December New World Team Update

hi everybody my name is greg henniger i'm a member of the community team here at amazon games and we've been scouring the internet you know listening to your feedback reading the forums looking on social media reddit all of these places and you know we decided it was time for a developer update video so to help me do that i'm going to have a host of a lot of the new world developers but first and foremost i have scott lane the game director and rich lawrence the studio head here at the irvine studio hey before we start i just wanted to uh call out the players and say thank you the engagement from the player base has been humbling and it's it's really helped us guide where we're going so i just want to say how much we appreciate the feedback and how constructive it's been and you know we like partnering with the players a lot so we're excited today is in response to the players have been asking us hey we want to know more about where you're going we want to go deep on some of these topics so so today is all about that it's responding to that right yep yeah and right at the top um you know uh something that a lot of players are talking about right now they're very concerned about and they would like a little bit more information you know as we've been updating the game recently with our you know game updates and patches there seems to be an introduction of more new issues while we're trying to fix other game issues can you talk a little bit about um how we're going to work to prevent some of that yeah that has been a problem we've introduced some new issues with some of the patches we've made we've done 19 patches since release which is kind of a blistering pace what we've been trying to do is balance uh new features as much as we can in with our fixes and what we've discovered is that we have a rate limit like we like we're going too fast honestly and so we're going to focus a lot on better testing longer testing making sure that we've got something fully ready for for release it's not like we weren't doing that before but we've learned some things that were emergent that surprised us and given that we're going to change our process we're going to focus on a few less features but deeper in terms of how we express them uh make those features bigger uh and and deliver them players with less bugs um you know that's that's going to be the the desired outcome that's our focus actually yeah can i add on to that just a little bit yeah so so with our weeklies you know in general you want to fix eight to ten maybe even 15 things a week problems and you want to make them really targeted but when we were watching the game live we saw problems that were bothering us it's like it just hurts in your stomach when you see players struggling with things so we were trying to get 50 60 things fixed a week and that left us you know not enough testing and it was we like like rich said we were trying to go too fast we were trying to fix more than we could and it created more problems than it's worth and we're learning from that and we're you know changing our process is improving every day so do you feel like the uh introduction of the the ptr the public test realm is going to help in that direction too yeah absolutely one it gives players a great way to to see a feature before it's complete right like have input on it um and we're we're looking at creating longer cycles for ptr so there's more time to do that you know get you know unfortunately when those features start with a longer cycle they're going to be really raw when they first come out but i think players understand that you know they they get that it's very new at that point that gives them more time to feedback on it more time for us to ingest that feedback like figure out what we can do with it improve the feature based on it and you'll see us using ptr continuously basically going forward for for all major new features last thing we want to do is surprise people with a new feature that's impactful to game play and they haven't had a chance to give us their expertise in saying this is good this is bad you know these are the aspects we like these the aspects we don't yeah even further like on the november release we didn't really have a chance to respond to what the players told us were the problems on the december release you're going to see that we actually were able to respond to a significant number and we're going to like rich said we're going to add even more time for january and going forward and so is the would you say that the best place to provide feedback if you're a player uh would be the forms or social or i mean we i we we look at a lot of different places um but where's the best place to get feedback it's the forums for sure um we look at reddit we look at the forums we look at other places we even watch in-game chat but the team scours the forums daily and we have internal communication networks that we use and i would say i see 20 to 30 forum posts shared with specific team members there a day at a minimum where we're raising awareness of things getting them added to lists and that helps drive our priorities yeah and we touched on this a little bit earlier but is the team prioritizing bug fixes and polish right now over new content or it's it's a little of both but the number one driver a priority is what has the biggest impact on the player so if we have a serious bug and a serious feature the bug is probably going to take priority because that is going to impact more players sure we have a pretty large team so we have some features that we feel are really important that we're going to be talking about today we keep we want to keep you know people working on those but not at the expense of a bad experience in live so live is always it's always it's always our number one driver right now but but new features are important too so it's it's a balancing act and we we don't have a hard rule every bug is more important than every feature or vice versa it's really looking at it holistically and then drilling down to you know this versus this that that being said i mean the takeaway should be we are we are prioritizing bugs we try to fix because we consider those larger impact to players once we deal with those bugs and they aren't larger impact then we're looking at features but people should understand that only so many people can be productive in fixing a given bug right so if we have a bug as a priority we put our best people on it you know like we give out every resource it needs we're not holding back but many times there'll be people who otherwise wouldn't have anything to do and they can work on features while others are working on the bugs right okay yeah that makes sense is there speaking of things we're working on right now uh server merges can you talk a little bit about server merges how they work how they're going to kind of look to players yeah the idea with the server merge is um well the primary pursuit about server merge is important to know which is to give a better play environment to players we find like we have all kinds of indicators but the number one is just play satisfaction players like being on a server that has a wide and diverse audience playing it right so um that's the objective with server mergers what happens with the server merger is there's a host that you're going to the server that we're moving to and then one two you know any number of servers may merge into that server and all of the players transfer there are steps taken to make sure that for instance companies get compensation if they're you know if there are changes going to a new server with that and then you land on the new map which is the map from the existing host server and a lot of times what's interesting is like immediately a bunch of wars break out because you know everybody's like oh let's resettle it which is actually kind of cool um but the the number one objective there is make sure there's no loss like you know nobody like loses anything there's no gold cost or anything to that obviously nothing on your character gets lost nothing reverts but you just have more people to play with so more opportunities for pvp more opportunities for pve go into dungeons you can easier find a group when there's more people on the server what we target with a merger is not to fill a server completely to capacity but to make it a very healthy full day cycle so even at its low web it's easy to for instance find a dungeon group that you know that's that's our primary motivation to make it easy for players to find social organization pvp or pve either way okay great that all sounds awesome we're going to continue to talk about you know new features coming we're going to talk about um gosh mutators were one thing we're talking about the roadmap we're going to talk about vision for new world so we have a full show coming up so we hope you stick around for the next segment we're going to be talking about the vision and the future of new world so we have some new people at the table we have dave verifyi who is the creative director and the art director charles bradbury so scott i think this is a kind of a big question right what is the vision for new world what are we going to see in the future so at the highest level the vision is that we wanted to create a world where pvp and pde players wouldn't just coexist but they'd complement each other so far you can see things like our territory mechanics supporting that although we do have a little work to do there we still want to figure out a way to give players a way to overthrow tyrants or absent leaders but i think one of the big things we should touch on is that between pvp and pve we plan on supporting both we don't have a favorite child in this one we think both are hugely important to the longevity of new world we still have a lot of story to tell about you know there's a lot more things we want to talk about on eternum more threats more villains coming through we still have to close this chapter on the isabella story we have we want more dynamic things happening in the world we love that that the world parts of the world feel different every time you come through it i think that's awesome we've heard the players loud and clear they want more variety in ai they want more variety and questing more things to do we're definitely going to lean into that hard we have these intersecting game systems that live in the sandbox we want to put more of that into play we think that's really important so and like i said we just we want to finish telling this story there's so much more to uncover in a tournament that we think is important when we think about all this in the long term it's going to be guided by the players what are they asking for what do they want how are they reacting to new things so a lot of this is like i can't give you an exact order but these are the direction we're pushing the game in over time right and you're saying you wanted to kind of finish a story that's really the the story of isabella and then tell new stories or continue the mystery that is eternum well there's a lot of new stories we want to tell you know and we're going to hint on some of those today we're not going to get specific we're not ready to talk about them but we have there's a lot more interesting people on this world than just isabella okay cool yeah we'll dive into that later uh with some of the other dev members yeah i just wanted to add i mean i think when i think about new world some of the things that are special to me about it are how players can change the world like people can actually have an impact on the world and change it i think that's something we want to continue to foster and build as we continue to grow the vision of the game uh that and like you mentioned the dynamic events i think those are big and we've got some really cool ones with the corrupted breaches and players can see those dynamically spreading up i wouldn't uh you know i could see us adding more of those and maybe even some that affect pvp in the future right because i think that the world changing each time you play is pretty cool yeah and you touched on that earlier the the the balance between pvp and pve um i would imagine that is you know something we're going to continue to invest in moving forward uh yeah i think uh like scott said we don't have a favorite child here right scott we like them both uh and i think we've got really cool content for both sides like on the pve side uh you know we've got more expeditions coming uh we have this great winter event that is all right the winter convergence event your convergence and more of that is coming and then on the pvp side right i think we've got really cool large-scale pvp moments with war it's like one of our best moments big and dynamic yeah i think our combat really shines at the small scale also so i think we want to start supporting that smaller scale in pvp also awesome yeah i know there's there's a lot of a lot of community members and players that you know are excited about that small scale um small scale pvp stuff yeah you know and i talked a bit or me and both dave and i talked a bit about the vision forward art has its own vision forward and i'd love it if charles would share some of that absolutely i think we've laid this pretty good foundation there's a lot of variety to the world there's all these different enemy groups the lost and the corrupted and stuff we want to keep building on that we have a lot of ideas of like new cultures that can come to the world and sort of spread out across our landscape and they bring their own culture and look and feel with them and so new outfits new architecture for players to