Amazon Games' New World has made big changes in its first year online with major updates on a regular basis that have addressed many of the issues players had at launch. Nearly every month since its release, New World's updates have introduced new content, weapons, events, system reworks, and quality-of-life changes that have significantly improved the game in many areas. As a result, leveling has become quicker, crafting is easier, combat is more fluid, the early game is more streamlined, and there's plenty of content for endgame players. While the game's population may not be what it was in its early days, current New World players seem to be growing more satisfied with the experience.

A roadmap revealing many of the biggest changes coming to New World has been revealed during the New World Dev Update for December, including some features that have long been requested by players. New World will soon be getting transmog, gear set storage, 20-player groups, changes to crafting tiers, territory wars, and some challenging new PVE content.

Let's get into it and see what they have in store for us over the next few months. First I would like to just say I really like this dev blog a ton more than usual, this one was a lot more relaxed showing out takes cracking jokes, and the best part it wasn't two hours long, it was just a nice short chat about what's coming.

Winter Convergence

So the first thing they talked about was The Winter Convergence of 2022. We can expect this to hit live in the next couple of weeks, if you guys didn't play last year, at this time let me just start by saying. This was the best event in my opinion that new world has ever had. it had different things you could do quests collecting the meteors, killing the yetis, it was just an all-around fun event, and the decorations around the settlements really gave the game a nice feeling during the holidays. This year they're adding a few new things, there will be a new world boss, a new quest associated with the winter warrior. This guy will be big, and dangerous, much like the real Halloween event boss. I'm excited to see if they will continue with last year theme and give us a bunch of new home decor and skins. One thing a bit silly with this year's event is they chose the same style of settlement Decor on Brimstone, a desert it's burning hot, but in town you're in a snow globe sort of situation. But anyway not a huge deal, it's just for fun.

Territory Control

The next thing they talked about was Territory Control, they're making three big changes in December in terms of wars and territory influence. The first change will be an introduction of a company leave cooldown, this cooldown will last 72 hours, and during that time you can participate in any activity associated with territory control, so it will become more important for people to really think before leaving a company. The next big change will be to war roster limits, they will be implementing a new mercenary limit, they wanted mercenaries to still be a thing to allow players to still participate and show support for their faction, or potentially show their ability to get recruited. But they wanted to limit it, so what they will be doing is setting the mercenary limit for a territory defense team to be 10, and the attacking teams will be set to 25 mercenary cap. They are also introducing a daily War limit, the limit will be one attack and one defense per day, and this limit will be account wide per world. So if you have multiple characters per server, you will still be locked on both.

I know these changes will piss off some players out there, but I think it is a good step. it will allow more players and more companies to get on the map, and allow people to have access to a system that before was controlled by a very small group of players.

They also emphasize that this is a December change only, not the end. They will be watching Territory Control and all those systems closely, and will continue to make changes moving forward that will improve them.

Crafting Stations

They talked about how they are changing crafting stations, what they are doing is making all procedural recipes, not have a crafting station tier requirement, stuff that has drop down menus. When I heard this a few months ago was exactly what they addressed, so that's pretty awesome, which was why would any company bother to spend going to upgrade anything. There are still huge benefits to upgrading, you will still need High tier stations for high-end specialty stuff, named items and that kind of thing but also the higher tier stations will offer lower reductions in crafting costs, as well as the new territory control.

New cinematics, quality-of-life changes, a hardcore Sandworm Elite Trial for the toughest PVE players, cross-world Outpost Rush, and a free weekend are just a few of the other things to look forward to in the near future. I do believe that more contents will released and waiting for players to explore in the New World future.

Just a few days ago, World of Warcraft: Dragonflight launched a new cosmetic collection feature that has similarities to a Battle Pass. This new World of Warcraft feature is called Trading Post. The purpose of this feature is to make it easier for players to obtain rare and exclusive cosmetics while playing the game.

