f13.net

https://www.newworld.com

Now in Closed Beta for a couple of weeks and being streamed by your favorite MMO / RPG streamers. Has PvP on some sort (three factions are in conflict). No classes a la UO. Graphics look pretty good. Release is August 31. Pre-order for guaranteed Closed Beta access. Published by the worst gaming publisher in recent history (0/2 for game releases so far, this will probably make it 1/3).

Edit: actually Stadia Games is the worst in recent history but Amazon Games is probably a close second

I don't even consider Amazon a games publisher. They don't seem to even hire people that want to make games. Netflix however has out done them. What an embarrassment. FAANG really just seems to quite literally not understand fun.

They are not fun havers.

Falc hooked me up with a key and I played for a bit last night. I was having a lot of fun, until monsters decided to stop spawning and I could no longer progress my quests. Messed around with crafting a bit, but a lot of stuff needs leather which was not on the table.

Game is (maybe) frying VRAM chips. Be careful on menu screens if your card has poor VRAM cooling unless you have a way of capping the possibly uncapped frame rates. Right now seems to be limited to some 3090 cards but if it is VRAM cooling related then potentially any video card with poor VRAM could be affected.

https://old.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/oobi56/did_the_new_world_beta_brick_your_gpu/
https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/oollg4/amazons_new_world_is_bricking_rtx_3090_graphics/
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/rtx-3090-owners-beware-amazons-new-world-reportedly-breaking-graphics-cards

I wish manufacturers in general would find a way to stop that insane uncapped frame ramp-up. I get it most noticeably in Madden (both on ps4pro and the new pc), but it's instantly recognizable as the uncapped thing.

Yeah and in a noisy test environment where you may not be able to hear the fans spin up all you need is an FPS counter running while QAing the different screens to see if it's happening.

Apparently happens during the login queue too; Falc posted in Discord that he was getting 90 FPS and 98% GPU usage.

Super annoying, especially because it keeps draining your card even when minimized AND in the queue. Anyway, capping the game at 60 FPS completely fixed the issue, GPU usage went down to 55%. I was at 75 fps before, so I didn't lose anything meaningful.

Game is totally safe to play, lots of people playing with no issues, people with bricked cards are lying, oh and we're patching in a menu frame rate limiter (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1063730/discussions/0/3060743573143138057/)

Meanwhile the game hit 190.000 concurrent players on Steam and 90k playing right now (past midnight in the US and 8am in most of Europe) so it's probably doing something right too.

Cause it's a free beta*?

* If you cancel your preorder

That, or maybe it's a fun MMORPG.

numbers during the first two weeks are always about hype. let me know how many dropped off at the 3 months mark.

Tell that to Crowfall. :why_so_serious:

I can tell you right now that the numbers will shrink horribly because New World's biggest issue is an obvious lack of enough content, but the foundation is extremely solid and fun so I bet that:

1) Will launch to good numbers
2) Then it will shrink and struggle through the first 6 months to a year
3) Then it will steadily grow over the next many years.

I tend to agree with you, provided Amazon doesn't shut it down between 2) and 3). The core game is fun enough that it should be able to sustain a good sized audience, assuming they can keep content coming and find a way to monetize it down the road. Do they have an optional subscription thing in mind? And if so, is it free with Prime? I really had not looked into this game at all, other than chatting with you guys in Discord, until playing the Beta. Now I'm pretty hyped for it; I'll post my full thoughts in a day or so, once I know the shine has worn off a little.

Hmmmm....hadn't heard about this.

Any word on if there will be a sub or if it is Box+F2P?

Its box + real world money cosmetics. They ditched their P2W cash shop items based on the backlash.

Also, this game is horrible.

So like Guild Wars 2 but shit?

The combat is interesting if you have a consistently sub-30 ping.

Not good, but interesting. 150+ ping and it's total dogshit combat. Mob AI is terrible, quests are all fetch/k10r. PvP is pretty bad, open world pvp is aids. Loot got adjusted right before I gave up, went from 99% is salvage trash to 95% is salvage trash. Crafting at the highest end is inferior to drops, and at lower levels not worth it.

You have options in how you look from Hobo to Pimp to Pirate to HoboMonk to PiratePimp. Or Knight/Conquistador, but heavy armor kept getting nerfed.

I'm kinda sad that I haven't played mmo in over a decade and instantly know what k10r means though I've never seen it shortened that way.

Which made me realize I'm technically doing k10r bounties in State of Decay 2, but they're interesting because while there are some straight kill x of x type zombie, most of them are 'kill an armored zed with a pistol (bring a lot of ammo)' or 'kill a juggernat with a melee weapon'. Heck, I thought 'kill 6 armored zeds with explosives' was going to be easy until I used up my entire inventory full of grenades to kill 2 (I ended up taking my swordswoman along and chopping their legs off and planting remote bombs on their back...and a van full of remote bombs). So it required some thought and planning to execute, and you can stack bounties by zed type, so the killx stuff kinda increments while working on the tricky ones.

So it sounds like they hired Koreans to design the game.

Korean MMOs, at least, have a minimal level of technical competence which far exceed what this game has. The jump animation, for example, is comically bad. And your character "wobbles"/leans to the left when moving (watch your head movement relative to the center crosshair when moving). Also tapping a movement key will make your character "lunge" in that direction but not actually change their location (i.e. you lunge in place).

I find it amusing that Amazon, of all companies, can't find a way to make the UX work on pings above 30. I mean, even WOW figured that shit out back in 2005-6 with ability queues and whatnot (I played on a west coast server from eastern europe with 600 ping and combat felt reasonably enjoyable for everything except organized pvp).

(the real solution is negative ping code, of course  :awesome_for_real:)

About six or seven years ago, I got called to a meeting of friends who had a major cultural initiative starting around a worthy issue. They had a big funder who wanted to build a fully-functional virtual world related to the issue, where the model was World of Warcraft etc. and they'd heard I knew a little about it all. I asked what the budget was for development, they all looked at each other and said, "We're not sure, like maybe $75,000?" I loved all these people but I basically couldn't help but fall over laughing.

It's just so fascinating to me that no matter what people spend, they can't even hit the marks on things we've learned in fifteen years of relatively mediocre MMO gaming. I'm not talking technical performance, I'm talking basic design like "is the combat fun" and "is there a reason to play besides the treadmill?"

Amazon took an interesting concept (open world PVP set in low-magic colonial America) and sideways fucked it into the most generic, terribad fantasy world possible, all with what appears to a semi-functioning but completely standard MMO gameplay loop engine.

