Good Morning Friends! I just realized that I talked about it on Twitter but have yet to talk about it here. The first non-Ishgard round of lottery is finished and I failed to snag the house I was interested in. I was bidder number 5 and I have no clue the total number of players that were in the running, but number 15 won. Even though it makes me sad that I lost the property, I will say it was an infinitely better experience than the previous click fest. On June 4th if my information is correct, I will be able to go house shopping again and place another bid that will be drawn on the 8th. I really think there needs to be some sort of in-game clock to let players know where we are in the housing draw period. Either that or I need to go sifting around on the interwebs and find a resource that is going to be reliable for this purpose.
I will take this opportunity to plug the Super Dungeon Friends discord again. If you are curious about the whole idea behind the SDF then you can read the original post. As far as me lately it has turned into an FFXIV housing system support group. I know a few people in the chat managed to snag a home and I was super happy for them. Since launching it has been expanded to have some channels related to other games as well including New World, Guild Wars 2, Diablo, Destiny 2, Lost Ark, and World of Warcraft. It is not exactly a high-volume server but is a fairly chill place to have a conversation.
So I know I said I was done caring about New World yesterday, but here comes some more New World talk. My main is currently situated on Valhalla and I got there because Minda my original server merged into Frislandia… and then Frislandia merged into Valhalla. The above screenshot was taken Monday night and represents something close to the active population of servers during North American primetime. So the server I play on is effectively the sixth most populous server during the times I am active. For a while now I have been hearing that Maramma is this haven for PVE players and that is really the place you want to be if you care about that side of the game. As a result, I have found myself contemplating a server move given that I have two free tokens.
So as a result I decided to create a throwaway character on that server to “test the waters”. In the hour I spent playing last night I saw far more openly racist statements in chat than I have ever seen playing on any of my previous servers. Frislandia is probably the worst server environment that I had been on during my time playing New World for community global chat, and it is starting to look like that even though it is very PVP focused… Valhalla is the best. The only problem with Valhalla is its extremely expensive prices for anything crafting-related. I think it is a sheer case of fewer resources entering the market and as a result, the price gets driven up. I responded to a comment from Nogamara about reagent prices, so I decided to use that as a reference point for the differences.
Reagent
Valhalla
Maramma
T5 Sandpaper
0.83
0.09
T5 Tannin
0.59
0.15
T5 Flux
3.05
0.89
T5 Weave
0.63
0.1
T5 Solvent
0.75
0.19
On my original server Minda we had this problem where everything was either worthless or had insane value, meaning that you could not make a reasonable living selling normal materials. Based on my quick survey of the Maramma economy, it seems as though that is taking place there as well. While reagent prices are nonsense on Valhalla, I can make quite a bit of money just by providing refined resources and selling them on the open market. I think again this is entirely brought on by the fact that we seem to be a very PVP-focused community, and as a result, there are fewer PVE-centric players providing the resources to the market. It is moments like this that I really miss the Guild Wars 2 economy where prices are so stable and regulated that you could set a clock by them.
So essentially I am finding out that the grass is not in fact greener on the other side. We are going through this weird period of Valhalla where there was a mass migration of green players to team purple, and as a result, my faction controls most of the map now. I really need to get over my own social anxiety and just put myself out there and do some end-game content. I’ve made a handful of friends of the server already through random interactions, and I would love to get to the point where I had a regular group of people interested in running dungeons. I think if I could ease my way into that side of the game that it might be the enjoyment I am looking for. All of this said… I am still actively playing Guild Wars 2 every night and if I just managed to get further into some of the grinds like Skyscale I would probably forget entirely about New World.
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Friends, I think I might be winding down my playtime of New World again. In my time playing the game I feel like I maybe understand what is wrong with the experience. Sure there are technical hurdles like the fact that the game was designed to be played like Ark on rented servers, but instead sold itself as an MMORPG. However, the core flaw that cannot be easily fixed is that the game feels progressively worse the longer you play it. For the first few dozen levels, everything feels fresh and new. It feels as though literally anything in the game is rewarding and just running around and clearing out towns gives you meaningful rewards. This changes as you start narrowing the scope of what exactly you need to be gaining anything feeling like meaningful progress.
