Zin_Ramu

We hear you on the trophy pain & friction - I feel it every week. Unfortunately, there have been other priorities for our UX team, which have prevented us from tackling this already.

But we are looking into some non-UX solutions that should help this pain. They won’t make it for S1, but in the next season or two we should have solution which will help remove some friction, until we get a permanent solution.

Hey all, love the passionate conversation on BB. A lot of varied opinions here, so I want to give a little more detail and context on our thinking.

We don’t think the BB is very over tuned, or in need of major changes. We are mostly concerned with its burst damage in extreme scenarios. The weapon is designed to be bursty, and we have no desire that change that. But with the damage mitigation changes we want to ensure its 1-shot potential isn’t too strong. The changes we are planning for S1 release, are really targeting that and some “extreme” combos.

Great news here @Deeward , yes we are planning some pretty big improvements to the PvP reward track. These changes in combination with cross world OPR and some other PvP suprises we have planned for S2 should make it a great PvP release.

We tend to agree that with all the other changes introduced in the PTR and how the Blunderbuss was untouched, it was a bit too strong in some aspects. Because of that we are going to make some changes before the S1 launch:
• Fixing a bug on claw shot cancel windows that was allowing some combos we didn’t want
• Reducing the stamina damage on ASB
• Reducing damage of consecutive pellets for ASB

We’ll also be keeping an eye on the Blunderbuss after release, and make sure these changes are sufficient.

The goal of the stagger changes was two-fold:

1. To identify a move as either a CC move or a damage move. And if it’s a CC move to make sure damage is low/moderate, and if it’s a damage move to remove the the CC.

2. More clearly differentiate which weapons had CC/staggers to differentiate weapons better.

In reviewing our decisions, I do think the removal of the stagger on all FnF was overly aggressive because it hurt the ability as a whole. We are reviewing this and will likely add the stagger back to first part (with a slight reduction in damage to that part) before S1 goes live.

The musket is a hard weapon to balance in a game like New World. But we do believe we can find a role for it in PvP - where its not dominate, but also not useless.

As a few posters have noted in this thread, the accuracy perk does make a pretty big difference at long range. That’s an intentional design decision where you have to forgo another potentially useful perk, to gain the distance advantage.

The changes in PTR are pretty drastic, but we want to make sure we move the meta here. We are reviewing the changes and considering making some minor adjustments, mostly to the inaccuracy caused by aiming, before it goes live in S1.

Sorry for delay, we were finalizing some changes and I was waiting on results of that. Here’s an update.

Currently in live, only weapons in OPR get a 3rd perk on upgrading to 600. Armor does not.

When S1 launches, we will add armor from OPR, so it will now get a 3rd perk as well as weapons. In addition, we will add upgrading both weapons and armor from War and Invasion with S1.

Unfortunately, we are not going to get upgrading for gypsum casts or breaches in S1. We hit some technical difficulties there. No plans yet on when or if that will happen.

We’re also excited about the ability to upgrade epics and pick up a 3rd perk. But we need to work through some issues before we consider it for many types items.

However, we will be implementing it for a few new systems in Season 1 - gear from war, invasion, and gypsum casts will all pick up a 3rd perk if upgraded to 600. And as reminder this functionality is already in for OPR and Breach gear.

Thanks all for the feedback on War and OPR. These are core parts of our game and things we want to continue to iterate on and improve for years to come.

While we are not locked in on the exact timing, we are targeting next season for some adjustments to OPR to improve the experience and shake up gameplay a bit.

We are also looking into war and would like to make some similar changes. No exact timelines for that yet, but we will definitely take these suggestions into consideration.

Thanks! We’re continuously trying to improve New World and love seeing that players are noticing. Our main areas of focus are making QoL changes, fixing bugs, and adding new content, like our Brimstone Sands update coming in Autumn. Unfortunately sometimes that new content does have bugs as we saw with the Summer Release. This is something we have to get better at and is something we’re spending more time on with the implementation of the rolling PTR, we aim to find and address bugs on a larger scale and knock them out before they hit the live game.

The upcoming Brimstone Sands release will bring a lot of new content also, expect more details on all the changes soon in our upcoming Developer Video.

In the short run, we are addressing the rate at which players can participate in war. There is a dev blog in progress that will touch upon this and more which will be posted in the coming weeks. The main goal of these changes is to prevent a very small group of players from determining the outcome of many wars, but it will help spread participation a bit

In the long run, now that wars are instanced, we have the ability to do instanced wars that are not related to the territory game. This means we could build a “casual war” sort of like OPR, where players sign up to play war and once sufficient people have signed up, it kicks off. There is quite a bit of work we still need to do before we can even start on this (like how do we deal with defender advantage or how we handle fort setup). So this is a long ways away, but its something we are considering for the future.

