Christmas — or some variation thereof — is coming to New World as the game’s first holiday. Yesterday, Amazon announced that it was putting up a new build on the test realm that included the Winter Convergence Festival, which may just get our award for “most awkwardly named holiday festival.”
The event includes a lot of snow and Northern Lights, not to mention a slew of repeatable events that can be run to earn currency to spend in a holiday shop.
This build also includes four themed winter villages, yeti-strewn ice caves, more side quests, a huge revamp to the endgame watermark system, a PvP balance pass, and the brand-new tradeskill Aptitude for those who love gaming the auction house. The community is… not happy at all with those HWM system changes.
“Since New World’s launch, we’ve heard the feedback from our community that the HWM system was not communicated effectively, promotes a single monotonous activity, had too much randomness, and was a bit too grindy. So, we are completely revamping the system to address these concerns. This new and improved HWM system is called **Expertise**.
In the December update, Expertise will govern the highest drops you can get per slot, much like HWM did. But starting in early 2022, it will also govern the effectiveness of your gear. This means if your War Hammer Expertise is 520, and you equip a 550 Gear Score War Hammer, the weapon’s effective Gear Score will be reduced to 520. While we understand to some players this may result in a temporary reduction in power, we believe in the long run this will result in more rewarding progression loop that can’t be bypassed by buying gear off the trading post. A major improvement provided by Expertise is that a player’s Expertise per slot is displayed on the inventory screen, as well as the average Expertise of all equipped gear. Additionally, each time a player gets an Expertise bump, a level up banner will appear showing their new Expertise Level. Note that the Expertise system unlocks at level 60, so this information will not be shown until then.”
In response to our recent article on rampant botting in the game, Amazon gave us an official statement: “We’re aware of player reports about increased bot activity in New World. Bots pose a persistent challenge for MMOs, and our team has deployed dedicated resources and tooling to identify and combat them. We are committed to continuous improvement in our fight against bots, and yesterday alone, we banned over 7,700 accounts for using bots. Our goal is to ensure New World is fun and fair for all players.”