Crafting in the early game feels phenomenal. You can walk outside of town and find a bounty of resources at your disposal to craft until your heart is content. However, once you move into the higher tiers of materials you put yourself in contention for the same resources that everyone else playing the game on your server is hungrily seeking. Sure there was what felt like an Iron shortage, but every single zone has two or three good Iron routes and if one is being farmed down, you can move over to a new area that is in less contention. When you get to Starmetal, Orichalcum, and Ironwood… there are literally two or three good routes in the entire game all of which are heavily farmed.
This leads me to the last week or two of my life as I have run a route in Brightwood that takes me past four spawn points for Ironwood, four spawn points for Orichalcum, and a couple of different spawns for Wyrdwood. I don’t really mention Wyrdwood as being a resource in heavy contention because if you are desperate enough there are ways to get an infinite amount of it by just farming mobs that can be harvested for it. A pack full of 3000 Ironwood or so, would end up netting me a half dozen skill raises, which is the byproduct of farming for hours. The problem is while doing the loop I was regularly in contention with four or five other players, hoping to arrive at exactly the right time for the “big nodes” to be respawning giving me the maximum yield for my harvest.
A had a few goals coming back to New World, and most of them were crafting-related. I wanted to push up my armoring skill and craft a full set of Voidbent Armor. This was accomplished and gave me a good suit of gear to run around and cause trouble in. The next was to push up my engineering to 200 and be able to craft at least one level 600 weapon, namely the hatchet. My last few weeks grinding away on the Ironwood trade, paid off yesterday allowing me to craft the Axe of the Abyss. Now unfortunately I am not sure what is left for me to do. I like a good grind but the grind has to be within reasonable reach, and as I survey my options I am not seeing one of those.
When I left New World my Furnishing was sitting at level 121 after a copious amount of grinding. This in theory would be my next target but it does not really seem terribly reasonable. There is a website that keeps a fairly accurate count on what it would take in resources to level crafting, and a suggestion of the cheapest path to get there. When I plugged in getting from 121 Furnishing to 200 it returned this. Pending that I had no resources saved up going into this, it would cost me something in the neighborhood of 88,000 gold to level this to 200. I have no interest in purchasing or farming 45,000 Pure Solvent, which only drops from a handful of level 55+ camps in the entire game.
What felt amazing at low levels just kept feeling worse as you climbed the crafting tiers. It would not be so bad if you were just contending for those high-level resources, but that is not the case. You still have to spend countless hours to grind your way up from the lowest level resource which is used in the crafting process of each additional tier. If my math is correct getting a single Ironwood Plank takes:
8 Ironwood
12 Wyrdwood
16 Aged Wood
64 Green Wood
7 Sandpaper
All of those resources are reasonable enough to farm, but that sandpaper requires just going out into the world and roaming around looting boxes. Beyond that, it requires you to be lucky that the reagent that you get is the one that you actually need. If it is not the one you need… then you have to grind faction tokens in order to buy converters to switch it into the reagent that is useful to you at a significant loss in quantity during the conversion. So when I look at the nonsense required to level Weaponsmithing, the other trade that I would find useful… it is again a big freaking no. Either I farm up almost 70,000 flux or I shell out roughly 246,000 gold in order to pay my way to level 200.
Farming resources are now enjoyable honestly because you end up walking away with a big stack of aptitude caches. However, they recently nerfed the number of materials that return from each cache, so again… lowering the amount of fun and increasing the amount of grind. I just don’t feel like the team that is working on this game understands what would make their game fun to play. They continue to double down on PVP as a focus, making me lose more interest in the game as a whole. They made a significant number of quality of life improvements, but I also feel there is a flawed core to the game experience once you reach the endgame.
The only other goal that I really have left is that I would still like to be able to say that I got my expertise up to 600. However, I can do that by playing for about fifteen minutes each day and earning a few very easy gypsum orbs. I think for the time being that is probably going to be my interaction with New World. The other track for expertise is grinding dungeons, which everyone seems to be doing. The end result is there is a flood of less than perfect level 600 orange weapons on the market board going for as low as 500 gold. I now have most of my slots filled with cheap cast-off weapons, and I really don’t see any point in attempting to get “good rolls” until I have maxed out that expertise score. If I could coax a regular group of four other players into having a dungeon night I would be game, but I am not going to subject myself to the generally awful community when I know everything I get will be disposable.