A full-loot PvP open world MMO survival game would never have attracted enough Western players to justify the costs. I'm surprised Amazon even allowed Double Helix Games to proceed initially on that design. And after that initial design failed, Amazon should've just killed the entire project like they did Double Helix Games other Amazon Games project Breakaway rather than let them try to shoehorn the initial base mechanics into as many other PvP and PvE design patterns as they could.

Edit: ...in the hopes that some idea might stick

Given Amazon Games track record with shutting down products before they release, I'm kind of amazed this one got as far as it did.

I don't get the hate for it, but I admittedly love bog-standard-MMO gameplay loops and haven't really found one that's clicked in a long time. It's pretty, it's fun to play, and there are a lot of cool crafting and harvesting things to mess with.

People here are stuck on the justified hate for Amazon, and enjoy the idea of a trainwreck. Which this game is not, not even close. It certainly was a few years ago, it almost died many times, but now it's chapter 0.1 of a pretty cool MMO.

Mmorpgs are piles of shit, that's a fact. The simple notion that FF XIV is super succesful NOW is unjustifiable and is a testament to that (full disclosure: I play FF14 and have an active subscription at the moment).

These games are about finding some hooks in parodies of open worlds, with some terrible combat and very cheap slot machine mechanics trying to appeal to the addiction to growing numbers. New World does the same as everybody else, failing in some departments and succeding in others. Pretending this game is a disaster doesn't make it one.

Highlights:

Combat is good. If it's not your style, then bummer.
Crafting/gathering with rabdom stats is good.
Loot with random stats is good.
Game looks more than good.

All it needs is more enemies/dungeons/zones/stories. Which will inevitably come.

I just want someone to make an actual open world that isn't just a damn treadmill. I still think it's possible; hell, I think Minecraft pretty well accomplished it, so what I really mean is that I want more of them.

I want someone to make a virtual world that isn't just one of 3 or 4 iterations of DikuMud, only with different tweaks on the gameplay loop. The closest thing I've come to an MMOG that really captures me was Conan Exiles.

Yeah, I enjoyed the building in that and some of the world design.

Yeah, most folks here are just totally burned out on the classic MMRPG mold, so not much chance they're going to like this.

That said, even though I still enjoy an old school Dikumud descendant, this setting doesn't attract me, plus I just don't have any confidence in Amazon to support this game for very long, especially if launch is rocky -- and launch is always rocky.

What annoys me the most is that they made the game easier over the past year. Combat was slower and more challenging, if you were aggroed by two mobs you were always in trouble, and defending was a much more important factor. Clearly this was great according to me as it was much more *Souls-like, but their focus groups must have revealed that the majority wanted more faceroll mowing through enemies and everything accelerated and became a matter of offense only. I still think the combat is fun enough, but it took me a minute to realize why I was enjoying it less than in 2020's closed alpha.

Too bad, really.

Or the learned from other failed MMOs that had super hard and/or grindy content and died horrible deaths because of it. I played this back then and pretty much turned it off and never went back because I assumed that was what it would be at launch.

That's one of the reasons Warframe continues to thrive - its pretty easy, and gives you lots of options to mow down the opposition.

Oh I am absolutely sure that they made the right call market wise, profit wise, majority-of-people wise.

Sucks to be me.

Oh I hear you. One of the reasons Star Trek Online was a great game was that it gave the player the option to play in Normal mode or Elite mode in missions if you wanted a bit more of a challenge.

It's called Wildstar syndrome

Man did they totally misread their audience with that game.

As usual it's a matter of how many are willing to pay for one or the other system. There are MANY who liked the old system in New World and are pissed about the changes, but in the end are they enough to pay make a game like this a commercial success? Or are they more than those who would vote with their wallet for the simpler system? The answer is no.

Yeah the Alpha players are all like “BRING BACK STAGGER”. I’ve only watched a few videos of what it used to be like and can’t really judge it against how it is now but watching the streams of people participating in the current wars with people running around unimpeded like their heads are cutoff is amusing. There’s not enough movement and counter-movement abilities, it feels like.

The problem with alpha players on MMOs is that the devs will always select the hard core poopsocker types from other games to be their early testers.

Which, granted, might be the only group of people willing to put time in to alpha test a game for a developer free of charge. But it leads to a bunch of games thinking that "WE CAN MAKE MONEY OFF THIS 85 DEGREE TREADMILL!".

I understand Amazon wanting to broaden the appeal of the game. The problem is the game still has many of the original design decisions that only make sense in that context including things like free-for-all looting even in PvE (e.g. I can loot / skin somebody else's kill immediately with no timer to wait for), extremely limited fast travel, no mounts, and settlement-specific (non-global) storage.

My point was kinda the opposite (apologies if you weren’t replying to me), that by using the hardcore poop in a  sock crowd as the early feedback from the devs can get tunnel vision and think that they will not succeed unless they make the group they are interacting with happy. Which means shit that would help mass appeal like making the game actually fun and interesting rather than about how “hard” it was to get an “achievement” gets put on the back burner.

They certainly didn't get tunnel vision this time. In this case they did everything they could against said alpha sockpoopers and everything to appeal to the masses. As I said, having pooped in socks a lot in my life, I can attest that I liked the game more 1 year ago. But as a company that has to make revenues they almost certainly made the right decision by making me unhappy. The only uncertainty is if the combat in its present form retains some of the stickyness of the older one. This new one is floaty and a bit tasteless, as opposed to the filling crunchyness of the old one. This one can lead to boredom quicker.

I mean, if the combat is only fun with sub-50 ping, I'd consider that a failure by itself...

Is that true though?

If you want a wide audience, yes.

No, it is NOT true that the combat is only fun with sub-50 ping. Up to about ping 120 there are basically no noticeable differences with sub-30 let alone sub-50. It probably gets worse over 150, and that's how it should be. If you have more than 150 ping I feel bad for you but twitch multiplayer games are always going to suck.

And I have double and triple tested it to make sure. This is just another example of false information spreading when something is somewhat instinctively disliked by many.

EDIT: expanded a bit.

Next thing you're going to say that games don't require a 240Hz monitor to be fun!

CRT for LIFE!

I don't think either Zetor or myself was commenting on this specific game but more on the general concept of games that require super low ping to be even remotely playable.

I enjoy people complaining that you can't play Rocksmith co-op over the Internet.

