New World Community Q&A Thoughts

 A little tardy (business travel), but here are my thoughts from the New World community Q&A earlier this month.

 I want to give the team kudos for tackling community feedback about the speed at which "critical community asks" are worked.  Basically: it's hard.  As someone who manages a software development lifecycle at work I totally get it, but this message probably falls flat on the community.  Still; kudos to the team for being willing to engage in the conversation and even follow it up in another video (where they mention "the door problem" which is very good at illustrating the point).

 Back to the community video; bots were discussed.  Bots are not the problem in New World anymore that they once were.  Sure bots are still out there but it has been pretty clean for a while.  I can't remember the last time I ran into a clear bot or felt like the market was dominated by bots dumping 0.01 materials 24/7.

 Armor types were discussed and we know balance changes are coming soon.  It is good to hear the team confirm they know light armor is too strong currently and needs a change.  They seem to be focused on making light armor more risky which I think is a good approach since light armor has such good bonuses compared to the others but has very little draw back.  It sounds like light will be a lot less versatile with defensive perks and thus be more of that "higher risk for higher damage" that it should have been all along.

 Greatsword and Musket balance... being worked on.  Duh.

 Zone revamps were mentioned and it was confirmed that zones will continue to be updated as the main story quest gets revamped.  While I wasn't sold on the revamps done already (I personally feel like they don't fit thematically) it is good to see games breath life into old areas.  I was a big fan when World of Warcraft redid most of their world and really liked when Guild Wars 2 chose to burn one of the main capitals, Lion's Arch, to the ground and then rebuild it.  Change is good for MMOs.

 Corruption portals are also on the revamp list: less frequent but more eventful/challenging.  I look forward to seeing them be more meaningful.

 The conversation wrapped up with a discussion on PvE vs PvP weapon and gear balancing.  "It's a hard problem" is a correct statement, but the team also mentioned there is already things like PvP only perks and PvE only perks so they've been working on this since the game launched.  I personally think they do a really good job of balancing across the modes.

 And last but not least they confirmed hippos are coming to New World, but only after we get monkeys.