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New World's developers have been in a bit of a pickle in the last few weeks. Their MMO has been wrought with embarrassing bugs and glitches. Some of them can be exploited to duplicate rare items, gold, and even furniture.
The general state of these issues is almost embarrassing for an MMO game as large and ambitious as Amazon's New World.
The developers had been backpedaling and putting out fires as and when they erupted with the issues. This was counter-productive in nature as when one problem was resolved, it created two further problems, and thus continued the ugly cycle. With New World's Patch 1.1, things have sadly been worse off.
Although the game's developers would have hoped that new content and updates would turn the tides in the community, what the patch has done is exactly the opposite.
Disregarding the never-ending bugs and lagging issues, Patch 1.1 is everything that is wrong with the game at the moment. Heck, it even wrecked the High Watermark System New World has implemented in the endgame.
How Patch 1.1 has changed this system for the worse for New World players
With this patch, the developers have made the acquisition of gears significantly harder. Not only that, but they have also managed to retroactively downgrade grinded and crafted items.
With this patch in effect, the New World players who have not grinded previously to get to the high watermark, are now stuck doing it for a significantly longer amount of time. At the same time, they will get the same rewards as those who did it before the patch.
The community feels this has been done because there is a serious scarcity of endgame content.
This is to artificially increase the time a player spends in the game. Seeing as how New World has been losing its player base over the weeks, there is a lot of truth in these assumptions.
The watermark system in New World already needs a significant amount of grind. It requires that players find rare spawn spots that are not camped by other players and open loots daily. With the newer updates, casual and solo players of New World have a significantly harder time trying to reach GS 600 on each item.
Youtuber KiraTV comments on the reason for this change in New World as:
"Amazon Gaming Studio knows that they don't have enough endgame content in the pipeline about to release to keep people playing the game ... And decided it is best to pat out the game time to reach that point [endgame] for any future players."
Specifically they have nerfed elite area loot, reduced rate and quality, of armor and weapon drop. The game has also buffed elite area mobs, increased their HP exponentially, increased XP requirements to level up trade skills, but it did not increase XP from crafting.
On top of this, these changes were not declared officially in the Patch 1.1 notes. They were rather sneakily implemented in New World, as the developers knew the backlash they would get from making these changes.
This has made New World's end-game more grinding and repetitive than it already was. The burnout caused by this will further deplete the already leaking New World player base. This also deters newer players or players that have not reached the 600 watermark.
What is the High Watermark System in New World?
On the New World forum, the developer HelpfulWalrus explains the High Watermark system as:
It’s a system that kicks in when your character reaches level 60 and ultimately governs the power of gear drops you receive as you venture into the more dangerous areas of the world and fight powerful enemies.
So at level 60, the players begin their Watermark system at 500. By looting new pieces of gear, there is a chance that the watermark will increase so there are rarer and more powerful pieces of loot the player may get in the future.
This system is also item specific. For armor, it is dependant on the slot type and for New World weapons, on weapon types.
The best places to increase HWM are by slaying Level 60+ enemies and Expedition bosses. The developer further adds that:
The system isn’t fully random, either. Each time you defeat a level 60+ enemy and don’t receive a gear item that increases its HWM type, you’re slightly more likely to see an increase the next time.
So once a player has obtained Level 60, the next objective in the game is to increase their Gear Scores for each of them from 500 to 600. To further simplify this, a player at GS 500 getting a loot with a GS 503 means next time they are eligible to get a drop of GS 503 or a little bit higher.
It is an innovative take on the usual mindless grinding that these games entail once a certain number of levels have been gathered.
With more and more bugs and exploits coming up each day, it seems New World has a bleak future to look forward to. This is disappointing news for the game, which looked like it had enough potential to be fun and engaging for a significant amount of time.
Disclaimer: The opinions present in the article belong solely to the writer.
