[2021] [Dev Blog] Update on Current Issues #1

Hey Adventurers,

Since launch, the team has been working hard to gather, investigate, and address issues surfaced by our players. We know how much our players care, and we resolve to be more transparent and communicate more frequently about how we’re addressing issues.

To begin, we want to provide an update on issues we believe are most critical to our community.

Character Transfers

It is important to us that everyone have the opportunity to choose which server they are playing on. By the time you are reading this, character transfers will have been re-enabled and most players should be able to move their characters. If you have questions about transfers, please visit our FAQ post here. We are committed to making sure our community is satisfied with where they are playing long term. We will continue to monitor your feedback after this wave of Character Transfers is complete and offer additional Transfers if needed. We are also working on region-to-region Character Transfers, but it is difficult to solve and will take time.

Full Server Status

In an effort to ensure that folks actively playing characters on a server are not competing in queue with new players, we have implemented a Full Server Status to prevent new characters from being created. We monitor the active users on each world and ensure that the Full Server Status continues to be accurate. We understand this may mean that new players are not able to play with their established friends and that some worlds are not receiving the volume of new players that others servers may, and this can have a variety of impacts. We continue to monitor this situation and will make real-time adjustments accordingly, as well as provide a 24 hour notice before a server is marked as full.

Economy and Deflation

We have seen a lot of feedback on the game’s economy and wanted to share a recent update we posted in the forums.

First, we want to start with our goals. We want a player driven economy with minimal NPC interaction where gold is valuable to all players, even end-game players.

Touching on the current state of the economy: From a data standpoint, the economy is performing within acceptable levels. All servers are creating more money than is being removed, and by a good margin. However, the economy is tighter at the end-game currently. When we look at surplus income generated by level, it’s very high in the 1-35 level range, decent in the 40-59 range, and gets narrow at 60. This means that as more players get to level 60, this will start to put more pressure on the economy.

The above charts show the difference between gold that comes into the economy and gold that goes out. Players are consistently generating a positive gold balance every day, but there is a downward trend. If this trend continues and we get closer to a negative in-out, we will take action. Our goal isn’t to drive this value to zero, or make it so no one can amass wealth. We want to ensure that overall gold balance per server stays in-check, so coin remains important.

There are two big changes that will help the end-game economy. One happened last patch, and one just happened. The first is fixing the Azoth Staff bug. This will allow players to complete high level corrupted breaches which generate good gold per hour. Second, we just turned Outpost Rush back on. Outpost Rush is a great source of income and will really help end-game players. We want to see the impact these fixes have before we make other larger changes.

We also want to remind everyone that there is a big gold bonus (10x) for your first 3 faction mission each day. This isn’t well communicated in the UX, so we’ll work on improving that. Make sure you run 3 faction missions each day to help your personal gold balance.

In our November major release (not a weekly patch), we have a slew of economic focused updates and bug fixes aimed at improving the current state of the economy.
General fixes:

Reduced Durability lost from PvP deaths by 10%.
Extended housing tax periods from 5 days to 7 days, without increasing taxed amount
Reduced attribute respec coin cost by 60%.
Reduced the quantity of honey gained from apiaries by 50% and the amount of milk from cows by 65%. Honey trees are unaffected by this change. We made this change because the volume of milk and honey in the world is higher than our initial estimates. The bees and cows are happy about this change.

All Trading Posts will been linked. This change was made to strengthen the economies less traveled territories, and ensure item availability in all territories.

Fees for buy and sell orders are defined by the Settlement that you’re posting them from.
Transaction Taxes on purchases you make are defined by the Settlement in which you are making the purchase.
Items listed in sell orders that expire are returned to the Settlement from which they were posted.
It is no longer possible to place items on the trading post for 28 days. The maximum is now 14 days.

We are amping the potency of Expeditions by doing the following:

Increased coin gained from expedition bosses starting at Starstone Barrows by 25% and ramping up to endgame expeditions by 100% per boss.
Reduced the coin cost of each of the tuning orbs and increased the corrupted shards players earn from minor and major Corrupted Breaches.
Reduced coin cost of chisels by 20-50% depending on tier.

We’re fixing a few bugs Repair Kits which should help crafters with a new item to sell, as well as lowering repair costs:

We fixed an issue that was causing the attribute perk mods to not be usable in crafting repair kits.
We fixed an issue that was causing using repair kits to cost coins. Repair kits should only cost coin in the process of being crafted.

Economy Exploits and Coin Farming

Regarding Coin and Item dupes, we apologize for disabling the player traded economy. Players found a Coin/Item dupe bug when player trading and were exploiting it heavily (they will be penalized for that behavior). We took immediate steps to mitigate the long term economic impact, by disabling trades in the short-term, while we worked on addressing the root cause. It was not a decision that was made lightly, but we feel the ability to trade and improve settlements is an important, and fun aspect of our game we aim to preserve. We have permanently banned players who exploited the Coin/Item dupe issue.

