New World Patch 1.1.1 review and recap of the recent blog post from Amazon Studio Games regarding current issues in the game and future plans.
This week’s patch was aimed at addressing issues with the 1.1 update. So due to it’s small size, we’ll be covering it in full along with the recent dev blog post explaining the current issues within the game and its development.
Update 1.1.1 Patch Notes review
Below are the full patch notes for Update 1.1.1, along with our comments on these issues and if they’ve been resolved as stated.
Greetings Adventurers!
This week’s update is focused on resolving some of the issues that have arisen from our November Update. Our development team is continually working on improving the New World experience and they thank you all for your patience and reports that you continue to make on the official forums. A full list of changes and fixes can be found below.
Motes from Elemental Enemies
- Fixed an issue causing a large number of motes to drop from elemental enemies.
- We also removed elemental motes as rewards from gathering elemental creatures and reduced the amount of other resources acquired from them to account for the number of them in the world and the frequency at which they respawn. The original intention with these creatures was to make them challenging and infrequent encounters in the world. The way we used them in practice resulted in them becoming less dangerous and more frequent which caused an imbalance with the amount of resources they provided, compared to the primary sources such as elemental plants and stones.
This change is absolutely horrendous for the game’s crafting. This killed the most reliable and quicker sources of a few materials; specifically motes and a few mid-tiers materials like Wyrdwood and Starmetal.
While those mid-tier resources have other plentiful sources and still drop from the enemies mentioned, motes do not. As for the mid-tier resources, they no longer provide them in a quantity that even makes sense, with most providing less less than 10 at time.
While Elemental Stones and Plants exist, most places that are frequented by anyone will always have these taken already, making them unreliable at best. They’ve always been that way, unless you log in at off peak hours.
Missing Horticulture (Harvesting) Gear
“In our latest update, we made a mistake that treated all tiers of the in-game Horticulture harvesting gear as future content, and unintentionally removed them from the game. We apologize for this bug that has caused you to lose some items you rightfully earned. If you have lost an acquired piece of Harvester Armor you should have an extra Rewards Chest in your Inventory after this update.
These reward chests contain a full set of Horticulturist armor provided at the highest Tier you personally have acquired in the past for any piece of the Harvester set. They are also rolling at the maximum Gear Score for that tier, and will be useable at any level to ensure you can equip them. These items are marked as Bind on Equip like any Harvester armor piece you would encounter normally. Once you open the chest it will provide you 5 items”:
- Harvester Hat
- Harvester Shirt
- Harvester Gloves
- Harvester Pants
- Harvester Shoes
This compensation does not seem to have gone through, as many have stated they have yet to get a chest. Have yet to see confirmation of such.
Housing
- Re-enabled trading, moving, and salvaging of furnishings/housing items
The only thing that can be said here is “Finally”. Having these unable to be touched at all caused a lot of problems, even for those not involved with the item duping that took place.
Crafting
- Fixed a bug where Jewel crafting recipes were not granting enough trade skill XP
- Recently we lowered the amount of trade skill XP provided by lower tiered items when a player reaches a new tier of crafting bases per skill. To use metal as an example, when a player unlocks Steel recipes they earn less from crafting iron recipes. We did this to emphasize crafting higher tiered items as you progress through trade skills and to also improve the value of higher tiered materials. Our intention behind this change is to reward players for crafting higher tiered items as they progress through the ranks of each trade skill. Before this change, we found players were spending too much time crafting low tier items as opposed to pushing their crafting skill up crafting items that they may actually use at their current level.
Basically to sum up these changes: Every 50 levels on a crafting trade skill, the tier(s) below that newly unlocked tier get reduced in XP. This means if you’re unable or unwilling to expend reagents, leveling your tradeskills will take longer than before and require way more of the same resources.
Trading
- Fixed an issue where players were not able to fill Buy Orders from local Storage Sheds
This is good, especially since with a lot of trading being disabled for a bit, people’s storage chests were overstocked with items from expiring listing.
