Late last night, Amazon published a dev blog addressing even more of the major topics facing the New World community – including promises about Amazon’s own communication. “We have made the commitment to post a notice every Tuesday on the status of our weekly patches, to let you know how it is looking and when it might ship,” the team says. “For every weekly update, we will continue provide Megathreads for feedback and bug reporting. We are also working very hard to be more actively communicative and present here in the forums on a daily basis.”
This particular missive dives right into the economy, which players have argued is suffering from severe deflation.
“From a data standpoint, the economy is performing within acceptable levels. All servers are creating more money than is being removed, and by a good margin. However, the economy is tighter at the end-game currently. When we look at surplus income generated by level, it’s very high in the 1-35 level range, decent in the 40-59 range, and gets narrow at 60. This means that as more players get to level 60, this will start to put more pressure on the economy. […] Players are consistently generating a positive gold balance every day, but there is a downward trend. If this trend continues and we get closer to a negative in-out, we will take action. Our goal isn’t to drive this value to zero, or make it so no one can amass wealth. We want to ensure that overall gold balance per server stays in-check, so coin remains important.”
To that end, the studio is encouraging players to make use of high gold-generation activities, like Outpost Rush and daily faction missions. It’s also planning a broad slew of adjustments that will affect gold generation and expenses, including PvP durability, housing taxes, repair kits, coin drops and costs, and even the trading post – yes, the trading posts in different territories will be linked. “This change was made to strengthen the economies less traveled territories, and ensure item availability in all territories,” Amazon says. (Some of these changes are in today’s patch, in fact.)
Amazon also notes that character transfers are live again and that it is actually working on region-to-region character transfers too – “but it is difficult to solve and will take time.”
The blog is enormous and tackles several other topics the studio has already touched on in past pieces, including gold farmer spam, war lag, patch windows, luck, whether the game is client authoritative (it’s not), punishment for folks weaponizing mass-reporting, and permanent bans for folks who exploited the coin dupe bug. “We are able to track how much coin was received from exploitive behavior, and will investigate and take remediation steps against companies that have egregiously exploited this,” the studio says. “We understand the frustration caused by trades being off and want to make sure that no one suffers in-game financial losses as a result from disabling wealth transfer methods. In the long term, if town maintenance is behind on a territory your company owns, or if you are unable to afford your taxes due to this, we will provide a make good.”
It’s 4409 words and worth a look if you thought Amazon’s comms needed more effort for sure.