In our efforts to mitigate this issue, we inadvertently introduced a new issue that enabled coin duplication via Territory upgrades. We addressed this as well in our next hot fix, where we re-enabled trading and company transactions, as well as remove any duped Coin from companies who exploited the issue (or accidentally triggered it). We are able to track how much coin was received from exploitive behavior, and will investigate and take remediation steps against companies that have egregiously exploited this. We understand the frustration caused by trades being off and want to make sure that no one suffers in-game financial losses as a result from disabling wealth transfer methods. In the long term, if town maintenance is behind on a territory your company owns, or if you are unable to afford your taxes due to this, we will provide a make good.

On the topic of coin farming. We know many of you have seen the annoying chat messages from players spamming gold sales, and we’re continuing to investigate solutions to this issue. Many coin sellers were creating new characters and transferring money to other accounts. To combat this, our weekly patch will include:

Banned and suspended many of the reported accounts, as well as bot accounts that were holding gold. Thank you for your reports for players spamming chat.
Added restrictions to prevent player-to-player trading and currency transfer from characters under level 10, or whose account is less than 72 hours old. Logging in after your account is 72 hours old will enable your ability to trade and transfer currency once you’ve hit level 10.
Redistributed coin value from some early quests to later in the Main Story questline, keeping the total amounts of coin earned the same, just delivered in quests slightly later.
Trading Post usage will be restricted until new characters accept the “Introduction to Trading Post” quest in their first settlement.

Outpost Rush

In a live environment at scale, we identified a rare issue that places players in limbo where they are neither in the world or in an Outpost Rush session. Solving this character state is very manual and time consuming, and we have not been able to reproduce the issue in internal testing. We are working on solutions to prevent the issue but it has not been an easy fix.

We did a cautious roll out to monitor for this issue to appear. If you have an issue with UI appearing improperly during Outpost Rush you can do a hard restart to resolve the issue permanently. If your character gets immobilized or stuck between the world and Outpost Rush, please submit a ticket to our Support Team to get unstuck. Getting this running smoothly is a top priority for the team, Outpost Rush is an important aspect of late game gameplay and economy.

Client Side Authority

There was a recent bug in New World that drove some speculation on how our simulation works. The bug was addressed quickly, but both the speculation and the bug deserve some clarity in explanation.

To be very clear, New World is not client authoritative — from a simulation standpoint, New World is entirely server based. At a high level the model is this: clients dispatch controller inputs to the server, and the server then checks that input for limits that might invalidate it, then if accepted uses it as an input to a character (“actor” is our internal name) within server memory. Physics and game rules are then run (entirely server side), and the outcome is sent back to the original client. Clients will then draw the outcome determined by the server.

Take the example of a player swinging a sword against an opponent. To the player, they hit a button and the sword swings, which might seem very client based. What actually happens is more complex. The player hits a button, a message is dispatched to the server that says “I pressed a button for a swing”, and at the same time the client starts drawing the visual of swinging the sword on the player display — this part is strictly graphical, and has nothing to do with the simulation. The server doesn’t even know about this graphical representation and hears no information other than the button press itself.

When the input reaches the server, it is checked to see if it is possible, and then the server begins animating an entirely server side version of the “skeleton” for the character with a swing. This is not an approximation or a bounding volume version of the skeleton, it’s actually fully detailed, being fully animated, so we can have precision that if the sword just barely touches the opponent, that is consistent between server and what client perceives as possible. If the result of this entirely server based animation is a hit, then that result is sent back to the client, otherwise a miss. It’s important to note that only after the server has performed the animation, and that results in the sword intersecting, is this considered a success. We don’t short cut or roughly compute this, we do full physics detail for all such actions. Upon receiving the outcome, either hit or miss, the client will adjust its visual display to match what the server has determined. There are some client side tricks we use here to “stretch” the animation while the client is waiting for the server answer, but the outcome is always based only on the server answer. This same pattern applies in combat and other precise physics simulation interactions.

We did have a bug, in which given certain circumstances we were waiting server side on input from a client before processing through to outcomes. Combined with an intentional weapon effect that allows for brief invulnerability, this created a situation where players could reach an invulnerable state and prolong it by making the client unresponsive, even though the client has no say in damage (both damage the player creates and damage taken by the player are computed server side based on the results of physics simulation plus game rules). This was a particularly bad bug given our server based simulation, and we apologize for that. We corrected the bug in code the same day we learned about it, then tested to make sure nothing unintended came out of those changes, and published the fix immediately after that.

