The economy in New World is already a broken mess. In addition to this, the game has already become stale and boring for many people. A ton of people are quitting quickly. One month ago, the game had 700-900k daily players. Today, it struggles to reach 450k. If this trend continues another month. The game will have lost half its player base in less than 2 months.
How can we stop this from happening in AoC? Below I'll list some fatal flaws New World did that we must avoid at all cost.
Quest/Dungeon rewards making crafted items obsolete
Very early in the game a quest in New World reward you with a very good amulet. This amulet alone makes every other amulet in the whole game, for every single player, wortless until lvl 100 jewelcrafting. Great care needs to be put into items you get for free like this.
Early game resources being more expensive than late game resources
Since even the late game recipies still require massive amounts of early game resourses we now see Iron ores being a lot more expansive than the late game starmetal. When the demand for early game resources is so much higher than late game ores a big problem arises. It is now more worthwile to simply farm the early game iron and sell it than actually leveling up anything yourself. To counter this, late game crafting need to have balanced recipies.
Overflooded markets
You need to craft a large amount of items to level up in New World. The amount of items you need to craft dwarfs the demand for those items. This results in refined materials being worth A LOT less than the sum of the items needed to craft it.
Mid level burnout
Since you are basically uselss in New World until lategame, there is almost nothing meaningful and fair to do while leveling. A ton of people quit at lvl 30 ish because you will do the exact same thing until level cap. There really is no point in doing other content than turboleveling til level cap. In AoC we need fun things to do at all levels. Even if you are lvl 27 there should be fun events where you can help and feel relevant. Ashes need to add varied and fun activities that are avaible during the whole leveling process.
Economy manipulation
Large guilds in New World instantly started exploiting the free economy. All members of the top guild gave 1 single player all their currency and that player in turn started manipulating prices on the auctionhouse by hoarding a ton of important items and then price fixing them. This would not be so bad if servers consisted of 10k players. But 100 super nerds can easily control 2000+ casual players. If a super tryhard group consentrates all their gold on a few individuals those players have massive control over the economy, resulting in them being able to make even more gold. It is literally impossible to keep up. Without control, you can expect the top guilds to be able to buy out every single house in AoC etc in the game after just a few days, if not hours.
Faction imbalance
On my server, a very strong guild joined a faction and completly sweeped the floor with everyone else. They took over everything and raised taxes to stupid amounts that ruined the experience for everyone else. Did players rally against the tyrants? Did heroes band togheter to fight the evil lords? Ofcourse not. Everyone just joined the faction the best guild was in. There was no fairy tale scenario of other guilds competing with them. Everyone just got demolished and crushed.
And I beg you, dont start with the "someone will eventually beat them" or "in the end, that guild will die out". No, your wrong, what instead happened is that everyone that did not like this got the hell out of the server and realm changed. The server is now 95% 1 single faction playing solo on the server, every part of the map is in their control.
AOE spam meta
The most effective strategy in New world large scale PvP is to simply lag out your opponents. Everyone rushing in and just facerolling the laggiest AOE is by far the best strategy. Look at this video for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJgxIML9rfM
How will Ashes of creation create a game where even 30v30 people dont turn into a massive lagspike battle? How will we create an enviroment where a 100v100 battle even can occur? Not even New World can manage a 30v30 battle battle without the server freezing. How will we stop people from running 100+ AOE spamming classes to simply shut down the game?
Almost no collectibles
The game has no mounts, a pathetic amount of pets and other fun stuff to collect. Most cool stuff will probably come from the real cash shop. This must not happen to AoC. Whatever your stance is on the matter, a lot of people love collecting stuff in MMO:s. It can be achivments, titles, mounts, cosmetic skins, rare items etc. But the fact of the matter is that there needs to be a lot of fun stuff to collect in game. The things you collect let you express yourself in the game and this seem to be important for a lot of players. Also these things shoult not be exclusive to the endgame.
