Update 10/27: The New World developers have issued a statement to clarify the situations with Invasions.

new world response

Original story follows.

New World, the MMORPG from developer Amazon Games Orange County, has maintained a steady fanbase since its launch, but players have lately issued many complaints with the game's bugs, systems, and more. New World's territories and settlements system plays a large part in the game, and players are encouraged to take control of settlements in order to level their settlement up and reap the benefits of taxes and holding the land.

Settlements can be fought over in 50v50 PvP battles called Wars, in which players of different factions battle to control three rally points that are vital to the defense of the towns. These wars result in the winning faction either maintaining control of the settlement or taking control from the losers.

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Additionally, New World's Invasions are PvE events in which players have to protect their settlements against eight waves of non-player enemies. Players began reporting complaints about Invasions when they realized that they seemed to be losing the most upgrades due to Invasions on their server, despite their performance being better than that of others. Other settlements who had failed to defend against Invasions seemed to experience less downgrades than the players who were doing the best.

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An Amazon Games representative then replied to a player, explaining that "the further players get and the more waves are beaten, the more crafting/refining stations get downgraded if the players fail." However, this turned out to be false, as another Amazon Games representative once again took to their forums to explain the problem in full. The number of downgrades a failed Invasion will cause is directly tied to the territory level of a faction's settlement. The only way to ensure that no upgrades regress is to successfully defend against the Invasion. Individuals helping their team also get their own rewards that increase in value the more the individual contributes.

This means that players are not necessarily punished for doing better than others when defending their settlements, but high level settlements will experience the highest penalties for participating in Invasions and failing to defend from all eight waves. This discourages high level settlements from partcipating in Invasions unless they know they can hold off the Invasion in its entirety, while encouraging lower level settlements to try their hands at the mode in order to gain individual rewards for contributing to their team's defense.

The New World developer ended their forum post by promising that the team would continue "keeping an eye on the tuning of Invasions."

New World is available now on PC.

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Source: New World Forums