Trading Post

If you have experienced World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, chances are you know that there are a total of four Major Factions in Dragon Isles, namely the Dragonscale Expedition, Iskaara Tuskarr, Maruuk Centaur, and Valdrakken Accord. A new Trading Post has been added in the capital of each faction.

This is a special market where players can get unique weapon and armor transmogs, pets, and mounts. Inventory in each Trading Post is also refreshed every month. If you are more interested in a certain item, you can also choose to freeze this item to save it for the next month. The Trading Posts themselves undergo some noticeable changes each month, with new and novel inventories displayed on the armor racks each time, and brand new mounts placed in the stables.

Trader's Tender

What you need to pay special attention to is that no matter which Trading Post you are in, you will need to use a new currency called "Trader's Tender" to trade. So, what channel should you use to get Trader's Tender?

First off, you can easily earn 500 Trader's Tender just by having an active subscription and accessing the Trading Post. Second, you'll need to complete special monthly challenges in the Traveler's Log. The content of these challenges changes every month, sometimes you need to complete progression activities such as World of Warcraft raids and Mythic+ dungeons, and other times you need to participate in some interesting activities such as resurrecting players or using emotes on specific NPCs.

In short, no matter what kind of challenge it is, it generally fits the holidays and themes in the game. And after you complete these challenges, you can earn another 500 Trader's Tender.

Players' Reactions To The New Feature

Once the Trading Post feature goes live, players from the Alliance will only need to head outside the Mage District in Stormwind to find the Tawny and Wilder Trading Post. And players from Horde can simply go to the Grommash Hold in Orgrimmar to find the Zen'shiri Trading Post.

If you are careful, you may have found that World of Warcraft has added stables to the two locations mentioned above in Shadowlands Patch 9.2.5, which seems to imply the emergence of new content. Players can expect to see the Trading Post in the Public Test Realm in the upcoming Dragonflight patch 10.0.5.

The general reaction from players to the Trading Post launch has been largely positive. The first reason is that most World of Warcraft players are more interested in collecting decorations. Secondly, players can also find various challenges that suit their play style in the Traveler's Log. Best of all, in the Trading Post, each month they can pick up interesting and unique items. These alone are enough to keep players logged in, even during the slow period of World of Warcraft's patch cycle.

If you want to complete the various challenges in the Traveler's Log faster, it would be a good choice to prepare some WoW 10.0 Gold in advance.

Trading in New World is once again temporarily disabled due to a newly discovered exploit affecting the Trading Post. This comes after the team had already paused some of its newly implemented cooldown restrictions on Company switching for a few days.

“Today our internal data alarms detected a Trading Post exploit, involving manipulating specific contracts in an error state. We have a fix for this issue in testing,” the update begins. Something set off the data alarms and they declare that only a small number of players took advantage of this exploit, but in order to shut down the possibility of more exploits and minimize damage to the economy, trading is once again temporarily disabled by Trading Post and player to player trading as well.

The downtime is likely to be minimal since they are currently testing a fix for the issue after identifying it. As with more recent times when trading was affected in this way due to exploits, the New World team looks to minimize disruptions.

This new issue comes on the heels of the week’s update, which stated the newly revamped Winter Convergence Festival, but also included some changes intended to fight the shell Companies, which let some territory fall under the control of the same people and eliminate fair competition. One of the changes included cooldowns when it came to certain actions:

“When leaving a Company, players will start a 72 hour cooldown on fighting in a defensive War and earning Influence for any Company toward War declaration eligibility. The cooldown begins once a player leaves.”

The issue arose when the update applied this penalty retroactively, meaning that those that had left companies this week were being locked out of participation in Wars. Some in the community expressed their frustration at the retroactive application and allegedly unclear time when they would’ve had to have their Company set.

Amazon has decided to suspend these cooldowns for a few days in order to let players get things in order. This will begin to be enforced on December 11th at 2 AM PT/ 5 AM ET so if you are thinking of switching Companies, you need to be in the right one three days before this deadline.