Im gonna drop a text bomb now.
Albion Online - a german game that did it mostly wrong is now being sort of reimagined into new world done by professionals (thank god).
Played the alpha to release, gave feedback in form of ~ 1000 posts on their forums, made it to round table and exchanged personal messages with the developers and a couple with the CEO.
The game had a ton of potential, all lost due to PVP enforcements. Over the course of 3 years, the dev team managed to first pull in players with the promise of player driven economy and pvp only to then walk back on it in favor of a pure pvp build.
We had 300+ members in our guild (Casual United) and we did farming and supply runs for pure pvp guilds. People were focused on crafting skill lines, you had to unlock every single one. There was 1 (useful) character per account and things were looking great. People whispered you if you were known for being a good crafter. Guilds had roles to fill and life skill players enjoyed bein needed and being useful.
Then they came up with Learning Points as a subscription and allowed multiple characters per account. They reduced crafting skill lines into families (swords for all 1h, 2h + special), increased farming timers from 8h to 22h, put a bottle neck on T5 resources to push people into red zones (full loot), they made most T5-T7 resources into pvp hotspots, did not limit alliances and did not regulate city plot auctions.
The result was a shit show; manipulative players throwing cash at devs to get a headstart for plots, buying most city plots, then put up a tax to remove and dominate any rival.
Crafters were not needed as you just made 3 characters, 1 pvp, 1 refining and 1 crafting alt, gave all three the sub bonus and circumvent using the market.
Farmers were left in the dust of multy account players and zerg guilds, abusing the 22h timer to put 1-3 people in charge of 150+ farming plots, creating a massive overload of horses and food, allowing their dominace to grow. Then using their masses to farm mobs for silver (there was no balance at first and you were able to kill T7 or T8 mobs with T3 to T4 gear), to buy the gold currency at a rate of 50-150 for 1 gold (it has increased to 2000+ for 1 gold).
This allowd them to constantly own all city plots, buy out all resources in the market place and then relist those at a higher price to dominate. They were able to buy up 30%+ of all territories with their millions in silver and pushed their gatherers to T8. We had 1-3 mega alliances at all times. They did not touch each other as it would have been a waste of time. But they never missed out on killing new players on sight or abusing them as guild slaves (you could allow entry into a guild by paying a fee on top of a guild tax (90% i.e.).
The cherry on the cake was the gold system; as a dynamic currency, you were able to control the price by dumping or investing millions of gold. Some guild leaders had a pretty close connection to GMs and devs, so they waited for the moment when the developers forcefullly watered the economy down with silver, to reduce the gold price during a holiday season. GMs and or devs told players about those events and they were able to snapshot the market yet agian for more gold.
As you can see, PVP as the main design goal made life skill players fodder and slaves for zerg guilds. I watched it happen, i did interviews with guild members and got the same feedback.
We lost 95% of all playes due to those imbalances. Game went to steam, then free to play. The saddle point was reached, when 100.000+ players melted down to 10.000, then 5.000 active players and so on.
CEO left the studio, game director doubled down on pvp only mechanics and that was that.
It is a toxic game concept if not done perfectly balanced and fair. From that point of view, i am looking at new world with a lot of hope.
Sorry for the long post, this is personal topic and i actually only wanted to say that pve and life skills are a ton of fun if they serve a role and are not dominated by pvp (or pve). Three pillars, all have to work together well. Most you tubers i have watched have zero clue about that and only want pvp or viewer numbers.
Ser medieval is the only content creator i'd highly recommend following for new world. He has 1000+ hours in the game and seems to understand the system well enough.