 :oh_i_see:

Rocksmith isn't an MMORPG though.

I was continuing to talk about the disconnect from reality (in the opposite direction, RS demands almost no latency but people want to play over the Internet). It's an mmo thread in 2021, what do you want from me?

I mean, I guess we could leave Falc to discuss this game with himselves  :drillf:

Yes, thanks. In that vein, it can't be stressed enough: New World has one fucking glaring problem and it's the amount of unique content, which is not nearly enough. Everything else might not be up everyone's alley but it's shockingly solid and fun, which is kind of demonstrated by the game's popularity at the moment (it hit 200k concurrent players over the weekend, I think we are clearly past the "testing it and refunding" phase).

What everyone having a blast right now doesn't know is that the honeymoon ends abruptly about 20 days in. Amazon Studios' challenge is not to retain those 200k players through the first year, it's to support it and keep fleshing it out enough in the next two years to give it the TESO/FF14 kind of delayed success.

I haven't done any PvP in this game but I have played lots and lots of it and other games and it still feels like to me that ping will matter in this game cause combat is not auto-targeting / auto-tracking like it is in traditional MMORPGs. E.g. projectiles like arrows and bullets have travel time so it's likely somebody will have an advantage though I'm not sure which. I.e. does having a high ping make you harder to hit with ranged weapons cause where the server thinks you are isn't where people see you on their screens? Or is it always best to have the lowest possible ping in either situation (shooting or moving)? In melee combat it'll likely matter too despite removing the stagger mechanic, which presumably gave a huge advantage to those that could interrupt first / faster, since positioning still matters.

Edit: actually after reading this:

https://forums.newworld.com/t/our-vision-for-combat-what-happened/146556

Maybe ping doesn't matter for melee now.

Of course ping matters. Again, like in any game that is twitchy. Why would anyone expect that to be different? And it pretty much only affects PvP.

My point was that it's not a thing specific to this one game so to list it as a negative trait of New World seems weird. And it certainly doesn't take sub-30 ping as mentioned earlier in this thread to be fun nor functional.

Hell, ping matters in FF XIV too, the slowest game in the world. Before they opened EU servers it was super hard to do primals because their telegraphs were unforgiving and our European ping often meant death. Action multiplayer games are ping dependent. I am not going to say "it's your fault if you have 150+ ping", but how's that New World's fault?

I've heard enough about this game to remember this site and see what people think here.  Must have some hype going for it.

 Can't believe I remembered my user name and password.

password1234 to the rescue again

This game especially, but also the hype for Ashes of Creation, and Crowfall, and isn't there another one as well? have me feel like I am taking crazy pills. I feel like Trisha Helfer's character in BSG: "all this has happened before..." and I am just waiting for the refrain.


These feel like quotes from the late aughts. They could be talking about Age of Conan, or Warhammer Online, or Aion, or SWTOR, Darkfall or any of the other detritus down in the gaming graveyard. If us nerds of F13 are good for one solitary thing on this earth, it should be spotting all the signs of yet another ambitious but ultimately vacant MMO train wreck. Quite frankly, I didn't think it was a skill that would ever see use again. We're like old gaffers in fantasy novels warning of the ancient evil we all thought defeated is ready to return, only to be ignored.

Then again, with the way "live service" games have been going these days, maybe our old MMO foes were just before their time. Maybe kids of the future will have to memorize the names in my sig* the way science students have to learn of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein. Fuck man, if we are doomed to do all this again, can I at least have my physique from the late Bush administration back as well?

*With bonus marks given for St. Barnett the Silver Tongued.

Twenty years ago we had hopes this genre could lead to something amazing. Now we know it doesn't. Because of that, most left the genre behind which makes a lot of sense. While some others found themselves content enough with the basics, the idea of a big bland shared RPG. Sue me, I'm getting older, I am not getting fresher.

In that sense, this game is fine. It has ZERO ambition, the feature list is incredibly small compared to all the other games you mentioned. The only slightly novel thing that it has is the combat style. It's just what I said above: a big very bland shared RPG and if that's what you are looking for it's quite fine. I don't think "trainwreck" applies to something that is bland. It takes more spark to make a train explode.

EDIT: As an RPG it's BLAND. As a MMORPG is fun. Meaning, from within the genre if for some reason you are still attracted to this kind of games, then it's an OK and fun one. From the outside, if you are NOT into MMORPG at all or anymore, then it is what it really is: bland.
I have no problem observing and admitting the difference between what I think of something, and the entertainment I can get out of it. Take mac and cheese for example.

"Live service" games are what the AAA publishers figured out about MMOG's. They really don't (and shouldn't) spend all that money making a world that can house thousands all at once in the same space because most of the people are only going to want to share their content with a small number of people. It's cheaper and thus more profitable just to make a co-op game and add content (along with copious microtrans for cosmetics) for 2-3 years before shuttering the service than it is to try to make content that can sustain that many different types of players for a decade, with constant balance fixes, scandals, and server architecture. WoW really was the last MMOG and it killed the genre (or in a more accurate sense, it destroyed the medium as a such). All those MMOGs mentioned haven't iterated one real step from WoW, and I think I'm 5 years past really being remotely interested in an MMOG again. I've said it on Discord - Conan Exiles was the last great MMOG/multiplayer experience I've had, and I ended up playing that with less than 10 other people on our own private server.

That's where MMOG's evolved, and it's a good evolution. MMOG's from AAA publishers are doomed to be failures because they are working on an outdated, unworkable model with a player base that either got tired of the genre with WoW, or literally grew up playing WoW, or missed it altogether and their first multiplayer experience was something like PUBG or Fortnite.

I remember being in the F&F alpha for Rift thanks to Hartsman. Such an amazing classless system with so much potential.

They kept shutting down my suggestions about running with those innovative parts and making it the core of their product pitch, I got shouted down a couple times by a dev. At one point I asked Scott what was up with that, and he said there was a very vocal and persuasive part of the team that basically wanted to make WoW 2.0  :oh_i_see:

And thus Rift languished in mediocrity.

If the game content (not the mechanics system) had been more WoW and less "let's remake Vanguard because that is where all of our grognard alpha testers came from" it probably would have been more fun to be honest.

