Introduction

The New World July community Q&A has been released. There were many questions asked and answered in the latest Forged in Aeternum Episode, but the more interesting question and answers were from the New World Discord.

In this article we’ll cover everything that was asked and answered during the New World July community Q&A.

New World July Community Q&A: Discord Q&A

Below are the questions that were answered by the devs in the official New World Discord from the July Q&A.

Territory Control

MrLou: Hello AGS Team,

Main Question > Are there any plans to revamp or remove the current war system in the future? While I understand that the war system was a key selling point for New World, I honestly believe that the territory control system is hindering the game’s potential for growth.

For instance, the current server structure based on territories limits the number of players on a server, preventing the possibility of a mega server like ESO or other successful MMOs. The war system itself is flawed. Allowing the top 1% of players to earn millions of gold each week from owning a zone seems imbalanced and gates content others would enjoy. (I appreciate your efforts to reduce this but it’s not enough.)

Instead, they could be rewarded with various incentives like skins, emotes, titles, tokens for purchasing PvP-related gear, azoth salt, PvP patterns (already in the game), and more. If you choose to keep the war system, consider limiting the rewards to gold solely for participating in wars.


@17thCenturyCableGuy responded: Thanks for the question! Couple things:

First, the war system isn’t the limiting factor on number of players in a server, so no changes to the war system would affect that server concurrency limit. The server population number is primarily based on ideal player density for a good experience, which can actually degrade if there’s too much player density.

Secondly, we do agree that we want more players to have access to war, and we have ideas on how to address it, but nothing we’re ready to share yet. On the rewards for territory ownership, we continue to look at them with an eye on better balancing, but in general we want territory ownership rewards to be in line with the difficult achievement of taking and holding territory on an open server.

Mounts

Madness: This might be too early but how will mounts be handled in open world pvp or what system will be in place so players can’t just run away before the fight starts

@17thCenturyCableGuy responded: Three key elements to this:

One, if you’re in ‘combat’ state (indicated by the crossed swords on the health bar), you can’t summon your mount.

Two, ANY damage from another player will dismount you if you are flagged, including ranged attacks.

And three, summoning has a 2 second delay, and any PVP damage will cancel the summon. We have a few knobs and dials to tune, and have done so a few times after our own playtesting, so if we still feel like it’s too easy to ride away from fights, we will re-tune. Our goal for mounts in PVP is that they don’t interfere with fights as much as possible.

Ljosa: Are open world housing, animal husbandry or farming any of the ideas you would like to see in the game in the future?


@17thCenturyCableGuy responded: We would love to see all of those in the game! With the exception of open world housing–there’s good things about it obviously but our experiences from the early years have shown us that it’s not always desirable to need physical space in the world to accommodate every player.

We feel our current housing solution, using phased house interiors, strikes a really good balance between settlements feeling like living neighborhoods, but without needing to introduce urban sprawl to Aeternum.

General

VeNoMoUs: Can you make music sheets salvageable?

People have hundreds of them and throw them out, maybe that’s the cause of the server lag issues with all the sheets staying in server memory until they disappear

@17thCenturyCableGuy responded: We are currently looking at the amount of items in the inventory, with an eye and strong desire to streamline them across the board.

Music sheets are a great example of where the inventory can get bloated – but we don’t yet have any concrete plans to share on how inventory items will be streamlined, including music sheets.

NateDoesLife: Is there a planned Inventory/storage overhaul coming. The storage shed system is very frustrating/annoying in terms of organization. I would love to see a full blown banking storage system similar to runescapes in which we can have custom tabs and sections for all our various items.


@17thCenturyCableGuy responded: We agree strongly with your point of view, and are actively looking into it. I’m sure you can imagine there are technical constraints to work around. We are still exploring!

godlyish: Will there be a change to leaderboards for the sand worm? Right now it feels less like a skill competition and more like a competition on who has the most free time. Adding in score/time would add a new flare to completions


@17thCenturyCableGuy responded: We can’t fit 20 people in a leaderboard at the moment, but as we look at future raid content, we will look at improving these leaderboards as well.

Thelema: Any plans on separating the PvE balance from PvP? Like when you flag for PvP or in a PvP instance like OPR some abilities and values would be different from when you were not flagged.


NW_ZinRamu: Yes, this is something we’ve discussed in the past and we think is important so we can push for exciting and strong PvE experiences without breaking the balance of PvP.

The first part of it will be coming in S3 when we use this new system to replace some of the balance we achieved through “required” perks. We will then build upon this system over time to include more aspects of combat.

Mee: Are there any chances for solo dungeons etc so u can play the game fully alone. It’s hard to find mates and harder to find good mates [could be the same dungeons just with weaker mobs].


NW_ZinRamu: There are no plans for solo expeditions at the moment. Those experiences are built for multiple players and designed with support and tank classes in mind.