explore new enemy families that players are going to have to deal with and so i think as we grow eternal and like flesh out what this world is i think there's a lot of opportunity there to like make the world more interesting do you think those new new enemy types and new areas are going to be the places where we're going to see like the brand new stuff or are we going to continue to refresh you know the the zones that um that people have been playing in already i think it's going to be a bit of both we talk a lot about like this dynamic world things are changing i think we want to see stuff in the areas that players are familiar with start to shift and change but also adding new zones and new areas that players can go to and like find new adventures as well yeah i think it's just so exciting that we're celebrating these different cultures and to be able to go over here to this culture because you want to craft something or something unique to them or go over to this part of the world it drives this this desire to explore the world and it keeps making it feel different you know and to your earlier question i think it's hugely important that while we are growing the world this current world is alive it's changing and it's going to be different over time right and we kind of talked about the vision for the future but in terms of a tangible road map is there anything you can share with us today yeah we're going to go pretty deep on some of this stuff so i'll just give you a quick high level but we just released our first event and we're in the process of releasing it which we're really excited about the winter convergence event we have something coming out in january mutators this is this is where when you're playing expeditions at the end of the game they're going to play a little differently they're going to get a little harder and they're going to have better rewards the more times you do them so it's going to create a repeatable loop yeah we'll deep dive into that later really deep div into that after that we want to spend a little time getting rid of some of the bug debt that we've accrued um so we're going to focus on fixing as many bugs we're going to dive really deep into the balance we fix balance regularly weekly and monthly but we're going to devote february to bugs balance and bots because we've heard players you know they're frustrated with some of these things and we want to fix those we want to make it better and we'll talk more about that later we're going to go deep on that too we're not going to go deep on this next one but we have mentioned that we want to we do want to close this chapter in isabella's story we want to close it in a really cool way and that's something a little further down the line that we can't wait to share with players yeah and i just want to add like this is sort of the road map we've laid out but we're always listening to what players want and adjusting and i think we saw a little bit of that with the expertise and gypsum the end game changes we made like we heard there were there was some room for improvement and we're always open to sort of interject things into the road map when we hear concerns from people yeah awesome so that's kind of the vision in the future of where we're going we're going to spend the rest of the show deep diving on a lot of these topics with other developers who solely focus on those things so it's going to be exciting all right so this next segment is going to be bugs exploits dupes and bands and we have some new people here at the table i'm going to introduce katie krasinski krazynski it's like the uh the cooler version of katie john krasinski i know it's better than the unabomber which is the one that people usually get my last name right katie kozinski you are the senior producer we also have scott geyser who's a game play engineer and we have already introduced rich so we don't need to do that again but i will ask you the first question rich um there are a lot of questions about how the band system works um within new worlds you know can you can you give some insight on that sure uh bummer of a topic to have to cover but i understand people being curious about it so there's actually multiple systems here one is the the first line of defense against particularly cheats is eac and then you know eac is regularly updated with information that allows it to identify people that may be running unauthorized third-party cheats that system will just automatically that you know prevent you from playing because we can't allow you into the game if you're using uh those third-party uh cheats and everybody should understand if you run a third-party cheat you're going to get banned in new world and you won't even be allowed into the game so that that is the only aspect of that system that's automatic there's a completely separate system that we use for sort of enforcement within the game for people uh called the ban system the band system's a little bit mislabeled because it's also a suspension system sometimes if you're doing something and it's negative and it's affecting other players but it's not really you know terrible it's just just wrong it's you know like you know like say you're bothering somebody you know consistently in game we need to make you understand that that's something that you can't do like you can't harass other players in those cases we might often just suspend you instead and say like hey you're going to get a notice it's going to tell you why you know there will be a period of time that you can't play until you stop this behavior it's also possible to have bands that are permanent in the case of some really egregious negative thing that you do that impacts other players the major measure there is the impact to other players you know that could be the economy it could be something about game play it could be something that you're doing to basically you know like throw a war or create an unfair advantage in a war um those kind of circumstances affect many other players in those cases we we are going to ban you it's a bummer to have to do but you know when you're disrupting other people's gameplay to that extent one thing we don't do is uh and i know there have been reports of this but i just want to make it clear we don't automatically ban on reports right reports lead to a human investigating the case trying to figure out what the impact was looking at the available data and if there's a conclusion there like yes you as a player did something that was very negative that affect many other players you might get banned but that's not something that just happens based on volume of reports or you know a particularly you know specific report it's always an investigation there's never an automatic step from a player report to a ban right and a player can go back and try and appeal their ban you know if they feel unjustly banned or something like that yeah we take each of those seriously and and i completely like we have reversed in some cases you know we found that like we've made mistakes when you have humans sometimes mistakes are made and i completely understand how disruptive that is and it's like you know apologize to anybody that was affected in that way but it's a necessary step right we need we need to be able to say yeah you've done something really bad that you know impacts the game and we also need to listen when you say i don't think i did the bad thing that you think i did yeah because sometimes there are flaws like sometimes there are issues in those kind of systems so we do take all that feedback seriously we investigate every case that's appealed many players have a different evaluation of their impact um and that can sometimes lead to disagreement right the player may say i didn't do anything that affected that company when i could i caused them to lose a war the other company may disagree and we can look at the game situation and say yes we disagree as well you did do something that affected that other company so there's not always going to be a perfect uh resolution there yeah but we do uh investigate every appeal right okay so how would you kill these questions for you how would you categorize how serious a penalty is yeah rich rich hit the nail on the head with that one so it is about player impact um depending on how much a player has violated our code of conduct or terms of use and this is again something that if it's not part of the um like you used a cheat or something like that if it's an in-game thing that players have reported we have somebody who goes and they look at the logs and they check that to see exactly what happened and then we make a determination from there um so yeah so it's all it's about player impact and again like rich said sometimes you might not realize what the impact was but we do and we have we use the code of conduct as our guide yeah and and we should emphasize that player impact can be um sort of abstract so say hypothetically you had a way to log in the game and suddenly make yourself level 60. um and you might as a player say well that didn't impact anybody else uh you know just the fact that i'm level 60 doesn't impact anybody else right but it does because it invalidates the accomplishments of people who work to get to that earn their way there uh so in that case for instance if that hypothetical were true we would ban you if you if you had knowingly done that if you had done that uh because you were deliberately trying to achieve the invalid result you'd say no you you've just invalidated everybody else that got to level 60 and therefore like you're banned right if you have to by mistake we'll we'll correct the mistake and set you back to level one but luckily there's no way to go from level one to 60. so it's completely but also like you brought up um there are like temporary bands suspensions and like permanent bands so is there like a level of like if you're a repeat offender of you know the same thing does that kind of increase yes yes it does so our customer support and moderation team they're able to see the history of how often you've been reported of the ban history or suspension history and that is considered so if you keep going back even though we've we've slapped your hand and we've told you not to do this if you keep going back and doing that or you modify the behavior but you're still violating the code of conduct then you're going to get a worse and worse penalty until eventually you're banned yeah and so the next topic is um bots i know people have been talking about bots in our game and you know scott this question uh probably for you which is like if i report a bot in the game how long does it take for that report to kind of be a meaningful you know impact so like katie said uh we we keep track of all those reports like we don't throw those away or anything and they're always there to reference um what we want to be careful of is basing any uh like penalty action entirely on reports because uh i know there you know there have been rumors and things that players can just use reporting as a weapon against other players to ban you know the the company leader of another company right before a war or something we don't do that and and um one of the reasons why it takes a little bit longer to get bots out of the world is because we don't just base it off of reports we also have to take those uh reports and then analyze uh like telemetry and logs and other things to try and um sort of like prove that there is bonding behavior going on and there are certain things we look for um you know there are indicators like thresholds of play time or repeated activity or things that like will be very unlikely for a player to do but even then it's not you know super trivial just from looking at that information um uh that someone is a bot or isn't and so you know our goal is not to ban players just that are getting reported or players that have a certain play style you know there are definitely players that just run around gathering things all the time and it would be you know horrible to to ban them like when we were looking at gather bots and we accidentally got some folks in companies that their whole job for their company was gathering and crafting and because they're so good at what they do the honest discussion at the table was like well no human would ever be able to do this and then later like yep actually there's a few humans that can do that so so that's one of those instances where where we thought we were making the right call and then we we heard the reports we heard the players and we made adjustments based on that so that we could correctly identify the bots instead of the just a really great gathering yes and just to cap that discussion off i mean there there are bots still you know that uh like all mmos we have spots still in the world we're never stopping going after those and so some people might ask well why is the spot you know like i've reported it it's still there it's because we haven't gotten definitive with being able to identify that bot but in the meantime we've banned thousands of others and we will eventually get to that and and and eliminate all of the ones that exist now and then a new wave will come in and we'll never stop working on that yeah the uh the the player experience seems to be you know paramount when it comes to prioritizing what we work on so how do you prioritize bugs that come in um or you know exploits that that type that type of thing so on my team what we do is first when we have a report from players or even from our own qa we have qa verify it um and we we create a ticket for it that then goes out to each game play team or or server team or engine team or the appropriate team for for