are deeply interesting to watch. This is the sort of thing that I really love to see because it is way more serious than the “whacky adventures of ghost hunters” vibe you often get from YouTube channels.
Exploring with Fighters
This is another channel that I stumbled onto through collaborations, specifically with Overnight/TFIL. Dan’s stuff is sort of hit or miss and he seems to do way more urban exploration/abandoned locations stuff than ghost hunting, but there are a handful of really interesting locations in the UK and Europe. Admittedly I don’t watch him that often but still someone I am subbed to that occasionally does something really interesting.
Mackie and Amanda
This is another channel that I stumbled onto due to collaboration. There was a series of videos where Amanda was recording with Twin Paranormal. Amanda is a medium and Mackie is seemingly one of those friends who is just down for any sort of nonsense. There is a massive backlog of stuff that I have not seen, but the few videos I have watched have been interesting. I really like the vibe of this group and they feel extremely relatable and don’t really fall into the over-the-top YouTuber rut as so many channels can over time. There is a deep sincerity with what they are doing and I dig that.
Lomar Mendz
The next couple of channels is recent finds. The algorithm fed me a series of videos that included Lomar and Chelsea as they were doing some Randonautica stuff, then I noticed they also did more than a fair number of ghost-hunting videos as well. Essentially Chelsea is in her words a “baby medium” and she is trying to learn to control it Lomar is just one of those “good dude” types that seem interested in exploring anything. There is a good-natured vibe to the channel, and while I have only watched a few things so far I do plan on diving back into the past content.
Exploring with Angelo
Another “Good Dude” type that I encountered through a series of videos he recorded with Lomar and Chelsea. I’ve not really plumbed much of his solo content, but it seems very interesting. Mostly throwing these channels out there because I think they are going to be ones that I really dig in the future. I don’t have much experience with either of the groups though.
Amy’s Crypt
This one is literally brand new to me. This was suggested by my friend Jae during our conversation this weekend and I have only had a chance to watch a single video. I often have one of these running in the background while I am playing games and then alt-tab over if things sound interesting. This is an Aussie couple that travels broadly and does investigations. So far I dig the vibe of the videos and they also seem to have a deep sincerity to them.
Madd Vladd – Skinwalker series
This one is interesting but also gives off deep “fake” vibes. I am throwing it in there just in case it eventually turns into something. The setup is that this dude is a gaming YouTuber with another channel and started having weird happenings in his backyard that open up onto an undeveloped area. Since Skinwalkers are the new hotness this video series for which there are only two currently, uses that titling. There were three months between the first and second video, which seems deeply suspect and makes me think there is maybe some “after effects” editing time happening. There are some fairly interesting things that go on. If you have an hour to sit down and watch with a deeply skeptical eye… it might be interesting.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start with a topic we did not get to last week and talk about the modern Digimon Card game. From there we talk about Fallout 76 and Thalen beginning the game, along with the various improvements that have happened over the years. We talk very briefly and very spoiler free about how good She-Hulk was. Kodra talks a bit about Taiji and its more approachable and less pretentious version of The Witness. Bel talks a bit about the Torchlight Infinite Open Beta and how you can actually use keybinds now. Ash talks about the card game roguelike Roguebook, and while Richard Garfield was involved it is nothing like Magic. Tam talks about how good the Leagues of Votann are and then dives into a topic about finding his white whale and how dumb limited availability items are.