Moderation

It is important to us that New World be a fun, inclusive, and safe place for everyone in our community. We have seen several issue arise regarding in-game moderation that we want to address. First, we do enforce our Code of Conduct. As players report violations they see in-game, those reports go into a queue to be reviewed by our moderation team. No player reports are moderated without a person reviewing the details of the report. Our team can make mistakes and we are continuing to train up our growing army of moderators.

Moderation can and has been weaponized as a warfare tactic. The pattern of behavior is that two rival groups will have confrontations in chat prior to a war or big fight. These groups try to goad one another into Code of Conduct violations and then eagerly report one another when violations occur. Those violations receive multiple reports, are reviewed by a moderator and if there is a legitimate violation then suspensions are issued. Again, these suspensions are not driven by the volume of reports but the legitimacy of the violation.

We also take advantage of automated systems such as Easy Anti Cheat to detect and remove folks who are using cheats and exploits. This process is data driven and automated.

War Lag

War is a critical feature of New World, so many other systems in the game benefit from claiming and holding territories. War also creates fun and dramatic gameplay moments that are exciting for players and exciting for our team to watch. We have been tracking all the feedback and issues players have been bringing to our attention. But the elephant in the room is the exploits that have been plaguing this feature. In particular, the now common practice of spamming the Ice Gauntlet, Fire Staff, or the Life Staff in order to create latency problems while capturing control points. We’ve made some initial changes here that were achievable in short development cycles, and are working on further updates with higher impact that need longer testing to preserve balance. As we stated at the start, War is a focal point of New World and your feedback on its design and gameplay is important to us. We will continue to explore War’s design in an upcoming Dev Blog.

Invasion Difficulty and Participation

Recently, there was some confusion over Invasions and how they relate to territory downgrades. How far you make it into an invasion does not determine how many stations will be downgraded if you fail the invasion. The number of downgrades your territory will incur if you fail are tied directly to the territory level of your settlement. The higher your territory level, the more downgrades you will incur if you fail. Successfully repelling an invasion will ensure that no upgrades are regressed.

Individually, you will be more likely to get better rewards the more you contribute to your team. So, contribute to your fort’s defense and make sure you’re giving the Corrupted all you’ve got! We’re keeping an eye on the tuning of Invasions and we appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far on this feature.

Additionally, we have seen two sides to an argument on Invasion participation. On one hand, governing Companies want to determine 100% of the participants defending against an Invasion, on the other hand, players being removed from Invasions feel like it is abuse of an existing game mechanic to exclude more players from joining. We understand both perspectives and the team is investigating solutions.

Patch Schedule and Downtimes

Our goal is to deliver weekly patches, in addition to our major releases, that address bugs, balance, and more. These patches and releases require server downtime. Following launch, our downtimes were taking place during EU prime time and we have also encountered issues which required more downtime than planned or communicated. We understand this is a frustrating experience and can create the impression that we favor some regions over others. We have been listening to community feedback and have been testing a few different timeslots to determine the least amount of players affected. When possible, we also do maintenances that go region by region, at the respective lowest usage, but this not always available for large updates. To ensure that you remain informed, we will provide updates every Tuesday on the status of our weekly patch. We understand that these downtimes may not be opportune for everyone, but we will continue to listen to your feedback and adjust to find a downtime schedule that impacts the fewest players.

How Does Luck Work?

Recently we have received a lot of questions about how Luck works in New World. “Luck” of the general type (as opposed to the types of Gathering Luck that you see on something like a sickle or a food buff) affects your chances to roll “higher” on our lists of items that come from enemies and containers like stockpiles. In the case of furniture schematics and found furniture items, the higher-end storage items are among the most rare. Increasing your Luck will definitely make this more likely to occur, but as with all luck - there’s no guarantee you’ll get it.

Fishing Chests

Due to an issue with botting, we have removed the amount of gold you receive in fishing chests. We understand the impact this has had on the incentives and rewards for fishing, and we will continue to explore opportunities to make fishing a rewarding experience for our players.

Perks and Gems

There are currently many issues with how Perks and Gems are functioning. For example, the Resilient Perk is granting damage absorption instead of critical damage absorption. The team is looking into this situation as this is not intended behavior. When we have a fix for it we will be adding it into one of our weekly updates. Our goal is to have all issues with Perks solved by our November monthly release.

250 Strength Bug

There is currently an issue where once your Strength Attribute reaches 250 you can no longer roll. This is a bug and the team is working to address it.

Property Taxes

We do hear the feedback that property taxes are high and the rate of payment is high. This is by design, owning three very nice homes in different parts of Aeternum is not intended to be easily achievable. We will continue to monitor feedback and data but we do not see cause for change at this time.

Faction Tokens

Faction Tokens have been a source of pain for players and we recently improved the situation by addressing a bug where the Faction token caps were not increasing after players had completed the rank-up quests for their faction. We also increased the Faction token cap by 50% for each Faction tier. We made this change so that players can earn extra tokens even if they’ve hit the reputation cap and want to save up while working to advance to the next Faction rank.