that issue um and then each sub team sort of triages it themselves in terms of priority and a lot of the times we use player impact as uh you know why is it important to fix right now um you know there's only so much time in the day there's only so many people on the on the team and we have a lot of different competing priorities um so we try and make sure you know like exploits and things of that nature are like the highest priority you know maybe like a misspelling or something would be a lower priority but even in those cases different people work on different uh things so you know we could you know designers can fix typos or data issues engineers are working on you know more systemic fixes uh to things and it's just a matter of bandwidth and impact a customer like what we can get the best roi on there's also a component of time um sometimes little bugs uh you know if they go too long like we might say like oh it's not a very priority it's just a little you know it's a problem in display for instance on a weapon uh and it's got the wrong value on it uh we might say well that's you know it's not as big a priority as the other bugs we're working on right now but after it's been on the pile for a while it actually kind of gets elevated you know and so we take deliberate schedule time to deal with the more minor bugs that normally wouldn't be addressed in a priority scheme because we know having them there persistently is really annoying yeah not to get too into the weeds there um um yeah so we also have in-game reporting which is where we determine the impact so how many players have reported um in the when you go to game and submit feedback and you tell us that there's an issue we use that to determine priorities see like what the impact is there we also use forums don't tell anybody but we use reddit so so we listen to players to see what is impacting them because we might think oh the number of reports is the impact and so we might use that but as we've grown since launch we've realized that it's not just the number of reports that we get but it's it's the context of the report so something might be happening to only 100 of our players but for them it's game breaking that's going to make the top of our list that's going to go all the way to the top and i know that some things have taken a while for us to address like the folks who can't transfer servers because of a pending or step contract that's something that we are looking at every day i'm in a meeting where we discuss our top issues and it is always the first thing that we discuss is where are we at with that and it's just it's not a simple problem to solve and so that goes back to what rich is talking about where there is there's also this this component of not just impact but time and then also what's necessary so because of because of the impact plus the amount of time it's taken that's why it's made it to the top of our list even though the number of players that are impacted is fairly small compared to the rest of our population so okay awesome and so i mean it's uh it can be kind of a dicey thing to find and exploit right and you want to report it to us but you don't want to tell everybody what the exploit is because then it might please don't alter uh alter the ecosystem what is the best way for somebody to report an exploit to us yeah um so the best way for reporting is um right right now we have forums and we have in-game feedback but if it's something that's like really bad or it's something where you suspect that someone's using an exploit or like a dupe or something like that you can always message us on the forums so anybody who has a dev or community manager tag you can message them directly don't don't post it everywhere um and if there's because if there's another bug that you want us to fix and you post this live and everybody uses it well we're not going to be focusing on that bug anymore and we're going to be all hands on deck to fix that so like we just need to make sure that we're we're being very careful with the way those are reported in the meantime our community managers are doing some cool stuff and some research to see if there's like a shadow forum situation that we can set up where people can feel safe to report without it yeah without it going everywhere so so yeah so there's there's op there's options there you can report in game if you see it and you want to like point out that someone specifically is using it or where an exploit can be used when you use that in-game reporting tool it tells us where you're at you don't need to provide your location um so if you use that and you will also see that it's just that if it needs to be done fast the forums are the best i'm in the forums all the time yeah and and we keep an eye on those like like katie said and even if it's just a message on the forum like we take that seriously and we will prioritize it if you know if if there's a report of a dupe or an economy breaking bug or something like that that will get to the top of the list right uh like and we don't need to make a youtube video about it because when that happens then suddenly everyone's doing it or not everyone uh even in those cases we found that it's actually a very small percentage of the population but the impact on everyone becomes huge and then we have to think about you know rollbacks if that's possible or you know we had to disable the economy uh when when issues like that were discovered um so it's a really big negative if if an exploit like that gets widely uh distributed yeah let's not shut down wealth transfers again yeah we have less fun than you do actually just to emphasize so the in-game reporting actually gives us a ton of context so uh if you have an opportunity using the in-game reporting for xbox tells us where you are it tells us what's going on in the world so it's a good tool uh the other thing that i want to mention is if you're reporting an exploit and you're not trying to be clever and reporting it after you've used it a hundred times um there are no repercussions to like i did this once and it happened to me that seems really odd and reporting we don't you know we don't ban people we like we actually congratulate and thank them for doing that yeah um because that's really valuable information for us we have had some people it's like i want to report the thing that i just did uh 20 times that occurred and now that i've made absolutely sure for the 50th time just to be clear that does not make it okay so the first time great maybe you didn't notice the second time you know okay pass that down though you know don't try to play that game yeah um uh and uh exploits also are um a great thing to play with on the ptr because the ptr doesn't impact the rest of the game from an economy standpoint and so we actually encourage people like if you think something might be an expert go and test it on the ptr yeah uh and then report it to us that way because uh no harm no foul if you're you know if you're on the phr you're not you're not really breaking any you know live server economy so it's fine still though if you notice an exploit on the ptr and you're checking it there still use the hidden pathways like message us directly because if it is something that's happening in the live game we don't we don't want to broadcast that we don't want to have to take the trade post down you can have domino effects yeah exactly all right well awesome thanks for your time we have a lot more coming up to talk about new world so stick around for this next segment we're going to talk a lot about the winter convergence event so i have with me mike willett the world experience lead rob chesney the narrative lead and phil bolus the open world lead so we got a table full of leads and a lot of questions about the world experience event so mike just give us you know kind of a high level what is the winter convergence event uh winter convergence is a holiday event where we celebrate the celestial binding and internum so during the winter uh the lights in the sky start to brighten because of these giant falling meteorites or we call them gleamites that fall to the earth and it's a sign of the forever winter that's coming to eterna and alongside that the winter wanderer who's this giant uh mystical yeti also appears in winter villages across eternum uh spreading the word of the the coming uh forever winter and then saying how we need to bind together to fight back against it so coming together bringing warmth amongst players socially but then participating in a ton of fun activities for players of all levels yes is this something that's going to like kind of repaint the landscape of eternum you know the the lights in the sky or is it going to be kind of centralized into like one space that everyone's gonna have to go to so the winter convergence takes place all across the tournament you'll see pockets of areas that have been kind of taken over by the forever winter so there's going to be frozen caves that have frigid folk and bad yetis that you need to go and fight against you'll see big changes to settlements you'll see brand new holiday trees that you can go interact with and get presents you can also go to the winter villages that are across the turn to to see the winter wanderer to get quests from him to turn in tokens to get tons of rewards that phil's going to talk about later yeah so everywhere you kind of see this impact into the landscape so it's it's a very fun activity that changes kind of like your perception of what happens here and it's more stuff that we want to do like this in the future it's a little bit more dynamic and fun sweet we spare no expense let me tell you when you walk into the settlements you're going to know it's winter i mean frigid folk is like a great band name also before it's what's out there yeah it's out there uh yeah the we've got the the treatments and in a lot of the settlements so it feels like the holidays upon attorney and then we've also got our winter villages which is you know uh the winter convergence to the max where it really feels like you're stepping into a new part of eternal it's gonna be really cool for players yeah and so you know in the open world maybe you can answer this uh you know this is the first event that we're bringing to new world um it seems like you know winter is just the perfect place to uh have that setting happen yeah uh i think when you uh we look at when the game released in september uh the time you know leading up to now i think this was the perfect moment to to release a big event in the world and it just coincides really nicely with um you know the holiday season where we have an opportunity to come together and spend a little bit more time playing games uh typically during this time and so we really wanted to make sure we had some some of that reflected in a tournament put our own supernatural spin on what that could be and introduced a lot of cool new stuff for players to do during this time yeah because we had the we had halloween come and go and we had kind of a taste of halloween in eternium with the pumpkins and things so it seems like that on steroids so that's gonna be pretty awesome i think that's putting it lightly but yeah yeah there was there was like some christmas junkies on the team too who have been working on this like i was shocked to get in and like read the first documentation on the winter convergence event because there was like people have been working on this for a long time like some of the earliest plans were years ago yeah and they really wanted to celebrate those differences that exist on eternum where it is a jovial time but it has this like eerie sense of darkness and a little bit of dread of like you know what could happen so everything is not as it seems on a tournament there's always that element of danger as the narrative lead um can you give us like kind of some background in like the lore of the winter convergence event or kind of how it came to be yeah and i think you know mike just mentioned that this idea that i mean eternum is a pretty spooky dark place you know there's uh there's the corrupted and the lost and i mean there's just threats at every turn and so from the beginning you know we definitely knew we wanted the winner conversions have been to be something you know happy and joyful but yet it needs to be inside the the spirit of what a tournament is and what new world is um so but i mean it's also really important for us and and a new world that you know we're we're looking at cultures from across the world we're not just trying to look at one culture so we looked at you know what's consistent in all the different winter festivals across the world and of course the solstice is the big thing um and so that's that was kind of the start of it this talk about the convergence and the dualism and the two things coming together um and then we pulled you know elements from a lot of different places the yeti of course comes from you know asia the uh we have some very familiar christmas elements to some people and then our our winterville just kind of they're a little bit like a christmas market i would say they at least have that vibe very european very european yeah yeah and so you know we we took all those elements and in terms of like the the the backstory inside you know what the winner wander is about is this idea that you know every year this there's this threat of of winter coming and you know it's possible that the forever winner would come it's like a winter that would last a really long time if not forever um and uh and the the winter wanderer is a is a figure that shows up that rallies people to bring happiness and joy and cheer and giving and generosity