Servers
- Technical groundwork for server merges
- War performance enhancements
I greatly dislike the lack of information on these. Like what things were changed to improve war performance. So far, that’s mostly been toning down skill VFX and similar things.
Also disappointed that things aren’t already in place for server merges, especially since they were tested on both the PTR and back in Closed Beta too. These are going to be needed for a lot of servers, as post-transfers, some servers are just dead.
General Bug Fixes
- Void Gauntlet – Fix to Oblivion not going onto cooldown if player swapped weapons during skill startup
- Void Gauntlet – Fix to consumable status effects being cleansed by Oblivion
- Fixed an issue that was causing Jewelcrafting to not award appropriate amounts of XP for higher-tier crafts
- Fixed an issue preventing players from earning the Lumberjack achievement
The change to Nullifying Oblivion is nice, as food buffs are pretty low impact, and people would often just troll flagged players by dropping a Nullifying Oblivion on someone gathering while flagged to remove their luck food, with no intention of actually fighting.
Unmentioned Additions
There’s one that went unmentioned in the patch note that they also turned on for this patch, their Thanksgiving event. There’s now gigantic Turkeys, named “Turkulon, Feathered Avenger of Death”, roaming Aeternum near some settlement.
Taking down Turkulon rewards you with a Monstrous Turkey Leg. This isn’t as easy of a task as you’d imagine as this is a level 66 enemy
This Monstrous Turkey Leg can be used with the cooking skill at a Tier 5 Kitchen to craft a special Luck food that grants a bonus to Constitution and Luck based on your player level. This ranges from 1 CON and 0.17% Luck at Level 1, up to 33 CON and 5% Luck at level 60.
While it’s not a big drop of any nature, it is a bit of luck that could be used while farming items. It’s equal to nearly two pieces of Luck Gear of the same level. That said, it’s a good farming food to pop for expeditions and Elite Farms if you don’t need stat foods to take on those tasks.
Update on Current Issues #3 Dev Blog analysis
Shortly after the release of the 1.1 “Into the Void” Update, AGS also released a forum post communicating on community issues. They often used these to talk about issues that are deemed as points of contention within the community.
Greetings Adventurers,
Thank you for your feedback and questions since our second edition of Update on Current Issues Dev Blog. We continue collecting your feedback and questions to find trends of active issues you, our community, are interested in learning more about. We appreciate everyone’s interest into our communication and where we’re going with New World and we want to continue being transparent and communicative on how we plan to reach our goals and address outstanding issues.”
Stability and Performance In-Game
We released an update today that we believe improved stability and are working feverishly on a fix for performance. The void gauntlet introduced a problem with status effects where they are using approximately 10x the bandwidth they should, resulting in performance issues when multiple status effects (not isolated to Void Gauntlet) are fired off. This impacts war, invasion, and any area groups of players are using weapons with status effects. We’ve isolated the issue and are confident we’ll have a fix released to players once it has been thoroughly tested. Not catching this prior to release was a mistake on our part and a net result of trying to go too fast. Going forward we strive to improve the quality of our releases. More details on release timing will be made available as soon as we have validated the fixes internally.
This is more in reference to the fixes they listed in the Update 1.1.1 Patch Notes. While they certainly didn’t fix everything, they have taken steps to address these as they can. I do personally believe it’d be hard to not notice these effects when doing proper testing. Either way, progress on the lag is good.
Lack of transparency on penalties/appeals
Understanding the messaging received when an account has had a penalty applied can be difficult and we realize that the categories are too broad, and may not provide enough information to players as to what they did that triggered the penalty. There are some steps we are going to take to address this. First, we will be publishing some support articles that better address and provide insight into the categories and how these categories are tied to the code of conduct and terms of services. This will also provide insight into the penalties, duration and the appeal process. Next, we are looking at the appeal process, to provide more timely and better communication from acknowledgement that the appeal was received and time expected for a reply. Next, we are revamping the penalty messaging that is seen in-game. The goal will be to provide additional clarity into the player actions that violated the code of conduct.