Falc, I bolded the parts of your original post for a reason. These games all failed, to a letter, because they launched with no where near enough content for the type of crowd they either hoped to attract, or attracted by their nature. Age of Conan was awesome in the first 20 levels of Tortage. 30-40 was bland but serviceable. After that was: "well, you guys grinded out boars in Everquest 1, you can damn well do it again." Warhammer was great in the first tier zone. Declined through the next 2. And by tier 4 it was just a bunch of quest givers standing on the side of the road, like their bus to the Fyre festival had broken down and they needed you to scavenge the parts to fix it. And on and on.

To be honest, although my post quoted you, it wasn't really aimed at you. A quick perusal of the Nw subreddit, and you would definitely be forgiven for thinking you had travelled back in time ten plus years to any of these games forums. All the blind hope, the "no this time it will be different" posts, the paving over of flaws T- 1 month out, the denial of cynical voices, etc.

Fun is fun. If you are having it in NW, you win. But we have been down this road before. I am already  reading articles about NW bring too grindy, only having limited quests,  having technical issues, and there is something of a surprise or indignation in the tones of them. Like this hasn't happened to us all before.

Oh man the things I've blocked out of my mind...yeah that test was wild. May have been the last one I really gave a lot of energy to because of the potential for a great game, the flexibility of the skill system and having presets to switch between, and the combat was one of the better mmo systems at the time. I was prepared to give that kind of energy to the Rocksmith+ beta, but whew. They bolloxed the fuck out of that beta.

Release just got delayed until 9/28 (so about a month).

Maybe they are patching stagger back in. Which means they'll delay it to October later to remove it again.

(https://i.gifer.com/74vs.gif)

Every time people mention "stagger" I have visions of Madeline Khan re-tracing the path to Yellowbeard's treasure.

Most of the dev team were EQ nerds.

Why did Rift suck:
because Rifts sucked, emergent pve that felt threatening and couldn't be camped or farmed at will continues to be a very cool sounding idea that is too difficult for most(any?) devs to pull off. the rift concept was the hook and it was utter trash in the last beta, word of mouth was bad, it felt very WoW clone-y and that was that

Why does New World suck:
the combat is designed for mobile and/or console with almost no abilities ala moba combat. Except the abilities are so incredibly uninspiring, honestly its fucking shocking in 2021 to see such blah abilities. Also it has no content. But honestly who cares. The game has literally nothing but the promise of a new well funded fresh virtual experience to rpg and kill things in: good enough in 2021 but the combat is bad. The lag is bad in the siege/BG zones. The design of the siege/BG's was awful in the last beta tho they could fix that but at the dark heart of it all. The combat isn't good. This was once pitched as Souls combat adapted to a MMO. That might have worked through word of mouth and streamers. This will not.

FF14:
There's a free 2 weeks for returning playters. Sign up by 8/20 to get it or something. You might as well. Nostalgia is fun, the MSQ is a decent single player game almost and the FF game has a ton of very FF/jrpg minigame things that are great. in-game card game, casino, fashion shows, chocobo racing, etc. feels like a world. Good on them.

What should you be looking forward to:
Lost Ark. Yes its korean dickpunch lotto grind for gear score (disgusting) but the pvp is just a tack on of gear normalized arena fights (1on1 or 3on3) and the class balance is good, the visuals are good and the combat is well designed. So fuck it who cares if the pve is evil korean bullshit if getting to max lvl isn't hard and you are allowed to pvp without racing through all the pve stuff? Rather the pve exists as something to do when you want to do it for the sake of doing more pve and is supposedly a series of decently challenging boss/raid style encounters.

Literally nothing in this sounds appealing to me. I think when I see Korean I tend to tune the rest out because I know roughly how it is going to go.

I hated Lost Ark because I don't like click-to-move combined with a ton of hotkeys. Stuff like Diablo works because you generally use LMB, RMB, and maybe 2-3 other buttons; Lost Ark seemed to want a traditional MMO rotation, which just did not feel great in the beta (or alpha or whatever happened a month or so ago).

Rotations for most classes, at least early levels, were like 123 buttons then on cooldown then you would use qwe buttons on another pack.

Definitely not WOW rotation shit though. It's slower.

Probably changes at max level when you can reduce cooldowns or whatever.

New World is really bad. Playing the open beta and my impression from streams was dead on. Combat feels really awful.

I consider it the best combat in a western MMORPG ever. That's' not much considering how bad combat in western MMORPG has always been, yet it's the best.

Released today.

So far, flawless launch (servers, lag, etc.). There are queues but that's inevitable and as long as you didn't go in with a specific server in mind, there are many less crowded ones to choose from.

So far in Grampa Ashamanchill's "Haven't we been here before?" Series: he tours  the New World subreddit and laughs at all the kids who have never seen an MMO launch before. "What the fuck is a queue?!? I thought that was something you used in billiards (the mobile game of course)."

Eventually got in, looked around... and refunded. It's pretty, but fuck me the mechanics are shithouse

The combat is actually better than it seems, but the game is too scripted, too shallow, they didn't full commit to pvp and we've never seen an ounce of evidence there is a good plan or good people to execute whatever halfbaked focus group plan they have.

So a PvE game with PVP tacked on vs a PvP game with PvE tacked on?

About the only lessons MMO devs truly learned over the last 20 years or so is that fully committing to pvp is a surefire way to kill a game.

Both PvP and PvE seem tacked on. The game truly didn't know what to become during early development and when it was rebuilt it felt like both experiences were half baked and only getting by thanks  to the engaging combat system. Overall, PvE is cool to play due to the action combat but there's a lack of mob diversity, and PvP is also cool to play due to the action combat, but it's still quite meaningless unless you are part of a large PvP oriented guild. To be fair though, isn't that how it should be? My assessment as a PvP person is that it's much better than I hought: I play with my PvP switch constantly on and the occasional gank makes it for spicier gaming sessions. You never get one-shot, which is also great, and tonight I am gonna take part in the first 50v50 battle in an effort to conquest a territory.

So yes, they didn't truly commit to anything, but I was expecting much worse PvP and so far it's actually fun and consensual and meaningful.

It's a PvP game with PvE tacked on which is why the PvE questing and story is horrifically bad -- maybe the worst of any MMORPG ever. However, the PvP got "watered down" during the many reworks. The game used to be a full-loot free-for-all PvP survival type game but that sort of game obviously would not justify an Amazon-level of investment and so got changed into the "faction"-style PvP you have now.

You can't even call only the PvE tacked on though.

PvP faction quests are the weakest of all the incredibly weak procedurally generated components. They are repetitive beyond belief, they don't work for groups to do together, its just an awful awful system that feels like it has to have been meant to be placeholder but then the game shipped without going back and working on it. They'll probably add mounts soon and make it even worse.