Zin

Thanks for the positive feedback on 3v3 PvP Arenas! We had a blast developing and play-testing it. And it was a ton of fun to take on some content creators to show off the mode (Arenas: Devs Vs. Creators Stream - News | New World).

I enjoy the casual and no loss nature of it (no durability loss, no consumables, etc.). It makes it fun to test out different builds and tactics.

We wanted to get this feature out quickly for players to experience...

No this isn’t our plan for transmog. We view Prime Gaming as a way for players to get extra skins or rewards, just like we do from Twitch Drops.

Transmog or a way to adjust visuals based on dropped items is definitely something we want to add to New World, but its a big feature that will take some time to get right, so no timeline for it yet.

Zin

Hey all,

Thanks for the discussion on balance. When we make balance decisions, we base our decisions on:

• Gameplay telemetry - based on data we collect from all players this weapon is outperforming in actual gameplay
• Combat math - this weapon combined with these stats / perks has the potential to be unbalanced versus other weapons

We regularily visit the forums and use them to help point out areas of potential concern, but we never make a decision on balance based on number of respondents to a thread. Instead we take balance discussions as something for our combat team to look into.

If they find issues when they dive into the telemetry and math, then we look for balance solutions that stay within the spirit & vision of the weapon. All weapons have some pro’s and con’s and we think that’s important to keep them interesting and different.

Zin

Based on the feedback we received, we’re going to hold off on the 40v40 change. We were hoping to get it tested in PTR to validate our view that it plays better. But that hasn’t happened yet, and we underestimated how important losing 20 people in war is. Even if it is slightly better for the 80 people, those 20 missing out are really hurt.

This will also allow us to focus on spawning change and see the results that has on war independent of any other changes.

Thanks for your feedback and clear reasoning, we may test this again in the future when there are more ways for people to participate in war.

Zin

Hello war enthusiasts,

Thanks for the feedback so far on the 40v40 war change. I wanted to discuss our goals for this change and also let you know this change is not set in stone. It’s an experiment we wanted to try, and I hope you all give it an honest shot. If we find the benefits don’t outweigh the negatives, we will revert the change.

There are two changes we are making simultaneously and want to test in the PTR - changing war to 40v40 and not allowing defenders to respawn at capture points. The intent of these changes are to:

• Give attackers a better chance in war. Currently defenders win around 80% of wars, and we would like to see this number be closer to 60%. We still want to give defenders an edge, but not have it feel so insurmountable.
  • Defenders not being able to spawn at capture points should give attackers a nice boost. It should make it easier to capture the 3 points to unlock attacking the gates.
  • It should be easier f...

In general we agree with the sentiment that its too difficult to win wars as an attacker. And while we want to give some advantage to defenders to reward them for the investment in their territories, its currently too much and negatively impacting territory politics and making it very difficult to usurp some established companies.

We are testing some smaller balance changes internally which we hope give attackers more of a chance, but we want to be careful not to swing the pendulum too far the other way, so we are taking a bit more time to test and iterate on these changes. Longer term we love the idea of having more people involved in the outcome of war, even if they aren’t directly participating in the war, but that isn’t something we will be focusing on for a while.

Thanks for feedback on OPR scoring. We agree there is room for improvement on this front. For our next release we are making some changes that have already been tested in the February PTR:

• Dealing damage now increases the player’s score.
• Reduced the amount of points granted from killing players.
• Reduced the amount of points granted from killing AI.

And there is more to come in the future. The biggest change we will be making is to reward points for capturing points in OPR. We’re working on this internally atm and will let you know when its ready for PTR testing.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. We hear you and definitely plan on sharing a high level roadmap in the future. We want players to be able to see what is coming and get excited about it, and to provide early feedback/thoughts on it.

We are still finalizing the format, level of detail, and duration we are going to share, so give us some time. But we plan on sharing a roadmap when its ready.

Zin

Hey @Laxx thanks for noticing this mechanic. I can confirm its in the game and intentional. The goal is to try to help you get out of those situations where you are pinned by AI.

You were close on how it works, but its a bit more complex. Every time an attack staggers you, it increments a hidden number by some value (varying from 0.5 to 1 depending on attack type). If that hidden number hits 2 before you exit a stagger animation, you get a free dodge roll (regardless of equip type). Note there is no character to character collision on this special dodge roll to let you roll past the enemies that are pinning you in.