This almost reads as a slap to the face. Support articles aren’t even a good temporary solution, considering the “offending” party often isn’t told what got them banned anyways. The only thing that needs work with the appeal process is clarity and information, not a quicker non-response. The In-game messaging has also improved slightly, but it’s still not going to be clear enough as the in-game messaging has much more limited space.
Honestly, they need to step back and really look at what’s wrong and what players are telling them. Not reading a few short posts and deciding these band-aids are the go-to solution.
They’re right on the edge of their record keeping being illegal, if it isn’t already. They need to actually track and make note of exact ban reasons, not just which rules may have been broken. This needs to include chat logs for additional context, even if not needed.
Moderation (both in-game and community spaces)
Regardless of where you’re participating, whether it’s in-game or through our community spaces like the Forums or the Discord, we heavily enforce our Code of Conduct to ensure a positive and constructive environment. We want everyone to feel comfortable participating in Aeternum and online. We hear the feedback about the inconsistency of penalties applied to player accounts and are implementing processes to address this issue.
Please continue submitting reports of players in-game and flagging threads and comments in the forums from players who are violating our Code of Conduct. The teams go through each report to determine the context behind the behavior and player moderation history before taking action. As we are all human, it’s possible that some unsavory actors are let through the cracks or someone may have been flagged erroneously but we will take corrective action should this occur.
We have some items we are looking into to make moderation more transparent, whether it’s finding the mechanisms to implement an in-game communication system to issue warnings or suspensions or a way to communicate if a report you submitted was action on. We are also working on a few support articles that will help clarify our moderation processes. Please keep your eye out for when these articles are released.
I’ve honestly heard very little about moderation being a problem, other than people making threads about bans and getting themselves locked/banned for things like ban evasion. So I don’t know the full extent of this issue as they present it.
Learnings from our PTR
This month we launched our first version of the Public Test Realm and we wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for all of your support and valuable feedback. It has been exciting to see the number of players actively providing feedback and reporting bugs both in-game and through the forums.
Moving forward, we see the Public Test Realm as an important tool in our development process and you will continue to see us invest and improve this public testing process. We want to acknowledge that we have heard your observations, especially in terms of the fire staff and ice gauntlet nerfs, the buffs to great axe, and the reticle design for ranged weapons. While you won’t always see immediate changes that reflect the feedback we receive, this doesn’t mean it’s being ignored or that you won’t see changes made in the future that address particular concerns surfaced by our PTR testers and players. Some changes, like weapon balance and tuning, are things that we will be constantly monitoring and adjusting as New World matures. Other changes may just need additional time for development and testing.
When it comes to weapon balance in particular, we will regularly adjust and tune these numbers as we gather and review your feedback, paired with game data. Especially with the introduction of new weapons, weapon balance will always be in flux. You can rely on us to continue listening, observing, and adjusting accordingly.
In our upcoming releases, you can expect to see more changes that reflect the feedback we have received from you, our community. We will continue to seek out opportunities for you to provide early patch feedback and help shape the future of New World.
Thank you again for all of your support and feedback.
I think they’re overlooking the whole point of a PTR. While a PTR won’t catch everything, it’s there for feedback and an early line of defense against bugs. It’s to test changes and give feedback whether or not the changes feel right to a player. Obviously there will always be people for or against certain weapon changes and the like but it’s important that this is taken into account before an update is pushed live. Unfortunately that means a longer PTR cycle, which may not be ideal for them.
Undocumented changes in updates
We are sorry that a number of undocumented changes made it into the 1.1 Into the Void update. This update includes many changes the team made months ago before we branched our launch build. This long time frame and the size of the patch, led to a number of changes that we missed in the release notes. This wasn’t intentional, and we are working to improve our processes to ensure more accurate release notes in the future.