and community spirit um to help ward off this this threat that can come there's also this sort of like there's a back story to the character of the winter wanderer that we're only hinting at right now so there's kind of more to come to be revealed about him and like how he became who he is and his relationship to the other yetis because of course there's a history there right so we'll probably see more in the future of uh some some new events and ways are all tying in together so i'm sure you think about that constantly as a narrative lead yeah and i think too like the winter event like i i imagine over the years we'll evolve it like we're going to be adding certainly new features too and stuff like that and so the story will evolve a little bit as well so you'll see you know more of the story but uh activities will increase like right now a lot of the stuff you do is uh finding lost presents um crafting things for your territory it could be like toys and gifts uh to to level up uh the treat the center of your town which will then give you even better presence and rewards so the more activities that you do the more that builds up that rep then you also have an opportunity to go into the shop and get even better rewards nice great segue because i have a question for you phil yeah uh can you tell us about the rewards like what can players expect when they jump in and engage with all this winter convergence and stuff for sure uh there's a lot to to discuss here i think um we've really chalked this event full of unique and exclusive rewards so throughout the duration of the event by doing the activities around the event players can earn tokens and they can use those special event tokens in our winter shop and uh through in the shop they'll be able to get exclusive uh furnishings and decorations for their house including animal ice sculptures which are really neat yeah that's cool and uh we've got uh exclusive new uh sets of armor as well as new sets of weapon they have like a really nice awesome looking frozen theme and uh we and at the top end we're also giving players um a skin that is inspired by what the winter wanderer is wearing so it's this nice like fur flowing cloak that you can get it's really cool um as well as a house pet which is a toy rabbit and uh an emote an exclusive emote themed to the event itself like a frigid your your cold emote yeah um and then uh on top of that you can also get patterns and patterns is a is a new item that we're introducing to in our december release where players can use that and a pattern is a a crafting recipe a one-time use crafting recipe that will emulate the exact appearance of an item but allows the crafter to craft that at whatever level they're capable of and add and control their perks with the perk mods and and really control the recipe and build their own types of uh unique armor sets with this specific visual um so uh those will be available in the uh winter shop as well as very rare drops from interacting with the tree of light okay and so depending on the crafting prowess you'll be able to craft super high gear score versions of the armor and the weapons that you can earn in the shop too so for the crafters out there you're going to want to make sure you got your your crafting gear and your trophies all ready to rock for this event because it's gonna pay off yeah that's awesome it's safe to assume that like the things that are happening and the things you get in during the event they're obviously gonna carry over once the event ends correct uh yep everything will carry over um you know the window to earn it is through only through the event but everything you earn it's going to stick around and turn them for forever what would it be if you couldn't keep your christmas presents right yeah yeah take them away at the end of christmas it would be forever winner oh that's really terrible that's exactly that's exactly young greg when he gets his christmas present there is a 50 chance that it's broken by the end of christmas day uh so i i would usually lose about half of my christmas presents drop them on the floor yeah that's why you buy digital presents that way so greg one more one more addition actually because there's even more to talk about with the rewards yeah uh we're also introducing um ways that players can increase their expertise in december um and through the event where they do that through crafting gypsum casts and earning different colors of the new material we've introduced called gypsum and we have a special event gypsum so by interacting with the tree of light uh every day uh level 60 players can earn um diamond gypsum and that gypsum if you interact with three trees is enough to uh earn a gypsum orb and craft an item that'll be a guaranteed increase to an expertise of your choosing so there's a lot to just uh dig in here also sorry one other thing uh yeah wait there's one more there's more from the very bottom of the stocking right in the very very bottom of the stocking when you uh the first uh for all players when you interact with the tree of light in the settlements you'll get a special lock box uh the first three times that you interact with it per day and that lock box will have a coin reward and some silver so that um it'll be a really good way for players to earn a little extra uh money this uh in-game currency yeah for for yeah that's awesome i mean it sounds like the winter convergence event just like is like chock full of you know new lore and creatures and visuals and things that everybody can jump into so i'm really excited about it i know a lot of the players out there are excited to jump in so thanks for joining us guys and uh giving us a look into the winter convergence event you bet yeah no thanks all right absolutely okay and for this next segment we're going to talk about a new feature coming to new world mutators and so i'm joined again by mike rob and charles so if you want to just kick it off mike what are mutators and how do they work so mutators are augments to ai elite ai and named niai in expeditions yeah nii so they're augments to the ai and they're on a weekly schedule and cadence and they go through different rotations and they're presented as challenges to the player and they're a great way to test out your gear your power level and to increase your power level so every week you take on a new expedition with a new set of mutations and challenges so you'll go sign up at the board you go up with your group you you enter you'll you'll see the challenges before you actually enter so you'll see what the week's challenges are so you can better equip uh your gear your consumables and prep yourself to to do several runs and so expect to play this upcoming um it's something that uh we think is going to be super fun for a lot of our hardcore pvers right because every single type of mutation presents a new and unique challenge so as you're going through it you might get shocked where certain enemies just start exploding or they start leaving like areas of effect that you need to now navigate around and you might be presented with different curses or different things that impact your core abilities that you weren't ready for before yeah so we think it adds a unique twist to the formula and makes things uh really challenging and rewarding when you can complete them yeah yeah yeah so it's like it's taking you know the things that you're familiar with adding these mutators on top of it so it's basically like new content to the game that that you you can understand and it's just making things different is that yeah it's it's a different type of variation of content so when you're going into it one way that you expect it to play against an enemy is going to change completely by the way that okay you interact with it so it'll have different affixes different types of curses and what we call promotions and each week there'll be a new combination of those things to challenge yourself okay yeah and you know i mean each of our expeditions has a different enemy family in it right you got the corrupted in one you got the angry earth and another one and then when you get into the mutators they're going to behave and you know they're going to have bonuses that are different than than what they normally have so it's going to really change up the whole combat dynamic in each expedition i mean yeah i think that's accurate so yeah so it's a it's primarily about expeditions but what about uh like invasions and outpost rush is our mutators gonna like make their way into shaking things up in those so that's something that we're currently exploring uh and so when we run the ptr that's upcoming in january and we run mutations we're going to get a lot of great feedback from that and we're going to see how that applies to going to an even larger scale um okay and uh so are there rewards are there like trials are there like different rewards that come from doing something that has a mutator on it or mutations yes absolutely each of the dungeon or each of the each of the expeditions there's a whole new unique like set of rewards for every single expedition that goes with mute cheaters and some sort of like rotating rewards as well depending on what the mutations are so we really wanted these like challenges for players to like feel really rewarding not just in the content itself but in the visuals that you get from that so there's a bunch of new unique sets with really cool visuals that i'm super excited for players to see that'll just like feel like when you've accomplished these different challenges you can show that off in town and be able to like really demonstrate your sort of accomplishment over these things do you have one that's like your favorite oh man again it's like picking your favorite child that's that's tough i think what's most exciting for me is we've been able to take a lot of the like core visual styles from each of these families the corrupted or the loss etc and like really amped them up to a new level for these outfits for the rewards for players so like there's a lot of really cool unique looks that'll feel different than the stuff that's in the game now and lets us artistically express kind of where we think the game could go right visually so i'm pretty excited about that i think tying into those rewards it should be said like there's 10 difficulty levels like each time that you run one of these uh expedition mutations like for the week so what you're trying to do is climb up that ladder and it's gonna challenge like your gear and your level and so every time uh every time you pass a certain score threshold you unlock the next mutation level and so it starts increasing in difficulty every single time that you jump up so sometimes you're going to be able to punch above your weight and other times it's going to become very difficult and it's going to take a lot more coordination and planning to start to get up towards that level 10 mark right so we expect uh players to you know coordinate well get their gear in line um and every single time that you run it uh you're going to get rewards but you're trying to keep climbing the ladder because the reward pool gets bigger and it gets better and it becomes a guaranteed way to increase your power level got it is it is it true that aren't do some of the drops and some of the mutators aren't they like more effective in other ones like do they help you for the other ones absolutely it just depends on what the combination is because there's going to be some things where you're going to need more fire resistance right or you're going to need to do more ice damage and so depending on what week it is and what expedition you're running you're going to have to you know adjust to that and so yeah some of those will feed into those other activities which could be useful in in other activities that you do whether it's in pvp or outpost rush or or any of the other game modes because you're like oh this person is wearing this type of gear i'm going to challenge that by you know equipping stuff that's like maybe more heavy and elemental or right damage okay i think i think i grok mutators now but you mentioned keys is there like a like kind of grind to get these keys so unlike our vanilla expeditions the keys here are universal so once you have a mutation key you can use it in any mutation and because we want players to run these more frequently they're going to be more freely available and so during the ptr we're going to figure out you know hey what is like the right amount of that you should be carrying at any given time and and where do we think players are going to be like climbing the ladder so we'll make adjustments and tuning based off of that but our goal is to have this is as repeatable like every day yeah yeah yeah uh awesome multiple times every day yeah and so you you were just touching on like when we might see this right january january yeah you'll see it on ptr in january and then i it's coming up soon the release it kind of depends on a lot of factors yeah and i mean obviously jumping into the ptr for everybody out there is like intrinsically valuable for us right so jump into the ptr give us feedback on you know all of these new features things you discover um but yeah we need to say it's public test from i think we do ptr the public public test realm yes yes and what was ai again uh artificial intelligence got it got it but see i think that's confusing to people too because like some people i think all the gamers mostly know that ai's enemies npcs yes we have our whole host it's an object that's been scripted to do things yes to hurt you yes based on what you do yeah so i think of npcs as being good guys like it comes from