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Good Morning Friends! I am dragging this morning because it is amazing just how far out of whack your sleep schedule can get during a three-day weekend. This weekend was a weird one because Friday and Saturday morning were devoted to trying to get an ending in Citizen Sleeper because we were planning on recording a “gameclub” style show on that game on Saturday night. Then the discussion was so compelling and I realized that I missed key elements of the game… which lead me Sunday morning to play the entire damned game from scratch. I’ve not finished the game a second time and I have to say, it is very much an experience worth having. The show we recorded should be considered a full spoiler experience, but this morning I am going to do my best to entice you in a spoiler-lite manner.
The world of Citizen Sleeper is that of a late capitalism dystopia similar to those familiar in the “mega-corporation” cyberpunk genre. In the future, truly sentient Artificial A.I. is outlawed, but there are ways to skirt the boundary and that is the emulation of a human brain. You play a “sleeper” or a robot frame that has the partial consciousness of a human brain being emulated on it and effectively sold into slavery… so that the original human can live a marginally happier life. The problem is that you escaped the bondage of the Essen-Arp corporation, but due to “planned obsolescence”, if you do not receive your regular dosage of stabilizer, your body will break down and die.
Mechanically Citizen Sleeper is a pen and paper roleplaying game lovingly presented as a single-player digital adventure. Essentially you have two resources Condition which determines how close to death you are, and Energy which is the equivalent of how well fed you are for lack of a better explanation. The game is divided into turns or “cycles” and at the beginning of each cycle, it takes two segments of energy to get up and move again. Upon the start of a new cycle, a number of D6 dice are rolled and that represents the scores that you can spend during that cycle on taking actions. As your condition depletes, it also reduces the total dice pool that you have available to you. Your character’s perks determine what bonuses you might have for any given action.
The game thrusts you into a world of poverty and stress, and the need to keep working to try and figure out a way to survive. You are cracked out of a cargo pod and given a place to stay, but not out of some sense of generosity. Turns out the person who finds you and gives you a place to sleep… needs you to help pay off debt and as a result asks you to get up and work almost immediately. So you spend the first few rounds rotating between the empty container you are sleeping in and the salvage yard as you encounter your first “clock”. “A Debt Called in” represents an 8 turn clock that starts counting down giving you that many turns to successfully pay off that debt before failing the action. These are essentially the actions that drive the course of the game as you are put under the gun to be able to take certain actions within a certain timeframe.
What sets this game apart from so many other games in the cyberpunk genre, is it is not hopeless. Sure this world is a bit of a shithole and you are encountering so many people living in abject poverty, but there are ways that you can make almost every life that you encounter better. The game is very “read-y” as Kodra called it on the show and there is copious amounts of text to sift through, but it is exceptionally well written and gives you a feeling for what these characters are like. The combination of artwork, narrative prose, and superb audio design come together to create what feels like the living breathing world of Erlin’s Eye, a space station that kicked the corporate overlords off of it and turned it into a haven for outcasts.
I have to admit I was not entirely certain about this game at first. It took me a number of turns before I really got into the flow of the experience. After that, I fell deeply into the “just one more turn” problem that you have with 4X games and maybe was up far later that first night than I had intended to be. It is a game with a large number of possible endings and as far as I can tell there is no real loss condition. Having played through it twice now, I am pretty happy with my choices in both cases and the remaining four achievements that I do not have… I am happy enough knowing they exist but not experiencing those specific endings. If you have a fondness for pen and paper roleplaying at all or the larger cyberpunk genre, then I suggest you give the game a closer look. Personally, I know that I will be watching anything that Jump Over The Age games creates from now on.
The post Citizen Sleeper Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we sit down to record the first “Aggrochat Game Club show”-like experience that we have done in a really long time. A few weeks back a copy of Citizen Sleeper showed up in our steam libraries courtesy of Tam, and after several played it… we set forth to eventually have a single show where we talked about it at length. The major benefit of this is that for the most part, it is a relatively short game, and also has a wide myriad of possible outcomes. This led to some interestingly varied experiences including one where Bel just played the game wrong entirely and made it out on the other side with a good ending. This is a full spoiler show about Citizen Sleeper so I highly suggest if you have not played the game… that you might do so and come back later.
Topics Discussed
