Amazon Games has announced some early details on an upcoming territory management revamp planned for New World. The first look into the work and the goals behind the changes has been released and it focuses on rewards.
Initially, they bring up the rewards for territory management that exists now. This works where Companies own territories and set their tax rates, players then participate in activities inside those territories that generate taxes. The Ledger, which keeps track of the taxes then pays the Company at certain intervals. This is the basic system that has existed over the past year since launch. Yet, some things have changed
Among the changes include the ability to travel between towns is faster, easier, and costs are lower. Azoth travel costs have been reduced by a lot. You can also store more items in a single town with extra capacity that now exists. All Trading Posts have also been linked together, so that also streamlined the experience. Players that were more spread out before now spend time in more central territories and have a narrower interdependence instead of being all over the place, adventuring and selling at specific trading posts.
Since the way people play is different, they're looking to balance the rewards better. In examining where the coin rewards for territories are, they found two territories, Windward and Everfall, where players are mostly congregating and selling, and those two are the most valuable territories to hold in terms of payout.
The team's goals are to try and distribute gold a little more equitably so that these two territories don't dominate all of the gold payouts. They're also looking for ways to have smaller towns get gold so that they can have more territories to fight for.
Several things need to be looked at and considered for this, including a review of upkeep costs and tax rates. This means housing taxes, crafting taxes, or even trade taxes. There are some charts to give an idea of how these might be balanced more equitably. With upkeep costs, higher tier and in-demand territories will see them go up, relative to rewards, and less competitive territories will see them go down instead of being uniform all around.
You can read the full post with the initial details on goals for the territory management revamp here over at New World.