a quest and a narrative guy so ah yeah that's because you tell the mpc what to say that's right i mean yeah but they're they're nice like bad guys you're a nice person they're not well i think that too so yeah all right anyway play in the ptr it's gonna be fantastic uh we're gonna have the rotations accelerated so you can participate in more and see how high up the ladder you can climb yeah right on thanks guys i think everyone can be really excited about the mutators and how they're going to change up the game all right so for this next segment we're going to be talking about kind of our february release how we're focusing on balancing the game a little bit more we are joined by dave hall who is the player experience lead so dave kind of at a high level how do you determine whether a weapon might be overpowered yeah that's a good question we have a lot of different uh tools that we use on this we look at the forums we obviously have our internal play tests we have our expert players we also look at how the wars and outpost rush modes are going and what weapons are being used for instance in a war if you know 40 out of the 50 people are using an ice gauntlet there's probably a reason they're trying to use the ice con right right so we need to kind of look into that and what is being done to what are they doing to cause this openness as we like to say and so i think uh it goes into a lot of different things and in the end it comes down to for me is this experience that's happening to the other players feel bad right like if is what this ice gauntlet doing to the other team right something they can't counteract is it something they don't like to play against is it making the game experience worse and do they feel bad that they're not using that weapon and do they want to switch now to go to that weapon um right those are things that really start to hone us in on like hey this might be something wrong with this weapon and let's take a closer look and on the reverse side right we're talking about overpowered weapons uh you know there's there's players who are talking about the fire staff and maybe the ice gauntlet being underpowered do you do you agree or i think they're in a really close place there was some pretty significant changes to them recently and i know those weren't super well received but they're they're a lot closer to the other weapons than they used to be we are looking at a few things in the very near future that are going to amp them up just a little more in particular for the fire staff we're looking at the fire mage side of the tree to do some little bit buffs in there and the ice gauntlet we're making sure to add a little more cc in because we i think we accidentally nerfed a little too far in their cc abilities right so now do when uh we're gonna use the ptr for a lot of this right like hopefully these things will be discovered on internal play tests you know through the qa team and what have you but you know when something goes a big change goes to the ptr uh we'll be looking for player feedback you know about overpowered or underpowered weapons um how do you take that feedback and ingest it you know to make changes yeah we have to do it very quickly first of all and so we take a lot of the feedback and we we actually sit in all day meetings all the combat designers we just sit around and we talk about everything in there and we raise everything up to the top that we think's the highest priority we look at the feasibility of the change how long do we think it will take is it an easy change is it just a data change or is it a complete rework of the ability those obviously will affect how we're going to approach the the issues that people are seeing so this could be for you scott when you decide to implement like a new perk uh instead of balancing or it could be for anybody when you implement a new perk instead of balancing the old ones um is there a science or a method to that um i think part of it is uh just our team capacity and who's working on different high priority things you know if there's a lot of high priority bugs then we might have more or less engineering support on a particular thing and it might be more designers able to address things so part of it comes down to you know who's able to do the work in in sort of the time frame we need in some cases it means that we already have the tech and we can make new changes or even adjust existing things depending on on a case-by-case basis um but that's probably the biggest thing sort of like who like what resources can we commit to fixing a particular thing yeah i think that um instead instead of saying instead like why did we focus on creating new ones versus this it's not a verses these things happen at the same time and so there is a resource part of this which is if we don't have the the resource that is supposed to be working on the new content if they're if they're needed on fixing old ones that's where we're going to put them we're going to put them on the fixing but most of the time we can work on both of these things at the same time it's just fixes aren't always easy right um and so it's going to seem like we're we're focusing on new content or new perks versus doing bug fixes but we're not these things are happening at the same time it's just the level at which we can get them complete yeah that's what changes yeah and some sorry sometimes you'll see uh people you know in the forums or on reddit or you know what have you saying like why not just buff all of the weapons until they're the same level instead of nerfing particular ones yeah that's a great great question i think uh with our weapons we do want them all to be around the same level obviously and for a lot of our updates we have been buffing unused abilities or upgrades that aren't getting usage but some of the overpowered ones we just had to bring back down into a little bit of a tighter control because otherwise it just kind of escalates uh to a point where at some point none of the enemies will be tough for you anymore right like they're just who wants that yeah you want to know none of the enemies being tough you want challenge in the game yeah i think so we want to try to keep it in a bracketed place and and i think with anything that's not being used we're always looking at how can we make them better for the player we want diversity in our builds we don't want everybody using the same tree we don't want everybody using the same three abilities so we want to make sure that's occurring for all our weapons and it sounds like this is you know an ever-evolving process um where we collect feedback from the players test iterate um that it's it's gonna continue to happen it's not just like one thing's going to end at all absolutely we're going to be doing this for the entirety of the project and i think one important thing to remember is that this is the beginning of the the lifespan and in the beginning there are a lot of little shifts that kind of need to happen this is the first time we've had so many people playing growing pains a little bit of growing there and so there's been some larger changes than we would like to normally do um but they seemed they had to be done and so i think we're getting to a place where the changes will be a little more subtle right uh and a little easier for people to yeah understand in terms of growing pains i know that some people are complaining about bots in outpost rush scott do you have any info on that um yeah so uh that's definitely a concern outpost rush is like one of the you know most engaging uh like level 60 uh experiences that players can engage in um and so when there's a bot or like an afk player or someone just taking up a slot to try and grind rewards um that that really hurts you know one side or the other whichever side is uh they're on and so we're doing a lot of different things um in that regard we're doing an uh analytics and telemetry to try and identify players we shortened uh the afk thresholds for apple structure because that's supposed to be like an active type of uh experience uh we're also changing the scoring system um a little bit uh this is announced in the december patch notes but we're gonna make it so that the assist kill contribution works a little bit differently than it does in the open world in the open world you know you want to favor the player and you know if someone's in your group and you kill something you want them to still get experience and loot and all that kind of stuff right but in outpost rush we sort of put you into these groups during during the game mode and then it wasn't it didn't really jive with with uh like our vision for that mode that you know you'd be off to one side not engaging in pvp and then you'd be getting all these assists and that was one of the things that was contributing to the score and allowing these bots to basically do nothing but still get you know a chess reward um so we're we're we're approaching it from a lot of different angles okay yeah that's good to know and speaking of patch notes katie i know this is something that comes up a lot in the community um when they feel like there's something that has been left out of the patch notes that it might have been done intentionally can you talk a little bit about how the team puts together patch notes yeah sure so first of all gonna throw ourselves under the bus a little bit that we never intentionally miss items from the patch notes but there's a lot of changes and the difference between what we did in alpha and beta and what we're doing now is we're providing more structure and really focusing on how to get the best out of our patch notes and ensure that we haven't missed anything but it's been a really tough process because for instance when we when we do a monthly release that first set of changes that we start looking at there's tens of thousands of them and sometimes it's it's difficult to keep track of those so we're constantly looking for ways to do better with that but i just want to make it very clear that there's not there's not an instance that we are like let's just leave that off let's not tell the players about this one that doesn't help us we want to tell players like what has changed what's new in the build what's different because we want you to go in and give us feedback that's a critical piece of our development cycle is getting player feedback and if there's something that we want to call your attention to we're going to do it and unfortunately we've had some misses in the past for sure and uh all the changes that that go into our game like there's a variety of them like art changes you know there's tweaks of different numbers and variables then there's like more systemic like code changes and and changes to systems and so even for one particular player facing change like to to modify like a fast travel system or something you know there might be six different check-ins that all change one thing or there might be like one change that that actually modifies like 12 things that the player will see so translating like the the changes that are the team members are making into like a bullet point list of like this is what the player will see uh can be challenging and then also the way we sometimes rely on like maybe engineers or other people that are very focused on on their work and like i'm changing this number from you know x to y but they don't understand the player yeah yeah there's a there's a lot of player impact that might like you know alter the loot rolls of every single chest in the game right right right um so yeah it's there's a lot of work yeah it's not it may seem like it's um it's a simple thing um but it is very complex and my dad always said that complex problems have simple easy to understand wrong solutions and that's where we have definitively landed with the patch notes but it is something that we're working on and we're trying to do better um we want to make ourselves like like the gold standard of this and we're falling short of that at this time so it's it's a it's a priority for my team in particular awesome awesome yeah it sounds like you know right now january february is really all about uh fixing process um the the balancing of things in the game the continued polish bug fixes things like that um so it sounds like we have a lot of really like maybe not crazy flashy things happening right now but like under the hood um in really important things for sure yeah all right well thanks for uh joining us on this segment and uh we will have more coming up next all right so this next segment is going to be all about weapons in new world and both of these gentlemen are heavily involved in how the weapons work adding new weapons tweaking the weapons we currently have so this question will be for you dave um you know what do you think about when you are coming up with a new weapon or what weapon should be introduced next uh there's a couple things i think first uh we always want to introduce weapons that bring new play styles to the game right like so something that really changes up the gameplay uh like with the void gauntlet our most recently introduced weapon uh we really wanted to bring in this idea of debuffing uh and sort of a counter to some healing and debuffing as a different play style so definitely looking with each weapon to bring in something new that changes up gameplay uh the second thing we look at is sort of trying to fill gaps right like we heard loud and clear from healers hey what do i use with my life staff uh and i think the void sorry the void gauntlet was like a compliment to that like those two weapons pair really well together so also just trying to fill gaps like that okay and speaking of like uh