A timely email from a reader this morning reminded me to poke my head into the New World subreddit to see what’s on fire now that we’re exactly one full month into the game, so consider me Donald Glover with a pizza box.
Our reader had tipped us off to some brewing threads about the lack of customization in the game – specifically the fact that female characters are stuck with relatively masculine bodies and clothing. “It feels like they created the game, went to launch it in alpha and went ‘oops we forgot to make female characters’ so they took the male models and gave them 3 long hairstyles and called it a day,” one poster lamented, pointing out that players complained about this in alpha too. We’ve already covered our frustrations with the game’s shallow customization, but the issue with female characters is particularly annoying.
We’ve also already covered the situation with the game’s deflated economy, but apparently, on some servers it’s so bad that the community has turned to gambling to make a buck. “My server has become a casino, and it’s honestly hilarious to watch,” declares one heavily upvoted thread from a player on Windsward, who says bets in the realm of 40,000 silver are not unheard of.
“[Y]ou’ll find sometimes near 100 players all gambling with one another, and the stakes are getting ridiculous. The game is simple. You approach a player in the designated casino area, and state your wager. If the wager is accepted by the other player, you both use the Dice emote and the loser trades the winnings to the winner. Obviously, nothing is stopping a player from cheating and just not giving the winnings over, but people quickly learned that they can do that only once before the entire server shuns them. I have a list of cheaters on an Excel spreadsheet.”
The designated casino area. Good grief. Do remember that this type of gambling is usually expressly outlawed in most major MMOs, for obvious reasons, so it’ll be interesting to see what Amazon does.
Many of the other complaints on Reddit that are leaping out at us this week are similar to ones that have been an issue with the game since launch: exploits, bugs and broken perks, griefers emptying guild coffers and jumping servers with a transfer, watermark farming, merge requests, studio communication, and travel currency gripes (I particularly sympathize with that one as I can’t stand the Azoth system). And the forums look pretty similar, just with more “dead game” insistence and a seemingly endless array of commenters demanding either a PvP server or for more players to flag for PvP, suggesting a bit of a disconnect of playerbases.
Veteran MMO players will note that this list looks bad, but it’s pretty much the reality of most major MMORPG launches, and those of you who remember the ones where you couldn’t log in for months will consider all of this to be relatively minor. That would include some of the 400,000 concurrent players who’ve logged in within the last day, a little less than half off the game’s all-time peak, not shabby at all. The game’s still rocking a “mostly positive” review score on Steam as well.
As the saying goes, happy players are playing, not posting.
New World has been patching up on Wednesdays, but you’ll notice that patch notes aren’t here, nor has the game gone down for maintenance. In response to player concerns on the official forums, Amazon did pipe up, suggesting that the patch has been postponed to some degree.
“We understand the desire for information regarding our plan for our next patch. The team’s working hard to address critical issues that have popped up over the past week as well as some other changes to help optimize your game experience. Once we have those fixes locked in we will be writing and distributing the our patch notes along with our expected downtimes. Remember to check the Official News section of the forum for the most up to date information. Thank you for your patience and understanding!”