However, we want to make sure everyone can easily participate in expeditions, so we’re making some changes in S3 to the difficulty of base expeditions to make them easy for all. We want players to be able to experience the fun and story of our expeditions in a low pressure setting. If players want a challenge they can participate in mutators.

Also as you can see on the roadmap we want to take expeditions cross world, like we recently did with OPR. That should make it much easier to find others to play with you.

Samuel Jones: The gearsets were a GREAT addition! Will we ever see the option to save our gearset along with the associated skill attributes and weapon trees so that we can cycle seamlessly between different builds?


NW_ZinRamu: We agree this would be a great addition, but we don’t have any current plans or time lines on when this might happen.

Gt: Is the ultimate combat trophy permanent or are trophy banes going to go away along with the banes and wards gear by the end of 2023?


NW_ZinRamu: There are no plans to remove trophies when we remove banes/wards. Trophies are one time acquisition, versus gear which you continuously update and change. Likewise trophies are a separate system, whereas banes/wards impacted options and choices on gear and replaced them with “required” perks. Lastly, I think they are sort of cool chaser items for that last bit of power.

Nebras5: Can we get a “ready up” feature in Arenas? The current prep time is pretty lengthy with a lot of downtime, but if everyone “readys up” the timer could be significantly shortened. (edited)

NW_ZinRamu: Interesting idea, I agree that this would be a good flow. But this isn’t something we’ve discussed internally yet, so no plans to pursue atm.

JakeL: Now that invasions have been adjusted, are you happy with the new difficulty level? Are too many being lost? Are there any future plans for invasions?

Hale and Hearty and Stalwart were removed as town buffs, but Stalwart was not added. Was this intentional?

Any plans for APIs for basic, public, game data? It would be super useful to get in-game events like Wars or invasions easily in Discord bots and similar applications.


NW_ZinRamu:
1. Our main goals with the invasion changes were to speed up the experience and create a smoother difficulty curve. We were pretty happy with the ending waves, so this mostly resulted in earlier waves becoming a bit harder. This has resulted in a dip of win rates. They dipped a bit farther than we had anticipated (especially on Fresh Start worlds). Win rates are starting to increase a bit as people are learning the new setups. We’ll be keeping an eye on win rates and if this trend doesn’t continue we may need to make further changes.

2. An inherent buff for Stalwart was not added. This was intentional. Overall, we feel stamina regen was in a good place without it, and prefer the way the game plays without it.

3. No plans atm for any APIs like this.

New World July Community Q&A: Forged in Aeternum Q&A

The below Q&A are the community questions and developer answers from the July Forged in Aeternum Q&A:

Are you happy with how many people attempted the Sandwurm and beat the Sandwurm? Will you tune future raid content so that it is more likely to be able to be completed by random groups?

Yes, we are very happy. We wanted to winrates to be difficult. It is balanced to be hard. That’s a goal we had and we think we’ve achieved that. It should be challenging elite content at first and then open up to more players over time. For example, when gear score increases etc. new world sandwurm raid

Is there any plan for the character rename feature?

It’s something we are talking about, but no plans to share yet with the community.

What do you think about adding suggested open world PvP elements, such as hot zones and a caravan trading system?


We’ve talked about both of those alot. We’re not ready to talk timeframes. But, at a high level I think both of them. The open world PvP is just fun, it’s cool. Season 3 will bring a new way to push influence that will hopefully bring a lot of open world PvP moments into the game.

But in the long term we have plans to push well past that.

Are you aware of the time it takes to accumulate azoth salt in the game? Are there plans to increase the azoth salt awarded from activities?

I think we made a great change on the PvP reward track, and I think what’s happened is that players are wanting to purchase more items. However, we are looking into the issues of not having enough salt.

Are there plans for Fresh Start servers this year?


No, no plans for them at this time.

Can you explain your point of view on the desire to add seasonal content instead of real definitive content?

I think seasonal content is real definitive content. I think it’s engaging content for the players to come back to and participate in after other content has lapsed. It gives players a reason to come back and check in.

We are looking at ways to keep seasonal content around longer.

Are barbershop features on your plans? Can we expect it to be coming next year?


Yes, it is on our plans. Our next communication will be more about the expansion. After that we’ll have a roadmap for next year. We are not ready to talk about barbershop just yet.

Can we expect any updates to address team imbalances to outpost rush and solo arenas in the near future?


We’ve seen the amount of OPR matches increase dramatically since cross server OPR. What this has also brought is a little more polarity with the results. There are definitely matches where there are stomps. We know it’s an issue. We are starting to look at it.

With that said, matchmaking is a huge complex proglem and it will take us a while to get to a solution that we are happy with.

Have you ever thought about reworking the debuff bar? It easily gets filled up and is generally hard to read.


Yeah, this is something that we are looking at. I don’t have an ETA because it’s a pretty complex UX system.

Will there be the addition of other siege weapons on OPR?


We’re thinking about that, but no definitive plans.