weapons kind of pairing together can you talk about the blunderbuss and how it might be different um from the musket yeah i'd love to talk about it so the underbust a really exciting new weapon will be coming out with pretty soon here and it's uh when you think of the musket it's a little more of a strategic weapon it's a longer range a little lower uh rate of fire all those type of things but when you get to the blunderbuss you're going to think more excitement more explosion a little more chaotic i would call it there's some navigational tools on it which are really exciting and a little more of a run and gun style so a definite difference in pace for this one in comparison to the musket it's going to be a little more short to mid range and also i think it's going to pair really really nicely with some melee weapons so uh and maybe even some staffs so it's going to be an interesting weapon that has a lot of uh different uses is that a hint on what it scales based on yeah a little bit i don't know if i'm allowed to say though speaking of weapons that are heavily requested and talked about by the community the great sword can you tell me anything about it uh we are working on a great sword i think we've heard it i think it's going to be an awesome weapon we talked about wanting to change up gameplay with each weapon i don't want to give away too much yet about the greatsword but i think it'll have this concept of stance switching and like having different modes within the weapon that i think will be really special and bring something new to the table okay i mean that that sounds great because people are knocking down our doors for that uh great sword uh another thing people are are also asking a lot about is daggers is that something uh something coming down the road or you know daggers are definitely a crowd favorite um we have a lot of different weapons on our table that we're looking at to make after uh the great sword and i think it's definitely at the table um i don't think it's a big table it's a pretty large table with a lot of different weapons on it and i think it's one that is near the front but it's not it's not quite there yet okay okay uh i'll take that as an answer um and another uh one of the last questions that we see just asked constantly is when can i use a shield and another single-handed weapon uh that one hasn't made the table yet and i just want to be a little still outside knocking on the door it's trying to get a seat at the table and it's it's something we really want to do but it is a it's actually a really large endeavor for us to get to accomplish this and we want to focus on filling in the other play spaces with the other weapons first before we go over to that um area okay all right so it's knocking on the door but we hear the feedback yeah i think we wouldn't do like it's going to take us a while to really build out a system where you could flexibly interchange weapons like that but like creating another weapon that does pair with a shield sort of like sword and shield like making a specific pairing is something that you know uh is not on the table yet so to speak but could be sooner okay do you have uh do you have a favorite weapon pairing or has it changed since you know since you started designing the game a while ago i was a big great great axe uh hammer sword user so yeah uh but that that recently the meta shifting a little bit which is cool in a game so i'm looking for my new pairing now yeah i used to i always run sword uh sword and shield and great acts and added in the warhammer and great acts and now i'm actually doing warhammer and arrow just i just like the bow and arrow now so we watch like a ton of streams you know a lot of content creators um we play in game with all these folks has there been anything that like surprised you in the way people are pairing weapons or kind of their you know their build maybe not a pairing but one of the things that i loved was some of the creative uses of the ice gauntlet like the the sneak up pvp moves like we see people hiding behind a bush and like see a big pvp mob grown in and then they like jump out of the bush and put blizzard and all these things on and sort of like belt the whole group that was super cool to see yeah yeah one of the things i really enjoyed was people just playing around and making their own paladin build that was something we actually had not really thought about when we were making all these uh updates to our weapons and everything and when we first saw it all this is amazing it might have been a little overpowered for the people playing against it so we might have made a little changes there but overall we just love the the fact that people can kind of go in there and make their own class i think that's just an amazing thing yeah i mean what's been really cool like having worked on new world for so long like the game now belongs to everybody else right and we're kind of just witnessing how they're engaging with it before it's been you know kind of theory crafting and wondering how people are going to use the game at scale so it's fascinating to watch and i think that's going to motivate you know future tweaks and balances and and improvements yeah for sure i love like checking the web and like finding better builds right for weapons that i've worked on it's like wow they thought of something i didn't like that's super cool it's amazing i love watching the streamers and especially the pvp streamers and watching how they uh how their new tactics are evolving every day is pretty amazing yeah awesome all right well thanks for joining us uh next we are going to be talking about end game content so in this next segment uh like i said we're going to be talking about end game content we have dave and phil both here to talk about this um i think one of the big things that the community is asking about and it's kind of a hot topic right now is why did you decide to remove the high water mark system uh well i think there were some improvements we wanted to make is how i would classify it and i think that the two big things i think of is one the high water mark system was completely random so players had no control over it and with the gypsum system players can do activities and then get gypsum and choose which casts they craft right so if you want to increase your sword uh you can do that you have some control over it and that's really important because sometimes you just get unlucky with roles and if you have a weapon or a piece of gear you really want to advance not being able to could be you know sort of devastating so that was one big thing the other thing is we just wanted more variety of activities right like with the old system it really rewarded uh named enemies right and almost too much it was too an efficient of a path and so everyone just did that and they missed all this other cool endgame content we have so with the different gypsums all the different activities you know you have incentives to do everything you can do corrupted breaches you know you can do all the different activities expeditions arenas which i think is is some of the most fun and difficult content in the game that no one's really doing so we really wanted to to bring people to all the content we have made sure on top of that too uh i think it's worth noting that we're no longer calling it the high watermark system we're calling it expertise because that's really what it is you're raising your level of expertise on each uh weapon or type of item that's uh that you can equip in the game and another big thing too that we've done to help give it a lot more structure and one of the i think the the big misses that we had when we initially rolled it out it was invisible to players so now when you go into your paper doll um you can see you know what is your level of expertise per every item that you have equipped also um when you do get a bump now in your expertise you get a nice notification that pops up on screen this big beautiful banner that lets you know just what you got and and what it affected and it feels it feels great i love it now it's like after you um loot a a chest or or kill an expedition boss and you get like that item that raises your expertise up you get this nice toast and it just feels like you just got stronger it's really cool now nice that's great um there's another question that keeps kind of arising is uh why down scaling gear instead of raising the gear score to a new cap that's a good question um well when we looked at players progression along the expertise system we did see that very very few people had actually maxed out their expertise and we wanted to address that portion before even you know attempting to raise the gear score so with our the gypsum system and surfacing the expertise now to players we're giving as dave mentioned a lot more control the players to start to grow and progress on that path and have it feel more tangible to them as they do it the other thing too is when we do raise our gear score we want to attach that to some good meaty content we don't just want to raise it just because you know if that makes sense we want to make sure that there's a reason that you need to get to you know above 600 gear score now to go attack some larger threats in the game yeah how do you uh how do you see these changes uh affecting crafters uh yeah i think what we want for crafters is for them to be able to participate but in their own way right like we don't want to have to force them into activities and what crafters most want to do is craft right like they love gathering the materials and then you know developing their skills the trophies the potions their gear sets to really maximize crafting so what we want to do is give them a path towards that so any crafted gear will never be down scaled or affected by expertise so it's an alternative path to get towards endgame gear because we know these people invest a lot of time and effort so we want them to have a viable path yeah and make sure that still feels rewarding another thing we're doing too we just we're adding a new reward type as well along in with the system and uh as players uh battling these our end game zones they can acquire a new type of item called a timeless shard and and these will be either armor or weapon shards and when they're crafted what what they'll provide they basically act as an artifact recipe so it's a one-time used craft but with that craft players will have a guaranteed attribute so you get a timeless bow shard as an example that would have a fixed deck fixed dexterity attribute and then you can also control uh what perk you put on that with our with the perk mods during crafting so there's a lot more control that those items are going to give crafters uh in pursuit of that perfect rolled item right yeah and are those pretty rare phil can you sell them when you get them uh they are pretty rare um uh but i think you know if you you run the elite zones enough and you're doing the end game content you should come across uh come across them frequently enough and um can you solve them yeah of course again of course you can what i like about our crafting system is that anyone can engage in it if they want but we also don't force it right so what's cool is like if i'm not a crafter and i get one of these timeless shards it's sort of like hitting a little mini jackpot right like i know i can go yeah to the trading post and sell this thing to a crafter who's really going to want it right yeah right um so going back to the gypsums a little bit uh why aren't all gypsums the same and why does it take more time to create something with one type of gypsum over another that's a good question so uh the different activities uh that dave mentioned and doing things like uh running expeditions opening elite chests killing uh bosses or elite named enemies right um participating in outpost rush uh a lot of different um and in crafting and uh uh closing max level uh corruption breaches in the world um all these things will give you different colors of gypsum um and then the recipes uh they require different amounts of gypsum because you know some of those activities are much more easy to accomplish than others so you know you might have to open um uh you know three elite you know have to get a good roll out of three elite chess versus like getting a good roll off of uh killing more elite named enemies or things like that um and then uh and you know things like uh expedition and outpost rush that take a little bit longer of your time would uh you'd have you have to do less of those to be able to craft a gypsum cast okay and we got a super interesting eighth gypsum that we recently added with the winter convergence event we wanted to just keep increasing the rewards based on feedback we saw in the ptr and also give something for end game players to do so we've now introduced diamond gypsum into the winter convergence event and so that'll be an eighth way you can get a cast which i think people really enjoy nice so there are people who think that expeditions aren't worth their time and effort and they're just not doing them do you agree well uh no i think there really is some some truth to that to to a level and and we've been working hard to try to address a lot of that um with this update i think that expedition's become a really great source for uh leveling your expertise in an expedition you get a guaranteed random expertise uh drop when you defeat a dun uh an expedition boss you're also going to be opening elite chests which have the uh possibility to reward you with obsidian gypsum and uh you also uh get a specific gypsum from doing the expedition itself so um if you're completing these dungeon runs