World Clock Bug

In Update 1.0.4, we implemented a mitigation to prevent world time to skip ahead or behind for most worlds, which would subsequently cause a variety of issues across the world. We are unable to replicate this issue internally and it is taking longer to fully address than we would like. We are aware of how frustrating this is and we will continue to monitor any future world time skips and work on improving this fix.

Images in Chat

Following Update 1.0.4, we discovered an issue where players were able to post images and other links in the chat that resulted in unsavory behavior. We have enabled a fix in each region that should resolve this issue and prevent players from abusing and exploiting this feature.

Crouching Bug

We discovered a bug where crouching could produce a healing effect and, if on Sacred Ground, you could increase the healing effects by crouching. There has been a mitigation implemented during Thursday’s server maintenance and we will have a permanent fix in an upcoming patch.

Watermark System

Many of you have been asking about the nuances of the High Watermark System, and I’m here to help! If you don’t know what the High Watermark System (HWM) does, 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.

When an enemy or container drops a piece of gear for you, it rolls on its Gear Score (GS). During your leveling experience, this GS naturally progresses with your level, so as long as you’re fighting enemies at or above your level, you’re getting drops that are in a power range that is good for your level.

When you reach the level cap, this mechanic changes a bit. At 60, you gain an upper GS limit (HWM) on drops that gradually increases as more powerful drops appear for you. This upper limit is per-item-type. For armor, it’s based on the slot type (e.g. head armor, chest armor, ring, etc.) and for weapons it is based on weapon type (e.g. sword, hammer, musket, etc.)

Only item drops affect your HWM. The moment the item drops, your relevant HWM is increased – you don’t even need to pick the item up. Crafting an item or buying one from the Trading Post will not give you an increase, but it can be a great way to give yourself an edge in search of more powerful gear in the more dangerous areas of the game.

Not all enemies and containers (including Event Reward Containers from Outpost Rush, War, Invasions, etc.) are created equal in the case of the HWM system. While you always have a small chance to see a HWM increase when defeating a level 60+ creature or searching a container in a level 60+ landmark, each level beyond 60 has a soft upper limit on the likelihood of an HWM increase. Similarly, Event Reward Containers will respect your current HWM and also have a small chance of increasing it. What this means is that while you’ll reliably see HWM increases up to GS 530 when defeating Level 61 enemies, your chances of seeing something beyond GS 530 from a Level 61 enemy is significantly lower than it is from a Level 62 enemy. Level 64+ enemies are capable of reliably dropping gear up to GS 600.

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. Additionally, some enemies, such as those found in Elite Landmarks and Expeditions, have a higher base chance of dropping items that increase your HWM. Level 60+ named enemies are even more likely to drop HWM-increasing items, and Expedition Bosses will always drop an item that increases your HWM.

Some of you may feel that competing for drops from powerful enemies in the open world is suboptimal in crowded areas, and you’re right. When lots of disparate groups are all attacking the same enemy, there is a smaller chance that those groups will see drops.

If you want to maximize your chances of getting HWM increases in a more controlled environment, Expeditions are a great way to do it. Garden of Genesis and Lazarus Instrumentality are full of elite monsters to fight, and the bosses guarantee that you’ll see an increase every time they drop a gear item for you.

We know that Tuning Orbs for those Expeditions are particularly time-consuming to craft right now, so we’re in the process of adjusting Expedition Tuning Orb crafting requirements. We expect to release an update to the crafting requirements for Tuning Orbs sometime in November after we have vetted the changes, so keep an eye on the update notes! We also heard your feedback on the High Watermark System and are tracking and fixing some issues with the final stages of HWM (591+ items) and creatures dropping HWM-increasing items the way we intend.

Communication

We have been listening to your feedback on ways we can improve our communication with you. This post, which hopefully you have gotten this far into, is an expression of our desire to do a better job of communicating about the issues and feedback we receive from our passionate community. We are making several improvements. First, we introduced the Dev Corner, a place where we will work with the design leads to provide greater insights into how various aspects of New World work. Additionally, we have made the commitment to post a notice every Tuesday on the status of our weekly patches, to let you know how it is looking and when it might ship. For every weekly update, we will continue provide Megathreads for feedback and bug reporting. We are also working very hard to be more actively communicative and present here in the forums on a daily basis. We want to continue to make further improvements, especially on how our Known Issues list and bug tracker work. We hear your feedback, we’ll keep working with you to improve.

We appreciate your patience, support, and understanding while we address these issues and continue to improve our communication with our community on issues moving forward. Additionally, we will provide regular updates on key issues moving forward.

See you in Aeternum!