Generally speaking though the entire game just lacks surprise. No champion packs or world spawns I'm aware of. No interesting loot that changes how weapon X plays or what you can do, no active ability items or instance ala Moba's. In pvp its way behind where SB was with no real stealth vs anti-stealth battle within the battle going on. They literally let people respawn ON THE FRONT LINE in the 50v50. Its as if nothing has been remembered of how to do PvP from the time before all anyone made was WoW clone vanilla trash that basically ended the genre for a decade.

Its not Tera good but it is player skill influenced combat. It has a large budget. It was released at a smart time though its hilarious that FFXIV is doing so well and Lost Ark is such a better game that Amazon had to rush it out to avoid Endwalker release and back burner a game that is actually ready to go (localization only) to give New World a chance. But it has the player numbers to make it feel rewarding to be a part of it just needs one of those classic first MMO patch is basically an expansion worth of changes and improvements like we used to always see in the DAOC-AO days.

Sigh, I really did love the stealth v. anti-stealth minigame inside of SB's PvP. That was maybe the most fun I've had in PvP, just that element alone.

So I've given to watching this game a bit on Twitch while I rock my 2 month old between sleep screaming sessions, and all I ever see is the streamer running somewhere. I'll go down a list of 20, one after another, and it is just them running and checking their map. Occaisionally someone is chopping a tree.

Sorry, no. No game can beat FF XIV base game in that department.

I agree with Falc here. Story aside (I skip all cutscenes) the quests in FFXIV are fucking horrible. Nonstep back and forth fedex shit, kill 2-3 rats, run back to the quest giver, talk to him, watch a cutscene, talk again, talk again again, turn in. Walk three feet, talk, talk, cutscene, talk, turn in. Rinse. Repeat. There are a handful of cool solo instances, but other than that it's all the same dumb bullshit.

New world's are nothing to write home about, but they're not offensively annoying like FFXIV.

Probably rose-coloured glasses, but I miss the PvP in Warhammer Online. Then again, I had a certain glee in punting opponents into lava.

It was probably shit.

Only the first battleground which you could no longer play once you passed the level cap. The second battlefield was like half as good but since everyone still had ass gear it was pretty ok. I don't think i ever made it to the third and kept restarting to play the first.

Pants on head decisions all around with Mythic titles.

Wasn't the tier 3 battlegrounds where some classes could just knock fools into the lava or something?

I only did tier 1 and that was a blast. Tier 2 was where I uninstalled.

As for tier 4, it was DOORHAMMER!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEedUeDJ7Us

The Tier 1 PvP  battlegrounds, or whatever they were fucking called were amazing, but over ilike one evening. The Tier 2 ones were okish, but by then people were starting to funnel into only one of them. Phoenix crossing I think it was called. By Tier 3, everyone and thier dog played that fucking Tor Annroc lava tunnel one, because it gave double the xp of the other ones. If you could stomach the deserted hour long queues for the other Tier 3 ones, they were alright. Better than sitting in lava.

Age of Conan PVP was better anyways. Free for All mother fuckers.

100% true. Also, it was action based. Also levels didn't matter as much as in usual MMORPGs.

Planetside was the only pvp-based mmo I've enjoyed.

yes

(I think I played it five times with people here on my first toon and never again)

I think it was Tier 3 when the punting began, and that was where I stopped playing.

Tier 1 was a lot of fun though...

It might not have began in Tier 3, but that was it's, er, finest hour. The battleground was called Tor Annroc, and it was fucking miserable.

I'm trying to remember if Dark Age of Camelot PvP was at all fun.

I was always told that DaoC was sacred ground when it came to open world PvP. And I never really liked PvP in RGPs.

When they introduced battlegrounds, the first PVP battleground was a shitton of fun. I think it was around level 20 or so. The realm war zones were ok, but the closed battlegrounds were the bomb. Then you leveled out of that 20-24 range and all of a sudden, the next battleground was emptier than the frontiers.

At launch it was one of the worst.
They gave the best speed buff AND the longest aoe cc to the same class type, then they gave one realm the best version of those two things (i can't remember what made it better) and the other realm that class also had decent dps and the third realm fuck you. Then they had a zero diminishing returns or counterplay cc system. Class balance in general was dogshit. But then they also tried to balance the realm versions of each class as well and failed even more.

DAOC was an overrated pile and not at all fun in pvp. The golden age of DAOC pvp involved literally using bots and a second account to get all the fun buffs on you. UO, AC, SB for sure and probably EQ Zek servers were all better but didn't spoonfeed shit the way DAOC did.

For me, nothing will ever top "l33tn3ss" my Centaur Summon/buffbot in Shadowbane.  He was very useful, and very naked....

Thinking back, my favorite pvp (other than planetside) was in UO. The actual pvp was ok, kinda frustratingly stacked in the favor of pks (compounded by the notoriety system). But I found the fun in playing a completely non-combat thief. 7xGM in thief skills plus treasure hunting. I would target pk guilds and steal from them incessantly, and the build actually made for an amazing defensive build due to the way hiding worked when I was doing it (you had to waste a skill slot on GM Detect Hidden or you weren't going to find me, and not many did...at first heh).

Stealing the guild keyring of some big pk guild was probably the high point of it, I spent a week or so doing recon and setting up the heist. They had rednamers farming npcs on Bucs Den and killing any players that would make the mistake of landing there, then they would hand off loot to a bluename that would port it back to the HQ. Turns out the bluename carried a bag of stones to all guild hideouts and the keys for them.

That was some amazing emergent gameplay.

DAoC had battlegrounds? I had forgotten about those.

RvR was fun if you had at least a full group to roam around with.  It could be entertaining if you had an OP 1v1 class with enough DPS to blow up one person before you died.  I remember tooling around with heretic+sorc and that was stupid OP and fun.

RvR could also be fun if you could get enough people moving in one direction (think at least 30 for small scale, 100+ for large scale). Plus someone bringing siege weapons.  Someone brought siege weapons, right?  Right?

The PvP/PvE areas were kind of pointless.  There was some back and forth in the first area introduced, Darkness Falls? But mostly the PvE there involved raid groups large enough that could only really be countered by another raid group.  Plus you could limit or lock out the other realms on a limited basis based on... keep ownership?  Relics? The PvP/PvE area accessible in the frontier really mostly involved groups waving at each other because they really just wanted the stuff.  With occasional single group ambushes that would result in suddenly everyone embroiled in a pointless back and forth instead of farming.