that gives you almost you know three opportunities per the time invested in that done that expedition run to uh to increase your expertise so pretty rewarding and timeless shards will really come from expeditions right that's what main sources that's one of those main sources for timeless uh yeah weapon and item shards for sure nice you know earlier in the show we talked a lot about the mutators how do you see the mutators affecting the end game uh a lot so phil said you know we don't want to increase gear score until we have new meaningful content that brings hard challenges and i'm sure as mike said mutators are hard like really hard uh so this is going to be a time where we increase the gear score because you're going to need it to deal with the difficulty 10 mutators so we're not going too much in the details yet but as you do mutators you're going to be getting a new resource that you can use to upgrade specific weapons and and you'll need to sort of do that as you're ranking up in the difficulty chain on mutators you'll have to keep increasing your gear a little bit to sort of keep up with the more difficult enemies yeah that makes a lot of sense that sounds awesome i'm really excited about these changes guys they're going to be great i'm super excited i'm really excited for our players to like just get in there and and start feeling the power i think it's just really palpable now when you get in there and you start uh earning your expertise bumps and you start getting those good rolls and crafting your gypsum like it all feels really rewarding so i'm really excited for people to experience it all right great thanks for sitting down and talking about endgame with us and we'll move on to the next segment all right and for this next segment we're going to be really diving into quests and lore within new world so we got mike back rob and charles in the seats um so this one might be for you rob there have been some changes to the main story quest since launch are we planning to continue that trend absolutely yeah so we're getting uh we're working on our quest tools all the time and we're improving like what we can do in quests the way we implement quests like to make them more fun more impactful and so we've been prototyping all of our new tech in in the main story and we're adding these even to uh quests that already live so uh destructible you know objects that you can destroy as part of a quest uh new sort of traversal puzzles and some of the main story quests um and wave event encounters which is something we didn't have before so all those are going into the main story quest and then you know of course we're also going to be uh finishing up this chapter uh this first chapter of the main story soon so that's uh that's pretty exciting definitely a lot of work going into that and uh yeah we're going to continue like you know possibly updating these quests when we find ways to do it or we see that like hey players aren't as engaged with these classes it sounds like um you know early on people were complaining that quest can be too repetitive and some parts of the world don't actually like have enough quests in them sounds like these are some of the answers to that uh that line of thought well yeah because yeah we're continuing to add new quests so we're in addition to the main story we're adding new quests to some of the territories we're putting npcs like out in the wild with new story lines and you know and new dynamics frankly that we didn't have in the game before we're also working on you know some some new quest lines that are associated with trade skills and weapon skills like super excited to because those like i think bring a different flavor to the experience that they'll run throughout you know from early on and the experience to the end yeah and then kind of touch on what rob was talking about with uh some of the updates to the quests uh charles and i have been working really closely with our zone teams to ensure like we're updating the art and poi so like you'll start to see more of the themes of like corruption uh and and like a withered lost and bile and just different elements start to tell more of the environmental story uh that's helping you know uh accentuate and and uplift a lot of the stories that they're trying to tell on the lower side so whether it's the interactions and sometimes we've wholesale moved pois and rebuilt things in order to tell better parts of the story yeah a lot of that is like the presentation of some of those events too making sure that like this narrative was there but we weren't really highlighting it and so now like making sure it's getting the love it needs to like express that narrative in a good way yeah nice so some players have expressed frustration with the quest flow and the travel times to get between quests or how are we addressing stuff like that mike so we're taking like a multi-pronged approach to addressing a lot of those things so uh first thing you notice and i believe this was in the november release as you run faster on roads so that's another little boost that you get to players that are just traveling along all the normal pathways and roads in eterna second thing is uh we're starting to add some additional spirit shrines closer to some expeditions that so once unlocked you're going to be able to get to certain expeditions a lot faster than you previously had been before additionally we're cutting out the modifier for distance traveled so reducing the cost uh for d for distance specifically uh for fast traveling from settlement to shrine or vice versa so that cost will get reduced so you'll be saving a lot more as off um and then what was the last one we're also revealing them on the map ahead of time so you can see where they are and find the spirit shrines i mean before you could you could follow the column in the sky but this kind of makes it a little bit easier for you to identify them on the map and then head over there to unlock it and hopefully make yourself make it easier to get around the world and then additionally with a lot of the new quests that we're doing we're having the uh the npc uh like follow along with you so a lot of times you're it's gonna be uh shorter distances traveled and then also you're going to have turn-ins in the next sequence of quests uh closer by for a lot of the new content that we're exploring nice putting the npcs out near the the situation they're going to send you to instead of their way back in the settlement sending you right yeah and you can see some of that with the varangian knights yeah and that like adds to like the dynamic feel of the world you're going out and like oh coming across these other adventures and sort of having these little experiences that feel more natural yeah so going back to the lore and the narrative um so far it feels like eternum has a lot more questions than answers uh even as we you know are going to start to wrap up story lines is the the mystery behind eternum going to remain you know a through line uh as we go forward yeah i mean definitely the uh you know the the fact that this island is this mysterious source of legend and myth for all the world's cultures is kind of the core idea of what it is and so what you know there's there's spoke stories and and you know superstitions that are associated with this and and you know that's a that's something we want to play with for for the life of the product and i think it's you know it's something that i guess what i want to mention is that there's another aspect with the enemy families with the corrupted and the lost and the angry earth where the dynamics between those in the history and how they relate to the ancients you know one of the big mysteries about who the ancients were where they came from and where they went um there's a lot of story there that we want to reveal over time um but we've charted it out and it's something that uh yeah we're super excited to explore so it does sound like we're going to kind of uh wrap up isabella's tale maybe thorpe's tale uh are there gonna be new major characters coming in uh to the mix definitely the um and yeah we haven't seen the last of them yeah they're iconic characters so you know we'll you know even when we wrap up this chapter the main story you know rest assured those those those guys are going to be back um but we'll be introducing new characters too um we definitely you know i think been brainstorming a lot on like different kinds of characters and you know historical people and and other sort of mythological figures that we could bring into the story going forward so i'm excited about that stuff yeah i was gonna say for me like the aesthetically and narratively like digging into this history looking at myths and legends from all these other cultures there's so much like interesting story to tell and it ties into our setting really nicely sort of brings a lot of like different culture and visual variety and like the kinds of stories we can tell are very different as we go area to area and as we add new zones i think that's pretty exciting i always i like this aspect where we're in this place where nothing really dies and on a long enough timeline who's really good who's really evil and do those roles you know change over millennia it's very interesting to see that dynamic and how it plays out in different situations yeah so you you were touching on you know bringing in new cultures and uh kind of the the art style of that i know your impetus has a lot of the how the biomes look and how players travel within those things um do those things intersect like the the arts and the uh how players move through the space um are they they're connected extremely absolutely you can't have one without the other i mean you have visual storytelling and and the the needs of the player and then they're not too different than i guess how humans react with things like how we observe something we speculate about it and then we engage with it and so you want things to feel like they're rooted and they're familiar yet they're they're different in a way that's intriguing and engaging and we look for those opportunities to you know create uh some of those juxtapositions right and make you think and put you at wonder i mean some of the vistas that charles and his team have created are you know gorgeous right so it's like we want to keep building upon like uh you know the structure that they've already laid down i was going to add like every time we're thinking about a new space or a new area or a new zone it's definitely something we've been talking about a lot is like what's the core dynamics here how can the environment like change the way you approach a space so players have to like sort of alter their mindset like oh i'm in this zone so i need to deal with and think about these things that i didn't have to think about in that other zone because this environment's different there's something different here that i kind of have to contend with i think we want to lean into that more more environmental stuff that just affects how you approach the game and sort of what you're doing in that zone yeah definitely want to take advantage of the the growing set of utilities that we're giving the player and how that interacts with the the the places that we create and i mean you know some of the new spaces we're working on are pretty dramatically different from what you've seen in the game so far like not just in terms of like the way they look but in the dynamics that you're talking about and like the stories that we're telling in them um and then we're also really working hard uh i think in all of our different disciplines on creating more discoverable stuff like things that players just happen on to whether that's you know a character a quest or like a little mystery that's embedded in the environment um like a lot more of that stuff is is getting added i think as we go forward and uh it's like i'm super excited to see more players finding that stuff like they found the um you know the ship the ghost ship that appeared off the coast um and we're looking forward to doing more stuff like that yeah that's awesome it sounds like there's a ton of exciting stuff to look forward to uh for the players both from a narrative perspective from a world zone perspective you know new enemy types coming in so you'll see all of that in the future and we'll we'll all check it out together that was a haul we got through a lot and uh i just wanted to say thank you to anyone and everyone that made it to the end of this video uh you know all of these questions we pulled from the forums from social they all came from the community so i really hope that you found it uh informative and that some of the things you were wondering about um you now have answers to and we gave you a little bit of a look at what's coming in the future what we're doing behind the scenes um yeah so thank you yeah we we just appreciate the feedback we uh we are so excited to answer questions and do this as a matter of fact if we hear from the community that this was beneficial and you like this we'll be happy to do it again yeah i did want to comment that we also heard you loud and clear that you wanted to see the devs do a run through merc guard we did it we'll be releasing it in a few days um how'd you do how'd you do so we were way under geared so our gear was 509 it should have been around 570. and my disclaimer is our pex lead was in tampa bay watching buffalo uh class lose that close game so we had we lost our best player but we held in there a little bit so we'll let you all judge how we did yeah yeah the world will get to judge all right thank you very much everyone for joining us thanks bye