Below is a list of the main changes that were either unintentional or not documented:
- Decreased loot quality and amount from elite chests – this is an unintentional bug that was introduced in the 1.1 patch. We are investigating this issue and working on a fix, and will release it as soon as its ready
- Removed Horticulture gear from the game – this was also an unintentional change.
- Removed double luck from Weaver’s Knot – this was an intentional change that we missed in the patch notes. We never intended for items to have double luck, and by design items should not have multiples of any perk.
- We also did a tuning pass on a number of equipment shortly after release that have just recently made their way into the game. We made these changes because a number of new perks had been created, but were not well-represented on our named items. We updated a variety of our items with fixed perks to host the new effects. We understand this has disrupted some of your carefully tuned character builds. In the future we will be more discerning and forthcoming about any changes we made here.
- Elite POI Difficulty Tuning – A number of POIs were increased in difficulty. We increased the difficulty of bosses, increased the number of enemies, increased the level of some enemies, and adjusted the placement of some elite chests. These were intentional changes that we missed in the patch notes. We wanted to increase the challenge of these end game areas.
- As a part of this tuning pass we also adjusted some paths that allowed players to attack enemies from safe areas or skip enemies
- As a part of this tuning pass the named enemies in Ebonscale Reach had their difficulty incorrectly increased too much, and we will be toning them down in a future patch
- The Darkness Membranes in Great Cleave and Mourningdale also had their difficulty incorrectly increased resulting in enormous HP values, and we will be adjusting them down in a future patch also
- Removed elemental quintessences as rewards from gathering elemental creatures – This was an intentional change that we made as a result of the number of these enemies and their spawn rates being much higher than when we originally designed the rewards for the creature. Our goal was to create better balance between these creatures and elemental stones & plants as sources of motes.
- Reduced the amount of wlidwood required to make glittering ebony – this was an intentional change we made to make the cost of Gltterring Ebony in-line with the other epic crafting materials, such as Asmodeum and Phoenixweave.
- Player to player trading is now possible in expeditions – this was an intentional quality of life improvement we forgot to document
- Players can now see which trophies they have equipped from the bio screen – this is another intentional quality of life improvement we missed in the notes
- Replaced Everfall well and Mourningdale statue with a fountain – this was an intentional change that was made in preparation for an upcoming player event.
This is all good information, but a lot of it doesn’t read as a “we forgot to include these”. The big ones, like the Weaver’s Knot and Elite POI changes are both efforts to slow the pace of High Watermark (HWM) Farming. Which in reality, is a pretty strange reason to do so.
I can definitely understand Weaver’s Knot getting changed, as it was the best in slot Luck Ring since the start of the game. Not even a perfectly crafted Luck Ring could compare.
The rest of the listed changes are Quality of Life changes and all good overall.
Crafting + Trade Skills
Every trade skill has it’s importance to the overall item economy within New World. At the highest level of trade skill mastery you’re capable of crafting some of the most powerful items in the game. Pursuing the materials and crafting those items are end game activities that are beneficial for players who are looking to craft the perfect item as well as create high value items to be traded. We want most of the things that you can craft at a Trade Skill’s cap to be able be able to be used by players who didn’t craft those things, but we also like that some things are just for the folks who are capable of making them. As we continue development we will look for opportunities throughout the range of trade skill levels and end game.
This is to say they want to make more things tradable, but don’t feel the need to. This is a bit of a hard to remedy situation in my opinion. While I can get having some untradable items, I don’t think anything that requires a specific recipe to drop to be crafted should be untradable. Maybe certain crafting recipes that are just there from leveling would be okay. Like some basic named gears and such but otherwise, I don’t see the point to it.
Update: Stance on Addons
Our overall goal on any form of addon is simple – it should not provide any advantage over a player using the regular game client. That means an addon can reorganize or present the information normally displayed in a different way, or provide information that normally would require a different UI view to achieve. The idea with the map addons is they fall under the latter category – we of course have an in-game map, and all they should be doing is displaying that map in a different way (it’s ok for the map to have a different artistic style, as long as it’s equivalent information to the in game map).