Mid was stupid overpowered at release with full duration AE stun and mezz, both of which could be re-applied with no fall-off or immunity.  Sorcs were okay with longer range AoE mezz (think 1850 vs 1500 for bard/healer) and decent speed.  Bards had an insta-mezz and the good speed.

Basically Mid had very good synergy with healer + DPS with decent numbers, Alb had numbers and had to pick and choose their utility for groups, and Hibs were the playground of the other two realms with the ability to include most (all?) utility but limited their group comp.  I don't think that ever significantly changed over the lifetime of the game.

and then there was early EQ Illusionists who could mez (enslave basically) someone basically forever or at least until one or the other logged off. could even pass control off to another Illusionist

Mid had healer AE stun and Thane AE DPS (hammers of doom), but only at start.  Shortly after the Thane hammers were nerfed to "great way to kill yourself" or "lagOmatic!HAHA!".  I'm surprised that I'm still bitter about how they fucked the Thane.  Hammers definitely needed nerfing, but ffs, give something else in compensation.

I vaguely remember battlegrounds.  I'm sort-of but with no details also remembering that there was something retarded that they did in battlegrounds that made them not fun.

So back to the perhaps not as interesting topic of New World, I've heard there is quite a bit of content gating through PvP. As in crafting and skill development quest chains require participation in PvP to complete? And this is for basic stuff like a recipe for bags, not just PvP stuff.

Hard pass. Maybe this game just doesn't stream well, but it just looks like a giant mess in action. Inevitable population crashes will not help the long term viablility of that strategy.

I think I'd really rather talk some more about DAoC.

My college roommate and his brother were way into it. I just didn't care for the game at all. The PVE was just so bad that I couldn't even stand being power leveled. The RVR wasn't than appealing to me either. I'm kind of surprised looking back though that I didn't at least have some extended time with this at end game. The three of us tended to play MMOs together for months on end.

I guess that means I really didn't like it.  :awesome_for_real:

You weren't powerleveled the right way then.   :awesome_for_real:

I started a cleric, got PL'd in PvE up to around 20 or so, then my guild said "fuckit" and off we went into the frontier.

We ran out to a keep, I manned the oil.  I think the first oil pour gained me close to 20 levels. It was absolutely hilarious. Pretty much closed out the night at nearly 50.

As far as I know nothing is gated behind PvP, only PvP stuff. I can craft bags no problem, so this is a weird rumor. Could be true, but in 45 levels I haven't found any gate whatsoever.
And no the game doesn't stream well because a lot of what makes it engaging is how you fight. The feel of it.

The battlegrounds came way after release. I went back after they started their "get a free level 20 character on your account" a few years after release and the battlegrounds were either new-ish or had been around for a little bit. The level 20 battleground was always full because people could just create a character and go with a little bit of gearing but then you had to level with their boring ass PVE to get into the later battlegrounds, which were completely barren.

I bought DaoC at luanch, created a character in Hibernia.  Hibernia consisted of one hill with brown frogs on it, and a sign that read "IOU one realm".  Could never get to the actual PvP.

Also, New World sucks. 

You have to do faction quests to make bags (more specifically, to buy one of the materials), but there are PVE or PVP quests available. Have made several bags, done zero PVP. No idea what the skill quests even are.

Don't forget a dragon that was more difficult than the alb/mid dragon for a long long time.

What's hurting the game a bit is the fact that they locked up a lot of servers and you can't create new characters there. So if you have friends who joined later specifically to play together, and for example I have four of them, they can't play with you. A server transfer token should arrive soon, but it has been a week now and patience is growing thin. Some will give up.

So Amazon just tried to make a Wow clone?  If it has good battlegrounds I might give it a whirl...

Welcome to the discussion from weeks ago?

It's a WoW clone if WoW had good combat, good crafting, and little content.

If you walk into this thinking it's a WoW clone you'll refund it in 4 minutes.

This may just be the best review you've ever written Falc  :grin:

Nothing about this is remotely WoW.

Its the first serious attempt at cashing in on survival (rust, ark, minecraft etc) game structure as a MMO. Except it started as the west's first for real pvp MMO in forever. Then it became whatever it is now. Which is a bit of a mess.

Much of the design underpinnings only make sense from a pvp perspective (e.g. no mounts) but pvp has be re-relegated somewhere along the way in design to borderline tacked on. Its an optional system (welcome back pvp flagging!) but there isn't much to the game beyond it and even the world pvp systems (SB timed sieges meet instanced max participants Battleground) are completely undercooked and lacking.

Also one of the worst quest design games in a decade or three shouldn't ever be compared to WoW.

Daic suffered from the ridiculous belief of the era that pve time sinks were terribly important. But I still think the realm war was the best implementation of any kind of community pvp war in the genre.

I'm counting eve as a different genre, rightly or wrongly.

Nothing about New World at launch has anything in common with a survival game. I don't know if that is something that existed previously (or was talked about in design docs but ultimately scrapped), but there's no kind of hunger mechanic, no building, no day/night cycles where things get more difficult... I honestly don't even understand the comparison.

Hoax is talking about what the game originally was, not what it is now. There was no hunger/thirst mechanic, from what I understand, but you could build settlements originally. So like Rust, Conan, etc. you would get together with friends and other like-minded individuals, gather resources, and build out a settlement that you would have to defend from other players. And the game still has the resource gathering and item crafting focus that survival-style games have.

Whatever were the survival roots of the game are completely gone and only left behind what turned out to be one of the winning aspects of the game: crafting and even more so gathering, are extremely satisfying. To me, this is the most pleasant gathering ever in a MMO.

No, the game still has aspects of its original design in it. Hoax mentioned mounts. I mentioned some additional ones here:


Another one to add to the list is the (server) laggy faction wars. That's not an easy problem to fix and it's probably not really a fault of the original design -- it's more that the original design was team-based PvP where small(ish) teams of people would fight PvP battles over player-built settlements and territories rather than the large-scale faction wars the game evolved into so they didn't have that server-lag issue originally.

The echoing sound when you are mining is very satisfying. On the other hand, there are only two types of mobs I've encountered: animals and different colored zombies.

That's one of the game's biggest sins: the lack of variety in mobs and locations. You can see that they put a little more effort at the higher levels but it's definitely too little. If the last zone they added is an indication of what's coming (Ebonscale Reach, level 55+) then the future looks cool, but it's undeniable that fighting a rotation of the same 5 mobs for over 50 levels is mindumbingly bad.

