Amazon Decides To Change New World’s Expertise System Following Community Backlash

A pro­posed endgame sys­tem for New World will see some mean­ing­ful changes fol­low­ing wide­spread com­mu­ni­ty backlash.

Ama­zon announced a new endgame sys­tem called Exper­tise for New World–one that would make all pur­chased, craft­ed, or quest gear sig­nif­i­cant­ly less pow­er­ful unless play­ers spend hours rais­ing their Exper­tise lev­els for each gear slot. This did not make the com­mu­ni­ty hap­py, obviously.

Many on the game’s forums and sub­red­dit threat­ened to quit the game entire­ly if this new sys­tem was released to the pub­lic servers. Fol­low­ing this swift out­rage, Ama­zon had decid­ed to make some more changes, stat­ing in anoth­er new devel­op­ment blog that “it is now clear we were wrong.”

“When we thought about it more, reduc­ing pow­er for exist­ing play­ers is just unac­cept­able and some­thing we will not do,” Ama­zon writes. “We ini­tial­ly thought it being only tem­po­rary and giv­ing a new path with to gain back that pow­er with Gyp­sum would be accept­able, but it is now clear we were wrong.”

Exper­tise is still com­ing to New World, but with more adjust­ments tag­ging along this time. Craft­ed items, items play­ers earn from quests, and gear acquired from fac­tion shops will not be affect­ed by the Exper­tise sys­tem. Items sold by oth­er play­ers on the game’s auc­tion house or earned from endgame activ­i­ties fol­low­ing an ear­ly Jan­u­ary 2022 update will be affect­ed by Expertise.

Ama­zon is also mak­ing adjust­ments to the way gear scales with Exper­tise. Instead of the effec­tive­ness of the gear being reduced to a play­er’s Exper­tise lev­el, it will instead be reduced to a mid­dle ground area between the gear score and the Exper­tise lev­el of that slot. 

Anoth­er change is com­ing to an endgame sys­tem thanks to the PTR. Cooldown timers for new endgame craft­ing ingre­di­ents called Gyp­sum have been adjust­ed, and the coin cost asso­ci­at­ed with new endgame craft­ing items like Gyp­sum Orbs and Gyp­sum Casts have been reduced significantly.

These changes seem to be going over bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous adjust­ment, but this is just the lat­est dra­ma to sur­round New World. The last cou­ple of months saw two econ­o­my shut­downs, time trav­el­ing servers, and a num­ber of issues stem­ming from a large update.