We are working to see if we can establish a simple and secure way to publish data for addon use; this would allow them to add functionality not currently available.
To put this in simpler terms from AGS’ weird wording: If an Add-on give any advantage over what you’d have without it, it’s bannable in their eyes.
The Overwolf Mini-map was considered not to be fair play because it showed the location of resource veins, regardless of your own skill level and if they were spawned. The Mini-map itself, without resource locations attached is perfectly fair.
To me this is just overly strict and unnecessary as far as Add-ons go. They can’t real be expecting people to memorize these locations. Yet they’ll also say having a map with resources open on a second monitor is considered fair. Is there a legitimate concern over this being a slight advantage? Not really.
Gold-selling players + bots
Based on the changes we’ve made in previous patches, reports of gold sellers are down 70% from previous volume, so substantial progress has been made, but this will always be a battle. As these bad actors adjust so will we. We also are identifying and banning the “spam” accounts of gold sellers more quickly overall. We’re banning at a higher rate against the bots who supply gold/materials, and are expanding that weekly. We’ll continue to be diligent on that front while looking for further ways to prevent bots from intruding on your game play experience. Please continue submitting reports of players in-game, and use the correct report reason for quickest resolution.
They’ve definitely followed through on this, though I still see bots active in chat few times a day when playing. It’s been heavily reduced and I’m glad it has been.
How do Housing Points Work?
Since multiple players can own homes on the same plot, each house is assigned a house score to determine which house is shown to the public. Your house’s score, the scores of any group members who also live on that plot, and the scores of the top 20 houses are shown on the house enter screen. The total score is based off of two factors: territory standing and decoration score.
The territory standing component of the score is the standing a player has gained in the territory where the house is, since the last time the scores were calculated. If the score is calculated every two days, it would be the standing the player gained in the last two days on their house’s territory. The decoration score is calculated from the items placed within a player’s house.
In the November Update, we resolved an issue where housing points spiked after player first set up their decoration after the first judging and housing scores should be functioning as intended. Down the road, we are working on implementing some UI features to help better demonstrate the scoring process.
Honestly, Housing points are really not a concern of mine. It’s nice to see details on the system, but it’s not an important feature.
Harvester Gear Set
In our latest update, we made a mistake that treated all tiers of the in-game Horticulture harvesting gear as future content, and unintentionally removed them from the game. This is an embarrassing mistake that is squarely our fault, and we apologize to our players who have had their harvesting and trading disrupted as a result.
We are working quickly to correct this and replace the lost items, targeting the next patch. Any player who had ever earned a single piece of this of this gear will be rewarded with a full set of bind on equip, Horticulture gear at the highest tier that was ever earned. The gear score for the replacement gear will be at the highest limit allowed per tier. This includes all Horticulture gear earned; whether you received it as a loot drop, it was traded to you, or you purchased it from the trading post. The items will be distributed directly to players and show up as a armor chest that will deliver the full set of gear.
This was supposed to be addressed with the 1.1.1 update, but seems to not have been set up properly.
Lost Housing and Compensation
On October 28th, we addressed an issue where players lost their houses and potential housing items. While we provided a fix to prevent players from losing their houses and housing items in the future, we were delayed in providing compensation for those who lost their houses. This has now been addressed in the November Monthly Release.
Players who lost their houses during world restarts will have their house restored if they are eligible to own a house in the settlement. If they cannot own another house, the house cost will be refunded and the furnishings returned to their storage. Please visit the settlement to start the restoration or refund.
This is a good thing that they’ve finally gotten this addressed. Houses do play a pretty important role while exploring or crafting. Not having access to them can be very detrimental to gameplay in general.
And that covers the recent news for New World.
Patch Notes are sourced directly from the New World’s website. The devblog featured on this post can also be found on the New World’s forums.
Here at VULKK.com we have a great selection of New World Guides, including Beginner Guides, Weapon Guides and Builds and Expedition Guides. Check back regularly as we build our New World archives with more helpful content for you.