So, apparently, there is an exploit that has been found wherein you can play in windowed mode, and moving the window around will essentially pause the game, so any incoming damage is stopped in the queue, etc.  Also, the game is client authoritative, so it won't be too long before someone figures out how to dump, or block incoming packets, so none of the queued damage, etc. gets' processed when you stop moving the window.

I remember there being something similar in DAoC which allowed people to jump up to areas they normally couldn't like in Darkness Falls, enabling them to get into enemy realms if I am remembering correctly.

:facepalm:

I'm curious now, though, how hard it will be to decrypt / reverse engineer the format of the data traffic between the client and server. There are tons of way to exploit that, especially in a PvP game, if that can be figured out. In EverQuest in the (very) old days somebody figured out how to decode the NPC and player positional data in the networking data. The data being sent was for the entire zone, not just a radius around where your player was and with a bit to Unix technical knowledge you could get that data to display on a zone map showing the positions of mobs and players. Good times.

Supposedly this is "fixed" now? Some people are saying you get disconnected now if you do this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/qazt5d/video_proof_that_new_world_is_client/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/qazt5d/comment/hh70ku5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Nope. They be lying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLtLxTahSjo&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLtLxTahSjo&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes)

This video was published at about 2130 CT time, and all of the issues are still there.

Yup. Like, I wanted to be right, about my thesis about this MMO not learning a thing from the past, but this is a little on the nose.

Your link is not the same exploit. So it's possible they fixed the first exploit linked but not this second one. In the first he is just standing there and is invincible, in the second he has to "pause" during a roll to get the invincibility. The second one also shows that just standing there (no roll) while "holding" the window does queue up the damage ticks which get applied when the window is released.

No it is not literally the same exploit people are were complaining about, that one involved a hatchet passive, but it is fundamentally the same. It shows the client queues up damage until it can communicate with the user's client, which is why it is used to hold control points. The second exploit he is showing is a "true" invincibility as it were, as the user is always rolling according to the server, it doesn't queue up damage to the user at all.

What's important is what the exploit reflects. Just how much of the information this game processes is done client side.

BTW their "fix" for the issue was to disable bordered windows mode, but not windows mode itself, and the hatchet passive, not the actual tricking the server into the client temporarily being offline.

This is some prime "client is in the hands of the enemy" shit. Everything old is new again! :awesome_for_real:

The second video shows that DOTs (and other debuffs I assume) are blocked by the infinite iframe as well. Check https://youtu.be/lLtLxTahSjo?t=430 -- 530 hp with a bleed debuff, and after he stops dragging the window, the debuff is gone and he's still at 530 hp.

Apparently, there's been another flaw found, which allows you to inject HTML into the chat.  Doing so, along with a bogus item link, can be used to crash the client of anyone that mouses over the link, as I understand it.   :awesome_for_real:

My wife, who plays New World, tells me that it isn't just HTML, it's also Javascript, and not only can it crash your game, but supposedly shut your computer down as well.

Who, in their right fucking mind, would allow customers to put JAVASCRIPT into a chat box, without some insanely-high levels of sanitization? Morons, that's who.

Also, they did patch in a fix for the dodge rolling invincibility exploit......which fucked up their auction house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIw3fT4IF2c&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIw3fT4IF2c&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes)

How in the actual fuck can any development on an online game not start with the very basic and proven ethos of "NEVER TRUST THE FUCKING CLIENT?"

Why should AGS, a game studio which has put out no real games of note, with all the resources cocaine that Amazon can provide, listen to anyone with experience in the MMO field over the last 20 years?

More seriously, this, if credible, explains why https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/qigb9b/former_ags_employee_explains_issues_with_nws/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/qigb9b/former_ags_employee_explains_issues_with_nws/)

If @cubesos is to be believed that confirms what I speculated on earlier that the game's underlying engine is not designed to handle the large-scale faction-based PvP the game eventually morphed into because it was originally designed for small team-based Rust / Conan-style PvP.

Apparently it's not really "client authoritative".

https://forums.newworld.com/t/notice-how-serverclient-authority-is-handled-in-new-world/473167


Still a mess, but looks like the client doesn't rule. And when it does, it's a fixable bug.


(https://i.imgur.com/U7eVmty.jpg)


(https://i.imgur.com/jCRqmsp.jpg)


*edit to add further dev explanations

It's a fixable bug... that breaks transactions in the auction house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIw3fT4IF2c&t=285s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIw3fT4IF2c&t=285s)

https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1454202432976732167 (https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1454202432976732167)

Like I said after trying the open beta. There doesn't appear to be much talent on this dev team and this game is not worth touching unless its first 3 major patches are large slam dunks of fixes, QoL and improvements.

None of that has happened. This game doesn't deserve to live. On to the next one.

Next MMO Design 101 (which these devs apparently all skipped) issue: gold is leaving the game much faster than it's coming in.

This sort of problem is conceptually and mechanically easy to fix but I wouldn't be surprised if things swing towards hyper-inflation rather than the current hyper-deflation before settling down to semi-equilibrium.

This is the earliest post I've been able to find so far that talks about and accurately predicts the issue: https://forums.newworld.com/t/in-game-gold-economy-is-about-to-crash-immediate-attention-required/362228

And the last week or so gaming sites started reporting on the issue:

https://blog.playerauctions.com/mmorpg/currency-crisis-in-new-world/

https://kotaku.com/new-worlds-economy-is-so-busted-players-are-bartering-1847904272

They addressed this a few days ago:

https://forums.newworld.com/t/fix-the-economy-money-created-vs-money-destroyed/425748/346

They also said they didn't have an automated ban system, but that turned out to be a lie, or functionally one.

Gold dup: https://forums.newworld.com/t/extremely-critical-duplication-exploit-methods-to-replicate-inside/485341/147

Doesn't that just fix the gold deflation?

 :awesome_for_real:

To be fair, I seem to remember FFXIV 2.0 struggling with similar deflation problems (there were no good gil generators at level cap once done with quests, except for levequests which suuuuucked), but iirc they addressed it in a subsequent patch.

That said, the stopgap solution AGS applied to fix the dupe bug enabled another dupe bug (https://massivelyop.com/2021/11/02/new-worlds-gold-dupe-exploit-stopgap-fix-revealed-another-gold-dupe/): if you tried to upgrade some building in town, the transaction wouldn't go through, but it'd also 'refund' the cost of the upgrade (which was never paid in the first place).

