To say New World has had some struggles since launching a month ago is an understatement. One of the areas where these issues are keenly felt, though, is in the MMO's PvP, especially its player wars. The developers took to the dev blog this afternoon to talk about some of the changes coming to PvP and Wars in Aeternum.
First off, developer Zin_Ramu on the forums apologized for the state War has been in since launch. And it's no surprise, given the general lag issues while playing, as well as the infamous invulnerability exploit that has plagued New World since launch. Additionally, wars typically turn into zergfests, with the side that can successfully zerg control points instead of structured attacks and strategy taking the win oftentimes.
"Before we dive in I want to apologize for all the issues we’ve seen in War so far, and thank you for your patience as we work to resolve them. I know there have been some serious lag issues in War and a number of exploits (including the invulnerability exploits) that have marred your experience. We’ve made an initial set of changes to address some of the issues, and are working on some higher impact changes that need more testing. It is a top priority for the team to get war to a stable, performant state where the skill and coordination of the best team determines the outcome.
Let’s start by reiterating our high level vision. We want to create a game where PvE and PvP not only co-exist but support each other. We also want “wars not ganks”— meaning we want to support meaningful PvP in War and the open world conflict between the three Factions."
The dev blog goes into what the team is seeing and hearing from players throughout the last few weeks, as well as some proposed changes to hopefully alleviate some of the problems facing the general state of PvP in New World. For starters, the advantages to flagging for open world PvP don't necessarily translate when you hit level 60, meaning there isn't a meaningful reason to put yourself at risk, especially when grinding in high-level, end game areas for high watermarks. The solution to this is for the team to increase your luck when you hit level 60, as well as adjusting the rewards for PvP kills to better "enhance players high watermark."
Additionally, the team is making some changes to how you can better plan for PvP in the open world by making it more clear that a faction member is flagged as well. This is especially important when questing near faction members when an opposing player marches in to know whether or not you'll have backup. The team is also working on how to differentiate skill animations to let players know whether an AOE attack came from an enemy or an ally, helping to make this clearer in the heat of the moment.
War itself is getting some love too, with performance and exploit issues being addressed in a forthcoming patch. The team also addresses the cooldown between Wars themselves and explains their reasoning for the current timing windows.
"There have been some complaints about War happening too often. There is a 24 hour cooldown between Wars, and with the War windows, that means War happens at most every 2 days per territory. Players can also delay that through the influence race, which is now much more viable since we fixed the escalating influence issue. Overall, we think a War every 2 days is a good cadence, but please continue to let us know what you think. We are seeing War fatigue from Factions which funnel a group of players into every War. While we love this cooperation, having one company (or one company’s worth of players) own multiple territories should be very hard and is not what we are balancing War cooldowns toward."
New World's developers also confirmed that Defenders are winning more than attackers - at the clip of around 80% of wars - an outcome the studio states they want, with the goal of rewarding defending companies that put in the work to upgrade settlements and build the ranks to defend the fort. However, the team is looking into balance and fixing exploits to ensure that attackers have a real chance too. Communication and clearly seeing what roles your teammates are playing are also addressed, though New World's devs don't really have any concrete plans on how to address these issues at this time.
Finally, the devblog addresses territory control and how it is changing hands pretty regularly. The devs state that, overall, there is a good balance of faction control across the board on most servers and go into the different ways it is set up to ensure faction balance on a server. However, they are looking at balance continually and will tweak/make changes when it looks like it's being thrown out of whack.
However, what is out of whack is the way some territories are simply more profitable than others, especially Everfall. As companies take over regions, it's pretty clear that not all regions are created equal. Late game regions like Ebonscale Reach and Restless Shore pale in comparison in terms of profitability to Windsward and especially Everfall. This makes it difficult for players to complete town projects there as the controlling companies lack the tax revenue to start the works necessary to provide the town board quests.
New World's dev team is looking into how to fix this and, effectively, distribute the "main tax income stream to every territory." There isn't really a word on exactly what this will look like or whether or not it will really make an impact, but the team will be testing and making further changes to help combat this issue.
You can check out the full Devblog for all the details. New World continues to combat some pretty major issues, including turning off the wealth transfers in the MMO to combat a gold dupe - which then introduced another gold dupe into the MMO.
