Continuing work on New World, the Amazon Game Studios team made some changes today to address recent bugs that made whole server sometimes skip time ahead by days. In addition, they reduced housing taxes by 90% temporarily to try and make up for some of the damage from recent exploits and downtime. The team also responded to player concerns over tweaks that the recent major update made to endgame, especially for solo players.
With the work and update hopefully ending the time skip bug, an additional note informed that weekly housing taxes will be reduced by 90% until the monthly December update hits. With the major November update only recently out, the December update should still take some time so the discount should be in place for a couple of weeks. Additionally, Company income from home ownership has been raised. They say that this is just the beginning of types of compensation to help the economy and make up for things like taking trading offline when trying to fix exploits and bugs.
Community response to that November update was mixed, in part because in trying to make things challenging for players, especially after introducing gear and new equipment, like the Void Gauntlet, things got significantly harder at endgame. This was particularly difficult and frustrating for solo players. Developer NW_Berserker_Mike posted a response saying that changes to Elite POIs in the endgame zones weren't made in a way that conveyed proper context as to why those changes were made and player frustration is being taken into account. They want to balance varied endgame content with challenge, and to make the rewards fit, but Amazon will be looking on how to make things blend better while still maintaining a challenge.
For more on the bug fix and tax reduction, see the update over at New World.
