Amazon Game Studios' New World is likely one of the most anticipated and controversial releases of the year, with a lot of hype surrounding its launch, to the point that it was extremely successful with an all-time peak of 913,027 concurrent players on Steam a few days in. However, New World's problems started arising relatively soon because of a handful of severe glitches and some design choices that ended up hampering the players' fun. One of the most renowned bugs is the one about duplicating Gold and materials, which allowed a few players to get infinitely rich.
What's worse is that the glitch appeared again and again in new forms, quickly ruining New World's economy in many ways. Another issue that came with it is that players started losing faith in Amazon after the developer didn't permanently ban all cheaters and exploiters sooner. Despite Amazon's attempts to regain the players' trust over the weeks, the Into the Void November patch was supposed to make New World much better, but it failed to do so because of secret changes making their way into the game with no communication from the developer.
Among these changes, there were heavy nerfs to loot from defeating enemies in PvE and from loot chests too, which made New World more of a grind than it already was. The category of players that was possibly hit the hardest is that of solo players, as a Reddit user by the name of Sans_19 states in their post on the platform. The main problem is that it's almost impossible to improve one's Gear Score in New World now if they play alone because there is no content that caters to solo players, but rather it's all about finding groups to steamroll content with and hope to increase the watermark that way.
Another Redditor states that one of the best bets for solo players in New World is gathering and crafting to farm resources and then purchase gear. The counterargument for this is that solo players are still left out of the best activities, so getting better gear is possible, but not an enjoyable experience.
A fellow MMO fan instead replies by highlighting how Final Fantasy 14 does allow solo players to get gear anyway, which is quite rare within the genre. Right now, New World is not in a good state because of all the current issues, and the overpowered Musket exploit found by Shroud doesn't help.
New World is available now on PC.
Source: Reddit