Ever since its release at the end of September, Amazon Game Studios' New World has been going through a short grace period at launch and a very rough patch up until now. The community was very happy with the game at launch, possibly also thanks to the honeymoon effect of the newly released MMO.
However, things started to deteriorate after players discovered a severe duplication glitch that wasn't fixed until it was too late. The economy suffered from this immensely, and New World's concurrent player numbers started to dwindle to the point that there were are only 100,000 active players now versus 900,000 players active in the first week.
Contributing to New World's community losing its faith in the developer were the recent changes made with the Into the Void update, which were pushed without notice and essentially nerfed the entire endgame experience. Players were unhappy with it and shared feedback with Amazon, but the following patches didn't do anything to help. The most recent patch included more nerfs, and it changed the way New World players can obtain Motes, removing them from the loot pool of elemental creatures.
What the community believes to be the final nail in the coffin is the fact that New World's next patch is going to introduce an Expertise value to determine the players' highest drops in terms of Gear Score, like the watermark. However, starting next year, the Expertise value will also determine the effectiveness of all gear, in the sense that having a given Expertise value for any slot means that all items with a higher Gear Score than that will see their values reduced to the Expertise level. This will make many players much weaker than they currently are, and it will be a huge detriment to crafting.
A Reddit user by the name of MetaWaterSpirit shared the news on the platform, and players quickly noticed that all gear from trading posts will now be rather useless. New World's crafting system needed a few improvements, but with this change, crafting high-end gear will no longer be a meaningful way to have better gear unless players already have their Expertise level up to the maximum, essentially lowering the prices on all crafted items.
Despite the fact that Amazon is committed to fighting bots in New World, botting is not the highest priority on players' list at this point, and keeping on ignoring the community's feedback can do more harm than good. The core infrastructure of New World is not in a bad shape per se, and with the right changes, the game could flourish once more.
New World is available now on PC.