So yeah, big clownshoe-ception energy here... though I assume anyone exploiting this will be relatively easy to track down and permaban (I hope/assume that AGS is keeping logs of all failed transactions)

While checking up on the status of the dup issues I ran across another one that's apparently been around since Alpha where boss (all?) mobs will instantly respawn if there are no players within rendering distance. So if you are by yourself in an area or with some people you can coordinate with you can move far enough away to get it to respawn "on demand" rather than waiting for the normal respawn timer.

https://forums.newworld.com/t/reekwater-named-elite-respawn-exploit/346348/8

I kind of like this mechanic.  Spawn timers kind of suck

Been playing new world for a few days. The lack of actual depth in the combat system makes this the "play when I'm bored game" so far. Its not a bad game just a game with a complexity in mechanics I normally ignore in other games.  I'm starting to doubt lost ark is going to be any different so after years of ignoring the mmo market I guess the genre hasn't changed much.

Another day, another dupe exploit, another economy (wealth transfer) shutdown:

https://forums.newworld.com/t/notice-temporarily-disabling-wealth-transfers-november-15/544856

https://forums.newworld.com/t/theres-a-trophy-dupe-going-on/542760/16

Amazon is starting to feel the like Conglomerate that does 2 things really well (AWS and online retail) and a whole bunch of other stuff not so well (Digital Content creation, video games, space exploration, Grocery). 

Starting to?

They should have delayed this again and launched Lost Ark instead.

Delayed or scrapped? I mean the original designers of this game really thought that a full loot pvp game for 40 bucks was worth amazons development budget. They've gone through 2-3 iterations of the games core systems before settling on a faction base pvp game with pve content hanging off. The actual combat isn't that great for players who prefer to do anything but swing a pointy stick around and is only passable in PVE because the mobs are designed to charge directly at you. The exploits are a meh concern the core game has a ton of nothing burger beyond being a crafting sim.

Economy reopened, another dupe found:

https://old.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/qvtoze/dupe_here_we_go_again/

The dupes are basically fractal at this point. But don't worry,vthe developers showed a graph displaying they have everything under control.

Yes, there are now reports of a crafting dup and a gold dup involving outpost rush.

Edit: *post not *put

Apparently some things in the game are indexed by name rather than a unique ID so deleting and reusing that name gets you back the values of original and changing the name effectively resets the values.

https://old.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/qwqy84/bugexploit_change_your_company_name_to_reset/

I'm now picturing the initial game engine meeting going something like:

Game Director: okay who here knows anything about databases?

Dev: Uh, I've written some SQL statements before?

Game Director: Okay you are now our Lead Database Engineer. Good luck!

Whoa hold up, that is how I got my job.

So now they’ve gone the opposite direction and have been “semi-randomly” giving out large amounts of gold to some people:

https://forums.newworld.com/t/people-getting-random-50-200k-gold-from-ags/

I say semi-randomly because people have not yet figured out why some people are getting them and why the amounts vary. Speculation revolves around compensation for the myriad of bugs and issues recently but it doesn’t appear to be consistent. And lots of memes are going around now about how AGS misplaced a few decimal points because the amounts given to some people are way out of line if they were meant to be compensation. And auction houses are of course totally ruined as people spend their new found wealth on durable goods.

Edit: looks like they are going to do a rollback: https://forums.newworld.com/t/announcement-emergency-maintenance-for-eu-central-region/592906

Not sure how they will handle people buying out the AHs and then giving the items to other people but I guess we will find out.

Sounds like Amazon is just fucking with things in some kind of performance art piece, pulling and cutting puppet strings and watching the madness.

I've certainly been entertained by all of this.

They handled it by rolling back everybody, not just those that received the gold.

https://forums.newworld.com/t/announcement-emergency-maintenance-for-eu-central-region/592906/4

Note you have to click on the blue "View ignored content" link to see the dev post because their forum software allows members to "vote" (flagging) to "hide" other people's posts, including devs.

Wut?

Feels apropos that their forum software setup allows for griefing. The game has a similar mass report abuse autoban feature that unscrupulous guilds are taking advantage of.

Goddamn, Amazon is even inventing new ways to fuck up forums.  :facepalm:

Nah, they just didn't learn anything from slashdot or reddit, where that sort of brigading had to be blocked.

Just like they didn't learn anything from previous MMOs.

Played day two of release up til maybe 2 weeks ago... got into my 50s but ran out of steam...  Over and over I would hear myself or a friend in Discord say something along the lines of:

"Didn't we learn in Shadowbane/WoW/Daoc/etc. that this was a bad idea"
"Didn't the MMO community learn that this is a really bad idea back in 2005?!?"
"Didn't we learn that if it can be abused it will be abused???"

It was very pretty I will give you that, and I liked big chunks of the game.

The idea that you were taxed more on houses in game than Mr. Space Cowboy himself pays IRL was some of the best unintentional humor of 2021.

Necro... or do we still say "Bloodworth"?

If only some company named Mythic had made a similar mistake many years ago with its engine's capabilities and the MMO Dev community could have learned from that mistake.   
/em rants from his armchair

A Bloodworth isn't a necro, it's a repost.

so i heard this game is a slow motion bedpan accident filmed on location. this pleases me because i enjoy any suffering self-inflicted upon amazon by amazon. how them subscriber counts lookin

I'm expecting this game to just be included with my Prime membership any day now.

Numbers are 90% lower of what it was when it launched. We are talking about 100k at peak which are not shit but not great. They are launching "mutators" for dungeons this month though, which are pretty cool.

If that happens and I can play it on my laptop, I'll make an account for the HA HAs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ZMly9YAPA&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ZMly9YAPA&ab_channel=JoshStrifeHayes)

If you are looking through this game's history, take a shot every time the word dupe comes up. Then pray they can dupe you a new liver.

I'd try it for free, maybe. I'm one of those 1% that plays these games for setting and story, and the setting really doesn't appeal to me, and I have heard absolutely nothing about the story, or even if it has one.

But that said, since I don't raid, or PvP, or buy/sell game items for profit, if they can make the single and small group game fun I'd be all right.

The story was:  you are shipwrecked on an island and there are 3 factions fighting for resources. Oh, and the island is full of Zombie Pirates!!!

There must be more to it that than, but in 54 levels that is all I picked up on.  Questing is very much along the lines of Everquest's Kill Ten Rats school of thought.