Channel: Play New World

Views: 74,108

Keywords: New World, New World Game, Amazon New World, Play New World, New MMO, MMO, MMORPG, RPG, Video Games, Games, Gaming, Game Trailer, Fantasy, Fantasy Game, Amazon Games, Official Trailer, Aeternum, Dev Diary, Developer Diary, Game Roadmap

Id: qITlQwrWG9c

Length: 90min 41sec (5441 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Draglek]

So next weapon is.. Blunderbuss ! Maybe January update ?

[u/maikol2346]

Looks like the current planned weapon release order is blunder --> greatsword --> ??? --> daggers

[u/mangzane]

Listening now! Will make some updates as I'm able:

8:30

Q: What is the vision of NW

Scott: highest level vision is where PvP and PvE players complement one another. They want players to be able to overthrow tyrants and absent leaders (over territories). Big takeaway, they don't have a favorite of PvP vs PvE. They know players want variety, and they will lean into that.

New event in January

February is focused on bug debt, balance, bots.

15:00

Q: How does the ban system work

Rich: First line of defense is EAC (automatic system) detects third party cheats. Things like behavior punishment is not automatic bans. Investigations made by humans. Not based on volume of reports.

21:00

Q: Bots. How long does a report of a bot take to be meaningful impact.

Scott: Keep track of all reports. They don't like to solely rely on reports (to avoid abuse). Analyze telemetry/logs/play time thresholds, ect for proof. They are aware of current bots, won't stop finding ways to identify newer bots to ban.

38:00

More story of the [winter] Yeti to be revealed. (Seems like the winter event is leading up to something bigger than a holiday event)

44:00

Discussing new Feature: Mutators

Mike: They are Elite AI, on a weekly cadence that give challenge to players. Sign up at the board and see the weekly challenges (expedition based) . Focused towards harcore PvE'rs, strategy and comp will be important. (Sounds similar to WoW M+, with different mob affixes to consider). Mutations will be in PTR in January. These Expeditions will give great rewards/sets/visuals. There is 10 difficulty levels.

52:00

Q: At a high level, how do you determine an OP weapon.

Dave: "Does a player feel bad for not using a weapon?" "Does it feel bad to be on the other end?". Utilize tools like forums, internal play test, analyze wars and OPR weapon use.

Q: How do you prioritize new perks vs balancing current perks?

Dave: Things happen in parallel. It's not one or the other. There are teams working on both, and sometimes balancing takes longer and lags behind.

Constantly improving how the determine bots/afk players in OPR.

1:00:00

Q: How do you determine what goes in the patch notes?

Katie: They don't intentionally leave things out of patch notes. Recognizes they have failed/missed items before, but it was not intentional. Have ten of thousands of changes, and they want to be transparent for player feedback.

1:03:00

New Weapons

Q: Can you talk about the blunderbuss

Dave: Coming soon. More explosion. Navigation tools. Run and gun style. short to mid range. Scales on...not telling us yet! Great sword, may focus on stance switching. Shield and any 1h weapon, not at the table yet.

1:12:00

End Game Content

Very few people had maxed expertise. They wanted to address the system before players maxed it. When they do eventually raise the GS, they want that to be attached to content, rather than just arbitrary grinding purposes.

They want crafters to be able to participate in their own way. Don't want to force them into something. Crafting should be viable for end game.

[u/cylonfrakbbq]

My main concern watching it is they felt people weren’t doing arenas or expeditions because named minis in POI were deemed to be a more efficient means of progress.

People were doing names in PoI because they aren’t gated behind costly orbs. The fact they aren’t even addressing the tuning orb costs is frustrating- even with the recent patch changes, they are too costly in terms of materials and skill investment. This goes even more so on lower population servers

[u/Coindweller]

My blunderbuss sword en shield combo is ready.

[u/Grantmitch1]

Can someone provide a summary of this?

[u/mcknightrider]

I'll be back in 90 minutes I guess!

[u/Redlaf]

Really excited to watch this, will probably update this comment after I do with thoughts but hopefully they touch on most items of concerns and give us some breath of life in this game

​

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Glad they've acknowledged a lot of the issues with the bugs. Their excitement with the winter convergence stuff was really nice to see. I know the devs get a lot of flack but seeing their passion for the game is really nice. I personally have really enjoyed the winter event so far so that's nice to see

​

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MUTATIONS IN JANUARY WOOOOO!! I'm actually so excited for a system like this, really can't wait

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New weapons sound fun. Blunder sounds like it'll be interesting especially in war pvps for clusters on points. Also the greatsword having different stances like the swtor system sounds just amazing

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Overall, happy with this. AGS has made clear efforts to talk to their community and it shouldn't go unnoticed. Hopefully more and more changes help fix this game up to its fullest potential

[u/DoctorOddy]

They didn't go into too much detail but I hope the fact that they mentioned a focus on small scale PvP means we will see stuff like instanced arenas or a 10v10 outpost rush map.